California

VIII
THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY

The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting summits, one might learn something of its private relations.

From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the Nevadas (nieve, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra Madre is of the Coast Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake, and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more than they can appreciate.

Geographically the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms. For two hundred miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its withered aristocracy of hills – how weazened and old you can see to this day – it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is a matter of two miles of sheer descent.

The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged crest above the abrupt desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and three-thousand-foot precipices have the pitch of toppling waters. As they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been more than terrifying.

Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through immeasurable years carved the fractured granite into shapes of enduring beauty. It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured them against the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine still against the morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided cañons, cut the course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of the range, scooped out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when the ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left, retreating northward, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And then the mountain was besieged with trees. They stormed it, scaled its free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the persistence of assault they are bent and contorted.

This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the Sierra slopes. They march along the water-courses, they climb up sheer precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command. By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily from the superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant bony ridge drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched and bowed. All the lower cañons are full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins, scrub oak, madroño, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet penstemons, flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.

The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, ponderoso, Coulteri, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting attenuata. On the western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all the open country, but it is no climber like monticola, the largest of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The firs usurp the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish, incommunicable, they seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce, librocedrus, and hardy junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees along the line; and highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed, wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs the wild sheep bed.

The trees have each their own voice – a degree of flexibility or length of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs, the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars. It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period, out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are growing trees whose seeds are fertile.

One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable. After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the royal presence.

The name Sequoia is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual botanical stupidities – an attempt to express quality as it is humanly measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read. Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.

Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and obscure the passes.

As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard, or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water; what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It makes lake borders by which the grass comes in – the small grass that is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.

In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen in drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds, as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the weathered headlands.

But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is lost in the sense of its irresistible march – it creeps and winds, it waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence. On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still almost soundlessly – the roar of it passes down the cañons, and is heard in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.

In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy, where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls, the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels. When the wind blows straight up the cañon they will rear against it, and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling water – it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.

Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the Py-weack, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish; horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago. Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice. The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem: they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.

North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering there with pale lamps held aloft.

No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight, only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.

The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light. One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast. Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the Sierra.

"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky, what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush," though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, Artemisia tridentata. It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to which the artemesia gives its name, coleogeny, pursia, dalia, "creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.

Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows, the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes" of the painted desert.

White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.

A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that man, at least, has found no other use for.

It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the creaking line of a twenty-mule team.

The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe. It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older, lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain, it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward, almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border, like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.

All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice, and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments, and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the efforts of modern science to read them.

Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them, wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often in very early light there are strange suggestions of – dunes and boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided. Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.

Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.

It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink. For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the abrupt landward fall of waves.

Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, Pinus flexilis, all the way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With it, but at lower levels to which the flexilis will never come, is found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the food-crop of the wild tribes. But the piñon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the slightest invitation.

There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree was once a very great capitan, who, in order that his death might be as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that if you sit down by a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough, you will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for taboose, or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look, indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.

Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back. For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could not penetrate.

And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly, I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage, their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty, without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the blossomy wonder is upon the world.

As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia. Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.

It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you move.