Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands written by Charles Nordhoff

C >> Charles Nordhoff >> Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands

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The Sacramento Valley closes in as you journey northward; and at
Red Bluff, which is the head of navigation on the river, you have a
magnificent view of Lassen's Peaks on the east--twin peaks, snow-clad, and
rising high out of the plain--and also of the majestic snow-covered crag
which is known as Shasta Butte, which towers high above the mountains to
the north, and, though here 120 miles off, looks but a day's ride away.

Redding, thirty miles north from Shasta, lies at the head of the
Sacramento Valley. From there a line of stage-coaches proceeds north
into Oregon, through the mass of mountains which separates the Sacramento
Valley in California from the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The stage-road
passes through a very varied and picturesque country, one which few
pleasure travelers see, and which yet is as well worth a visit as any part
of the western coast. The Sacramento River, which rises in a large
spring near the base of Mount Shasta, has worn its way through the high
mountains, and rushes down for nearly a hundred miles of its course an
impetuous, roaring mountain stream, abounding in trout at all seasons,
and in June, July, and August filled with salmon which have come up here
through the Golden Gates from the ocean to spawn. The stage-road follows
almost to its source the devious course of the river, and you ride along
sometimes nearly on a level with the stream, and again on a road-bed cut
out of the steep mountain side a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above
the river; through fine forests of sugar-pines and yellow pines many of
which come almost up to the dimensions of the great sequoias.

The river and its upper tributaries abound in trout, and this region is
famous among Californian sportsmen for deer and fish. Many farm-houses
along the road accommodate travelers who desire to stay to enjoy the fine
scenery, and to hunt and fish; and a notable stopping-place is Fry's Soda
Spring, fourteen hours by stage from Redding, kept by Isaac Fry and his
excellent wife--a clean, comfortable little mountain inn, where you get
good and well-cooked food, and where you will find what your stage ride
will make welcome to you--a comfortable bath. The river is too cold for
bathing here in the mountains because of the snow-water of which it is
composed. About ten miles south of Fry's lies Castle Rock, a remarkable
and most picturesque mountain of white granite, bare for a thousand feet
below its pinnacled summit, which you see as you drive past it on the
stage.

Fry's lies in a deep canon, with a singular, almost precipitous, mountain
opposite the house, which terminates in a sharp ridge at the top, one of
those "knife-edge" ridges of which Professor Whitney and Clarence King
often speak in their descriptions of Sierra scenery. If you are a mountain
climber, you have here an opportunity for an adventure, and an excellent
guide in Mr. Fry, who told me that this ridge is sharp enough to straddle,
and that on the other side is an almost precipitous descent, with a fine
lake in the distance. If you wish to hunt deer or bear, you will find
in Fry an expert and experienced hunter. He has a tame doe, which, I was
told, is better than a dog to mark game on a hunt, its sharp ears and
nose detecting the presence of game at a great distance. If you are
a fisherman, there are within three minutes' walk of the house pools
abounding in trout, and you may fish up and down the river as far as you
please, with good success everywhere. In June and July, when the salmon
come up to spawn, they, too, lie in the deepest pools, and with salmon
eggs for bait you may, if you are expert enough with your rod, take many a
fat salmon.

[Illustration: A BOTTLING-CELLAR.]

It is astonishing to see how the salmon crowd the river at the spawning
season. The Indians then gather from a considerable distance, to spear and
trap these fish, which they dry for winter use; and you will see at this
season many picturesque Indian camps along the river. They set a crotch of
two sticks in a salmon pool, and lay a log from the shore to this crotch.
Upon this log the Indian walks out, with a very long spear, two-pronged at
the end and there armed with two bone spear-heads, which are fastened to
the shaft of the spear by very strong cord, usually made of deer's sinews.
The Indian stands very erect and in a really fine attitude, and peers into
the black pool until his eye catches the silver sheen of a salmon. Then
he darts, and instantly you see a commotion in the water as he hauls up
toward the surface a struggling twenty-five or thirty pound fish. The
bone spear heads, when they have penetrated the salmon, come off from the
spear, and the fish is held by the cord. A squaw stands ready on the shore
to haul him in, and he is beaten over the head with a club until he ceases
to struggle, then cleaned, and roasted on hot stones. When the meat is
done and dry it is picked off the bones, and the squaws rub it to a fine
powder between their hands, and in this shape it is packed for future use.

From one of these pools a dozen Indian spearmen frequently draw out four
hundred salmon in a day, and this fish forms an important part of their
food. Of course they kill a great many thousand female salmon during the
season; but so far, I believe, this murderous work has not been found to
decrease the number of the fish which annually enter the river from the
ocean, and go up to its head waters to spawn.

If you visit this region during the last of June or in July, you may watch
the salmon spawning, a most curious and remarkable sight. The great fish
then leave the deep pools in which they have been quietly lying for some
weeks before, and fearlessly run up on the shallow ripples. Here, animated
by a kind of fury, they beat the sand off the shoals with their tails,
until often a female salmon thus labors till her tail fins are entirely
worn off. She then deposits her eggs upon the coarse gravel, and the
greedy trout, which are extravagantly fond of salmon eggs, rush up to eat
them as the poor mother lays them. They are, I believe, watched and beaten
off by the male salmon, which accompanies the female for this purpose.
When the female salmon has deposited her eggs, and the male salmon has
done his part of the work, the two often bring stones of considerable size
in their mouths to cover up the eggs and protect them from the predatory
attacks of the trout.

And thereupon, according to the universal testimony of the fishermen of
these waters, the salmon dies. I was assured that the dead bodies often
cumber the shore after the spawning season is over; and the mountaineers
all assert that the salmon, having once spawned up here, does not go down
to the ocean again. They hold that the young salmon stay in the upper
waters for a year, and go to sea about eighteen months after hatching; and
it is not uncommon, I believe, for fishermen hereabouts to catch grilse
weighing from two to four pounds. These bite sometimes at the fly. The
salmon bite, too, when much smaller, for I caught one day a young salmon
not more than six inches long. This little fellow was taken with a bait
of salmon eggs, and his bright silvery sides made him quite different from
the trout which I was catching out of the same pool. His, head, also
had something of the fierce, predatory, hawk-like form which the older
salmon's has.

Fry is an excellent fisherman himself, and knows all the best pools within
reach of his house, and, if you are a mountaineer, will take you a dozen
miles through the woods to other streams, where you may fish and hunt for
days or weeks with great success, for these woods and waters are as yet
visited by but few sportsmen.

And if you happen to come upon Indian fishermen on your way--they are all
peaceful hereabouts--you may get the noble red man's opinion of the
great Woman Question. As I stood at the road-side one day I saw an Indian
emerging from the woods, carrying his rifle and his pipe. Him followed,
at a respectful distance, his squaw, a little woman not bigger than a
twelve-year-old boy; and _she_ carried, first, a baby; second, three
salmon, each of which weighed not less than twenty pounds; third, a wild
goose, weighing six or eight pounds; finally, a huge bundle of some kind
of greens. This cumbrous and heavy load the Indian had lashed together
with strong thongs, and the squaw carried it on her back, suspended by a
strap which passed across her forehead.

When an Indian kills a deer he loads it on the back of his squaw to carry
home. Arrived there, he lights his pipe, and she skins and cleans the
animal, cuts off a piece sufficient for dinner, lights a fire, and cooks
the meat. This done, the noble red man, who has calmly or impatiently
contemplated these labors of the wife of his bosom, lays down his pipe and
eats his dinner. When he is done, the woman, who has waited at one side,
sits down to hers and eats what he has left.

"Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." Miss Anthony and
Mrs. Cady Stanton have good missionary ground among these Indians. One
wonders in what language an Indian brave courts the young squaw whom he
wishes to marry; what promises he makes her; what hopes he holds out;
with what enticing views of wedded bliss he lures the Indian maiden to the
altar or whatever may be the Digger substitute for that piece of church
furniture. One wonders that the squaws have not long ago combined and
struck for at least moderately decent treatment; that marriages have not
ceased among them; that there has not arisen among the Diggers, the Pit
River Indians, and all the Indian tribes, some woman capable of leading
her sex in a rebellion.

But, to tell the truth, the Indian women are homely to the last degree.
"Ugly," said an Oregonian to me, as we contemplated a company of
squaws--"ugly is too mild a word to apply to such faces;" and he was
right. Broad-faced, flat-nosed, small-eyed, unkempt, frowzy, undersized,
thickset, clumsy, they have not a trace of beauty about them, either young
or old. They are just useful, nothing more; and as you look at them and
at the burdens they bear, you wonder whether, when the Woman's Rights
movement has succeeded, and when women, dressed like frights in such
Bloomer costume as may then be prescribed, go out to their daily toil like
men, and on an equality with men--when they have cast off the beauty which
is so scornfully spoken of in the conventions, and have secured their
rights--whether they will be any better off than these squaws. When you
have thoughtfully regarded the Indian woman perhaps you will agree with
Gail Hamilton that it is woman's first duty to be useless; for it is plain
that here, as in a higher civilization, when women consent to work as men,
they are sure to have the hardest work and the poorest pay.

[Illustration: INDIAN RANCHERIA.]

As you ascend the Sacramento you near Mount Shasta, and when you reach
Strawberry Valley, a pretty little mountain vale, you are but a short ride
from its base. It is from this point that tourists ascend the mountain.
You can hire horses, guides, and a camp outfit here, and the adventure
requires three days. You ride up to the snow-line the first day, ascend to
the top the following morning, descend to your camp in the afternoon, and
return to the valley on the third day. Mount Shasta has a glacier, almost,
but not quite, the only one, I believe, within the limits of the United
States. The mountain is an extinct volcano. Its summit is composed of
lava, and if your eye is familiar with the peculiar shape of volcanic
peaks, you can easily trace the now broken lines of this old crater as you
view the mountain from the Shasta plain on the north.

There are many extremely pretty valleys scattered through these mountains,
and these are used by small farmers, and by sheep and cattle owners who
in the winter take their stock into the lower valleys, but ascend into the
mountains in May, and remain until October. This is also a timber region,
and as it is well watered by permanent streams you see frequent saw-mills,
and altogether more improvement than one expects to find. But, proceeding
further north you come upon a large plain, the Shasta Valley, in which
lies the considerable town of Yreka, notable during the last winter and
spring as the point from which news came to us about the Modoc war.

From Yreka you may easily visit the celebrated "lava beds," where the
Indians made so stubborn and long-continued a defense against the United
States troops; and at Yreka you may hear several opinions upon the merits
of the Modocs and their war. You will hear, for instance, that the Indians
were stirred up to hostilities by mischievous and designing whites, that
white men were not wanting to supply them with arms and ammunition, and
that, had it not been for the unscrupulous management of some greedy and
wicked whites, we should not have been horrified by the shocking incidents
of this costly Indian trouble, in which the United States Government for
six months waged war against forty-six half-starved Modocs.

The Shasta Valley is an extensive plain, chiefly used at present as
a range for cattle and sheep. But its soil is fertile, and the valley
contains some good farms. Beyond Yreka gold mining is pursued, and,
indeed, almost the whole of the mountain region north of Redding yields
"the color;" and at many points along the Upper Sacramento and the
mountain streams which fall into it, gold is mined profitably. One day,
at the Soda Spring, several of us asked Mr. Fry whether he could find
gold near the river. He took a pan, and digging at random in his orchard,
washed out three or four specks of gold; and he related that when he was
planting this orchard ten years ago he found gold in the holes he dug for
his apple-trees. But he is an old miner, and experience has taught him
that a good apple orchard is more profitable, in the long run, than a poor
gold mine.

A large part of the Sacramento Valley is still used for grazing purposes,
but the farmers press every year more and more upon the graziers; and the
policy of the Government in holding its own lands within what are called
"railroad limits"--that is to say, within twenty miles on each side of the
railroad--for settlement under the pre-emption and homestead laws, as well
as the policy of the railroad company in selling its lands, the alternate
sections for twenty miles on each side of the road, on easy terms and with
long credit to actual settlers, prevents land monopoly in this region.
There is room, and cheap and fertile land, for an immense population
of industrious farmers, who can live here in a mild climate, and till
a fertile soil, and who need only intelligence and enterprise to raise
profitably raisins, orchard fruits, castor-oil, peanuts, silk, and a
dozen other products valuable in the world's commerce, and not produced
elsewhere in this country so easily. It is still in this region a time of
large farms poorly tilled; but I believe that small farms, from 160 to 320
acres, will prove far more profitable in the end.

The progress of California in material enterprises is something quite
wonderful and startling. A year brings about changes for which one can
hardly look in ten years. It is but eighteen months ago that the idea of a
system of irrigation, to include the whole of the San Joaquin Valley, was
broached, and then the most sanguine of the projectors thought that to
give their enterprise a fair start would require years, and a great number
of shrewd men believed the whole scheme visionary. But a few experiments
showed to land-owners and capitalists the enormous advantages of
irrigation, and now this scheme has sufficient capital behind it, and
large land-holders are offering subsidies and mortgaging their lands
to raise means to hasten the completion of the canal. Two years ago
the reclamation of the tule lands, though begun, advanced slowly,
and arguments were required to convince men that tule land was a safe
investment. But this year eight hundred miles of levee will be completed,
and thousands of acres will bear wheat next harvest which were overflowed
eighteen months ago. Two years ago the question whether California could
produce good raisins could not be answered; but last fall raisins which
sold in the San Francisco market beside the best Malagas were cured by
several persons, and it is now certain that this State can produce--and
from its poorest side-hill lands--raisins enough to supply the whole
Union. Not a year passes but some new and valuable product of the soil is
naturalized in this State; and one who has seen the soil and who knows the
climate of the two great valleys, who sees that within five, or, at most,
ten years all their overflowed lands will be diked and reclaimed, and all
their dry lands will be irrigated, and who has, besides, seen how wide is
the range of products which the soil and climate yield, comes at last to
have what seems to most Eastern people an exaggerated view of the future
of California.

But, in truth, it is not easy to exaggerate, for the soil in the great
valleys is deep and of extraordinary fertility; there are no forests to
clear away, and farms lie ready-made to the settlers' hands; the range of
products includes all those of the temperate zone and many of the torrid;
the climate is invigorating, and predisposes to labor; and the seasons are
extraordinarily favorable to the labors of the farmer and gardener. The
people have not yet settled down to hard work. There are so many chances
in life out there that men become overenterprising--a speculative spirit
invades even the farm-house; and as a man can always live--food being
so abundant and the climate so kindly--and as the population is as yet
sparse, men are tempted to go from one avocation to another, to do many
things superficially, and to look for sudden fortunes by the chances of
a shrewd venture, rather than be content to live by patient and continued
labor. This, however, is the condition of all new countries; it will pass
away as population becomes more dense. And, meantime California has gifts
of nature which form a solid substratum upon which will, in a few years,
be built up a community productive far beyond the average of wealthy or
productive communities. This is my conclusion after seeing all parts of
this State more in detail than perhaps any one man has taken the trouble
to examine it.

[Illustration: PIEDRAS BLANCAS.]

CHAPTER II.

WINE AND RAISINS--PROFITS OF DRYING FRUITS.

I have now seen the grape grow in almost every part of California where
wine is made. The temptation to a new settler in this State is always
strong to plant a vineyard; and I am moved, by much that I have seen, to
repeat here publicly advice I have often given to persons newly coming
into the State: Do not make wine. I remember a wine-cellar, cheaply built,
but with substantial and costly casks, containing (because the vineyard
was badly placed) a mean, thin, fiery wine; and on a pleasant sunny
afternoon, around these casks, a group of tipsy men--hopeless,
irredeemable beasts, with nothing much to do except to encourage each
other to another glass, and to wonder at the Eastern man who would not
drink. There were two or three Indians staggering about the door; there
was swearing and filthy talk inside; there was a pretentious tasting of
this, that, and the other cask by a parcel of sots, who in their hearts
would have preferred "forty-rod" whisky. And a little way off there was a
house with women and children in it, who had only to look out of the door
to see this miserable sight of husband, father, friends, visitors, and
hired men spending the afternoon in getting drunk.

I do not want any one to understand that every vineyard is a nest of
drunkards, for this is not true. In the Napa and Sonoma valleys, in
the foot-hills of the Sierra, at Anaheim and elsewhere in the southern
country, you may find many men cultivating the grape and making wine in
all soberness. But everywhere, and in my own experience nearly as often,
you will see the proprietor, or his sons or his hired men, bearing the
marks of strong drink; and too often, if you come unexpectedly, you will
see some poor wretch in the wine-house who about four o'clock is maudlin.

[Illustration: POINT ARENA LIGHT-HOUSE.]

Seeing all this, I advise no new settler in the State to make wine.
He runs too many risks with children and laborers, even if he himself
escapes.

In giving this advice, I do not mean to be offensive to the great body of
wine growers in California, which numbers in its list a great many
able, careful, and sober men, who are doing, as they have done, much and
worthily for the prosperity of the State and for the production of good
wine, and whose skill and enterprise are honorable to them. But the best
and most thoughtful of these men will bear me out when I say that wine
growing and making is a business requiring eminent skill and great
practical good sense, and that not every one who comes to California with
means enough to plant a vineyard ought to enter this business or can in
the long run do so safely or profitably.

Fortunately, no one need make wine, though every man may raise grapes;
for it is now a fact, established by sufficient and practical trial,
that raisins, equal in every respect to the best Malaga, can be made in
California from the proper varieties of grapes, and can be sold for a
price which will very handsomely pay the maker, and with a much smaller
investment of capital and less skill than are required to establish a
wine-cellar and make wine. The vineyard owners already complain that they
can not always readily sell their crude wine at a paying price; but the
market for carefully-made raisins is, as I am told by the principal fruit
dealers in San Francisco, open and eager. To make wine requires uncommon
skill and care, and to keep it so that age shall give it that merit which
commands a really good price demands considerable capital in the necessary
outlay for casks. While the skillful wine-maker undoubtedly gets a large
profit on his vines, it begins to be seen here that there is an oversupply
of poorly-made wine.

But any industrious person who has the right kind of grapes can make
raisins; and raisin-making, which in 1871 had still a very uncertain
future in this State, may now safely be called one of the established and
most promising industries here.

In 1872 I ate excellent raisins in Los Angeles, and tolerable ones in
Visalia; but they sell very commonly in the shops what they call
"dried grapes," which are not raisins at all, but damp, sticky,
disagreeable things, not good even in puddings. This year, however, I
have seen in several places good native raisins; and the head of the
largest fruit-importing house in San Francisco told me that one
raisin-maker last fall sold the whole of his crop there at $2 per box
of twenty-five pounds, Malagas of the same quality bringing at the
same time but $2.37-1/2. There is a market for all well-made raisins
that can be produced in the State, he said, and they are preferred to
the foreign product.

At Folsom, Mr. Bugby told me he had made last year 1700 boxes of raisins,
and he was satisfied with the pecuniary return; and I judge from the
testimony of different persons that at seven cents per pound raisins will
pay the farmer very well. The Malaga and the White Muscat are the grapes
which appear here to make the best raisins. Nobody has yet tried the
Seedless Sultana, which, however, bears well here, and would make, I
should think, an excellent cooking raisin.

For making raisins they wait until the grape is fully ripe, and then
carefully cut off the bunches and lay them either on a hard clay floor,
formed in the open air, or on brown paper laid between the vine rows. They
do not trim out poor grapes from the bunches, because, as they assert,
there are none; but I suspect this will have to be done for the very
finest raisins, such as would tempt a reluctant buyer. The bunches require
from eighteen to twenty-four days of exposure in the sun to be cured.
During that time they are gently turned from time to time, and such as are
earliest cured are at once removed to a raisin-house.

This is fitted with shelves, on which the raisins are laid about a foot
thick, and here they are allowed to sweat a little. If they sweat too much
the sugar candies on the outside, and this deteriorates the quality of the
raisin. It is an object to keep the bloom on the berries. They are kept in
the raisin-house, I was told, five or six weeks, when they are dry enough
to box. It is as yet customary to put them in twenty-five pound boxes,
but, no doubt, as more experience is gained, farmers will contrive other
parcels. Chinese do all the work in raisin-making, and are paid one dollar
a day, they supplying themselves with food. There is no rain during the
raisin-making season, and, consequently, the whole outdoor work may be
done securely as well as cheaply.

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