After Shasta and the springs, another of the desolate, fascinating canyons to be threaded for many miles besides the twistings of a melancholy river, then—of a sudden—open country, farmers growing green things, ranch-houses, dusty county-roads, with automobiles plowing them dustier still, little towns, more ranches—everything in California from two to two million acres is a ranch—then a grinding of air-brakes and your neighbor across the aisle is fumbling with his red-covered time-table to locate the station upon it. As for you, you don't care about what station it really may be. It is a station. You are sure of that. There is the familiar light yellow depot, but in the well-kept lawn that abuts it grows a giant tree. That tree is a palm, and the palm-tree typifies California to every tingling sense of your mentality.
This is the real California. The mountains have already become accustomed things to you, the broad ranches were coming into their own before you ever reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland, a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this little unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that you are at last in a land that bids defiance to that trinity of scourging giants—December, January and February—and calls itself summer the whole year round.
This palm has brought you to a sense of your location—to California. The romance that has been spelled into you of a distant land, and of the men who toiled that it become a great state peopled with great cities, of Nature's lavish gifts and terrific blows laid alike upon it, came into your heart and soul and body at the first glimpse of that tree. Before the train is under way again your camera has been called into action—mental processes are supplemented by a permanent record chemically etched upon a film of celluloid.
After that pioneer among palm-trees, more of these little yellow depots and more of these rarely beautiful palms standing beside them. The ranches multiply, this valley of Sacramento is a rarely fertile thing. Growth stretches for miles, without ever a hint of undulation. California is the flattest thing you have ever seen. And again and again you will be declaring it the most mountainous of all our states. The flat-lands carry you beyond daylight into dusk. The towns multiply, a glow of arc reflection against the shadows of evening is Sacramento a dozen miles distant. Then there is a rattle of switches, a halt at a junction station, and mail is being gathered from the impromptu literature makers on our train to go east. The main line is reached. And a little later the Straits of Costa are crossed. Here is a broad arm of the sea and if it were still lingering daylight you might declare that Holland, not Switzerland, had been transplanted into California. The sea laughs at bridges, and so from Benecia to Port Costa we go on a great ferryboat, eleven Pullmans, a great ten-drivered passenger locomotive—all of us together. For twenty minutes we slip across the water, breathing fresh air once again and standing in the ferry's bow looking toward the shadowy outline of a high, black hill carelessly punctuated here and there by yellow points of light. A new land is always mysterious and fascinating; by night doubly mysterious, doubly fascinating.
The ferry boat fast to its bridge, the locomotive is no longer an impotent thing. We are making the last stage of a long trip across the continent by rail. The little towns are multiplying. The subtle prescience of a great city is upon us. We turn west, then south and the suburban villages are shouldering one another all the more closely the entire way. We skirt and barely miss Berkeley, hesitate at Oakland and then come to a grinding final stop at the end of a pier that juts itself far out beyond the shallow reaches of San Francisco bay. Again there is a ferry boat—a capacious craft not unlike those craft upon which we have ridden time and time again between Staten island and the tip of Manhattan—and when its screws have ceased to turn we will finally be in the real San Francisco, reached as a really great metropolis may be reached, after an infinitude of time and trouble. It is still October—the warmest month of the year in the city by the Golden Gate—and the girls and their young men fill the long benches on the open decks of the ferry. The wind blows soft from the Pacific, and straight ahead is San Francisco—a mystery of yellow illumination rising from the water's edge.
As the ferry makes her course, the goal is less and less of a mystery. Street lights begin to give some sort of half-coherent form to the high hills that make the amphitheater site of San Francisco, they dip in even lines to show the course of straight avenues. A great beer sign changes and rechanges in spelling its lively message, there is a moon-faced clock held aloft, you pinch your memory sharply, and then know that it must be the tower of the great ferry-house, the conspicuous waterfront land-mark of San Francisco.
In another five minutes you are passing under that tower—a veritable gate-keeper of the city—and facing up Market street; from the beginning its undisputed chief thoroughfare. A taxicab is standing there. You throw your hand-baggage into it, come tumbling after, yourself. There is a confusion of street-lights, a momentary intimacy of a trolley car running alongside—a little later the glare and confusion of a hotel lobby, the fascinating fuss of getting yourself settled in a strange town. There is a double witchery in approaching a great new city at night.
In the morning to tumble out of your hotel into that same strange town in the clarity of early sunshine, to have this great street or that or that—Market or Geary or Powell—stretching forth as if longing to invite your explorations—here again is the fascination of travel. The big trolley cars come rolling up Market street in quick succession, and for an instant their appeal is strong. But over there is a car of another sort, running on narrow-gauge tracks and with the roar of an endless cable ever at work beneath the pavement. The little cars upon those narrow tracks interest you. They are as gaily colored and as bravely striped as any circus wagon of boyhood days, and when you pay your fare you can take your choice—between the interior of a stuffy little cabin amidships or open seats at either end arranged after the time-honored fashion of Irish jaunting cars. San Franciscans do not hesitate. They range themselves along the open seats of the dinky cars and look proud as toads as the cars go clanking up the awful hills.
The San Francisco cable car is in a transportation class by itself. It clings tenaciously to early traditions. For in San Francisco the cable railroad was born—and in San Francisco the cable railroad still remains. One Andrew S. Halladie was its inventor—somewhere early in the "seventies." Up Clay street hill, and to know and appreciate the slope of Clay street hill one must have seen it once at least, Halladie's first car struggled, while its passengers held their breaths just as first-comers to San Francisco still hold their breaths as they ride up and down the fearful hills. The telegraph told to the whole land how a street railroad was running on a rope out in that little-known land of marvels—California. But the telegraph could not tell what the railroad on a rope meant to San Francisco—San Francisco encompassed and held in by her high sand hills. The Clay street cable road had conquered one of the meanest of these hills and they began to plan other roads of a similar sort. Like a blossoming and growing vine the city spread, almost overnight. Sand-dunes became building-lots of high value and a new bonanza era was come to San Francisco. And, with the traditional generosity of the coast, she gave her transportation idea to other cities. In a little while St. Louis, Chicago, Washington and New York were banishing the horse cars from their busiest streets. A new era in city transit was begun.
A few years later the broomstick trolley—cheaper and in many respects far more efficient—displaced the cable-cars in many of these cities. But San Francisco up to the present time has stuck loyally to her old-time hill conquerors. And the nervous lever-clutch of the gripman as he "gets the rope" is as distinctive of her as are the fantasies of her marvelous wooden architecture.