Kitabı oku: «In to the Yukon», sayfa 8
FOURTEENTH LETTER
SAN FRANCISCO
Los Angeles, October 12, 1903.
We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patronized Palace Hotel, and on which the Fair estate has just renewed a mortgage for another term of years.
In the morning we essayed to have a look at the city, and so took a long, wide electric car devoted to that purpose. A ride of thirty miles, and all for the price of only “two bits”! We circled around the city, we traversed its streets and avenues, climbed and descended its multitude of hills, went everywhere that an electric car might dare to go, and were given the chance to try the cable trams when the declivity was too steep for anything to move that did not cling.
The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and watered flowers superb, the unwatered, blistered sand spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden winds dreadful.
The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an old city – half a century old – old for the driving West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles of small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly needing a coat of paint, and mostly constructed thirty or forty years ago. A town once replete with vigor, that has slumbered for several decades, and is now reviving into life again. The vast mansions of the bonanza kings, the railway lords on “Nob Hill,” are now all out of date and mostly empty of their former occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O’Briens are dead, their heirs scattered to the winds. The Crokers, the Stanfords, the Huntingtons are reminiscences. The street urchins know them no more. Fashionable San Francisco has moved to another hill. The tenement quarter of the town has crept to their very doors. But the business section of the city has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the glory and boast of the Pacific Slope, is still the chief hostelry of the town; and yet the city is instinct with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares are full of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and Oriental commerce has entered the somewhat somnolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle of Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United States to the far east. Where the Pacific Mail S. S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the Pacific five years ago, now six lines of great freight and passenger steamships are unable to satisfy the increasing demands of trade. Now twenty steamers and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver and take cargoes, where few or none came six years ago. On the land side, too, there is progress. The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Company, so cleverly and firmly fastened by Huntington and his friends; and there are hopes that other lines may yet establish independent relations with the city. Along with this new growth of commerce have come a new throng of energetic men, and new fortunes are being made – and more widely distributed. The city, the commercial center, the ocean port, are all growing at a steadier, healthier gait than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza kings and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco was “in the soup,” so to speak. Its rich men were leaving it, did leave it; its sand-lots proletariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its middle class, the people making and possessing only moderate incomes, were doubtful of a success that to them had not yet come. To the north, sleepy Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma had been born; and in the south, Los Angeles had risen, like a phœnix, from the torrid sands. But San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the fleet of Montejo; the nation quickened with a consciousness that she was a world-power; that the trade and commercial dominance of the Pacific lands and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night San Francisco found herself re-endowed with new life.
After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon strolling about through the business streets and along the docks and wharves, viewing the many new shops, splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sumptuous display of their wares, the great trading centers of New York and Chicago, and noting the volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town streets, the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the waterfront for several miles.
No finer sight have we seen than when we stood near the surf-washed rocks, famous as the home of the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward the wind-tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight or ten full-rigged ships and four-masted barques converging on the narrow entrance of the Golden Gate, coming in out of the west, laden with the teas and silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudinous sails all set before the breeze, like a flock of white-winged sea birds, while slipping among them a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome came swiftly in.
Another day we were ferried five miles across the wide bay toward the north, to the pretty suburban residence section of Sausalito, and there taking an electric road were brought to the foot of Mount Tamalpais, and then changing to a climbing car were pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet into the air, to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of sea and bay, and dominates the landscape for many miles. Below us, at our feet, lay the great Bay of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green, garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the ships of war and of commerce, the narrows of the Golden Gate; and, westward, the Pacific Ocean, with the distant Farallon Islands, outposts of the Orient, while far to the east, peeping above the clouds, gleamed the snow-capped summits of the Sierra Nevadas.
Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced to see the blue uniform of Uncle Sam after the many weeks of red coats upon the Yukon. Say what you may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of our boys in blue. I well remember how good it seemed when we met them in command of the fortress of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago.
We also spent a night in Chinatown – or part of the night – for we were bound to see its horrors and its joys. The opium dens – a picture of Hop Sing and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit – I bring home to you; the theatre, where the audience and the actors were equally interesting; the Joss house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show you; the barber shop where they shave the head and scrape out the ears and nose; the many handsome shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms of bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children.
While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in San Francisco more particularly, have been greatly lessened in number the last few years, it is interesting to note how many of the more progressive Japanese are now to be seen in all of the great cities along the Pacific coast. In Vancouver, all of the bell boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel Vancouver were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake little fellows, speaking good English, dressed in American style, and seeming to know their business perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and Portland, and now we find them in large numbers in San Francisco. They get along well with the white man. They dress like him, eat like him, walk like him, and try to look as much like him as possible. They seek employment as servants, as day laborers, and are also getting extensively into trade in a small way. They keep prices up like a white man and join labor unions like the white man, and sympathetically act with him to a degree that eliminates the prejudice that hedges in and drives out the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genuine want in the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that Japanese capital is now coming into California and making substantial investments, the expenditure of their money giving employment to American white labor.
Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other day, I noticed that all the labor gangs employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks, dull-looking Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed to me as I looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that they gave less promise of satisfactory American citizenship than did the up-to-date, alert, intelligent Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental country, whose greatness was destroyed by Rome two thousand years ago; the other expressed the awakened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the Pacific.
That night when we first crossed the bay toward the long line of glittering city, the tall Norwegian said to me: “I have sailed all about this world and visited many cities, but San Francisco suits me the very best of them all.” And his black-eyed Tartar wife from Moscow exclaimed: “Ah, I will never leave here till I die.” All who visit San Francisco feel this subtle charm. There is a certain something in the air that soothes as well as stirs. Its lawns and flowers where water is applied; its sunshine, never too hot, for it is tempered by the breezes from the sea; no winter, rarely a dash of snow; no torrid sun; an atmosphere almost gentle, yet not destroying energy.Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow-gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the famous grove of immense redwood trees that comes down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mending their nets and loading them into their lateen-sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city; while, sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt and put it in his creel, “If a man has nothing to do but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along this coast. I’ve tried them all.”
Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow-gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the famous grove of immense redwood trees that comes down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mending their nets and loading them into their lateen-sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city; while, sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt and put it in his creel, “If a man has nothing to do but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along this coast. I’ve tried them all.”
From Santa Cruz we went over to the quaint old Spanish town of Monterey, once California’s capital, now the barrack sanitarium of Uncle Sam’s soldier boys, and upon whose quiet main street still dwells the Mexican-Spanish beauty to whom Tecumseh Sherman once made love, and in whose garden yet grows the pomegranate he planted in token of their tryst. She has never wed, but treasures yet the memory of her soldier lover.
Near Monterey is that marvelously lovely park, surrounding the great Del Monte Hotel, built by Crocker and Stanford and Huntington in their days of power, and where, among groves and lawns and gardens, winds the seventeen-mile drive of which the world has heard so much. Imagine the parks of Blenheim and Chatsworth and Windsor all combined, but filled with palmettos and palms and semi-tropical verdure – giant live oaks and Norfolk pines and splendid redwood, with all the flowers of the earth, with ponds and fountains, and you will have some faint conception of the beauty of Del Monte, an object-lesson of what the landscape gardener may do in California. We regretted leaving this superb place, but were glad to have had even a glimpse of it.
All the day we now hastened south on the flying “Coast Limited,” bound for Santa Barbara. First ascending the broad valley of Salinas River, the Coast Range close on our right, a higher range of mountains on our left, until, converging, we pierced the barrier by a long tunnel and slid down to San Louis Obispo and then to the sea. Many monstrous fields of sugar beet, miles of prune and almond and apricot trees, thriving orchards all of them; then mile after mile of wheat stubble, stacks of wheat straw, piles of sacked wheat at the by-stations; then herds of cattle and many horses as we reached the head of the valley. A rich and fecund land, held originally in big estates, now beginning to be cut up into the smaller farms of the fruit growers.
Toward the end of the afternoon we were skirting along by the breaker-lashed coast of the Pacific. A clear sky, a violent wind and tempestuous, foam-covered sea. We sat with the windows open, not minding the heat of the sun. The tide was at ebb, and upon the sand we saw many sea birds, gulls in myriads, snipe, plover, yellow-legs, sand-pipers in flocks, coots and curlew. We also passed a number of carriages driving close to the receding waters.
The country grew constantly warmer, the soil responding to cultivation with more and more luxuriant crops; among these, fields of lima beans, miles of them, which are threshed out and shipped in enormous quantity. It was dark when we drew in at Santa Barbara, and we did not know what hotel to go to, but, tossing up, chose the Potter. Many runners were calling their hostelries; the Potter porter alone was silent. As we drove in his ’bus through the palm-bordered streets, a cozy home showing here and there in the glare of an electric street light, we wondered what our luck would be. Imagine our delight when we drew up at the stately portal of a modern palace, built in the Spanish style and right on the borders of the sea. The moon was almost full, the tide near flood, the sunset breeze had died, the sea air soft and sweet, and the palace ours! A new hotel, two millions its cost, no finer on the Pacific Coast. And in this off season the prices were most moderate. Nowhere yet have we been so sumptuously housed. In the lovely dining-room we sat at supper by a big window looking out over the moonlit sea.
In the morning we wandered far down upon the beach, watching the breakers beyond the point, and later went up to the famous old Franciscan Monastery, a mile beyond the town. A shrewd yet simple father in brown monk’s robe who asked many questions of the outside world, showed us all about, and in the garden stood for his photograph, quite pleased at the attention. No more charming wintering spot have we yet come to than Santa Barbara.
In the late evening we entrained again and took the local for Los Angeles. For quite an hour and a half we ran close to the ocean, the perpetual breaking of the crested waves upon the shore sounding above the roar of the moving train. A yet greener land we now passed through, everywhere watered by irrigation, everywhere responding with seemingly greater luxuriance. It was just dusk as we turned inland, and quite dark when we came through the big tunnel into the head waters of the Los Angeles Valley. Just then a bright young fellow sat down beside me, and, talking with him, I was pleased to find him from West Virginia. A. Judy, from Pendleton County. A few years ago the family had come to this southern land and all have prospered. He was full of the zest of the life that wins.
Presently we came to many lights among shade trees, mostly palms, then houses and more lights, wide streets showing themselves. We were in Los Angeles, the metropolis of Southern California, the furthest south that on this journey we shall go.
FIFTEENTH LETTER
LOS ANGELES
Los Angeles, October 13, 1903.
We slept in Los Angeles with our windows wide open and felt no chill in the dry, balmy air, although a gentle breeze from seaward sifted through the lace curtains all night long. The sun was streaming in when at last we awoke to the sound of New England church bells. We breakfasted on plates piled high with big, red, sweet strawberries, dead ripe, evenly ripe, but not one whit over ripe. A ripeness and sweetness we have never before tasted, even in Oxford. In Seattle and Tacoma we met the royal crab of the Puget Sound, and found him big and bigger than the crabs of England and of France – big as dinner plates, all of them, and now we find in the great, luscious strawberry of Los Angeles another American product as big as those that grow in the gardens of merrie England.
Los Angeles! How can I tell you of it and of the lovely region of the American Riviera all round about it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams of Southern California and the country of Los Angeles, and when, during his seven long months of winter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to go there and to end his days among these orange groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And when he dies – so it is said – every good Yukoner and Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to Southern California! So I had imagined much for this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi-tropics, within the immediate borders of the United States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern city among all of this delight of climate and of verdure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapers far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are fine, but old in type – most or all erected thirty or forty years ago – while the many huge blocks of Los Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tramways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, and has put and is now putting his millions into the electric tramway system of Los Angeles.
During the morning we rode some thirty miles upon the tourist’s car, seeing the city, its many fine parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its extraordinary extent of imposing residences. And when we might ride no longer, we strolled on through Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place, and among those sections of the residence quarter where no tramways are allowed to profane the public way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los Angeles’ astonishing growth, for many of these superb homes are not built and owned by the business men making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but are built and owned by those who have already acquired fortunes in other parts of the United States and of the world, and who by reason of the genial climate of Southern California, have come here to live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are derived from sources elsewhere than in California, and they spend freely of those incomes in the region of their new homes. The exquisite lawns, the flowering shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the constant use of water and expert gardeners’ skill, give to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. Water does it all, and man helps the water.
Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the Methodist Church; the other under the control of the State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and bounds. It is the center of the gardens and orchards and citrus fruit trade of Southern California, and is the Mecca toward whose environs comes in perpetual procession the unending army of the world’s “One Lungers,” and their friends.
Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the swift, through electric train. Once a separate community, now already become a suburb of the greater growing city. “The finest climate on the earth,” they say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are there to prove it. A large town of residences, each standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes and occupied by a cultivated society.
We did not tarry to see the celebrated ostrich farm, which is one of the famous sights of Pasadena, but went on toward the mountain chain beyond and north of Pasadena to the base of towering Mount Low, and climbed right up its face a thousand feet on an inclined plane steeper than any of Kanawha’s, and then another thousand feet by five miles of winding electric railway. A wonderful ride into the blue sky, with a yet more wonderful panorama stretching for many miles beneath our feet. All the valley of the Los Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretching far as the eye could see until bounded by the mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated volcanic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified waves of a mighty sea. Below us the perfect verdure of irrigated land, the patches and masses of greenness everywhere threaded and interspersed by the irrigating ditches and pools and ponds whereby the precious water is impounded and distributed when used.
Los Angeles lies very near the center of an immense cove, whose sea line marks the great indenture on the southwest of the United States, where the coast bends in from Cape Conception and curves southeastward to the borders of Mexico, a total coastal frontage on the Pacific Ocean of near three hundred miles.
On the north, the mountains of the Coast Range, and the westward jutting spurs of the Sierra Nevada come together and form a barrier against the cold northern airs. Eastward their extension forms a high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Mountain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second finest harbor in California, is the most southern port and trade outlet. A vast “ventura,” as the Spaniards called it, upon this fertile plain and rolling upland anything will grow if only it has water. For three or four months in the year, from early November to March, the skies pour down an ample rainfall, and the world is a garden. During the other eight months, man – the active American – now irrigates the land with water stored during the rainy season, and thus a perpetual and prolific yield is won from the fecund soil. Here the famous seedless orange was discovered, perpetuated, and has become the most coveted citrous fruit. Fortunes have been made from the raising of these oranges alone. The immense and fragrant strawberries ripen every month the year round. Figs and pomegranates abound. Apples, pears, olives and grapes yield enormous and profitable crops. No frosts, no drouths. Last year Los Angeles and its contributing orchards shipped twenty-five thousand carloads of citrous fruit. This year they reckon to do yet more. Their capacity is only limited by the markets’ demand, and both seem boundless.
The air is dry like that of the Yukon Valley, and similarly, extremes of temperature are easily borne. It is never unpleasantly hot in Southern California, they say, just as the Yukoner vows he never suffers from the cold. “Only give us water to wash our gold;” “water to irrigate our crops,” cries each, “and we will become richer than the mind of man can think.” But the types of men and women are somewhat different in the two extremes. A sturdier race wins fortune from the soil in the Klondike land; there the children have rosier faces and are more alert. On the crowded streets of the southern city the pale presence of the “one lungers” is at once remarked. But for this, the people might be the same.
We left this gracious garden land, with its gentle climate, by the midday train, this time leaving the coast and following the interior San Joaquin Valley route. Just at the outskirts of the city our train halted a moment, and, looking from the window, I saw a most astonishing spectacle – an extensive enclosure with a large, wide-roofed building in its midst, and enclosure, roof and air all thick with myriads of pigeons. Here is the greatest pigeon roost of the world, where an enterprising bird lover raises squabs by the thousands, cans them in his own factory, and sends them all over the earth to the delight of the epicure. Just why such myriads of birds should not fly away, I do not know, but there they were covering the ground, the roof, and filling the air in circular flights, and seemed rarely or never to leave the borders of the enclosure.
For a few hours we retraced our way and then turned eastward across the edge of the great Mojave Desert. Crossing the barrier of the San Fernando Mountains on the north, through a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel, we left the greenness of olive grove and orange orchard behind, and came out into a continually more and more arid country. Cactus and yucca began to appear and to multiply, the dwarf shrunken palmetto of the Mexican plains grew more and more plentiful, and then we came through dry, parched gulches and cañons, out onto a dead flat plain stretching away toward the eastern horizon as far as the eye could see – sand and sage brush and stunted cactus; a hundred miles or more away a faint blue mountain range showing in the slanting sunlight against the eastern sky. Dry and arid and hopeless to man and beast. A terrible waste to cross, or even to enter, and lifeless and desolate beyond concept.
During the night we crossed over the high, arid Tehachapi Mountains and descended into the San Joaquin Valley, traversing that wonderfully fertile garden land until in the morning we were at Oakland. We then crossed the five miles of wide harbor and took our last breakfast in the city of the Golden Gate.
After night had fallen and I sat with my cigar, I chanced to fall in with an interesting young Jap, “R. Onishi,” on his first visit to America, correspondent of the “Jije Shimpo,” Tokio’s greatest daily newspaper. He had come over to investigate the growing rice plantations of Texas, with a view to Japanese capital becoming interested in development there. He had been much impressed with the opportunity there offered, and should report favorably on the proposed enterprise. Not to use Japanese labor, but for Japanese capital under Japanese management to use American labor. So does the opportunity and natural wealth of our country begin to attract the investment of the stored wealth of Asia as well as of Europe. Like the rice dealer I met on the “Kaiser Frederich,” crossing the Atlantic two years ago, Mr. Onishi said that American rice brings the highest price of any in the markets of the world, and he looks for a large export trade to Asia of American rice, as well as wheat. And America, how vast and rich and hopeful a land it seemed to him!
I have now seen almost the entire Pacific Coast of our Northern American Continent. From Skagway, from Dawson to the sight of Mexico. Its old and its new towns and cities, its ports and trade centers have I visited, and greatly has the journey pleased and profited me. The dim perception of our future Pacific power that first dawned upon me at Vancouver has now become a settled conviction. We are just beginning to comprehend the future dominance and potency of our nation in Oriental trade, in commerce, in wealth, in enlightened supremacy. And it fills the imagination with boundless sweep to contemplate what are the possibilities of these great Pacific States.
Among the cities of the future upon the Pacific Coast, Seattle and Los Angeles are the two that impress me as affording the wider opportunity and certainty of growth, wealth and controlling influence in trade, in commerce, in politics. If I were a young man just starting out, I should choose one of them, and in and through Seattle I believe there is the larger chance. Or if I were on life’s threshold and, say, twenty-five and vigorous, I would pitch my tent within the confines of the continent of Alaska, and by energy, thrift and foresight, become one of its innumerable future millionaires.
