The cows are not driven more than a mile to be milked; the fields being so arranged that the corral is near the centre. When they are milked, they stray back of themselves to their grazing places.



CHAPTER X.

TEHAMA AND BUTTE, AND THE UPPER COUNTRY.

General Bidwell, of Butte County, raised last year on his own estate, besides a large quantity of fruit, seventy-five thousand bushels of wheat. Dr. Glenn, of Colusa County, raised and sent to market from his own estate, two hundred thousand bushels. Mr. Warner, of Solano County, produced nine thousand gallons of cider from his own orchards. A sheep-grazer in Placer County loaded ten railroad cars with wool, the clip of his own sheep. For many weeks after harvest you may see sacks of wheat stacked along the railroad and the river for miles, awaiting shipment; for the farmers have no rain to fear, and the grain crop is thrashed in the field, bagged, and stacked along the road, without even a tarpaulin to cover it.

In 1855, California exported about four hundred and twenty tons of wheat; in 1873, the export was but little less than six hundred thousand tons. In 1857, six casks and six hundred cases of California wine were sent out of the State; in 1872, about six hundred thousand gallons were exported. In 1850, California produced five thousand five hundred and thirty pounds of wool; in 1872, this product amounted to twenty-four million pounds. Thirty million pounds of apples, ten million pounds of peaches, four and a half million pounds of apricots, nearly two million pounds of cherries, are part of the product of the State, in which the man is still living who brought across the Plains the first fruit-trees to set out a nursery; while four and a half million of oranges, and a million and a half of lemons, shipped from the southern part of the State, show the rapid growth of that culture.

In the northern counties, of which Tehama and Butte are a sample, they are usually fortunate in the matter of late as well as early rains; but close under the coast range the country is dryer, as is natural, the high mountain range absorbing the moisture from the north-westerly winds. They begin to plow as soon as it rains, usually in November, and sow the grain at once. Formerly the higher plains were thought to be fit only for grazing; but even the red lands, which are somewhat harder to break up, and were thought to be infertile, are found to bear good crops of grain; and this year these lands bear the drought better than some that were and are preferred. Lambing takes place here in February, and they shear in April. The grazing lands abound in wild oats, very nutritious, but apt to run out where the pastures are overstocked. Alfilleria is not found so far north as this; alfalfa has been sown all over the valley in proper places, and does well. They cut it three times in the year, and turn stock in on it after the last cutting; and all who grow it speak well of it.

Red Bluff is one of the oldest towns in the valley; it stands at the head of navigation on the Sacramento, and was, therefore, a place of importance before the railroad was built. The river here is narrow and shoal, and it is crossed by one of those ferries common where the rapid current, pushing against the ferry-boat, drives it across the stream, a wire cable preventing it from floating down stream. The main street of the town consists mainly of bar-rooms, livery-stables, barber-shops, and hotels, with an occasional store of merchandise sandwiched between; and, if you saw only this main street, you would conceive but a poor opinion of the people. But other streets contain a number of pleasant, shady cottages; and, as I drove out into the country, the driver pointed with pride to the school-house, a large and fine building, which had just been completed at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, and seemed to me worth the money. The town has also water-works; and the people propose to bridge the Sacramento at a cost of forty thousand dollars, and to build a new jail, to cost fifteen thousand dollars. Such enterprises show the wealth of the people in this State, and astonish the traveler, who imagines, in driving over the great plain, that it is almost uninhabited, but sees, in a thirty-thousand dollar school-house in a little town like Red Bluff, that not only are there people, but that they have the courage to bear taxation for good objects, and the means to pay.

From Red Bluff two of the great mountain peaks of Northern California are magnificently seen—Lassen's Peaks and Shasta. The latter, still one hundred and twenty miles off to the north, rears his great, craggy, snow-covered summit high in the air, and seems not more than twenty miles away. Lassen's Peaks are twins, and very lonely indeed. They are sixty miles to the east, and are also, at this season, glistening with snow. Between Lassen's and the Sacramento, some thirty miles up among the mountains, there is a rich timber country, whose saw-mills supply the northern part of the valley with lumber, sugar-pine being the principal tree sawed up. The valley begins to narrow above Red Bluff, and the foot-hills and mountains still abound in wild game. Hunters bring their peltries hither for sale; and this has occasioned the establishment at this point of a thriving glove factory, which turned out—from an insignificant looking little shop—not less than forty thousand dollars' worth of gloves last year. Two enterprising young men manage it, and they employ, I was told, from fifty to eighty women in the work, and turn out very excellent buckskin gloves, as well as some finer kinds. Such petty industries are too often neglected in California, where every body still wants to conduct his calling on a grand scale, and where dozens of ways to prosperity, and even wealth, are constantly neglected, because they appear too slow.

This whole country is only about four years in advance of the lower or San Joaquin Valley, and the influence of climate and soil in bringing trees to bear early was shown to me in several thrifty orchards, already beginning to bear, on ground which four years ago was bought for two dollars and fifty cents per acre. The habit of raising wheat is so strong here, that almost every thing else is neglected; and I remember a farm where the wheat field extended, unbroken, except by a narrow path leading to the road, right up to the veranda of the farmer's house. His family lived on canned fruits and vegetables; and except here and there a brilliant poppy, which stubborn Dame Nature had inserted among his wheat, wife and children had not a flower to grace mantle or table. I confess that it pleased me to hear this farmer complain of hard times, because, as he said, the speculators in San Francisco made more money from his wheat than he did. If the speculators in San Francisco teach the farmers in California to grow something besides wheat, they will deserve well of the State.

The upper waters of the Sacramento run through mountain passes, and between banks so steep that for miles at a time the river is inaccessible, except by difficult and often dangerous descents; and an old miner told me that when this part of the river, between where Redding now lies and its source, near Mount Shasta, was first "prospected" for gold, the miners or explorers had to build boats and descend by water, trying for gold by the way, because they could not get down by land. In those days, he said, if a company of miners could not make twenty dollars a day each, the "prospect" was too poor to detain them; and they made but a short stay at most points on the Upper Sacramento.

The country was then full of Indians; and it was very strange, indeed, to hear this miner—a thoroughly kind-hearted man he was, and now the father of a family of children—tell with the utmost unconcern, and as a matter of course, how they used to shoot down these Indians, who waylaid them at favoring spots on the river, and tried to pick them off with arrows.

I remember hearing a little boy ask a famous general once how many men he had killed in the course of his wars, and being disappointed when he heard that the general, so far as he know, had never killed any body. I suppose a soldier in battle but rarely knows that he has actually shot a man. But one of these old Indian fighters sits down after dinner, over a pipe, and relates to you, with quite horrifying coolness, every detail of the death which his rifle and his sure eye dealt to an Indian; and when this one, stroking meantime the head of a little boy who was standing at his knees, described to me how he lay on the grass and took aim at a tall chief who was, in the moonlight, trying to steal a boat from a party of gold-seekers, and how, at the crack of his rifle, the Indian fell his whole length in the boat and never stirred again, I confess I was dumb with amazement. The tragedy had not even the dignity of an event in this man's life. He shot Indians as he ate his dinner, plainly as a mere matter of course. Nor was he a brute, but a kindly, honest, good fellow, not in the least blood-thirsty.



The poor Indians have rapidly melted away under the fervent heat of forty-rod whisky, rifles, and disease. This whole Northern country must have been populous a quarter of a century ago; General Bidwell and other old Californians have told me of the surprisingly rapid disappearance of the Indians, after the white gold-seekers came in. It was, I do not doubt, a pleasant land for the red men. They lived on salmon, clover, deer, acorns, and a few roots which are abundant on mountain and plain, and of all this food there is the greatest plenty even yet. If you travel toward Oregon, by stage, in June, July, or August, you will see at convenient points along the Sacramento parties of Indians spearing and trapping salmon. They build a few rude huts of brush, gather sticks for the fire, which is needed to cook and dry the salmon meat; and then, while the men, armed with long two-pronged spears, stand at the end of logs projecting over the salmon pools, and spear the abundant fish, the squaws clean the fish, roast them to dryness among the hot stones of their rude fire-place, and finally rub the dried meat to a powder between their hands, or by the help of stones, when it is packed away in bags for winter use.

What you thus see on the Sacramento is going on at the same time on half a dozen other rivers; and I am told that these Indians come from considerable distances to this annual fishing, which was practiced by them doubtless a long time before the white men came in. Not unfrequently in these mountains you will find a castaway white man with a half-breed family about him; "squaw-men" they are called, as a term of contempt, by the more decent class.

As you drive by the farm-houses on the road, you may commonly see venison hanging on the porch; and every farmer has a supply of fishing-rods and lines, so that you can not go amiss for trout and venison. Few of them know, however, that a trout ought to be cooked as quickly as possible after he is caught; and if you do not take care, your afternoon fish will appear on the table next day as corned trout, in which shape I have no liking for it.

The Shasta Valley contains a good deal of excellent farming land, but it is used now chiefly for cattle and sheep, and in many parts of it the grazing is very fine. There are a number of lesser valleys scattered through the mountains hereabouts. Indeed, the two ranges seem to open out for a while, and Scott's Valley on the west, and the Klamath Lake country to the east and north-east from Yreka, are favorite grazing regions. Here there is occasional snow in the winter, and some cold weather; the spring opens later and the rains last longer. The streams in all this region bear gold, and miners are busy in them. Yreka, in the Shasta Valley, is the centre of a considerable mining district, and therefore a busy place, even without the Modoc war, which gave it a temporary renown during the winter and spring. Now that the Modoc war is closed, no doubt the famous lava beds will attract curious visitors from afar. They can be reached in thirty-six hours from Yreka; and that place is distant thirty-six hours from San Francisco.

Aside from the public lands still open in small tracts of eighty and one hundred and sixty acres to pre-emption by actual settlers, under the homestead law, and the railroad lands, to be had in sections of six hundred and forty acres, the Sacramento Valley contains a number of considerable Spanish grants; and the following account of these, which I take from the San Francisco Bulletin will give an Eastern reader some idea of the extent of such grants, their value, and how they are used:

"The first large tract of land north and west of Marysville is the Neal grant, containing about seventeen thousand acres. This grant is owned by the Durham estate and Judge C.F. Lott, though Gruelly owns a large slice of it also. The Neal grant is mostly composed of rich bottom-lands; nearly all of it is farmed under lease; the lessees pay one-quarter to one-third of the crops as rent. They do very well under this arrangement.

"The next grant on the north is that of Judge O.C. Pratt. It contains twenty-eight thousand acres of bottom-land. Butte Creek skirts it on one side for a distance of seventeen miles, and a branch of that creek runs through the centre. Nearly six thousand acres are covered with large oak-trees. There are about one hundred miles of fences on this rancho; there are about ten thousand sheep, twelve hundred head of cattle, and two hundred horses on it; the land has been cultivated or used as pasturage for about fourteen years. About ten thousand acres of it, I am informed, would readily sell in subdivisions for fifty dollars per acre; ten thousand acres would sell for about thirty dollars, and eight thousand acres at twenty dollars per acre. There are many tenants on this tract, having leases covering periods of three to five years; rent, one-fourth of the crop raised; the owner builds fences and houses for the lessees. The average quantity of wool annually grown on this rancho is sixty thousand pounds; beef cattle, two hundred and fifty head; value of produce received as rent from tenants, twelve thousand dollars per year. Judge Pratt is willing to sell farms of one hundred and sixty to three hundred and twenty acres at about the rates named, and on easy terms.

"The Hensley grant, lying north of Judge Pratt's rancho, contains five leagues. It was rejected by the United States Courts, and was taken up by, and is covered with, settlers, who own one hundred and sixty to three hundred and twenty acres each, worth forty to sixty dollars per acre. Little or none of that land is for sale, the owners being too well satisfied with their farms to sell them, even at the highest ruling rates.

"General Bidwell's rancho adjoins Judge Pratt's. It contains about twenty thousand acres, of which about one-quarter is of the best quality, and would readily sell at fifty to sixty dollars per acre. About five thousand acres more, lying along the Sacramento River, are subject to overflow. That portion is very rich grazing land, and is worth fifteen to twenty dollars per acre. The other ten thousand acres lie near the foot-hills; they are extremely well adapted to grape culture, and are worth five to twelve dollars per acre. General Bidwell is not willing to sell.

"The next rancho on the west is owned by John Parrot. It contains about seventeen thousand acres, and lies on the east bank of the Sacramento River. It contains about four thousand acres of first-class wheat or corn land; the remainder is composed of excellent pasturage; there are only a few thousand sheep, and a few cattle and horses on this rancho. It has for several years been cultivated by Morehead and Griffith, under a private arrangement with the owner. It is understood that Parrot would sell, either in a body or in small tracts, to desirable purchasers; his prices would probably range from fifteen to fifty dollars per acre.

"The next large rancho is that of Henry Gerke, living twenty miles above Chico. It now contains about eighteen thousand acres, of which a large portion is suitable for wheat or corn growing, and grazing purposes. One of the largest and finest vineyards in the State is on this rancho; and the wine it produces has a large sale in the State. The most of Gerke's land is devoted to wheat raising; eighteen hundred tons of wheat were raised on it last year, and about twenty-two hundred tons this year. It is mostly tilled by tenants. The land is worth from twenty to fifty dollars per acre. The owner would sell the whole rancho, but it is not known whether he would sell in small tracts or not. He has a standing offer of six hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for the land, vineyards, and improvements.

"General Wilson owns several thousand acres of the original Gerke grant. His land is altogether devoted to wheat growing, and is worth forty dollars per acre.

"A.G. Towne's grant adjoins Gerke's on the north and west. It now contains about twelve thousand acres; much of it is devoted to wheat growing, and is worth fifteen to forty dollars per acre, or an average all round of twenty-five dollars.

"At Tehama, on the west side of the Sacramento River, is Thome's grant. It contains about twenty thousand acres, one-third of which is of the very best quality of wheat land, the remainder good grazing. It is understood that this land can be bought either as a whole or in small farms. The best of it is worth about forty-five dollars an acre; the body of it about twenty dollars.

"The next grant, on the north, is that of William G. Chard. It is nearly all cut up and owned in small farms. Colonel E.J. Lewis, a well-known politician, is one of the largest owners on the Chard tract. He is extensively engaged in wheat raising.

"Ide's grant is adjacent, on the north; it is also mostly divided and owned in small tracts of one hundred and sixty to four hundred acres each.

"The Dye grant lies east of and opposite to Red Bluff. It was originally a large grant, but has been partially subdivided. It contains some good bottomland, but is mostly adapted to grazing.

"The most northerly grant in the State is that formerly owned by the late Major Redding. It is partially subdivided. Like the Dye grant, it contains some rich bottom-land, but, like it, is mostly adapted for grazing and grape growing. Haggin and Tevis lately bought (or hold for debt) about fifteen thousand acres of this rancho, which are worth about one hundred thousand dollars, or about seven dollars per acre. It is understood from inquiries made from the owners of these two last named tracts, that they are willing to sell grain lands at about an average of thirty dollars per acre."

Of course these grants make up, in the aggregate, but a small part of the arable land of the Sacramento Valley.



CHAPTER XI.

TOBACCO CULTURE—WITH A NEW METHOD OF CURING THE LEAF.

The manufacture of cigars is one of the largest industries of San Francisco. Last year the Government received taxes on 78,000,000 cigars made in the State of California, and in September alone taxes were paid on 8,000,000. But, though the State has thousands of acres of land well fitted to produce tobacco, and though the "weed" has been grown here for twenty years or more with great success, so far as getting a heavy crop is concerned, I doubt if even 1,000,000 of cigars have, until this fall, been made of tobacco raised in California.

There has, however, been no lack of efforts to produce here tobacco fit to manufacture into cigars and for smoking and chewing purposes. The soil in many parts of the State is peculiarly adapted to this plant; the climate, mild and regular, favored its growth and hastened its perfection. The best seed was procured from Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and Cuba. But for many years the product was rank, coarse, and fitter for sheep-wash than for any other purpose.

Meantime, however, not a few men familiar with the old processes of raising and curing the plant have tried their best ingenuity to improve the quality. It was thought that the soil was too rich, because the tobacco makes a rapid and heavy growth; but planting on thinner or older soil did not answer. Several methods of curing were contrived, and there is now reason to believe that the one known as the Culp process, from the name of its patentee, will produce the desired result. I had heard and read so much about it, and about the merit of the tobacco produced by it, that I went down to Gilroy, seventy or eighty miles south of San Francisco, to see what had really been accomplished. The account I give below will probably interest many tobacco growing and manufacturing readers, while it will, I fear, painfully affect the spirits of the anti-tobacconists; for there is reason to believe that tobacco will become presently one of the most important and valuable crops of this State.

I must premise that I am not an expert in tobacco, nor familiar with the methods pursued in the East. I have seen a tobacco-field and the inside of a Connecticut curing-house, and that is about all. I give, therefore, not opinions, but facts.

Gilroy stands in a long and broad plain, a very rich piece of alluvial bottom, with water so abundant that artesian wells are easily bored and very common. At the depth of one hundred and thirty feet they get flowing wells, and it happened in one case of which I heard that the water came up with such force as to prevent the casing going down into the well, and the pressure of the water broke away the ground, enlarged the bore of the well, and threatened to flood a considerable area, so that the farmers gathered in force, and by means of an iron caisson loaded with stones, and with many cart-loads of stones besides, plugged up the dangerous hole.

The land is a deep alluvial loam, easily worked, and here, and in some neighboring valleys, many tobacco growers have been engaged for the last ten or twelve years. Mr. Culp, who was a tobacco grower, and, if I understood him rightly, also a manufacturer in New York for some years before he came here, and who appears, at any rate, to be a very thorough farmer and a lover of clean fields, has planted tobacco here for fifteen years. He has a farm of about seven hundred acres, four hundred of which have this year been in tobacco. From him and others I learned the following particulars of the way in which they cultivate the plant in California.

They sow the seed from the 1st to the 10th of January, and sometimes even in December. The beds are prepared and sown as in the East, except that they do not always burn the ground over, which, if I remember rightly, is invariably done in Missouri and Kentucky. In this season, the days are always warm enough for the little plants; but there are light frosts at night, and they are protected against these by frames covered with thin cotton cloth.

The fields are plowed—by the best growers—ten inches deep; cross-plowed and harrowed until the soil is fine, and then ridged—that is to say, two furrows are thrown together. This saves the plants from harm by a heavy rain, and also makes the ground warmer, and is found to start the plants more quickly.

Planting in the fields begins about the 8th of April; and the plants are set a foot apart in the rows, the rows being three feet apart, if they are from Havana seed; if Connecticut or Florida, they stand eighteen inches or two feet apart in the rows.

They had grown, besides Havana and Florida, for their crop, Latakia, Hungarian, Mexican, Virginia, Connecticut-seed Standard, Burleigh, White Leaf, and some other kinds, by way of experiment.

Cultivators and shovel-plows are used to keep the soil loose and clean; if the weather should prove damp and cold, the shovel-plow is used to make the ridges somewhat higher. They go over the fields twice in the season with these tools, using the hoe freely where weeds get into the rows. Last year, in twenty-six days after they were done planting, they had gathered two bales of tobacco. This, however, is not common, and was done by very close management, and on a warm soil.

All the tobacco growers with whom I spoke assert that they are not troubled with that hideous creature, "the worm." They attribute this in part to the excellence of their soil, and partly to the abundance of birds and yellow jackets. They do not "worm" their crop, it seems, which must give them an enviable advantage over Eastern growers.

They do not always "top" the Havana, and they do very little "suckering." If the ground is clean, they let the suckers from the root grow, and these become as large and heavy as the original plant. They believe that the soil is strong enough to bear the plants and suckers, and that they get a better leaf and finer quality without suckering.

The planting is continued from April until the latter part of July, so as to let the crop come in gradually; the last planting may be caught by an early frost, but whatever they plant before the 1st of July is safe in any season. Cutting begins about the 4th of June, and this year they were cutting still on the 19th of October. The earlier cut plants sprout again at once, and mature a second and even a third crop. Mr. Culp told me that he had taken four crops of Havana in one year from the same field, and I saw considerable fields of third crop just cut or standing; but in some cases the frost had caught this. "If the soil is in perfect order, we can here make a crop of Havana in forty days from the planting," said he.

One man can prepare and take care of ten acres here, keeping it in good order. For planting and cutting, of course, an extra force is used. One man can set out or plant three thousand plants in a day of Havana; of the other kinds from fifteen hundred to two thousand.

The tobacco is cut with a hatchet; if it is Havana, the toppers usually go just ahead of the cutters in the field, or they may be a day ahead. Florida is topped ten days or two weeks before cutting. You must remember that after April they have no rain here, so that all field work goes on without interruption from the weather, and crops can be exposed in the field as a planter would not dare do in the East. Up to the cutting, the methods here differ from those used in the East, only so far as climate and soil are different.

When the plant lies in the field Mr. Culp's peculiar process begins; and this I prefer to describe to you as nearly as I can in his own words. He said that tobacco had long been grown in California even before the Americans came. He had raised it as a crop for fifteen years; and before he perfected his new process, he was able usually to select the best of his crop for smoking-tobacco, and sold the remainder for sheep-wash. One year two millions of pounds were raised in the State, and, as it was mostly sold for sheep-wash, it lasted several years, and discouraged the growers. Tobacco always grew readily, but it was too rank and strong. They used Eastern methods, topping and suckering, and as the plant had here a very long season to grow and mature, the leaf was thick and very strong.

The main features of the Culp process are, he said, to let the tobacco, when cut, wilt on the field; then take it at once to the tobacco-house and pile it down, letting it heat on the piles to 100 degrees for Havana. It must, he thinks, come to 100 deg., but if it rises to 102 deg. it is ruined. Piling, therefore, requires great judgment. The tobacco-houses are kept at a temperature of about 70 degrees; and late in the fall, to cure a late second or third crop, they sometimes use a stove to maintain a proper heat in the house, for the tobacco must not lie in the pile without heating.



When it has had its first sweat, it is hung up on racks; and here Mr. Culp's process is peculiar. He places the stalk between two battens, so that it sticks out horizontally from the frame; thus each leaf hangs independently from the stalk; and the racks or frames are so arranged that all the leaves on all the stalks have a separate access to the air.

The tobacco-houses are frame buildings, 100 x 60 feet, with usually four rows of racks, and two gangways for working. On the rack the surface moisture dries from the leaf; and at the proper time it is again piled, racked, and so on for three or even four times. The racks are of rough boards, and the floor of the house is of earth.

After piling and racking for three weeks, the leaves are stripped from the stalk and put into "hands," and they are then "bulked," and lie thus about three months, when the tobacco is boxed. From the time of cutting, from four to six months are required to make the leaf ready for the manufacturer.

"Piling" appears to be the most delicate part of the cure, and they have often to work all night to save tobacco that threatens to overheat. Mr. Culp thinks the dryness of the climate no disadvantage. I was told that they find it useful sometimes to sprinkle the floors of the tobacco-houses.

I saw racks, too, in the fields—portable, and easily carried anywhere; and on these a great quantity of Florida tobacco, used for chewing and smoking, had been or was getting cured. It was piled in the field where it was cut, and the whole curing process, up to "bulking," is carried on in the open air. Havana "fillers" they also cure in the field, as the fine color is not needed for that.

Mr. Culp thought his method of horizontal suspension allowed the juices from the stalk to be carefully distributed among the leaves. He told me that a fair average crop was about 1500 pounds of Havana, or 2500 pounds of Florida, per acre, of merchantable leaf. In favorable localities this was considerably exceeded, he said. For chewing-tobacco, the cut plant is piled but once.

For four hundred acres of tobacco, about one hundred and twenty-five Chinese were employed in cutting and curing. After planting and up to the cutting season they had but fifty men employed. The Chinese receive one dollar a day and board themselves, living an apparently jolly life in shanties near the fields.

They get their Havana seed from Cuba. The Patent Office seed did not do well. They do not like to risk seed of their own plants. He used home-grown seed for nine years; he could not say that there was a serious deterioration or change in the quality of the tobacco, but a singular change in the form of the leaf took place. That from home-grown seed gets longer, and the veins or ribs, which in Havana tobacco stand out at right angles from the leaf stalk, take an acute angle, and thus become longer and make up a greater part of the leaf. Of Florida tobacco the home-grown seed comes true.

In summer the roads get very dusty in California, and this dust is a disadvantage to the tobacco planter. On the Culp farm I found they were planting double rows of shade trees along the main roads, and graveling the interior roads; also, they seem to feel the high winds which sweep through the California valleys, and were planting almonds and cotton-woods for windbreaks in the fields. It seemed odd to see long rows of almond-trees used for this purpose.

This process has so far won the confidence of experts in tobacco in this State, that a company with large capital has undertaken not only the raising of tobacco by its method, but also the manufacture into cigars, and plug, smoking, and fine-cut chewing-tobacco. They are just beginning operations in Gilroy, on a scale which will enable them to manufacture all the tobacco grown this year on about six hundred acres, and they mean to plant next year one thousand acres, and expect that from fifteen hundred to two thousand acres will be planted and cured by others under licenses from the patentee. Commercially, of course, their undertaking is yet an experiment, though excellent cigars and tobacco have been made already; but the year 1874 will decide the result; and if it should prove as successful as is hoped, and as there is good cause to believe it will, a new and very profitable branch of agriculture will be opened for the farmers of this State; for tobacco will grow in almost all parts of it.



CHAPTER XII.

THE FARALLON ISLANDS.

If you approach the harbor of San Francisco from the west, your first sight of land will be a collection of picturesque rocks known as the Farallones, or, more fully, the Farallones de los Frayles. They are six rugged islets, whose peaks lift up their heads in picturesque masses out of the ocean, twenty-three and a half miles from the Golden Gate, the famous entrance of San Francisco Bay. Farallon is a Spanish word, meaning a small pointed islet in the sea.

These rocks, probably of volcanic origin, and bare and desolate, lie in a line from south-east to north-west—curiously enough the same line in which the islands of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Island group have been thrown up. Geologists say they are the outcrop of an immense granite dike.

The southernmost island, which is the largest—just as Hawaii, the southernmost of the Sandwich Island group, is also the biggest—extends for nearly a mile east and west, and is three hundred and forty feet high. It is composed of broken and water-worn rocks, forming numerous angular peaks, and having several caves; and the rock, mostly barren and bare, has here and there a few weeds and a little grass. At one point there is a small beach, and at another a depression; but the fury of the waves makes landing at all times difficult, and for the most part impossible.

The Farallones are seldom visited by travelers or pleasure-seekers. The wind blows fiercely here most of the time; the ocean is rough; and, to persons subject to sea-sickness, the short voyage is filled with the misery of that disease. Yet they contain a great deal that is strange and curious. On the highest point of the South Farallon the Government has placed a light-house, a brick tower seventeen feet high, surmounted by a lantern and illuminating apparatus. It is a revolving white light, showing a prolonged flash of ten seconds duration once in a minute. The light is about three hundred and sixty feet above the sea, and with a clear atmosphere is visible, from a position ten feet high, twenty-five and a half miles distant; from an elevation of sixty feet, it can be seen nearly thirty-one miles away; and it is plainly visible from Sulphur Peak on the main-land, thirty-four hundred and seventy-one feet high, and sixty-four and a half miles distant. The light-house is in latitude 37 deg. 41' 8" north, and longitude 122 deg. 59' 05" west.

On our foggy Western coast it has been necessary to place the light-houses low, because if they stood too high their light would be hidden in fog-banks and low clouds. The tower on the South Farallon is, therefore, low; and this, no doubt, is an advantage also to the light-keepers, who are less exposed to the buffetings of the storm than if their labor and care lay at a higher elevation.

As the Farallones lie in the track of vessels coming from the westward to San Francisco, the light is one of the most important, as it is also one of the most powerful on our Western coast; and it is supplemented by a fog-whistle, which is one of the most curious contrivances of this kind in the world. It is a huge trumpet, six inches in diameter at its smaller end, and blown by the rush of air through a cave or passage connecting with the ocean.

One of the numerous caves worn into the rocks by the surf had a hole at the top, through which the incoming breakers violently expelled the air they carried before them. Such spout-holes are not uncommon on rugged, rocky coasts. There are several on the Mendocino coast, and a number on the shores of the Sandwich Islands. This one, however, has been utilized by the ingenuity of man. The mouth-piece of the trumpet or fog-whistle is fixed against the aperture in the rock, and the breaker, dashing in with venomous spite, or the huge bulging wave which would dash a ship to pieces and drown her crew in a single effort, now blows the fog-whistle and warns the mariner off. The sound thus produced has been heard at a distance of seven or eight miles. It has a peculiar effect, because it has no regular period; depending upon the irregular coming in of the waves, and upon their similarly irregular force, it is blown somewhat as an idle boy would blow his penny trumpet. It ceases entirely for an hour and a half at low water, when the mouth of the cave or passage is exposed.



The life of the keepers of the Farallon light is singularly lonely and monotonous. Their house is built somewhat under the shelter of the rocks, but they live in what to a landsman would seem a perpetual storm; the ocean roars in their ears day and night; the boom of the surf is their constant and only music; the wild scream of the sea-birds, the howl of the sea-lions, the whistle and shriek of the gale, the dull, threatening thunder of the vast breakers, are the dreary and desolate sounds which lull them to sleep at night, and assail their ears when they awake. In the winter months even their supply vessel, which, for the most part, is their only connection with the world, is sometimes unable to make a landing for weeks at a time. Chance visitors they see only occasionally, and at that distance at which a steamer is safe from the surf, and at which a girl could not even recognize her lover. The commerce of San Francisco passes before their eyes, but so far away that they can not tell the ships and steamers which sail by them voiceless and without greeting; and of the events passing on the planet with which they have so frail a social tie they learn only at long and irregular intervals. The change from sunshine to fog is the chief variety in their lives; the hasty landing of supplies the great event in their months. They can not even watch the growth of trees and plants; and to a child born and reared in such a place, a sunny lee under the shelter of rocks is probably the ideal of human felicity.

Except the rock of Tristan d'Acunha in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, I have never seen an inhabited spot which seemed so utterly desolate, so entirely separated from the world, whose people appeared to me to have such a slender hold on mankind. Yet for their solace they know that a powerful Government watches over their welfare, and—if that is any comfort—that, thirty miles away, there are lights and music and laughter and singing, as well as crowds, and all the anxieties and annoyances incidental to what we are pleased to call civilization.

But though these lonely rocks contain but a small society of human beings—the keepers and their families—they are filled with animal life; for they are the home of a multitude of sea-lions, and of vast numbers of birds and rabbits.

The rabbits, which live on the scanty herbage growing among the rooks, are descended from a few pair brought here many years ago, when some speculative genius thought to make a huge rabbit-warren of these rocks for the supply of the San Francisco market. These little animals are not very wild. In the dry season they feed on the bulbous roots of the grass, and sometimes they suffer from famine. In the winter and spring they are fat, and then their meat is white and sweet. During summer and fall they are not fit to eat.

They increase very rapidly, and at not infrequent intervals they overpopulate the island, and then perish by hundreds of starvation and the diseases which follow a too meagre diet. They are of all colors, and though descended from some pairs of tame white rabbits, seem to have reverted in color to the wild race from which they originated.

The Farallones have no snakes.

The sea-lions, which congregate by thousands upon the cliffs, and bark, and howl, and shriek and roar in the caves and upon the steep sunny slopes, are but little disturbed, and one can usually approach them within twenty or thirty yards. It is an extraordinarily interesting sight to see these marine monsters, many of them bigger than an ox, at play in the surf, and to watch the superb skill with which they know how to control their own motions when a huge wave seizes them, and seems likely to dash them to pieces against the rocks. They love to lie in the sun upon the bare and warm rocks; and here they sleep, crowded together, and lying upon each other in inextricable confusion.



The bigger the animal, the greater his ambition appears to be to climb to the highest summit; and when a huge, slimy beast has with infinite squirming attained a solitary peak, he does not tire of raising his sharp-pointed, maggot-like head, and complacently looking about him. They are a rough set of brutes—rank bullies, I should say; for I have watched them repeatedly as a big one shouldered his way among his fellows, reared his huge front to intimidate some lesser seal which had secured a favorite spot, and first with howls, and if this did not suffice, with teeth and main force, expelled the weaker from his lodgment. The smaller sea-lions, at least those which have left their mothers, appear to have no rights which any one is bound to respect. They get out of the way with an abject promptness which proves that they live in terror of the stronger members of the community; but they do not give up their places without harsh complaints and piteous groans.

Plastered against the rocks, and with their lithe and apparently boneless shapes conformed to the rude and sharp angles, they are a wonderful, but not a graceful or pleasing sight. At a little distance they look like huge maggots, and their slow, ungainly motions upon the land do not lessen this resemblance. Swimming in the ocean, at a distance from the land, they are inconspicuous objects, as nothing but the head shows above water, and that only at intervals. But when the vast surf which breaks in mountain waves against the weather side of the Farallones with a force which would in a single sweep dash to pieces the biggest Indiaman—when such a surf, vehemently and with apparently irresistible might, lifts its tall white head, and with a deadly roar lashes the rocks half-way to their summit—then it is a magnificent sight to see a dozen or half a hundred great sea-lions at play in the very midst and fiercest part of the boiling surge, so completely masters of the situation that they allow themselves to be carried within a foot or two of the rocks, and at the last and imminent moment, with an adroit twist of their bodies, avoid the shock, and, diving, re-appear beyond the breaker.

As I sat, fascinated with this weird spectacle of the sea-lions, which seemed to me like an unhallowed prying into some hidden and monstrous secret of nature, I could better realize the fantastic and brutal wildness of life in the earlier geological ages, when monsters and chimeras dire wallowed about our unripe planet, and brute force of muscles and lungs ruled among the populous hordes of beasts which, fortunately for us, have perished, leaving us only this great wild sea-beast as a faint reminiscence of their existence. I wondered what Dante would have thought—and what new horrors his gloomy imagination would have conjured, could he have watched this thousand or two of sea-lions at their sports.

The small, sloping, pointed head of the creature gives it, to me, a peculiarly horrible appearance. It seems to have no brain, and presents an image of life with the least intelligence. It is in reality not without wits, for one needs only to watch the two or three specimens in the great tank at Woodward's Gardens, when they are getting fed, to see that they instantly recognize their keeper, and understand his voice and motion. But all their wit is applied to the basest uses. Greed for food is their ruling passion, and the monstrous lightning-like lunges through the water, the inarticulate shrieks of pleasure or of fury as he dashes after his food or comes up without it, the wild, fierce eyes, the eager and brutal vigor with which he snatches a morsel from a smaller fellow-creature, the reliance on strength alone, and the abject and panic-struck submission of the weaker to the stronger—all this shows him a brute of the lowest character.

Yet there is a wonderful snake-like grace in the lithe, swift motions of the animal when he is in the surf. You forget the savage blood-shot eyes, the receding forehead, the clumsy figure and awkward motion, as he wriggles up the steep rocks, the moment you see him at his superb sport in the breakers. It seemed to me that he was another creature. The eye looks less baleful, and even joyous; every movement discloses conscious power; the excitement of the sport sheds from him somewhat of the brutality which re-appears the moment he lands or seeks his food.

So far as I could learn, the Farallon sea-lions are seldom disturbed by men seeking profit from them. In the egging season one or two are shot to supply oil to the lamps of the eggers; and occasionally one is caught for exhibition on the main-land. How do they catch a sea-lion? Well, they lasso him, and, odd as it sounds, it is the best and probably the only way to capture this beast. An adroit Spaniard, to whom the lasso or reata is like a fifth hand, or like the trunk to the elephant, steals up to a sleeping congregation, fastens his eye on the biggest one of the lot, and, biding his time, at the first motion of the animal, with unerring skill flings his loose rawhide noose, and then holds on for dear life. It is the weight of an ox and the vigor of half a dozen that he has tugging at the other end of his rope, and if a score of men did not stand ready to help, and if it were not possible to take a turn of the reata around a solid rock, the seal would surely get away.

Moreover, they must handle the beast tenderly, for it is easily injured. Its skin, softened by its life in the water, is quickly cut by the rope; its bones are easily broken; and its huge frame, too rudely treated, may be so hurt that the life dies out of it. As quickly as possible the captured sea-lion is stuffed into a strong box or cage, and here, in a cell too narrow to permit movement, it roars and yelps in helpless fury, until it is transported to its tank. Wild and fierce as it is, it seems to reconcile itself to the tank life very rapidly. If the narrow space of its big bath-tub frets it, you do not perceive this, for hunger is its chief passion, and with a moderately full stomach the animal does well in captivity, of course with sufficient water.

The South Farallon is the only inhabited one of the group. The remainder are smaller; mere rocky points sticking up out of the Pacific. The Middle Farallon is a single rock, from fifty to sixty yards in diameter, and twenty or thirty feet above the water. It lies two and a half miles north-west by west from the light-house. The North Farallon consists, in fact, of four pyramidal rocks, whose highest peak, in the centre of the group, is one hundred and sixty feet high; the southern rock of the four is twenty feet high. The four have a diameter of one hundred and sixty, one hundred and eighty-five, one hundred and twenty-five, and thirty-five yards respectively, and the most northern of the islets bears north 64 deg. west from the Farallon light, six and three-fifths miles distant.

All the islands are frequented by birds; but the largest, the South Farallon, on which the light-house stands, is the favorite resort of these creatures, who come here in astonishing numbers every summer to breed; and it is to this island that the eggers resort at that season to obtain supplies of sea-birds' eggs for the San Francisco market, where they have a regular and large sale.

The birds which breed upon the Farallones are gulls, murres, shags, and sea-parrots, the last a kind of penguin. The eggs of the shags and parrots are not used, but the eggers destroy them to make more room for the other birds. The gull begins to lay about the middle of May, and usually ten days before the murre. The gull makes a rude nest of brush and sea-weed upon the rocks; the murre does not take even this much trouble, but lays its eggs in any convenient place on the bare rocks.



The gull is soon through, but the murre continues to lay for about two months. The egging season lasts, therefore, from the 10th or 20th of May until the last of July. In this period the egg company which has for eighteen years worked this field gathered in 1872 seventeen thousand nine hundred and fifty-two dozen eggs, and in 1873 fifteen thousand two hundred and three dozen. These brought last year in the market an average of twenty-six cents per dozen. There has been, I was assured by the manager, no sensible decrease in the number of the birds or the eggs during twenty years.

From fifteen to twenty men are employed during the egging season in collecting and shipping the eggs. They live on the island during that time in rude shanties near the usual landing-place. The work is not amusing, for the birds seek out the least accessible places, and the men must follow, climbing often where a goat would almost hesitate. But this is not the worst. The gull sits on her nest, and resists the robber who comes for her eggs, and he must take care not to get bitten. The murre remains until her enemy is close upon her; then she rises with a scream which often startles a thousand or two of birds, who whirl up into the air in a dense mass, scattering filth and guano over the eggers.

Nor is this all. The gulls, whose season of breeding is soon past, are extravagantly fond of murre eggs; and these rapacious birds follow the egg-gatherers, hover over their heads, and no sooner is a murre's nest uncovered than the bird swoops down, and the egger must be extremely quick, or the gull will snatch the prize from under his nose. So greedy and eager are the gulls that they sometimes even wound the eggers, striking them with their beaks. But if the gull gets an egg, he flies up with it, and, tossing it up, swallows what he can catch, letting the shell and half its contents fall in a shower upon the luckless and disappointed egger below.



Finally, so difficult is the ground that it is impossible to carry baskets. The egger therefore stuffs the eggs into his shirt bosom until he has as many as he can safely carry, then clambers over rocks and down precipices until he comes to a place of deposit, where he puts them into baskets, to be carried down to the shore, where there are houses for receiving them. But so skillful and careful are the gatherers that but few eggs are broken.

The gathering proceeds daily, when it has once begun, and the whole ground is carefully cleared off, so that no stale eggs shall remain. Thus if a portion of the ground has been neglected for a day or two, all the eggs must be flung into the sea, so as to begin afresh. As the season advances, the operations are somewhat contracted, leaving a part of the island undisturbed for breeding; and the gathering of eggs is stopped entirely about a month before the birds usually leave the island, so as to give them all an opportunity to hatch out a brood.



The murre is not good to eat. If undisturbed it lays two eggs only; when robbed, it will keep on laying until it has produced six or even eight eggs; and the manager of the islands told me that he had found as many as eight eggs forming in a bird's ovaries when he killed and opened it in the beginning of the season. The male bird regularly relieves the female on the nest, and also watches to resist the attacks of the gull, which not only destroys the eggs, but also eats the young. The murre feeds on sea-grass and jelly-fish, and I was assured that though some hundreds had been examined at different times, no fish had ever been found in a murre's stomach.

The bird is small, about the size of a half-grown duck, but its egg is as large as a goose egg. The egg is brown or greenish, and speckled. When quite fresh it has no fishy taste, but when two or three days old the fishy taste becomes perceptible. They are largely used in San Francisco by the restaurants and bakers, and for omelets, cakes, and custards.

During the height of the egging season the gulls hover in clouds over the rocks, and when a rookery is started, and the poor birds leave their nests by hundreds, the air is presently alive with gulls flying off with the eggs, and the eggers are sometimes literally drenched.

There is thus inevitably a considerable waste of eggs. I asked some of the eggers how many murres nested on the South Farallon, and they thought at least one hundred thousand. I do not suppose this an extravagant estimate, for, taking the season of 1872, when seventeen thousand nine hundred and fifty-two dozen eggs were actually sold in San Francisco, and allowing half a dozen to each murre, this would give nearly thirty-six thousand birds; and adding the proper number for eggs broken, destroyed by gulls, and not gathered, the number of murres and gulls is probably over one hundred thousand. This on an island less than a mile in its greatest diameter, and partly occupied by the light-house and fog-whistle and their keepers, and by other birds and a large number of sea-lions!

When they are done laying, and when the young can fly, the birds leave the island, usually going off together. During the summer and fall they return in clouds at intervals, but stay only a few days at a time, though there are generally a few to be found at all times; and I am told that eggs in small quantities can be found in the fall.

The murre does not fly high, nor is it a very active bird, or apparently of long flight. But the eggers say that when it leaves the island they do not know whither it goes, and they assert that it is not abundant on the neighboring coast. The young begin to fly when they are two weeks old, and the parents usually take them immediately into the water.

The sea-parrot has a crest, and somewhat resembles a cockatoo. Its numbers on the South Farallon are not great. It makes a nest in a hole in the rocks, and bites if it is disturbed. The island was first used as a sealing station; but this was not remunerative, there being but very few fur seal, and no sea-otters. This animal, which abounds in Alaska, and is found occasionally on the southern coast of California, frequents the masses of kelp which line the shore; but there is no kelp about the Farallones.

In the early times of California, when provisions were high-priced, the egg-gatherers sometimes got great gains. Once, in 1853, a boat absent but three days brought in one thousand dozen, and sold the whole cargo at a dollar a dozen; and in one season thirty thousand dozen were gathered, and brought an average of but little less than this price.



Of course there was an egg war. The prize was too great not to be struggled for; and the rage of the conflicting claimants grew to such a pitch that guns were used and lives were threatened, and at last the Government of the United States had to interfere to keep the peace. But with lower prices the strife ceased; the present company bought out, I believe, all adverse claims, and for the last fifteen or sixteen years peace has reigned in this part of the county of San Francisco—for these lonely islets are a part of the same county with the metropolis of the Pacific.



CHAPTER XIII.

THE COLUMBIA RIVER AND PUGET SOUND—HINTS TO TOURISTS.

In less than forty-eight hours after you leave San Francisco you find yourself crossing the bar which lies at the mouth of the Columbia River, and laughing, perhaps, over the oft-told local tale of how a captain, new to this region, lying off and on with his vessel, and impatiently signaling for a pilot, was temporarily comforted by a passenger, an old Californian, who "wondered why Jim over there couldn't take her safe over the bar."

"Do you think he knows the soundings well enough?" asked the anxious skipper; and was answered,

"I don't know about that, captain; but he's been taking all sorts of things 'straight' over the bar for about twenty years, to my knowledge, and I should think he might manage the brig."

The voyage from San Francisco is almost all the way in sight of land; and as you skirt the mountainous coast of Oregon you see long stretches of forest, miles of tall firs killed by forest fires, and rearing their bare heads toward the sky like a vast assemblage of bean-poles—a barren view which you owe to the noble red man, who, it is said, sets fire to these great woods in order to produce for himself a good crop of blueberries.

When, some years ago, Walk-in-the-Water, or Red Cloud, or some other Colorado chief, asserted in Washington the right of the Indian to hunt buffalo, on the familiar ground that he must live, a journalist given to figures demolished the Indian position by demonstrating that a race which insisted on living on buffalo meat required about sixteen thousand acres of land per head for its subsistence, which is more than even we can spare. One wonders, remembering these figures, how many millions of feet of first-class lumber are sacrificed to provide an Indian rancheria in Oregon with huckleberries.

On the second morning of your voyage you enter the Columbia River, and stop, on the right bank, near the mouth, at a place famous in history and romance, and fearfully disappointing to the actual view—Astoria. When you have seen it, you will wish you had passed it by unseen. I do not know precisely how it ought to have looked to have pleased my fancy, and realized the dreams of my boyhood, when I read Bonneville's "Journal" and Irving's "Astoria," and imagined Astoria to be the home of romance and of picturesque trappers. Any thing less romantic than Astoria is to-day you can scarcely imagine; and what is worse yet, your first view shows you that the narrow, broken, irreclaimably rough strip of land never had space for any thing picturesque or romantic.

Astoria, in truth, consists of a very narrow strip of hill-side, backed by a hill so steep that they can shoot timber down it, and inclosed on every side by dense forests, high, steep hills, and mud flats. It looks like the rudest Western clearing you ever saw. Its brief streets are paved with wood; its inhabitants wear their trowsers in their boots; if you step off the pavement you go deep into the mud; and ten minutes' walk brings you to the "forest primeval," which, picturesque as it may be in poetry, I confess to be dreary and monotonous in the extreme in reality.

There are but few remains of the old trapper station—one somewhat large house is the chief relic; but there is a saw-mill, which seems to make, with all its buzz and fuzz, scarcely an appreciable impression upon the belt of timber which so shuts in Astoria that I thought I had scarcely room in it to draw a full breath; and over to the left they pointed out to me the residence of a gentleman—a general, I think he was—who came hither twenty-six years ago in some official position, and had after a quarter of a century gained what looked to me from the steamer's deck like a precarious ten-acre lot from the "forest primeval," about enough room to bury himself and family in, with a probability that the firs would crowd them into the Columbia River if the saw-mill should break down.

On the voyage up I said to an Oregonian, "You have a good timber country, I hear?" and his reply seemed to me at the time extravagant. "Timber?" he said; "timber—till you can't sleep." When I had spent a day and a half at anchor abreast of Astoria, the words appeared less exaggerated. Wherever you look you see only timber; tall firs, straight as an arrow, big as the California redwoods, and dense as a Southern canebrake. On your right is Oregon—its hill-sides a forest so dense that jungle would be as fit a word for it as timber; on the left is Washington Territory, and its hill-sides are as densely covered as those of the nearer shore. This interminable, apparently impenetrable, thicket of firs exercised upon my mind, I confess, a gloomy, depressing influence. The fresh lovely green of the evergreen foliage, the wonderful arrowy straightness of the trees, their picturesque attitude where they cover headlands and reach down to the very water's edge, all did not make up to me for their dreary continuity of shade.

Astoria, however, means to grow. It has already a large hotel, which the timber has crowded down against the tide-washed flats; a saw-mill, which is sawing away for dear life, because if it stopped the forest would doubtless push it into the river, on whose brink it has courageously effected a lodgment; some tan-yards, shops, and "groceries;" and if you should wish to invest in real estate here, you can do so with the help of a "guide," which is distributed on the steamer, and tells you of numerous bargains in corner lots, etc.; for here, as in that part of the West which lies much farther east, people live apparently only to speculate in real estate.

An occasional flash of broad humor enlivens some of the land circulars and advertisements. I found one on the hotel table headed "Homes," with the following sample:

221 ACRES,

Four miles east of Silverton; frame house and a log house (can live in either); log barn; 20 acres in cultivation; 60 acres timber land; balance pasture land; well watered. We will sell this place for $1575. Will throw in a cook stove and all the household furniture, consisting of a frying-pan handle and a broomstick; also a cow and a yearling calf; also one bay heifer; also 8400 lbs. of hay, minus what the above-named stock have consumed during the winter; also 64 bushels of oats, subject to the above-mentioned diminution. If sold, we shall have left on our hands one of the driest and ugliest-looking old bachelors this side of the grave, which we will cheerfully throw in if at all acceptable to the purchaser. Old maids and rich widows are requested to give their particular attention to this special offer. Don't pass by on the other side.

* * * * *

HOME, SWEET HOME!

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Home!

We still have a few more "Sweet Homes" for sale, consisting of, etc., etc., etc.

Title perfect—a Warrantee Deed from the hub of the earth to the top of the skies, and Uncle Sam's Patent to back us!

A further-reaching title one could scarcely require.

I don't know where I got the belief that the Columbia was a second-rate river. There must have been some blunder in the geographies out of which I got my lessons and my notions of the North-west coast at school. Possibly, too, the knowledge that navigation is interrupted by rapids at the Cascades and Dalles contributed to form an impression conspicuously wrong. In fact, the Columbia is one of the great rivers of the world. It seems to me larger, as it is infinitely grander, than the Mississippi.

Between Astoria and the junction of the Willamette its breadth, its depth, its rapid current, and the vast body of water it carries to sea reminded me of descriptions I had read of the Amazon; and I suspect the Columbia would rank with that stream were it not for the unlucky obstructions at the Cascades and Dalles, which divide the stream into two unequal parts.



For ten miles above Astoria the river is so wide that it forms really a vast bay. Then it narrows somewhat, and the channel approaches now one and then the other of its bold, picturesque shores, which often for miles resemble the Palisades of the Hudson in steepness, and exceed them in height. But even after it becomes narrower the river frequently widens into broad, open, lake-like expanses, which are studded with lovely islands, and wherever the shore lowers you see, beyond, grand mountain ranges snow-clad and amazingly fine.

The banks are precipitous nearly all the way to the junction of the Willamette, and there is singularly little farming country on the immediate river. Below Kalama there are few spots where there is even room for a small farmstead. But along this part of the river are the "salmon factories," whence come the Oregon salmon, which, put up in tin cans, are now to be bought not only in our Eastern States, but all over the world. The fish are caught in weirs, in gill nets, as shad are caught on the Hudson, and this is the only part of the labor performed by white men. The fishermen carry the salmon in boats to the factory—usually a large frame building erected on piles over the water—and here they fall into the hands of Chinese, who get for their labor a dollar a day and their food.

The salmon are flung up on a stage, where they lie in heaps of a thousand at a time, a surprising sight to an Eastern person, for in such a pile you may see many fish weighing from thirty to sixty pounds. The work of preparing them for the cans is conducted with exact method and great cleanliness, water being abundant. One Chinaman seizes a fish and cuts off his head; the next slashes off the fins and disembowels the fish; it then falls into a large vat, where the blood soaks out—a salmon bleeds like a bull—and after soaking and repeated washing in different vats, it falls at last into the hands of one of a gang of Chinese whose business it is, with heavy knives, to chop the fish into chunks of suitable size for the tins. These pieces are plunged into brine, and presently stuffed into the cans, it being the object to fill each can as full as possible with fish, the bone being excluded.

The top of the can, which has a small hole pierced in it, is then soldered on, and five hundred tins set on a form are lowered into a huge kettle of boiling water, where they remain until the heat has expelled all the air. Then a Chinaman neatly drops a little solder over each pin-hole, and after another boiling, the object of which is, I believe, to make sure that the cans are hermetically sealed, the process is complete, and the salmon are ready to take a journey longer and more remarkable even than that which their progenitors took when, seized with the curious rage of spawning, they ascended the Columbia, to deposit their eggs in its head waters, near the centre of the continent.

I was assured by the fishermen that the salmon do not decrease in numbers or in size, yet in this year, 1873, more than two millions of pounds were put up in tin cans on the Lower Columbia alone, besides fifteen or twenty thousand barrels of salted salmon.

From Astoria to Portland is a distance of one hundred and ten miles, and as the current is strong, the steamer requires ten or twelve hours to make the trip. As you approach the mouth of the Willamette you meet more arable land, and the shores of this river are generally lower, and often alluvial, like the Missouri and Mississippi bottoms; and here you find cattle, sheep, orchards, and fields; and one who is familiar with the agricultural parts of California notices here signs of a somewhat severer climate, in more substantial houses; and the evidence of more protracted rains, in green and luxuriant grasses at a season when the pastures of California have already begun to turn brown.

Portland is a surprisingly well-built city, with so many large shops, so many elegant dwellings, and other signs of prosperity, as will make you credit the assertion of its inhabitants, that it contains more wealth in proportion to its population than any other town in the United States. It lies on the right bank of the Willamette, and is the centre of a large commerce. Its inhabitants seemed to me to have a singular fancy for plate-glass fronts in their shops and hotels, and even in the private houses, which led me at first to suppose that there must be a glass factory near at hand. It is all, I believe, imported.

From Portland, which you can see in a day, and whose most notable sight is a fine view of Mount Hood, obtainable from the hills back of the city, the sight-seer makes his excursions conveniently in various directions; and as the American traveler is always in a hurry, it is perhaps well to show what time is needed:

To the Dalles and Celilo, and return to Portland, three days.

To Victoria, Vancouver's Island, and return to Portland, including the tour of Puget Sound, seven days.

To San Francisco, overland, by railroad to Roseburg, thence by stage to Redding, and rail to San Francisco, seventy-nine hours.



Thus you may leave San Francisco by steamer for Portland, see the Dalles, the Cascades, Puget Sound, Victoria, the Willamette Valley, and the magnificent mountain scenery of Southern Oregon and Northern California, and be back in San Francisco in less than three weeks, making abundant allowance for possible though not probable detentions on the road. The time absolutely needed for the tour is but seventeen days.

Of course he who "takes a run over to California" from, the East, predetermined to be back in his office or shop within five or six weeks from the day he left home, can not see the Columbia River and Puget Sound. But travelers are beginning to discover that it is worth while to spend some months on the Pacific coast; some day, I do not doubt, it will be fashionable to go across the continent; and those whose circumstances give them leisure should not leave the Pacific without seeing Oregon and Washington Territory. In the few pages which follow, my aim is to smooth the way for others by a very simple account of what I myself saw and enjoyed.



And first as to the Cascades and the Dalles of the Columbia. You leave Portland for Dalles City in a steamboat at five o'clock in the morning. The better way is to sleep on board this steamer, and thus avoid an uncomfortably early awakening. Then when you do rise, at six or half past, you will find yourself on the Columbia, and steaming directly at Mount Hood, whose splendid snow-covered peak seems to bar your way but a short distance ahead. It lies, in fact, a hundred miles off; and when you have sailed some hours toward it the river makes a turn, which leaves the snowy peak at one side, and presently hides it behind the steep bank.

The little steamer, very clean and comfortable, affords you an excellent breakfast, and some amusement in the odd way in which she is managed. Most of the river steamers here have their propelling wheel at the stern; they have very powerful engines, which drive them ahead with surprising speed. I have gone sixteen miles an hour in one, with the current; and when they make a landing the pilot usually runs the boat's head slantingly against the shore, and passengers and freight are taken in or landed over the bow. At the wood-pile on the shore you may generally see one of the people called "Pikes," whom you will recognize by a very broad-brimmed hat, a frequent squirting of tobacco-juice, and the possession of two or three hounds, whom they call hereabouts "hound-dogs," as we say "bull-dog." And this reminds me that in Oregon the country people usually ask you if you will eat an "egg-omelet;" and they speak of pork—a favorite food of the Pike—as "hog-meat."

The voyage up the river presents a constant succession of wild and picturesque scenery; immense rocky capes jut out into the broad stream; for miles the banks are precipitous, like the Hudson River Palisades, only often much higher, and for other miles the river has worn its channel out of the rock, whose face looks bare and clean cut, as though it had been of human workmanship. The first explorer of the Columbia, even if he was a very commonplace mortal, must have passed days of the most singular exhilaration, especially if he ascended the stream in that season when the skies are bright and blue, for it seems to me one of the most magnificent sights in the world. I am not certain that the wildness does not oppress one a little after a while, and there are parts of the river where the smoothly cut cliffs, coming precipitously down to the water's edge, and following down, sheer down, to the river's bottom, make you think with terror of the unhappy people who might here be drowned, with this cold rock within their reach, yet not affording them even a momentary support. I should like to have seen the rugged cliffs relieved here and there by the softness of smooth lawns, and some evidences that man had conquered even this rude and resisting nature.

But for a century or two to come the traveler will have to do without this relief; nor need he grumble, for, with all its rugged grandeur, the scenery has many exquisite bits where nature has a little softened its aspect. Nor is it amiss to remember that but a little way back from the river there are farms, orchards, cattle, and sheep. At one point the boat for a moment turned her bow to the shore to admit a young man, who brought with him a wonderful bouquet of wild flowers, which he had gathered at his home a few miles back; and here and there, where the hill-sides have a more moderate incline, you will see that some energetic pioneer has carved himself out a farm.

Nevertheless it is with a sense of relief at the change that you at last approach a large island, a flat space of ten or twelve hundred acres, with fences and trees and grain fields and houses, and with a gentle and peaceful aspect, doubly charming to you when you come upon it suddenly, and fresh from the preceding and somewhat appalling grandeur. Here the boat stops; for you are here at the lower end of the famous Cascades, and you tranship yourself into cars which carry you to the upper end, a distance of about six miles, where again you take boat for Dalles City.



The Cascades are rapids. The river, which has ever a swift and impetuous current, is nearly two miles wide just above these rapids. Where the bed shoals it also narrows, and the great body of water rushes over the rocks, roaring, tumbling, foaming—a tolerably wild sight. There is nowhere any sudden descent sufficient to make a water-fall; but there is a fall of a good many feet in the six miles of cascades.

These rapids are considered impassable, though I believe the Indians used sometimes to venture down them in canoes; and it was my good fortune to shoot down them in a little steamer—the Shoshone—the third only, I was told, which had ever ventured this passage. The singular history of this steamboat shows the vast extent of the inland navigation made possible by the Columbia and its tributaries. She was built in 1866 on the Snake River, at a point ninety miles from Boise City, in Idaho Territory, and was employed in the upper waters of the Snake, running to near the mouth of the Bruneau, within one hundred and twenty-five miles of the head of Salt Lake.

When the mining excitement in that region subsided there ceased to be business for her, and her owner determined to bring her to Portland. She passed several rapids on the Snake, and at a low stage of water was run over the Dalles. Then she had to wait nearly a year until high water on the Cascades, and finally passed those rapids, and carried her owner, Mr. Ainsworth, who was also for this passage of the Cascades her pilot, and myself safely into Portland.

We steamed from Dalles City about three o'clock on an afternoon so windy as to make the Columbia very rough. When we arrived at the head of the Cascades we found the shore lined with people to watch our passage through the rapids. As we swept into the foaming and roaring waters the engine was slowed a little, and for a few minutes the pilots had their hands full; for the fierce currents, sweeping her now to one side and then to the other, made the steering extraordinarily difficult. At one point there seemed a probability that we should be swept on to the rocks; and it was very curious to stand, as General Sprague and I, the only passengers, did, in front of the pilot-house, and watch the boat's head swing against the helm and toward the rocks, until at last, after half a minute of suspense, she began slowly to swing back, obedient to her pilot's wish.

We made six miles in eleven minutes, which is at the rate of more than thirty miles per hour, a better rate of speed than steamboats commonly attain. Of course it is impossible to drive a vessel up the Cascades, and a steamboat which has once passed these rapids remains forever below.

At the upper end of the Cascades a boat awaits you, which carries you through yet more picturesque scenery to Dalles City, where you spend the night. This is a small place, remarkable to the traveler chiefly for the geological collection which every traveler ought to see, belonging to the Rev. Mr. Condon, a very intelligent and enthusiastic geologist, the Presbyterian minister of the place. You have also at Dalles City a magnificent view of Mount Hood, and Mr. Condon will tell you that he has seen this old crater emit smoke since he has lived here.

There is no doubt that both Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens have still internal fires, though both their craters are now filled up with ashes. There is reason to believe that at its last period of activity Mount Hood emitted only ashes; for there are still found traces of volcanic ashes, attributable, I am told, to this mountain, as far as one hundred miles from its summit. Of Mount St. Helens it is probable that its slumbering fires are not very deeply buried. A few years ago two adventurous citizens of Washington Territory were obliged, by a sudden fog and cold storm, to spend a night near its summit, and seeking for some cave among the lava where to shelter themselves from the storm, found a fissure from which came so glowing and immoderate a heat that they could not bear its vicinity, and, as they related, were alternately frozen and scorched all night—now roasting at the volcanic fire, and again rushing out to cool themselves in the sleet and snow.



The rocks are volcanic from near the mouth of the Willamette to and above the Dalles, and geologists suppose that there have been great convulsions of nature hereabouts in recent geological times. The Indians have a tradition, indeed, that the river was originally navigable and unobstructed where now are the Cascades, and that formerly there was a long, natural tunnel, through which the Columbia passed under a mountain. They assert that a great earthquake broke down this tunnel, the site of which they still point out, and that the debris formed the present obstructions at the Cascades.

Oregon, if one may judge by the fossil remains in Mr. Condon's collection, seems once to have been inhabited by a great number and variety of pre-adamite beasts; but the most singular object he has to show is a very striking ape's head, carved with great spirit and vigor out of hard lava. This object was found upon the shore of the Columbia by Indians, after a flood which had washed away a piece of old alluvial bank. The rock of which it is composed is quite hard; the carving is, as I said, done with remarkable vigor; and the top of the head is hollowed out, precisely as the Indians still make shallow depressions in figures and heads which they carve out of slate, in which to burn what answers in their religious ceremonies for incense.

But supposing this relic to belong to Oregon—and there is, I was told, no reason to believe otherwise—where did the Indian who carved it get his idea of an ape? The Indians of this region, poor creatures that they are, have still the habit of carving rude figures out of slate and other soft rocks. They have also the habit of cutting out shallow, dish-like depressions in the heads of such figures, wherein to burn incense. But they could not give Mr. Condon any account of the ape's head they brought him, nor did they recognize its features as resembling any object or creature familiar to them even by tradition.

The Dalles of the Columbia are simply a succession of falls and rapids, not reaching over as great a distance as the Cascades, but containing one feature much more remarkable than any thing which the Cascades afford, and indeed, so far as I know, found nowhere else.

The Columbia above the Dalles is still a first-class river, comparable in depth and width, and in the volume of its water, only with the Lower Mississippi or the Amazon. It is a deep, rapidly-flowing stream, nearly a mile wide. But at one point in the Dalles the channel narrows until it is, at the ordinary height of the river, not over a hundred yards wide; and through this narrow gorge the whole volume of the river rushes for some distance. Of course water is not subject to compression; the volume of the river is not diminished; what happens, as you perceive when you see this singular freak of nature, is that the river is suddenly turned up on its edge. Suppose it is, above the Dalles, a mile wide and fifty feet deep; at the narrow gorge it is but a hundred yards wide—how deep must it be? Certainly it can be correctly said that the stream is turned up on its edge.

The Dalles lie five or six miles above Dalles City; and you pass these rapids in the train which bears you to Celilo early the next morning after you arrive at Dalles City. Celilo is not a town; it is simply a geographical point; it is the spot where, if you were bound to the interior of the continent by water, you would take steamboat. There is here a very long shed to shelter the goods which are sent up into this far-away and, to us Eastern people, unknown interior; there is a wharf where land the boats when they return from a journey of perhaps a thousand miles on the Upper Columbia or the Snake; there are two or three laborers' shanties—and that is all there is of Celilo; and your journey thither has been made only that you may see the Dalles, and Cape Horn, as a bold promontory on the river is called.

What I advise you to do is to take a hearty lunch with you, and, if you can find one, a guide, and get off the early Celilo train at the Dalles. You will have a most delightful day among very curious scenery; will see the Indians spearing salmon in the pools over which they build their stages; and can examine at leisure the curious rapids called the Dalles. A party of three or four persons could indeed spend several days very pleasantly picnicking about the Dalles, and in the season they would shoot hare and birds enough to supply them with meat. The weather in this part of Oregon, east of the Cascade range, is as settled as that of California, so that there is no risk in sleeping-out-of-doors in summer.

There is a singularly sudden climatic change between Western and Eastern Oregon; and if you ask the captain or pilot on the boat which plies between the Cascades and Dalles City, he can show you the mountain range on one side of which the climate is wet, while on the other side it is dry. The Cascade range is a continuation northward of the Sierra Nevada; and here, as farther south, it stops the water-laden winds which rush up from the sea. Western Oregon, lying between the Cascades and the ocean, has so much rain that its people are called "Web-feet;" Eastern Oregon, a vast grazing region, has comparatively little rain. Western Oregon, except in the Willamette and Rogue River valleys, is densely timbered; Eastern Oregon is a country of boundless plains, where they irrigate their few crops, and depend mainly on stock-grazing. This region is as yet sparsely settled; and when we in the East think of Oregon, or read of it even, it is of that part of the huge State which lies west of the Cascades, and where alone agriculture is carried on to a considerable extent.

You will spend a day in returning from the Dalles to Portland, and arriving there in the evening can set out the next morning for Olympia, on Puget Sound, by way of Kalama, which is the Columbia River terminus for the present of the Northern Pacific Railroad. It is possible to go by steamer from Portland to Victoria, and then return down Puget Sound to Olympia; but to most people the sea-voyage is not enticing, and there are but slight inconveniences in the short land journey. The steamer leaving Portland at six A.M. lands you at Kalama about eleven; there you get dinner, and proceed about two by rail to Olympia. It is a good plan to telegraph for accommodations on the pretty and comfortable steamer North Pacific, and go directly to her on your arrival at Olympia.

Puget Sound is one of the most picturesque and remarkable sheets of water in the world; and the voyage from Olympia to Victoria, which shows you the greater part of the Sound, is a delightful and novel excursion, specially to be recommended to people who like to go to sea without getting sea-sick; for these land-encircled waters are almost always smooth.

When, at Kalama, you enter Washington Territory, your ears begin to be assailed by the most barbarous names imaginable. On your way to Olympia by rail you cross a river called the Skookum-Chuck; your train stops at places named Newaukum, Tumwater, and Toutle; and if you seek further, you will hear of whole counties labeled Wahkiakum, or Snohomish, or Kitsap, or Klikatat; and Cowlitz, Hookium, and Nenolelops greet and offend you. They complain in Olympia that Washington Territory gets but little immigration; but what wonder? What man, having the whole American continent to chose from, would willingly date his letters from the county of Snohomish, or bring up his children in the city of Nenolelops? The village of Tumwater is, as I am ready to bear witness, very pretty indeed; but surely an emigrant would think twice before he established himself either there or at Toutle. Seattle is sufficiently barbarous; Steilacoom is no better; and I suspect that the Northern Pacific Railroad terminus has been fixed at Tacoma—if it is fixed there—because that is one of the few places on Puget Sound whose name does not inspire horror and disgust.



Olympia, which lies on an arm of Puget Sound, and was once a town of great expectations, surprises the traveler by its streets, all shaded with magnificent maples. The founder of the town was a man of taste; and he set a fashion which, being followed for a few years in this country of abundant rains, has given Olympia's streets shade trees by the hundred which would make it famous were it an Eastern place.

Unluckily, it has little else to charm the traveler, though it is the capital of the Territory; and when you have spent half an hour walking through the streets you will be quite ready to have the steamer set off for Victoria. The voyage lasts but about thirty-six hours, and would be shorter were it not that the steamer makes numerous landings. Thus you get glimpses of Seattle, Steilacoom, Tacoma, and of the so-called saw-mill ports—Port Madison, Port Gamble, Port Ludlow, and Port Townsend—the last named being also the boundary of our Uncle Samuel's dominions for the present, and the port of entry for this district, with a custom-house which looks like a barn, and a collector and inspectors, the latter of whom examine your trunk as you return from Victoria to save you from the sin of smuggling.

From Port Townsend your boat strikes across the straits of San Juan de Fuca to Victoria; and just here, as you are crossing from American to English territory, you get the most magnificent views of the grand Olympian range of mountains and of Mount Regnier. Also, the captain will point out to you in the distance that famous island of San Juan which formed the subject or object, or both, of our celebrated boundary dispute with great Britain, and you will wonder how small an object can nearly make nations go to war, and for what a petty thing we set several kings and great lords to studying geography and treaties and international law, and boring themselves, and filling enterprising newspapers with dozens of columns of dull history; and you will wonder the more at the stupid pertinacity of these English in clinging to the little island of San Juan when you reach Victoria, and see that we shall presently take that dull little town too, not because we want it or need it, but to save it from perishing of inanition.

It is something to have taste and a sense of the beautiful. Certainly the English, who discovered the little landlocked harbor of Victoria and chose it as the site of a town, displayed both. It is by natural advantages one of the loveliest places I ever saw, and I wonder, remote as it is, that it is not famous. The narrow harbor, which is not so big as one of the big Liverpool docks, is surrounded on both sides by the prettiest little miniature bays, rock-bound, with grassy knolls, and here and there shady clumps of evergreens; a river opening out above the town into a kind of lake, and spanned by pretty bridges, invites you to a boating excursion; and the fresh green of the lawn-like expanses of grass which reach into the bay from different directions, the rocky little promontories with boats moored near them, the fine snow-covered mountains in the distance, and the pleasantly winding roads leading in different directions into the country, all make up a landscape whose soft and gay aspect I suppose is the more delightful because one comes to it from the somewhat oppressive grandeur of the fir forests in Washington Territory.

In the harbor of Victoria the most conspicuous object is the long range of warehouses belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, with their little trading steamers moored alongside. These vessels bear the signs of traffic with a savage people in the high boarding nettings which guard them from stem to stern, and which are in their more solid parts pierced for musketry. Here, too, you see a queer little old steamboat, the first that ever vexed the waters of the Pacific Ocean with its paddle-wheels. And as your own steamer hauls up to the wharf, you will notice, arrayed to receive you, what is no doubt the most shocking and complete collection of ugly women in the world.

These are the Indians of this region. They are very light-colored; their complexion has an artificial look; there is something ghastly and unnatural in the yellow of the faces, penetrated by a rose or carmine color on the cheeks. They are hideous in all the possible aspects and varieties of hideousness—undersized, squat, evil-eyed, pug-nosed, tawdry in dress, ungraceful in every motion; they really mar the landscape, so that you are glad to escape from them to your hotel, which you find a clean and comfortable building, where, if you are as fortunate as the traveler who relates this, you may by-and-by catch a glimpse or two of a fresh, fair, girlish English face, which will make up to you for the precedent ugliness.

Victoria hopes to have its dullness enlivened by a railroad from the mainland one of these days, which may make it more prosperous, but will probably destroy some of the charm it now has for a tourist. It can hardly destroy the excellent roads by which you may take several picturesque drives and walks in the neighborhood of the town, nor the pretty views you have from the hills near by, nor the excursions by boat, in which you can best see how much Nature has done to beautify this place, and how little man has done so far to mar her work.