Bancroft's Tourist's Guide. Yosemite. San Francisco and around the Bay, (South.)

by Unknown

Now, when will you go? If you have means and are sure of time to see all the wonders and beauties which the State offers, then might you wisely and safely leave the best until the last; that is, reserve Yosemite for your final trip before you return. But, lest time or cash should fail, or sudden summons hasten your departure, it is wisest and safest to make sure of it at once while you may. It would never do to go back East, confront inquiring friends, and have to humbly confess that you had been to California, but had not seen Yosemite.

Then, how shall you go. If you are fresh and strong, with the nerve and muscle of a young and enthusiastic college pedestrian, you can do it on foot, as Bayard Taylor did Europe. It's the most independent and enjoyable way of all if you have time and disposition, and no ladies in your party. If you should wish to try that, get a copy of the Overland Monthly for July, 1870, turn to the article "Yosemite on Foot," and you have your guide.

If you haven't time or ambition to distinguish yourself by emulating Weston, you may possibly contemplate an excursion on hoofs. Several parties have done Yosemite on all fours, and report a tough American nag, or a wiry little Mexican mustang as an indispensable auxiliary. Parties who wish to avoid the sense of dependence, as well as the pecuniary expense of hiring a stable horse, frequently buy a tough native horse for seventy-five or a hundred dollars, use him for the entire trip, with no expense beyond that of daily feeding, keep him until they have finished their tour, and then sell him for nearly as much, in some cases even more, than they paid.

Mounted in this way you accomplish a sort of vicarious pedestrianism, gladly substituting equine hoofs for human heels, while the animal himself rejoices in a responsible backer in the bifurcated person of your bestriding self; or, still again, it may be—it probably does be, as our little four-year-old says—that you are too fashionably lazy,—I beg pardon, I meant to say, it is possible that you have inherited a constitutional aversion to protracted exertion, which, by long indulgence, has quite unfitted you for the thoroughly manly or womanly pursuit of grandeur, beauty, and pleasure in the saddle—chasing health on horseback.

One other way remains, before you fall back upon the fashionable and feeble way of "being carried" in the regular, orthodox and popular style, which suffers you to attempt no personal exercise beyond "the heavy looking on." You may combine saddle and wagon: that is, take a strong wagon, carrying tent, provisions and cooking apparatus, with one or two of the more unskillful riders on the seat, while the others in the saddle revolve as equestrian satellites around.

But if you decide, as most do, and as you probably will, to take no responsibility and cumber yourself with no care, you select one of the various public routes, seek out its agent, make your contract, give up all planning and providing on your own part, pay over your coin, take your tickets for the round trip, commit yourself to one of the various lines of public conveyances, dismiss all anxiety and give yourself up to receive and absorb all the pleasure that may lie along the route, or await you at its end.

And if your object is simply enjoyment, untroubled by exertion, and unmixed with anxiety, that is, undoubtedly, the best way.

You are in San Francisco, at the Grand, at the Occidental, at the Lick House or the Cosmopolitan. In their luxurious beds you have slept off the fatigue of thirty-three hundred miles across the continent, and at their bountiful tables you have fed yourself into courage and spirit for new and further enterprise. You have come forth so fresh and brave that you feel ready for eight thousand miles more, straight across the tranquil Pacific; or climbing, unaided, the loftiest vertebral peak of that spinal range which furnishes the backbone of the continent. Your new vigor has let off its frothy effervescence in sundry spasmodic dashes about the city and around its suburbs. You have driven to the Cliff House, interviewed the seals, climbed Telegraph hill, rusticated at Woodward's, spent an afternoon at Bancroft's, crossed to Oakland, inspected Alcatraz and Fort Point, and, in short, completed the little day-trips and half-day tours which so restfully entertain the newly-arrived traveler, gradually acclimate him to our occidental air and familiarize him with our cosmopolitan people. You feel strong and fresh: ready for the grand excursion. All your drawing-room and dining-table suits are snugly packed in trunks, folded away in drawers or carefully hung in wardrobe or clothespress. The roughest, strongest and warmest suit in your possession you have donned. Specially provide good stout, yet easy, boots or shoes, with the softest and most comfortable of socks or stockings. Remember that every day brings two climates, a cool or even cold one for morning and evening, with a hot and dusty noon sandwiched between. Umbrellas and rubber blankets you won't need, though a good traveling shawl will serve you frequently and well. Stovepipe hats are an abomination—a hard hat of any shape, first cousin to it, and the extra wide brimmed ladies' picnic hat, closely akin to both. Browns, drabs and grays are your best colors; linens and woolens your best materials; fine flannels next the skin, and especially provide plenty of something soft and thick to come between you and the horse, during the necessary miles in the saddle. This last is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. Calculate to spend at least two weeks in the valley, and allow two or even three days each way for your trip in and out. Of course you can go faster and quicker if you wish or must, but of all excursions imaginable, Yosemite most needs deliberation and leisure. These are precisely the two things of which the average American tourist has the least. Whence it has happened that very few indeed, especially of our own countrymen, have ever really visited Yosemite. Hundreds have dashed in, plunged around and rushed out. Horace Greeley staid about as long as it would take him to rush off one of his patent chain-lightning, hieroglyphic Tribune editorials.

He rode in at midnight, reached his lodging at one o'clock in the morning, too tired to eat, and too sore to tell of it; went to bed, sick, sore and disgusted. Up late next morning, so lame he could hardly sit in his saddle, hobbled hurriedly around three or four hours, and was on his way out again at a little after noon.

Many of the grandest sights he didn't even catch the remotest glimpse of; those he did see he just glanced at, too weary to appreciate their slightest beauty, and too hurried to allow himself time to begin to grow to the true scale of their grandeur; and having given to the whole valley about one quarter of the time necessary to thoroughly study, intelligently enjoy and heartily appreciate the least of its wonders, he has the presumption to fancy he has "been to Yosemite." The fact is, he never really saw a single object about the valley, except, possibly, the giant cliff, Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah, which, as he says, looked as if it might have leaned over and buried him beneath its vastness, and which, as I say, would, doubtless, have done so speedily, had it known that the shabby rider who shambled along under its base that moonlight night, sore at one end, sleepy at the other, and sick all the way between, was going to rush off and talk so inadequately, unworthily and even untruthfully about objects which no human eye ever did see or could see in the condition of his sleep-oppressed optics on that slumbrous August morning. He has the cheek to declare that the fall of Yosemite is a humbug. It would be interesting to know what the fall thought of Greeley. One thing is sure, all earlier and later visitors unite in the opinion that the only humbug in the valley that year went out of it in his saddle about three o'clock on that drowsy August afternoon, and has never since marred the measureless realities which he sleepily slandered. The simple fact is, Mr. Greeley saw the little which he did see three or four months too late in the season. If he ever comes again, at the right time, and stays to really see the wonders of the valley, he will be heartily ashamed of what he then wrote, and freely pardon his present critic. Meantime, exit H. G. We bear thee no malice. The soul that can see and feel as little as thine did in Yosemite provokes no anger, but only sorrow and compassion. For the sake of thy sore and raw and sadly-pummeled body, we freely forgive the terribly shaken soul that inhabited it on that memorable midnight when horse and saddle maliciously united in assault and battery on the most sensitive portion of thine editorial corporosity. Vale, Greeley, vale. The next time thou comest hither, wear what hat thou likest and match it with what suit may please thee best, but if thou lovest life, and wouldst see good days, tell, oh Horace, tell the truth.