Santa Cruz was associated in our minds with neither seaside resort nor mission, but with the grove of giant redwoods second only to the mighty trees of Mariposa. Our first inquiries were for the road to this famous forest, and we learned it was a few miles north of the town. We followed the river canyon almost due north over a shelflike road cut in the hillsides some distance above the stream. It commands a beautiful view of the wooded valley, which we might have enjoyed more had we not met numerous logging-wagons on the narrow way. The drivers—stolid-looking Portuguese—frequently crowded us dangerously near the precipice along the road; in one instance, according to the nervous ladies in the rear seat, we escaped disaster by a hair's breadth. According to the law in California, a motorist meeting a horse-drawn vehicle on a mountain road must take the outside, even though contrary to the regular rule. The theory is that the people in the car are safer than those behind a skittish horse, though in instances such as I have just mentioned the motorist faces decidedly the greater danger. We climbed a gradual though easy grade for six or seven miles and turned sharply to the right down a steep, winding trail to the river bank.
We left the car here and crossed a high, frail-looking suspension foot-bridge which swayed and quivered in a most alarming manner, though it probably was safe enough. The trees are at the bottom of the canyon in a deep dell shut in by towering hills on either side. They are known as Sequoia Sempervirens (a slightly different species from the Sequoia Gigantea of the Mariposa Grove) a variety never found far from the sea. The grove is private property and the guardian nonchalantly said, "Two bits each, please," when we expressed our desire to go among the trees. He then conducted us around a trail, reciting some interesting particulars about the tawny Titans.
"There are eight hundred trees in the grove," he said, "and of these one hundred and fifty are over eleven feet in diameter and two hundred and twenty-five feet high. This is the only group so near the coast and generally they grow much higher above the sea level. I saw two of them fall in a terrific storm that swept up the valley a few years ago, and the shock was like an earthquake. You can see from the one lying yonder that their roots are shallow and they are more easily overthrown than one would think from their gigantic proportions. This old fire-hollowed fellow here could tell a story if he could speak, for General Fremont made it his house when he camped in this valley in '48. Yes, it is a good deal of a picnic ground here in season—the grove is so accessible that it is visited by more people than any of the others."
All of which we counted worth knowing, even though recited in the perfunctory manner of the professional guide. One needs, however, to forget the curio shops, the pavilions and picnic debris and to imagine himself in the forest primeval to appreciate in its fullest force the solemn majesty of these hoary monarchs. They are indeed wonderful and stately, their tall, tapering shafts rising in symmetrical beauty and grace like the vast columns of some mighty edifice. Millenniums have passed over some of them and all our standards of comparison with other living things fail us. The words of William Watson on an ancient yew recur to us as we gaze on these Titans of the western world:
"What years are thine not mine to guess;
The stars look youthful, thou being by,"
—but our musings were cut short when we noted that the shadows were deepening in the vale. We had some miles of mountain road to traverse if we were to spend the night at San Jose and we retraced our way to Santa Cruz as fast as seemed prudent over such a road.
We could not think of leaving the town without a visit to the mission, even though they told us that little but the old-time site could be seen. We climbed the hill overlooking the sea to a group of buildings now occupied by a Catholic convent; among these was a long, low, whitewashed structure, now used as quarters for the nuns. This, they told us, was the ancient monastery. Or, more properly, the ancient monastery stood here and the present building was reared on its foundations.
The church-tower fell in 1840 as the result of an earthquake and ten years later a second shock demolished the walls of the building. Being within the limits of the town, the debris was not allowed to remain, as in lonely Soledad or La Purisima, and the site was cleared for other purposes. And this reminds us that we owe the existence of many of the mission ruins to their isolation; wherever they stood within the limits of a town of any size they either have been restored or have disappeared. Of the former we may cite Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo and of the latter, Santa Cruz and San Rafael.
The mission at Santa Cruz was another of Padre Lasuen's projects—founded under his direction in 1790. It never prospered greatly, its highest population being five hundred and twenty-three in 1796. From that time it declined rapidly and at the secularization in 1835 the Indians had almost disappeared. The property at that time was valued at less than fifty thousand dollars and, as we have seen, the church was destroyed five years later. Santa Cruz would doubtless rejoice to have her historic mission among her widely heralded attractions to-day, but it is gone past any rehabilitation.