Indian Cradle, Washington TerritoryIndian Cradle, Washington TerritoryClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Running the Rookeries-Gathering Murre EggsRunning the Rookeries—Gathering Murre EggsClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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° 41’ 8’’ north, and longitude 122° 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.
Light-House on the South FarallonLight-House on the South FarallonClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Arch at West End, Farallon IslandsArch at West End, Farallon IslandsClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Sea-LionsSea-LionsClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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° 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's NestThe Gull's NestClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Shags, Murres, and Sea-GullsShags, Murres, and Sea-GullsClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Contest for the EggsContest for the EggsClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
The Great RookeryThe Great RookeryClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Indian Girls and Canoe, Puget SoundIndian Girls and Canoe, Puget SoundClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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, tomyknowledge, 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 hemustlive, 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.
Salem, Capital of OregonSalem, Capital of OregonClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.
Seattle, Washington TerritorySeattle, Washington TerritoryClick Thumbnail for full-size Illustration
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.