Kitabı oku: «In to the Yukon», sayfa 7
TWELFTH LETTER
SEATTLE, THE FUTURE MISTRESS OF THE TRADE AND COMMERCE OF THE NORTH
The Portland Hotel,Portland, Oregon, October 3, 1903.
Just one week ago to-day the steamer “Dolphin” landed us safely at the pier at Seattle. The sail on Puget Sound, a body of deep water open for one hundred miles to the ocean, was delightful. We passed many vessels, one a great four-masted barque nearing its port after six or eight months’ voyage round the Horn from Liverpool.
Seattle lies upon a semi-circle of steep hills, curving round the deep waters of the Sound like a new moon. An ideal site for a city and for a mighty seaport, which some day it will be. Many big ships by the extensive piers and warehouses. The largest ships may come right alongside the wharves, even those drawing forty feet. The tracks of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways bring the cars along the ship’s side, and there load and unload. All this we noted as our boat warped in to her berth. A great crowd awaited us. Many of our passengers were coming home from the far north after two and three years’ absence. Friends and families were there to greet them; hotel runners and boarding-house hawkers; citizens, too, of the half world who live by pillage of their fellowmen were there, and police and plain clothes men of the detective service were there, all alike ready to greet the returning Klondiker with his greater or lesser poke of gold. It was exciting to look down upon them and watch their own excitement and emotion as they espied the home-comers upon the decks. We, as well, had all sorts of people among our passengers. Mostly the fortunate gold-finders who had made enough from the diggings to “come out” for the winter, and some, even to stay “out” for good. A young couple stood near me; they were on their wedding trip; they would spend the winter in balmy Los Angeles and then return to the far north in the spring. An old man stood leaning on the rail. Deep lines marked his face, on which was yet stamped contentment. He had been “in” to see his son who had struck it rich on Dominion Creek, who had already put “a hundred thousand in the bank,” he said. He had with him a magnificent great, black Malamute, “leader of my boy’s team and who once saved him from death. The dog cost us a hundred dollars. I am taking him to Victoria. I couldn’t let him go. His life shall be easy now,” the old man added. Just then I noted a tall man in quiet gray down on the dock looking intently at two men who stood by one another a little to my left. They seemed to feel his glance, spoke together and moved uneasily away. They were a pair of “bad eggs” who had been warned out of the Yukon by the Mounted Police, and who were evidently expected in Seattle. One, who wore a green vest and nugget chain, played the gentleman. The other, who worked with him, did the heavy work and had an ugly record. He was roughly dressed and wore a blue flannel shirt and a cap. A bull neck, face covered with dense-growing, close-cropped red beard, shifty gray eyes. He had been suspected of several murders and many hold-ups. Detectives frequently travel on these boats, keeping watch upon the “bad men” who are sent out of the north. We probably had a few on board. In the captain’s cabin, close to our own, were piled up more than half a million dollars in gold bars; the passengers, most of them, carried dust. But the pair, and any pals they may have had along, had kept very quiet. They were spotted at the start. They knew it. Now they were spotted again, and this, too, they discerned.
Seattle is the first homing port for all that army of thugs and scalawags who seek a new land like the far north, and who, when there discovered, are summarily hurried back again. It is said to be the “nearest hell” of any city on the coast. The hungry horde of vampire parasites would make a fat living from the pillage of the returned goldseeker if it were not for the vigilance of the police. A strong effort is now being made by the authorities of Seattle to stamp out this criminal class and drive it from the city.
Our impression, as we crowded our way through the pressing throngs upon the pier and pushed on up into the city, was that we were in another Chicago. Tall buildings, wide streets, fine shops, great motion of the crowds upon the streets, many electric tram-cars running at brief intervals, and all crowded.
On our trip up the Yukon we had made the pleasant acquaintance of a Mr. S – and a Mr. M – of Columbus, O. Keen and agreeable men who had been spending a month in Dawson puncturing a gold swindle into which an effort had been made to lead them and their friends by unscrupulous alleged bonanza kings. They had cleverly nipped the attempt in the bud, and were now returning, well satisfied with their achievements. We had become fast comrades and resolved to keep together yet another few days. We found our way to the Grand Rainier Hotel, one of Seattle’s best, and now kept by the old host of the Gibson House in Cincinnati.
Our favorable impressions of Seattle were confirmed that night when our friends introduced us to the chief glory of Puget Sound, the monstrous and delicious crab, a crab as big as a dinner plate and more delicate than the most luscious lobster you ever ate. They boil him, cool him, crack him and serve him with mayonnaise dressing. You eat him, and continue to eat him as long as Providence gives you power, and when you have cracked the last shell and sucked the last claw, and finally desist, you contentedly comprehend that your palate has reflected to your brain all the gustatory sensations of a Delmonico banquet, with a Sousa band concert thrown in.
Saturday, after we had spent the morning in seeing the shops and wandering along the fine streets of the choicer residence section of the city, we all took the tourist electric car, which, at 2 P. M., sets out and tours the town with a guide who, through a megaphone, explains the sights.
Seattle now claims one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and probably has almost that number. A distinctly new city, yet growing marvelously, and already possessing many great buildings of which a much larger town might well boast.
Toward evening, at 4:30 P. M., we took the through electric flyer, and sped across a country of many truck gardens and apple orchards, some thirty-five miles to Tacoma, that distance farther up the Sound, and once the rival of Seattle. A city more spread out and less well built, the creation of the promoters of the Northern Pacific Railway Co., in the palmy days of Henry Villard. Tacoma, too, possesses superb docking facilities and a good two miles of huge warehouses and monstrous wharves, where, also, great ships are constantly loaded and unloaded for the Orient, South Africa and all the world, but whence few or no ships depart for the Northern Continent of Alaska. Tacoma seemed less alive and alert than Seattle, fewer people on the streets, smaller shops and business blocks, and the people moving more leisurely along the thoroughfares. In Seattle the houses mostly fresh painted; in Tacoma the houses looking dingy and as though not painted now for many a month. Seattle is noted for the public spirit of its citizens; they work and pull together for the common weal, but Tacoma is so dominated by the railway influence which created it, that the people are lacking in the vigor of the rival town.
As our electric train came to a standstill, W – rode up on his bicycle, and he was surely glad to see us. Messrs. S – and M – had come over with us for the ride, and we all five set right off to find our dinner. “Cracked Crabs” was again the word, and W – added, “Puget Sound oysters broiled on toast.” A delicate little oyster about the size of one’s finger nail, and most savory. When our party left the table, we were as contented a group as ever had dined.
We lodged with W – , and were delightfully cared for – a large, sunny room overlooking such a garden of roses and green turf as I never before have seen. Roses as big as peonies and grass as green and thick as the velvet turf of the Oxford “quads.” Our host gave us each morning a dainty breakfast, and then we foraged for ourselves during the day.
In the morning of Sunday we attended the Congregational Church, and in the afternoon rode on the electric car to the park, a few miles – two or three – out of the city, along the shores of one of the fine bays that indent the Sound. Not so fine a park as Vancouver’s, but one that some day will probably rank among the more beautiful ones of our American cities.
On Monday we wandered about the town, visited its museum, saw the fine public buildings, and spent several hours in going over and through the most extensive sawmill plant on the coast – “in the world,” they say. The big business originally instituted by one of the early pioneers, is now managed by his four sons, all graduates of Yale. We met the elder of them in blue overalls and slouch hat, all mill dust. A keen, intelligent face. He works with his men and keeps the details of the business well in hand. How different, I thought, from the English manner of doing things. These men are rich, millionaires; college bred, they work with their men. In England they tell you that no man who would give his son a business career would think of sending him to college. Oxford or Cambridge would there unfit him for business life. He would come out merely a “gentleman,” which there means a man who does nothing, who earns no bread, but who lives forever a parasite on the toil of others.
In these great mills the monstrous fir and pine logs of Washington are sawed up, cut, planed, and loaded directly into ships for all the markets of the earth – Europe, South Africa, Australia, China, South America and New York, wherever these splendid woods are in demand. The forests of Washington and British Columbia are said to possess the finest timber in the world, and all the world seems to be now seeking to have of it.
Many fishing-boats were in the harbor and along the water-side, and many of the big sixty-foot canoes, dug out of a single immense log, paddled by Indians, were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the States of Washington and Oregon the Indians are the chief reliance of the hop growers for the picking of their crops, and every summer’s-end the various tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come from everywhere – from Vancouver’s Island, from British Columbia and even from Alaska. They voyage down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop at the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as water will carry them. They bring the children and the old folks with them, they buy or hire horses, and they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields, where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of the hops. They were now returning, and many were passing through Tacoma. They were here outfitting, and spending their newly earned wages in buying all those useful and useless things an Indian wants – gay shawls and big ear-rings for the squaws, gaudy blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys for the papooses. On the side the women were also selling baskets made in their seasons of leisure. In the shelter of the long pier one afternoon we came upon a group of several family canoes preparing for the long voyage to the north. A number of pale-face women were bargaining for baskets; one had just bought a toy canoe from an anxious mother, and I was fortunate in buying another. Near by a man was carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. They were evidently from Alaska. Alaska and a thousand miles or more of sea lay between them and home. They looked like a group of Japanese and spoke in gutteral throat tones. The Indians we lately met at Yakima were wholly different, being redskins of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. When in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bompas, who has spent more than forty years among the Indians of the north, told me that in his view the coast Indians had originally come over from North Asia and were allied to the Mongolian races, while he believed that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed Indian of the interior was of Malay origin and of a race altogether distinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according to our preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but rather a bastard Jap. He fishes and hunts and works, and his labor is an important factor in solving the agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The enormous and profitable hop crops could not be gathered without him.
We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the chance of visiting some of the primeval forest regions of the State, where the largest trees are yet in undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking advantage of a railway excursion to Yakima, there to see the State Fair, was too good to be lost, and we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S – had joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excursion tickets, and climbed into one of eleven packed passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific special, and made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and southeast, across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and down into the dry, arid Yakima River basin to the city – big village – of North Yakima. An arid valley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. The hills all round sere and brown, tufted and patched with dry buffalo grass and sage brush; the flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this by irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. The river is robbed of its abundant waters, which are carried by innumerable ditches, and then again divided and sub-divided, until the whole level expanse of wide valley is soaked and drenched and converted into a smiling garden. Here and there a piece of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid between the green.
North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that still dwells hard by upon its reservation, is a thriving little place, the greenest lawns of the most velvety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the water comes. Trees shading its streets, which are bounded on each side by flowing gutters, and the driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, and these we were glad to see. All fine, very fine, and such apples as I never before set eyes on. Thousands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped to Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is their size and flavor.
Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of these great land grant fed railway corporations. While the Northern Pacific had advertised an excursion to Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women and children to the fair, it yet made no extra provision to take them back, so that when next day several hundred were at the station in order to board the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, and the very many saw with dismay the train pull away without them! We had got into a sleeper on the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another twelve hours in the overcrowded little town.
Yesterday we boarded the night express for Portland. The country between this city and Tacoma is said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for even lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret the travel at night. On the other hand, we saw much fine forest in crossing the Cascade Mountains, although the finest timber in the State is, I am told, over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of the Olympia Mountains, between Puget Sound and the Pacific. There the trees grow big, very big, and thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in diameter at the butt.
The Puget Sound cities are destined to become among the chief marts of commerce and of trade upon the Pacific Coast, and they are filled with an energetic, intelligent population of the nation’s best. The climate, too, though mild, is cool enough for the preservation of vigor. Roses bloom all the winter through in Tacoma, they tell me. And the summers are never overhot. The humidity of the atmosphere is the strangest thing to one of us from the East. “More like England than any other is the climate,” they say, and the exquisite velvet turf is the best evidence of this. But the most wonderful sight of all to my Kanawha eyes was the ever-present snow-massed dome of Mt. Rainier, lifting high into the sky, sixty miles away, but looking distant not more than ten.
The third great center of the life of this northwest coast is Portland. Solid, slow, rich, conservative. A hundred and twenty miles from the sea, but yet a seaport. Situated on the Willamette River, six miles from its confluence with the mighty Columbia. Already Seattle outstrips it in population, so a Portland man admitted to me to-day, yet Portland will always remain one of the great cities of the coast. It possesses many miles of fine docks; the waters about their piles are not quiet and serene, but swift and turbulent, sometimes mad and dangerous. It has a complete and extensive electric tramway system, and this evening we have ridden many miles about the city, and up by a cable road onto the heights, a straight pull four hundred feet in the air. Below us lay the city, level as a floor, the Willamette winding through it, crossed by many steel draw-bridges, while distant, to the north, we could just make out the two-mile-wide Columbia. Portland is a wealthy and substantial city – a city for the elderly and well-to-do, while Seattle is the city for the young man and for the future.
The lesson we have really been learning to-day, however, is not so much of Portland as of the river Columbia, the really “mighty Columbia.”
At 9:30 we took a train on the Oregon Shortline Railway up along the Columbia – south shore – to the locks at the Cascades, a three hours’ run, and then came down again upon a powerful steamboat of the Yukon type, though not so large. It took us about four and one-half hours with only three landings and with the current. The last fifteen or twenty miles of the trip the river was fully two miles wide, although at the Cascades it had narrowed to be no broader than the Kanawha. On either side the valley was generally occupied by farms and meadows, grazing cattle, many orchards, substantial farmsteads. A long-time settled country and naturally fertile. And along either shore, at intervals of not more than a quarter of a mile, were the fish-traps, the wheels, the divers handy contrivances of man, to catch the infatuated salmon. Until I saw the swarming waters of that creek of Ketchikan, my mind had failed to comprehend the fatuity of these fish. This year, owing, they say, to the influence of the hatcheries established by the Government, the catch of salmon here has been enormous; so great, in fact, that “hundreds of tons” of the salmon had to be thrown away, owing to the inability of the canneries to handle them before they had spoiled.
The Portland people whom I have met and talked with all tell me that even though Seattle secures the Alaskan trade, even though Seattle and Tacoma obtain the lion’s share of the waxing commerce of China and Japan, yet will Portland be great, because she must ever remain the mistress of the trade of that vast region drained by the Columbia and the Willamette, all of whose products come to her by water, or by a rail haul that is wholly downgrade. And when I realize that the Columbia is plied by steamboats even up in Canada, a thousand miles inland, where we traversed its valley on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and that when Uncle Sam has built a few more locks, these same boats can then come down to Portland, and Portland boats ascend even to the Canadian towns, as well as traverse Washington and enter Idaho and Montana, then is it that I realize that the future of this fine city is most certainly well assured.
THIRTEENTH LETTER
THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE
State of Oregon, the Valley of the Willamette,October 3, 1903.
From Portland to San Francisco. Written while moving thirty miles an hour on the Southern Pacific Railway.
Here we are flying due south from Portland, crossing the entire State of Oregon. We have left Portland on the 8:30 morning train – “The Southern Limited” – and shall be in “Frisco” at eight o’clock to-morrow night. We are now ascending the beautiful valley of the Willamette, “Will-am-ett;” with a fierce accent on the am. Flat and level as a table – ten to twenty miles wide and two hundred miles long, lying between the Coast Range on the west and the higher Cascade Mountains on the east. A land of perfect fertility, so gracious a country as I have never yet beheld. In winter, rarely any snow, plenty of rain and very much moist Scotch air. In summer, a sunshine that ripens fields of wheat, a moisture that grows the biggest apples and prunes and small fruits. Everywhere neat, tidy farmhouses, big barns. Great stacks of wheat straw and as big ones of hay, and these generally tented in with brown canvas. We are passing, too, extensive fields of hop vines, an especially lucrative crop at present prices – twenty-five cents a pound, while seven cents is reckoned as the cost. Everywhere we see flocks of chickens, turkeys and some geese plucking the stubble fields, for the crops are all cut and harvested. And every now and then we espy a superb Mongolian pheasant in gorgeous plumage, for they have become acclimated and multiply in this salubrious climate. Herds of fine cattle and sheep are grazing in the meadows, and the horses are large and look well cared for. A rich, fat land, filled with a well-to-do population. I have just fallen into talk with a young lawyer who lives at the port of Toledo, where Uncle Sam is dredging the bar at the mouth of the Yaquina River, and to which city new railroads are coming from the interior, and where they expect a second Portland to grow up. He tells me that east of the Cascade Mountains lie other fertile valleys west of the Rockies, and where also is the great cattle and stock raising region of the State, and where moisture is precipitated sufficient to save the need of irrigation.
Now we are just coming to the Umpqua River and the town of Roseburg – a garden full of superb roses blooming by the station – where stages may be taken to the coast at Coos Bay, another growing seaport section, where extensive coal mining and timbering prevail. And as the dusk grows we are passing over the divide to Rogue River and its verdant valley, which we shall traverse in the night. Oregon is green and the verdure much like that of England – the same moist skies, with a hotter summer sun urging all nature to do its best.
In the night we shall climb over the Siskiyou Mountains, and by dawn will be in sight of Mount Shasta. At Portland we were amidst mists and fogs and drizzling rain, so we caught no glimpses of Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Jefferson, all of whose towering snow-clad cones may be seen on a clear day. We hope that to-morrow Mt. Shasta will be less bashful and not hide her white head.
Sunday A. M., October 4th.
In California! We were called at six o’clock that we might see Mt. Shasta, and also have a drink from the famous waters of Shasta Spring. Mt. Shasta we did not see, so great were the fog masses and mists enshrouding her, but we have had a drink from the elixir fountain. A water much like the springs at Addison, in Webster County, W. Va., but icy cold.
Now we are coming down the lovely valley of the Sacramento. A downgrade all the way to “Frisco.” The verdure is growing more tropical. The undergrowth of the forests is more and more luxuriant. I see big, red lilies by the swift water-side. The air is milder. We have descended already 1,600 feet since passing Shasta Spring. We have five hundred feet more to drop to Oakland. We are now in a ruggedly volcanic mining country, many iron, lead and copper mines and once placer diggings for gold, these latter now pretty much worked out, only a few Chinese laboriously washing here and there.
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.
