Now we are at Keswick and see our first groves of figs and almonds and some wide-reaching palms and the spreading umbrella-trees, and many prune orchards. The valley is widening, the air is warmer than we have known it for many days. We are surely in California.
I have just been talking with the brakeman. He has been in Dawson and on the Klondike. “Mushed” through the White Pass, but, after reaching Dawson, he lost heart and came back again without a stake. The man who failed! Another, a big man, with a strong jaw and keen eye, has just climbed on the rear platform. He, too, has been in Dawson, stayed one day, bought a claim in the morning for $1,000, and sold it in the evening for $15,000, and then came right back to his almond groves to invest his make and thereafter rest content with California. The man who won.
Near us sits a black-eyed Russian woman, young and comely, whose husband was one of the discoverers of gold in Nome, and with her the loveliest blue-eyed Norwegian maiden just arrived from Hammerfest. “My husband’s sister who is come to America to stay,” the Russian says in perfect English. She is learning to talk American, and wonders at the huge cars, the multitude of people, the distances—“only a few hours from Trondhjem to Kristiania, but over four days and nights from New York to Seattle!” she exclaims. And her blue eyes grow big with wonder at the half-tropical panorama now unrolling before us.
I am writing this letter by bits as we travel. We are now on a straight track, as from my improved handwriting you may detect. A stretch of thirty-seven miles straight as the crow flies. We are past the smaller fruit farms of the upper Sacramento Valley; we are out on the interior plain that from here extends all down through California, a thousand miles almost to Mexico. We are in the wonderful garden land of the State. On either side of us stretches away, as far as the eye can see, a flat, level plain. It is one monstrous wheat field, and fences only at rare intervals mark it into separate holdings. On the east, far on the sky line, extend the snow-tipped summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains; on the west, the Coast Range. We have passed out of the region of mists and clouds, and are now in a clear, warm sunshine, the heavens an arching vault of cloudless blue. As clear as on the Yukon almost, but with many times the warmth. This is the region of the Mammoth Bonanza wheat farms you have so often read about. And one feels that man hereabouts does things in a big way.
In Oregon, they tell me, the climate is so equable that a single blanket keeps you warm of night the year round. You need it in summer; you do not need more in winter. Here, I fancy, you scarcely need any at all, so much further south have we already come.
Even yet we are passing through the wide stretches of wheat lands, wheat now milled in California and sent in many big ships to the Orient. The Chinaman is just learning the joy of an American flap-jack or a loaf of wheat bread—and he can’t get enough.
Dusk has come down upon us before we have reached Carquinez Strait, over which our train—a long train—is carried by a monstrous ferry boat, and then, skirting San Francisco Bay, we are soon among the suburban illuminations of Oakland. Across the five miles of water lies San Francisco, its million glittering electric lights stretching several miles and covering the hills on which the city is built, while far out on the right flashes the intermittent gleam of the light-houses marking the entrance of the Golden Gate. The ferry-boat taking us across is said to be the largest in the world, and the Norwegian lass’s big blue eyes grow all the bigger as she looks about her on the multitude of fellow-passengers. And then we are ashore and are whirling through broad, well-lighted streets to our hotel, “The Palace,” where now we are.