A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

It is another phase of human life in the vast backward of time, when the dust and dirt deposits of the Mississippi, and its tributary valleys, were accumulating as the ice fled northward. Again Man comes into our view, the same identity of thought and form, which makes the hero and the lover, the fundamental consciousness developed, as in you and me.

We move westward to where the Sierra Nevada Valley Mountains breast the Sacramento Valley, and nod to the answering summons of the Coast Range, where the rays that empurple the sawed edges of the Sierras dip the peaks of the coast in roseate halos.

A sunburst from the gathered edges of a thunderstorm reveals upon a platform of rock, that sticks out from the mountain side like a lozenge from a cake, a group of sunburnt men and women. Somewhat higher up and behind them a circle of low covers made of boughs, woven together and rudely thatched, indicates their simple homes. The place of their sojourn has been propitiously, even tastefully chosen. It is a somewhat scattered woodland, made up of colossal cone-bearing trees, that seem located at such even distances apart that their contact creates over the ground beneath them a softened twilight, though the sun at its zenith pours over their motionless and dependent boughs its full effulgence. The spot forms a terrace upon the ascending areas of a great mountain chain whose highest and peaked ridges glisten from distant snowfields.

Before this group of silent people, far below them in the broad valley of the present Sacramento, a scene of incomparable interest and beauty is displayed. They seem absorbed in its contemplation, and to their eyes perchance its varied features appeal with a force symptomatic of all the intense delight the poet or the artist would to-day feel before the return of its exciting and marvellous incidents.

It is a critical moment in the vast drama of orogenic change, which has built the continent; one act in that procession of acts, which moulded the surface of the earth into habitable forms, and etched its surface with the beauty of design.

The broad physiographic trough upon which these mountain denizens are gazing has become an area of conflict. The volcanic forces of the earth are even now engaged in making monumental deformations, and here below them they watch the splendid crisis of an engagement between the lava-rock welling from the furnaces of the earth’s interior, and the flashing currents of foam-filled water. Let us trace the picture.

On one side of the broad depression, filled to its farthest marge with intermittent forest-land, broad backs of alluvial sand, and seamed with sparkling rivers, rise the myriad summits of a long range of mountains torn by time and deeply bitten into picturesque contrasts of ravine, gorge, canyon, buttes and facetted pinnacles of stone. Far over the wide valley, scarcely seen, but still like a shadow upon the horizon, is the western limit of this quarternary basin, another line of hills, less wonderful, younger, and rather monotonously low.

The landscape disappears northward in bare regions that are hidden in clouds of mist, and far southward, and to the west, spectators just discern the limits of the Salt Sea. But it is upon the marvels beneath them that their eyes are fixed, eyes that are yet more quickly arrested by sensation, by the brusque struggles of natural forces, than by the alluring distance, shimmering hot beneath the noon-day sun.

Almost immediately beneath their feet, though on the level of the general valley, is a river bed, which, deserted by its former tenant, still holds dwindling lakes of water, somewhat connected, like a string of opal dishes, by filaments of thin and feeble rivulets. At a point north of them and fixed to their attention upon the mountain side by a dull murmurous succession of detonations, and splintering gashes in the rock, a pasty exudation of molten rock slips down in black lines or faintly rubescent streaks, and, uniting in an invading tongue of slaggy fusion, has entered the river valley, which is now, at its first courses, filled from rim to rim with half liquid scoria.

The lithic tide is carried on in a sluggish simulation of water currents, rolling over in its advance, or spurting in sudden liquid torrents from swelling concretions; now caught by the asperities of the channel, and now flowing faster at its unimpeded centre, dragged out in liguous coils and ropes of lava, and again, down some steeper declivity, tumbling in a shaggy cataract of braids, tortuous links, and vermiculate confusion. Beneath the mute group the igneous outburst has reached a pond, one of the derelict lakes along the river’s deserted way, and it is the fierce conflict thus begun which holds them in a rapt posture, like modelled images. As the flowing rock enters the lake with slow and even step, or spills into it, in flocks of bubbling slag, from its higher decrepitating surfaces, explosion follows explosion; the water is ejected in spurts of spray, and falling backward over the hot and half consolidated magma, flashes into steam. Rising clouds of vapor conceal the exact limits of the invasion, and points of contact, but the coarse rumble, the intermittent gushes of water upward, the far away reverberations of the earth’s opening crust, and the quivering pulsations that shake the table rock on which our spectators are standing, announce the new geological chapter in the world’s making, the last catastrophe before the earth lies quiet and smiling at the feet of men.