With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

To understand the movies, and why so many of them are no better than they are, and why and when and how they are improving, we have to know something about motion-picture beginnings. And to understand the beginnings of the movies in the country, in the days when the new experiment began to grow to the proportions of a real industry, we can turn to California.

Not to Hollywood, where so many of the movies are made—but to the Sierras; for in the California gold rush of ’49, and the years that followed, we find a strange and vivid parallel.

Bakersfield, California, lies in a great bowl of plain, so vast it seems flat. On one side of the city is the Kern River, with countless oil derricks dotting the prairie-like country and stretching away towards the uplands that rim the mountains. To the south, the country is highly cultivated, flat as your hand, with beautiful shade-trees, and green fields and irrigation ditches, and growing crops—alfalfa, melons, grains, and fruits. A gray ribbon of asphalt boulevard stretches out from the city, straight as an arrow for some sixteen miles, and then with a single slight angle sixteen miles more, to the mountains towards Los Angeles, where it climbs up into the Tejon Pass. Along this strip of boulevard all the cars in the world seem to be passing; dusty trucks from the desert, the great humming busses of the El Dorado long-distance stage-line, shiny new touring-cars of the city people, mud-stained motors from the trans-continental highways, and innumerable Fords.

Coming into Bakersfield from the south, along that long stretch of straight perfect boulevard, you get the effect of an established civilization equal to that found anywhere on the surface of the earth.

Bakersfield itself, showing some signs still of the young, quick-grown city, is up-to-date, bustling, modern. The oil fields across the river, with their smoke and grime and activity, testify to the grinding wheels of industry.

But if you go a couple of miles out of the city, following the Kern River upstream toward the distant gulch where it leaves the mountains, you come to the great expanses of rolling plain-like upland, still almost as it was when only the Indians traversed its seemingly aimless footpaths, still as it was when the Spaniards jingled across it to their isolated haciendas, still as it was when the early gold-seekers invaded the country from north and south, in the days of ’49.

From Bakersfield you can reach the gold diggings either by going to the nearest mountains direct, or by following up along the Kern River. Once I drove a machine almost to the top of Greenhorn Mountain, that towers some five thousand feet out of the blunt Sierra range that overlooks the plain and the tiny city far below. There, amid the flowers and grasses that carpet the ground beneath black oak and sugar pine, were relics of the old days, when men found gold in every hill.

We visited Greenhorn City—once a bustling mining camp, but now only a ghost-like street of mossgrown ruins among the trees, with new growth pushing its way through the rotting boards that were once dance hall or cabin, storehouse or saloon.

Near one clearing, half a mile away, was the remnant of a miner’s cabin only lately fallen to the ground. The old man who lived there had buried a sack of gold-dust, and later been unable to find it again. For years he lived on at the mountain shack; lonely after the others had gone, searching with a lantern at night for the spot where he had buried his fortune, until his mind was entirely gone.

From Greenhorn we dropped down to the upper Kern River valley, shut in the hills, where we found other rough little towns of bygone days—not yet deserted, because of the valley crops and ranges; Bodfish, Isabella, and Kernville, all much as they were in the years of Bret Harte, when men went mad for California gold.