Before the road was made, the passage was one of extraordinary difficulty. A wagon once started, they say, from Folsom, bearing “Carson or bust” in large letters upon the tilt. After ten days, it returned lamely enough, with four of the twelve oxen gone, and bearing the label “Busted.”
When we were nearing Hank Monk‘s “piece,” I became impatient to see the hero of the famous ride. What was my disgust when the driver of the earlier portion of the road appeared again upon the box in charge of six magnificent iron-grays. The peremptory cry of “All aboard” brought me without remonstrance to the coach, but I took care to get upon the box, although, as we were starting before the break of day, the frost was terrible. To my relief, when I inquired after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a timber ranch in the forest “six mile on.” At early light we reached the spot—the summit of the more eastern of the twin ranges of the Sierra. Out came Hank, amid the cheers of the half dozen men and women of the timber ranch who formed the “ball,” wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins without a word. For miles he drove steadily and moodily along. I knew these drivers top well to venture upon speaking first when they were in the sulks; at last, however, I lost all patience, and silently offered him a cigar. He took it without thanking me, but after a few minutes said: “Thet last driver, how did he drive?” I made some shuffling answer, when he cut in: “Drove as ef he were skeert; and so he was. Look at them mustangs. Yoo—ou!” As he yelled, the horses started at what out here they style “the run;” and when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we must have done three miles, round most violent and narrow turns, with only the bare precipice at the side, and a fall of often a hundred feet to the stream at the bottom of the ravine—the Simplon without its wall. Dropping into the talking mood, he asked me the usual questions as to my business, and whither I was bound. When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he said, “D‘you tell now! Jess give my love—at Bendigo—to Gumption Dick.” Not another word about Australia or Gumption Dick could I draw from him. I asked at Bendigo for Dick; but not even the officer in command of the police had ever heard of Hank Monk‘s friend.
The sun rose as we dashed through the grand landscapes of Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy snow-drifts and still sadder forests of gigantic pines nearly three hundred feet in height, and down the canyon of the American River from the second range. Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through the pine woods into an open scene. From gloom there was a change to light; from somber green to glowing red and gold. The trees, no longer hung with icicles, were draped with Spanish moss. In ten yards we had come from winter into summer. Alkali was left behind forever; we were in El Dorado, on the Pacific shores—in sunny, dreamy California.
CHAPTER XX.
EL DORADO.
THE city of the high priest clothed in robes of gold figures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic in caravels and cockboats, and toiled in leathern doublets and plate armor through the jungle swamp of Panama, were lured on through years of plague and famine by the dream of a country whose rivers flowed with gold. Diego de Mendoza found the land in 1532, but it was not till January, 1848, that James Marshall washed the golden sands of El Dorado.
The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly paradise in America. Not to speak of New Atlantis, the Canadian Indians have never ceased to hand down to their sons a legend of western abodes of bliss, to which their souls journey after death, through frightful glens and forests. In their mystic chants they describe minutely the obstacles over which the souls must toil to reach the regions of perpetual spring. These stories are no mere dreams, but records of the great Indian migration from the West: the liquid-eyed Hurons, not sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Californian if they are not Malay, the Pacific shores their happy hunting-ground, the climate of Los Angeles their never-ending spring.
The names The Golden State and El Dorado are doubly applicable to California; her light and landscape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on the Pacific side, nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow: even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in golden haze. No more cliffs and canyons—all is rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the Californian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the sea. The scenery of the Nevada side was weird, but these western foot-hills are unlike anything in the world. Drake, who never left the Pacific shores, named the country New Albion, from the whiteness of a headland on the coast; but the first viceroys were less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they christened it New Spain.
In the warm dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of rich red loam, and through forests of noble redwood—the Sequoia sempervirens, brother to the Sequoia gigantea, or Wellingtonia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop through the American River, just below its falls, where, in 1848, the Mormons first dug that Californian gold which in the interests of their church they had better have let alone, we came upon great gangs of Indians working by proxy upon the Continental railroad. The Indian‘s plan for living happily is a simple one: he sits and smokes in silence while his women work, and he thus lives upon the earnings of the squaws. Unlike a Mormon patriarch, he contrives that polygamy shall pay, and says with the New Zealand Maori: “A man with one wife may starve, but a man with many wives grows fat.” These fellows were Shoshonés from the other side of the plateau; for the Pacific Indians, who are black, not red, will not even force their wives to work, which, in the opinion of the Western men, is the ultimate form of degradation in a race. Higher up the hills, Chinamen alone are employed; but their labor is too costly to be thrown away upon the easier work.