On we went then over the mountains to the Tonto Basin and through the Reno Pass to the Verde River. We were encamped there over Sunday on January 1st in the former reservation of the now deserted Fort McDowell, and early on Monday morning we started for Phœnix. By a forced march of thirty miles we entered the city at ten o’clock the same evening and had a huge supper in a Chinese restaurant; then, while our animals were eating their fill of fresh alfalfa in a corral attached to a livery-stable, we slept deeply near by on a heap of hay, glad to have reached the end of our six weeks’ march across the narrowing frontier.
San Francisco, Cal.,
February 1, 1893.
Not the most interesting nor profitable and certainly not the most adventurous of the many miles which I have walked in a slow progress across the continent has been this last stage of the journey up through California. And yet the remembrance of it will always have a place apart. Work was plenty, but I made no long stops, pressed on at the rate of thirty miles a day, impelled by the delight of walking in so glorious an air through the marvellous beauty of this Pacific slope.
Fresh from the dusty plains I was soon in the midst of the orange-groves heavily laden with ripe fruit all about Colton and Riverside, where the hills were terraced as in the Riviera and the sky was the deep, unfathomable blue of Italy. It was January, and the first, fresh green of the new year was upon the fields and had touched with infinite delicacy the rugged sides of the mountains whose summits flashed white in places from melting snow. The early mornings were frosty, but mid-day warmed to a gentle glow, and the cool of the evening came with the declining sun.
Many a time, on the plains or in the mountains, in the presence of some Mexican Pueblo of adobe huts in a strangely foreign setting of cedar-trees, with threads of water apparently flowing up hill along the irrigation ditches to scant fields reclaimed from the desert, it had been difficult to realize that one was still in America. Here again was strongest suggestion of the foreign, in the houses which survive from the Spanish period, and especially the old Mission churches, where dwells the dignity of age and one can pass completely into the very atmosphere of Spain.
It was on the third day’s march, I think, from Los Angeles that I found myself nearing San Buenaventura. It was late in the afternoon, and the road ahead was an easy upward slope for several miles. Just at sunset I reached the summit. The town of San Buenaventura lay below me, with its long main street curving through rows of houses of widely various kind, and the Mission church standing on an elevation to the left, with its stucco walls bathed in sunset light, making a strange contrast with the modern town. And beyond, with the sun’s red disc a half circle on the horizon line, lay the peaceful sea, with a tongue of living flame across it turning to black coals the islands in its wake. In a moment the sun was gone, the shadow of the evening was upon the ocean, and over the town had fallen the transfiguration light which rests after sunset in spring-time upon Naples.
Three thousand miles away, and a year and a half in point of time for me, was Long Island Sound. I recalled the last glimpse of it as I looked back from Greenfield Hill in the early morning of my start, and saw it radiant in the sunshine of a midsummer day. And here again, after many months and many leagues of land journey, was the sea. Θἁλαττα! Θἁλαττα! I called aloud, for there was no one near enough to hear.
It was a rare moment, worth living for, that first unexpected glimpse of the Pacific. But strangely enough the feeling which it bred was no harbinger of an eager willingness to end my long experiment. Many a time when work was hard, and far more ardently when there was no work and the physical conditions of life seemed well-nigh unendurable, had I looked with longing to a return to normal living. And yet, as I neared my journey’s end I found possessing me a strange indifference to the idea of return. I do not attempt to analyze the feeling, I simply note it as a fact; but in some degree I recognize in it a vague unwillingness to have done with a phase of experience which for me has opened avenues of useful knowledge. Among them all there rises clearest at this moment the way of added knowledge of my country. I may have travelled it to little purpose, but I am conscious at least of a new-born sense of things which comes of actual contact with the soil and with the primal struggle for existence among men. One stands awestruck before the vastness of our great domain and its quick redemption from the wilderness. But most of all it is contact with the people which breeds in one the strongest patriotic feeling. Local conditions and the presence of large numbers of yet unassimilated foreign elements and rapid changes in economic relations and native weaknesses and vagaries are responsible for awful sores upon the body politic, while the power of aggregated wealth grows apace, and fierce antagonisms and sectional differences arise. Yet beneath the troubled surface of events one comes to know of the great body of a nation whose unity has been purchased and made sure by such a cost of blood and treasure as was never poured out upon the altar of a nation’s life before, and one sees a people intelligent, resourceful, and hugely vital, having much to learn and surely learning much, assimilating foreign elements with miraculous swiftness and growing stronger thereby, living laborious days wherein the rewards are to thrift and energy and enterprising skill, knowing no defeat and unacquainted with the sense of fear, and awakening year by year to a fuller consciousness of national life and of the glorious mission of high destiny. And with increasing knowledge the love of country grows until all thought of worth in her is merged and lost in reverence, and love of her becomes a summons to live worthy of the name and calling of an American.