"I reckon there ain't much chance of our ever seeing Salt Lake or California either," grumbled one of the hunters, "and even if we do reach the coast the Mexicans 'll clap us into prison."
"Well, so fur's I'm concerned," said Smith decisively, "I'd rather be alive and in a Greaser prison than to be dead in the desert. I'm going to California or die on the way."
History chronicles few such marches. Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across the sun-baked lava beds of southwestern Utah, over the arid deserts and the barren ranges of southern Nevada, and so to the foot-hills of that great Sierran range which rears itself ten thousand feet skyward, forming a barrier which had theretofore separated the fertile lands of the Pacific slope from the rest of the continent more effectually than an ocean. The lava beds gave way to sand wastes dotted with clumps of sage-brush and cactus, and the cactus changed to stunted pines, and the pines ran out in rocks, and the rocks became covered with snow, and still Smith and his hunters struggled on, emaciated, tattered, almost barefooted, lamed by the cactus spines on the desert, and the stones on the mountain slopes, until at last they stood upon the very summit of the range and, like that other band of pioneers in an earlier age, looked down on the promised land after their wanderings in the wilderness. No explorer in the history of the world, not Columbus, nor Pizarro, nor Champlain, nor De Soto, ever gazed upon a land so fertile and so full of beauty. The mysterious, the jealously guarded, the storied land of California lay spread before them like a map in bas-relief. Then the descent of the western slope began, the transition from snow-clad mountain peaks to hillsides clothed with subtropical vegetation amazing the Americans by its suddenness. Imagine how like a dream come true it must have been to these men, whose lives had been spent in the less kindly climate and amid the comparatively scanty vegetation of the Middle West, to suddenly find themselves in this fairyland of fruit and flowers!
Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across the sun-baked lava beds of southwestern Utah.
Copyright, 1906, by P.F. Collier & Son.
"It is, indeed, a white man's country," said Smith prophetically, as, leaning on his long rifle, he gazed upon the wonderful panorama which unrolled itself before him. "Though it is Mexican just now, sooner or later it must and shall be ours."
Heartened by the sight of this wonderful new country, and by the knowledge that they must be approaching some of the Mexican settlements, but with bodies sadly weakened from exposure, hunger, and exhaustion, the Americans slowly made their way down the slope, crossed those fertile lowlands which are now covered with groves of orange and lemon, and so, guided by some friendly Indians whom they met, came at last to the mission station of San Gabriel, one of that remarkable chain of outposts of the church founded by the indefatigable Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra. The little company of worn and weary men sighted the red-tiled roof of the mission just at sunset, and though Smith and his followers came from stern New England stock which prided itself on having no truck with Papists, I rather imagine that as the sweet, clear mission bells chimed out the angelus they lifted their hats and stood with bowed heads in silent thanksgiving for their preservation.
I doubt if there was a more astonished community between the oceans than was the monastic one of San Gabriel when this band of ragged strangers suddenly appeared from nowhere and asked for food and shelter.
"You come from the South—from Mexico?" queried the father superior, staring, half-awed, at these gaunt, fierce-faced, bearded men who spoke in a strange tongue.
"No, padre," answered Smith, calling to his aid the broken Spanish he had picked up in his trading expeditions to Santa Fé, "we come from the East, from the country beyond the great mountains, from the United States. We are Americans," he added a little proudly.