Do not dare to come into this town and call her mountain Rainier, after the fashion of government "map sharps" and railroad advertisements. It is Mount Tacoma, if you please, and woe be to any man who calls it anything else. Former President Taft once shouldered the question upon reaching the northwestern corner of the land like a true diplomat. At the dinners in both Seattle and Tacoma he referred to the great guardian peak of Washington as "the mountain" thereby offending no one and leaving a pleasant "lady or the tiger" mystery as to which of the two names he would use in private conversation.
But whether the mountain be Rainier or Tacoma, it is going to be one of the great playgrounds of the nation—and that within very few years. Think of starting out from a brisk American city of a hundred thousand population and within two hours standing at the foot of a giant glacier grinding down from the heavens, a cold, dead, icy thing but still imbued with the stubborn sort of life that stunted vegetable growths possess, a life that makes the frozen river travel toward the sea every day of the year. A man living in Tacoma, or Seattle, or Portland, for that matter, can have both the dangers and the joys of Swiss mountain climbing but a few hours distant. It takes knowledge and courage to make the ascent of Rainier—a tedious trip which starts through the three summer months in which it is possible at five o'clock in the morning so as to reach the summit before the snows begin to melt to the danger point. And yet, in the hands of skilled guides, so many women cross the crevices and climb the steep upward trails, that the record of their ascents is no longer kept.
This great Swiss mountain—higher than Blanc, and vastly more impressive from the fact that its fourteen thousand foot summit rises almost directly from the sea—is the central feature of the newest of all the government parks. It is in the stages of early development and already the tourists are coming to it in increasing numbers. Given a few years and Rainier will vie in popularity with the Yellowstone, the Yosemite and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. In scenic beauty of its own inimitable sort it already ranks with these.
The man who makes the ascent of Rainier—if poetry and imagination rest within his soul—may truly feel that he has come near to God. He can feel the ardor and the inspiration of the red men who gave the mountain its mystic symbolism. He can look up into the clouds and feel that he is at the dome of the world. He can look down, down past the timber line off across miles of timber land and catch the silver of Puget Sound and the distant horizon flash of the Pacific. He can see smoke to the south—Portland—smoke to the north and west—Seattle—and nearer than these—the brisk Tacoma that hugs this mountain to herself.
If imagination rest within him he can now know that these cities, at the northwest corner of America, are barely adult, just beginning to come into their own. A great measure of growth and strength is yet to be given to them.
19
SAN FRANCISCO—THE NEWEST PHŒNIX
We came upon it in the still of an early Sunday evening—the wonderful city of Saint Francis. Throughout that cloudless Sabbath we had journeyed southward through California. At dawn the porter of the sleeping car had informed us that we were in the Golden State, not to be distinguished in its northern reaches from Oregon. Men were talking of the wonders of the Klamath country into which the civilizing rails of steel are being steadily pushed, the breath of tomorrow was upon the lips of every one who boarded the train, but the land itself was wild, half-timbered, rugged to the last degree. Through the morning grays the volcanic cone of Shasta was showing ever and ever so faintly, and if an acquaintance of two hours with the peak that Joaquin Miller has made so famous did not enthuse the man behind the car-window, it must have been that he was still a bit dazed, not surfeited, with the wonders of Rainier.
At the foot of Shasta our train stood for a bare ten minutes while travelers descended and partook of the vilest tasting waters that nature might boast in all California. Shasta spring water is supposed to be mightily beneficial and that is probably true, for our experience with spring waters has been that their benefits have existed in an inverse ratio to their pleasantness of taste. But if Nature had given her benefactions to Shasta a sort of Spartan touch, she has more than compensated for the severity of her gifts by the beauty of their setting. You literally descend directly upon the springs. The railroad performs earthly miracles to land a passenger in front of them. It descends a vast number of feet in an incredibly short length of track—the conductor will reduce these to cold statistics—and your idea is a quick drop on a gigantic hair-pin. At the base of the lowest leg of this hair-pin is the spring, set in a deep glen, the mossy banks of which are constantly adrip and seemingly one great slow-moving waterfall, even throughout the fearfully dry seasons of California. The whole thing is distinctly European, distinctly different—a bit of Swiss scenery root-dug and brought to the West Coast of the United States.