THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are,
indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no
place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who
lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of
interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian
Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its
altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It
feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit
you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the
south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte
Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open
ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to
climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the
white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa
County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
shoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred
feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the
soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of
men's talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.
And though in a few years from now the whole district may be
smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the
heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet
in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of
nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill
and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before
the flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has
twice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again,
after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to
Vallejo. Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green
strath of Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay
of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo
Ferry. Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through
the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the
passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the
steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the
ocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky was
still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from
seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,
shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a
blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still
such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to
be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long
pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy
pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon
the entire absence of any human face or voice--these are the marks
of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,
labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon these would be
plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills
would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that, too, is one
of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd
of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and
return with bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place
of fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to
labourers, and partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary
display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE: the
tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire
hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness
of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence. In
our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and
while one window would not open, the other would not shut. There
was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey
wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary
inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we
ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the
bay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above
the green level of the island opposite. It told us we were still
but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at
that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills. It called to
us over the waters as with the voice of a bird. Its stately head,
blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of
wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For Tamalpais stands
sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay
and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both. Even as
we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,
one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with
white sails, homeward bound for England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the
ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay
died out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures;
the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood
clear against the sky. But by-and-by these hills began to draw
nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to
clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the
sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley. A great
variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove,
among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about
equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and
growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded
most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town
after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best
to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,
and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the
traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the
springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by
stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a
frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the
progress of the iron horse.
