A Pacific Coast Vacation

by Mrs. James Edwin Morris

Now, all this time the great spirit was ignorant of the fate of his beloved daughter, but when the old mother grizzly came to die she felt that she could not lie peacefully in her grave until she had restored the princess to her father.

Inviting all the grizzlies in the forest to be present at the lodge of the princess, she sent her oldest grandson wrapt in a great white cloud to the summit of Mt. Shasta to tell the Great Spirit where his daughter lived.

Now when the great Manitou heard this he was so happy he ran down the mountain side so fast that the snow melted away under his feet. To this day you can see his footprints in the lava among the rocks on the side of the mountain.

The grizzlies by thousands met him and standing with clubs at “attention” greeted him as he passed to the lodge of his daughter.

But when he saw the strange children and learned that this was a new race he was angry and looked so savagely at the old mother grizzly that she died instantly. The grizzlies now set up a dreadful wail, but he ordered them to keep quiet and to get down on their hands and knees and remain so until he should return. He never returned, and to this day the poor doomed grizzlies go on all fours.

A wonderful feat of jugglery, but a greater was that of the Olympian goddess who changed the beautiful maiden Callisto into a bear, which Jupiter set in the heavens, and where she is to be seen every night, beside her son the Little Bear.

The angry Manitou turned his strange grandchildren out of doors, fastened the door and carried his daughter away to his own wigwam.

The Indians to this day believe that a bear can talk if you will only sit still and listen to him. The Indians will not harm a bear. Now for the meaning of those queer little piles of stones one sees so frequently in the Shasta mountains. If an Indian is killed by a bear he is burned on the spot where he fell. Every Indian who passes that way will fling a stone at the fated place to dispel the charm that hangs over it.

“All that wide and savage water-shed of the Sacramento tributaries to the south and west of Mt. Shasta affords good bear hunting at almost any season of the year—if you care to take the risks. But he is a velvet-footed fellow, and often when and where you expect peace you will find a grizzly. Quite often when and where you think that you are alone, just when you begin to be certain that there is not a single grizzly bear in the mountains, when you begin to breathe the musky perfume of Mother Nature as she shapes out the twilight stars in her hair, and you start homeward, there stands your long lost bear in your path! And your bear stands up! And your hair stands up! And you wish you had not lost him! And you wish you had not found him! And you start for home! And you go the other way glad, glad to the heart if he does not come tearing after you.”[1]

Downward from Mt. Shasta flows the Sacramento river. For thirty miles it goes tumbling over bowlders and granite ledges on its way to the sea. In mid-summer the Sacramento cañon is a paradise of umbrageous beauty, a region of forest and groves, of leafy shrubs, delicate ferns, mosses and beautiful flowers, of roaring, tumbling rivers, shining lakelets and dancing trout streams.