Seven Weeks in the Great Yo-Semite

IT is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean. Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless intervals of amber weather, and that soi-disant summer is one entire amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature ; the wealth of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,— a single flat doing service for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notesof-hand, the Almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All The Year Round.

Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits are produced ! Fruit enough metaphorical: for the scientific man or artist who cannot make hay while such a sun shines from April to November must be a slothful laborer indeed. But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his breakfast, —who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons, figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds ?

Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Occidental Hotel. Its comfort is like that of a royal home. There is nothing inn-ish about it. Remembering the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained to say that I have never, even in New York, seen its equal for elegance of appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of cuisine. Having come to this extreme of civilization from the extreme of barbarism, we found that it actually needed an exertion to leap from the lap of luxury, after a fortnight’s pleasaunee, and take to the woods again in flannel and corduroys.

But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the heavenly climate, the paradisiacal fruits, and the royal hotel of San Francisco, were the old friends whom we found, and the new ones we made there. With but one exception, (and that an express - company, not a man,) we were received by all our San - Francisco acquaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a welcome and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was honorable to them. Need I say whose brotherly hands were among the very first outstretched to us, in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by whose radiant face and golden speech we were most lovingly detained evening after evening and far into the night? A few days ago when we read that dreadful message, “ Starr King is dead” the lightning that carried it seemed to end in our hearts. We withered under it; California had lost its soul for us; at noon or in dreams that balmy land would nevermore be the paradise it once was to us. The last hand that pressed our own, when we sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the same that had been first to give us our California welcome. Just before the lines were cast off, Starr King stood at the door of our state-room, and said, —

“ I could not bear to have you go away without one more good-bye. Here are the cartes-de-visite I promised. They look hard-worked, but they look like me. Good bye ! God bless you ! I hope to make a visit to the East next summer, and then we will get together somewhere by the sea. Good bye ! ”

He went down the ladder. When the steamer glided off, his bright face sent benedictions after us as far as we could see ; and then, for the last time on earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded from our sight, — but, oh ! never from our hearts, either in the here or the hereafter. “ We shall see him, but not now.” We shall be together with him “in the summer, by the sea”; but that summer shall have other glory than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.

King was to have joined us in our YoSemite trip. We little knew that we were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.

If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of Eden, — into a region which out - Bendemered Bendemere, out - valleyed the valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.

We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins’s camera across the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil’s window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes’s study. At Goupil’s counter and in Starr King’s drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,—I, let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.

No Saratoga affair, this ! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and curling - kids. Driven by the œtrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the San - Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is “ goes back on ”) her back-hair, abandons her capillary “ waterfalls ” for those of the Sierra, and, like John Phœnix’s old lady who had her whole osseous system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her “ skeleton ” behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three or four times presented to us during our seven weeks’ camp there, —though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her life.

Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry day since my return Iwas riding in a train on the New-York Central, when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of beeves, accosted me with the question, — “ Friend, yeou ’ve travelled consid’able, and believe in the religion of Natur’, don’t ye ? ” “Why so?” I responded. “Them boots” replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite. Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had, — and it is not difficult to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt’s revolvers which had come with us across the continent ; our ammunition we got in San Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth transportation : our necessaries we left to be purchased at that jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits, sardines, and applebutter, — in the latter, a jug of sirup for the inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him and starvation ; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to stick !

The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite (and he must be rather of the CountDevereux than the Foppington-Flutter school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California. Everybody rides there ; if you wish to create a sensation with your horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franeiscan Boulevards) with its cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat in the next Congress. The nation of beggars -on-horseback which first colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that Americans who never sat even so little as an Atlan tie-State’s pony, on coming here presently take to the saddle with all their hearts. In most of the smaller Californian towns, a very serviceable halfor quarter-breed saddle-horse is to be had for forty dollars, — the “breed” portion of his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the remaining fraction being native or Mustang stock. This animal, it need be, will live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule, — travel all day long on an easy “ lope,” never offering to stop till fatigue makes him fall, — and, if you let him, will take you through chaparrals, and up and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts, supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and fifty dollars.

It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started, but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted to the rider’s form as an old “ incroyable’s ” pair of pantaloons. There is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower lumbar vertebræ behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,—thus affording capital relief both to one’s self and one’s horse, and bringing in both from a fifty-miles’ march comparatively unjaded.

The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like an Omega upside-down (Ʊ), left unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances. Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of the rider’s leg. The surcingle, or, Californicà}, the cinch, is a broad strip of hair-cloth, with a padded ring at either end through which you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.

The only particular in which I could not commend and adopt the native practice was the Mexican bit. It is a dreadful instrument of torture, putting immense leverage in the rider’s hands, and enabling him at will to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces; indeed, the horse on which it is used is guided entirely by pressure on the opposite side of the neck from that in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of drawing his head around would so lift the bit as to drive him frantic. There are very few horses of any breed, even the Mustang, that never stumble; and as I prefer lifting my horse, to letting him break his knees or neck, I want a bridle I can pull upon without tearing his mouth. So, in spite of its handsome appearance and the very manageable single white cord into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed the Mexican head-gear, and took the ordinary Eastern snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed our accoutrement, — whips being here unknown.

I may as well make a word-map of our route before going farther. Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship themselves and their horses from San Francisco by steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Joaquin, the most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State, — a series, indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region, that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying the northern portion of the State, —resembling in its physical features, much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,—and that rises east of the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach the ocean ; its threading stream is the Merced ; and if on any good United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving the San Joaquin at Stockton en route for Mariposa,— the Stanislaus, the Tuolonmo, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains, somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small settlement dropped down in this not, unfruitful waste, and thrice you come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish plaza, and Yankee notions sold around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, “ peep, and botanize”; besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to neither of which each other’s society or their own new trade was congenial,

I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole road is interesting,— especially to one making a specialty of owls. The only game within easy reach is the dove and the California ground-squirrel,— a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray, barring the former’s subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of the Sierra, — or ought to be : many cattle died along the San Joaquin last summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we forded it at Roberts’s Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior to the finest white-oaks of the East, but surpassed in beauty every tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a NewEngland meadow, and wept at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,—possessing, moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal embonpoint, unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of color from our artists’ hands.

At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade of pack-animals, transferred our wagonload to their backs, (the average mulepack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,) roped it there in the most approved muletero - fashion, and started into the wilderness.

Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who with myself had formed the original overlandparty, we numbered two young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Düsseldorf friend,—also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally, Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco. To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former, perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in return. We picked him up in a San - Francisco employment - office, after looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair, serviceable - looking hands, and no end to selfrecommendations; but then it was impossible to ask after him at his “ last place,” that having been General Johnston’s camp during Buchanan’s forcible-feeble occupation of Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soupmeat went into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him, marriage - service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing which I think finally “fired our Northern hearts ” and clinched the matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance, whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our pis-aller, — we finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to help pack our nudes or care for them and the horses.

The boy we obtained near Mariposa He was an independent squire to the man of whom we got the extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of trustee and prochein amy to an orphan family of mules. At fifteen years and in jackets, he was one of the keenest speculators in fire-arms I ever saw; could swap horses or play poker with anybody; and, take him for all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall never look upon his like again.

Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five pack-beasts by as many towlines, we struck up into the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills, commencing our climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve of these we pursued a road in some degree practicable to carts, and leading to one of those inevitable steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his first swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing the sawmill in the very act of astonishing the wilderness with a dinner - whistle, we struck a trail and fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was almost a continuous alternation of descent and climb over outlying ridges of the Sierra. Our raw - recruited mules, and the elementary condition of our intellects in the science of professional packing, spun out this portion of our journey to three days, — though allowance is to be made for the fact of our stopping at noon of the second day and not resuming our trail till the morning of the third. This interim we spent in visiting the Big Trees, which are situated four or five miles off the Yo-Semite track.

“ Clark’s,” where tourists stop for this purpose, is just half-way between Mariposa and the great Valley. “ Clark ” himself is one of the best-informed men, one of the very best guides, I ever met in the Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, stalwart old grizzly - hunter and miner of the '49 days, wears a noble full beard hued like his favorite game, but no head-covering of any kind since he recovered from a fever which left his head intolerant of even a slouch. He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in the winter, and in summer occupies a hermitage built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild - strawberry sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.

Before reaching Clark’s we had been astonished at the dimensions of the ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.

But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants. People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves, and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that, though I always thought I had believed travellers in their recitals on this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.

Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty - two trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in circumference ; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet; fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and sixty ; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and eighty; two between eighty and ninety ; two between ninety and one hundred; two are just one hundred ; and one is one hundred and two. This last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet. I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,—for it is prostrate,—and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark. I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet, — its circumference one hundred and two feet plus a fraction. Of course the thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.

To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house. You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope up from your root-peak. Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end, our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still living, and all have the bark upon them still, while the tree is to some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter, — over one hundred and twenty in circumference ! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though with my mind’s eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them half a day, the artists making color - studies of the most picturesque, the rest of us izing away at something scientific,—Botany, Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to do here or in the Valley,—the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a cramped cofiin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt for comparison ; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon’s, your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an average timber-tree as a large man against Sequoia gigantea. What our artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees’ color,—a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety to the forest, “ making sunshine in the shady place" also, their typical figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a plover’s egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.

Between all the ridges we had hithertocrossed, silvery streams leaped down intensely cold through the granite chasms, — all of them fed from the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque, — most of them good trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw : and now, on leaving Clark’s, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us quite apropos at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily furnished us with frogs enough for an entráe. Between two and three in the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall the YoSemite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy, save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.

Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly “ sign ” intersected our trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless ; but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This was the “ Lady Washington,” and much resembled a snowy daylily with an odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of our approach to the Valley’s tremendous battlement, till our trail turned at a sharp angle and we stood on “ Inspiration Point.”

That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature.

We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in height, —a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazv green spiculœ, — they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.

There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we could only guess. When Nature’s lightning hits a man fair and square, it splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.

I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly, for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spellbound to the tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,—broadly burning, rather than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From that sun, clear back to the first avant - courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven — ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,—so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,—so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on the granite lid of the Great Valley’s upgazing eye. In the first astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and seemed to see an unbroken sky-line ; but as ecstasy gave way to examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice surpassed our immediate vis-à-vis in height.

First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length ; but that detracted no more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built on its grand flat top. And, oh ! the gorgeous masses of light and shadow which the falling sun cast on it, — the shadows like great waves, the lights like their spumy tops and flying mist, — thrown up from the heaving breast of a golden sea ! In California at this season the dome of heaven is cloudless ; but I still dream of what must be done for the bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula’s coronation-day majesties by the broken winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the Valley’s tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish alias, — some Mission Indian having attempted to translate by ”El Capitan ” the idea of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.

Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the skyline, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous To-coy-æ, better known through Watkins’s photographs as the Great North Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.

We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand -point to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories, and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered glacis of detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life save the pabæozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a Yo-Semite crag inorganic, as I used to speak of everything not strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the dábris at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and exuvice of a stone life’s great work-day ? Who knew but the vital changes which were going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us because silent and vastly secular ? What was he who stood up before Tis-sa-aek and said, “ Thou art dead rock ! ” save a momentary sojourner in the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived long enough to hear strike ? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads at a time,—if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of some one small being in the fenceless vivarium of the Universe? Let not the ephemeron that lights on a baby’s hand generalize too rashly upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.

I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave. Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was its fostering god, — the former a radiant maiden, the latter an ever-young immortal, —

“amorous as the month of May.” Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer, kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley - tribes began to starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened, and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her nation’s woes, she rose from her lover’s arms, and cried for succor to the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty cone split from heaven to earth, — its frontal half falling down to dam the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches, — its other segment remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the in~ memoriam title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan, — where a lively faith and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.

Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man, — in the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact, and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his own way ; but a fact with its facets cut — otherwise a poem—is unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal translation ; poems circulate virgin and verbatim. In some future article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River, and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by the lantern of Indian legend.

Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun, — chrysoprase beautiful enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John’s apocalyptic heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great mountain-ranges, — into a field of perfect light, misty by its own excess, — into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the phœnix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some rich old clover-mead ; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise ; but for ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on rock, the great world might well be running back in stone - and - grassy dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet hut two daughters, the crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature’s self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a sudden, and ns-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new cycle,— spout up remorseful lavas from her longhardened conscience, and hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins ? Earth below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset wherever for a space he glided out of the shadow of woods.

To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from possessing it. Only the silleros of the Andes, our mules, horses, and selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.

Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp, — calling, it “ Camp Rosalie,” after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt’s. Removing our packs and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow, with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring fire,—made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a threeforked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks, — selected a cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant baldacchini for the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep on evergreen -strewings.

During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks and coffee. Then the. loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and colorboxes, the sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of injunction about the dumpling in the grouse - fricassee.

Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a living landscape, color-studies on the spot; and though I am not here to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks’ camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or the pool with various success for our next day’s dinner, or hunting specimens of all kinds, — Agassizing, so to speak.

I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish. — to that select minority of illuminati who go trouting for intellectual culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a Sonata of Beethoven’s,—who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola in the cast of a fly, — who call three little troutlings “a splendid day’s sport, me boy ! ” because those rash and ill-advised infants have been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon, — and those the dull, black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots, — I gave over bothering the unambitious burghers of the flood with invitations to a rise in life, and took to the meadows with a butterfly-net.

My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) should chase the butterfly on horseback. You are liable to put your net over your horse’s head instead of the butterfly. The butterfly keeps rather ahead of the horse. You may throw your horse when you mean to throw the net. The idea is a romantic one; it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when court-butterflies were said to have been netted from the saddle, — but it carries you nowhere else in particular, unless perhaps into a small branch of the Merced, where you don’t want to go. Then, too, if you slip down and leave your horse standing while you steal on a giant Papilio which is sucking the deer-weed in such a sweet spot for a cast, your horse (perhaps he has heard of the French general who said, “Asses and savans to the centre!”) may discover that he also is a sage, and retire to botanize while you are butterfiying,—a contingency which entails your wading the Merced after him five several times, and finally going back to camp in wet disgust to procure another horse and a lariat. An experience faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon convinced me that the great arm of the service in butterfly - warfare is infantry. After I had turned myself into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to success. Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of its groves and meadows is sucked by some of the largest, the most magnificent, and most widely varied butterflies in the world.

At noon those of us who came back to camp had a substantial dinner out of our abundant stores, reinforced occasionally with grouse, quail, or pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined à la fourchette, in their workshop, — something in a pail being carried out to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness, and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, “ Death on the Pail-Horse.” At evening, when the artists returned, half an hour was passed in a “ private view ” of their day’s studies; then came another dinner, called a supper ; then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the genial way to bed-time.

In his charming “ Peculiar,” Epes Sargent has given us an episode called the “ Story of Estelle.” It is the greatest of compliments to him that I could get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore the name of one of the most audacious and picaresque mortals I ever knew, — our hired man, who sold us — ourBut hear my episode: it Is

THE STORY OF VANCE.

Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with the Secesh uncle. I will be brief. Our stores began to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of purchases, and eighty golden dollars, bidding him good-speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was to return laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, and oil, on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. Seven days glided by, and the material for more slapjacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our bag-bottoms.

One morning I determined to save the party from starvation, and with a fresh supply of the currency set out for Mariposa. At Clark’s I learned that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest of the sunlight in a siesta. When he arose, his animals were undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark’s only horse to go in search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen him since.

Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I resumed my way toward the settlements. Coming by the steam sawmill, I recognized Vance’s steed grazing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, and led him in triumph to Mariposa. There I arrived at eight in the evening of the day I left the Valley, having performed fifty miles of the hardest mountain-trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve hours, making allowance for our halt and noonfeed at Clark’s. If ever a California horse was tried, it was mine on that occasion ; and he came into Mariposa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled or jaded in the least.

Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory had carried him home to his old stable,—also the remaining events in Vance’s brief, but brilliant career. That ornament of the Utah and To-Semite expeditions had entered Mariposa on Clark’s horse, — lost our eighty golden dollars at a single session of blulf,— departed gayly for Coulterville, where he sold Clark’s horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving title,) — and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the days of Gil Blas!

Too happy in the recovery of Clark’s and our own animals to waste time in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our commissariat needed,—nooned at Clark’s, on my way back, the third day after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover - bread ; but, after such an experience as our party’s, I venture to say they would have regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same enthusiasm shared our artists, savans, and gentlemen, embracing the shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, “ A slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation ” ?

Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream, and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice opposite. This is the Yo - Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian, “ Cho-looke.” By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the headlong flood from cataract to rapids for about four hundred feet; but the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.

While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit “ Po-ho-nó,” or “ The Bridal Veil,” which was passed on the southern side in our way to the second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-saack was a good, so is Po-ho-nó an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water forever rushing down a cañon through which the stream breaks from its feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-nó; while the very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the Valley-cataracts to the YoSemite itself, and having a width of fifty feet. Its name of “ The Bridal Veil ” is one of the few successes in fantastic nomenclature ; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth at her granite wedding,—no commemorator of any fifty-years’ bagatelle like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her nuptials.

On either side of Po-ho-nó the sky-line of the precipice is magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three hundred feet. A little farther are “ Eleachas,” or “ The Three Brothers,” flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior bounding - planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.

One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the shore of Lake Ah-wi-yah, — a crystal pond of several acres in extent, fed by the north fork of the Valleystream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow strait between the North and Smith Domes. By this tranquil water we pitched our third camp, and when the rising sun began to shine through the mighty cleft before us, the play of color and chiaroscuro on its rugged walls was something for which an artist apt to oversleep himself might well have sat up all the night. No such precaution was needed by ourselves. Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out by dawn ; for the studies were grander, the grouse and quail plentier, and the butterflies more gorgeous than we found in any other portion of the Valley. After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the river more enchanting at every step. I was obliged to penetrate in t his direction entirely on foot, — clambering between squared blocks of granite dislodged from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of which might have been excavated into a commodious church, and discovering, for the pains cost by a reeonnoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest shady stretches of singing water and some of the finest minor waterfalls in our American scenery.

Our last camp was pitched among the crags and forests behind the South Dome,—where the Middle Pork descends through two successive waterfalls, which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass Cho-looke, while the loftiest is nearly as high as Po-ho-nó. About three miles west of the Domes, the south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep cañon leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through this cañon comes the Middle Fork, and along its banks lies our course to the great “ Pi-wi-ack ” (senselessly Englished as “ Vernal”) and the Nevada Falls. For three miles from our camp opposite the Yp-Semite Fall the cañon is threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles ; in others we became quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main precipice had made but slight compromise. But for our light marching order,— our only dress being kneeboots, hunting-shirt, and trowsers, — it would have been next to impossible to reach our goal at all.

But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge ; an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across the mighty caldron at the base of the fall; and straight before us in one unbroken leap came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite shelf nearly four hundred feet in height and sixty feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterprising speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five cents’ toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the cañon to the very crown of the cataract. The he weakest nerves need not have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we had just climbed.

Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest manzanitu may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other, — creating thus the very typical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining barrenness of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the Alleghany chain.

Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream’s immediate margin,—getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fret work of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us, —we came at last to the base of “ Yowi - ye,” or Nevada Fall.

This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants sideways from the cliif about a hundred feet below the crown of the fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.

At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a cul-de-sac of Nature’s grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite barathrum, whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous series of Yo-Semite effects; eight hundred feet above us, could we climb there, we should find the silent causes ot power. There lie the broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow - peaks ; thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came. Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun, towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown’s serrated edge cutting the sky at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,—of holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way have we toiled since then,—and we know better now. Have we endured all these pains only to learn still deeper Life’s saddest lesson, — “ Climb forever, and there is still an Inaccessible” ?

Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature’s topmost treasurehouse. Yo-wi-ye answers us ere we turn back from the Yo-Semite’s last precipice toward the haunts of men :—

“ Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down to you ! ”