The Pacific Railroad—Open

VII.

OUTSIDE of San Francisco, California has many a wonder in nature, many a rare development of industry, to show its visitors. But summer tourists must be choice in their selections. A few days for railroad excursions into the valleys of the coast mountains about San Francisco will show us some of the grand wheat-fields, the orchards, and the vineyards; will exhibit the advantages of agriculture in a country where you can plough and plant from December till April, and then begin to harvest, and keep at that till October, with no barns necessary for housing animals or crops ; will open to us beautiful natural groves of oaks ; will reveal to us charming little nooks with rural homes among the neighboring hills ; will invite us to health-giving sulphur-baths and soda-springs, more delightfully located than Sharon or Saratoga ; will give us a peep into the gardens of the old Catholic missionaries among the Indians, — now overgrown with peach, plum, and fig trees, — where we may enjoy the novelty of picking ripe figs from trees nearly as large as the big elms on Boston Common ; will —if we go far enough, a two days’ ride — take us into the wild valley of the Geysers, where a miniature hell sends up its sulphurous waters, and burns and poisons all the earth and air within reach ; will carry us into the grand forests of red-wood in the coast mountains, — promise of the mammoth trees of the Sierra, — a light, delicate, reddish pine, that enters largely into the lumber supply of the San Francisco market; will introduce our curious steps to the great quicksilver mine of New Almaden, the rival of the Almaden mine of Spain ; or will set us down under the mountains, by the ocean’s shore, at Santa Cruz, — the Nice of our Pacific coast, — where the pure air is soft and health-giving. Farther down, Los Angeles invites us with stories of the tropical wealth of Southern California, of grape-vines like trees, of orange and banana groves, of cotton plantations, of agricultural wealth unbounded, of a climate so dry and even, so soft and sweet, as to surpass Italy’s.

But most of us will wait for the Southern Pacific Railroad, already moving out from both sides, to introduce us to this region of almost fabulous wealth and beauty; and after a hasty run, with wide-open eyes, to Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Clara Valleys, perhaps into that of Russian River, we shall prepare for the one great wonder which we came out to see, — The Yosemite Valley. For this, ten days, a full purse, Professor Whitney’s new and model guide-book and maps, — one of the best incidental gifts of the geological survey of the State,— and a camping suit, with duster and overcoat, are essential. The best way to go is by night boat or early morning cars to Stockton ; then by stage one hundred miles up the San Joaquin Valley, — O, how dry and dusty ! —through rich wheat-fields, and through that magnificent ruin, that foot-ball of Wall Street, Fremont’s Mariposa estate. In one of the dying villages of this principality, — Bear Valley, or Mariposa, — saddle-horses and guides are procured. If possible, add tents, blankets, and food, and travel independent of ranches and hotels. The first day after leaving the stage, we shall reach Clark’s Ranch for dinner, by way of White and Hatch’s. To this point we may ride in wagons, and stop over a day to see the Big Trees of the Mariposa grove. These are four or five miles from Clark’s, and if possible we persuade him to go with us. He is in natural sympathy with all these wonders and beauties of the Sierra Nevada, is the State’s agent for the care of the valley and the grove, and whether within his wide-spreading cabins, or under his protecting hay-stack, or in your own tent by the side of his grand open-air fires, he will care for you as a father for his children, and be proud to have you praise his trees, his river, and his mountains.

Another day — the fourth — takes us into the grand valley, after a hundred miles of wagon and forty of saddle riding from Stockton ; and every man and woman of us should dwell long upon the first views that open to us as we come out of the woods, and should look over into the depths below, and on to the heights above and beyond. The Atlantic early introduced its readers to what is here spread before the first awed, then delighted, and always wondering spectator. But only seeing is believing what this gorge in the mountains reveals. It is Nature speaking to man in a way that proves and exalts her supremacy.

There are primitive hotels here ; but if we have tents and blankets, we should pass each of our three days at different points in the valley, — one in the lower part, under El Capitan, another where the music of the Yosemite Fall will lull us to sleep, and the third by the lake, or in the neighborhood of the Vernal Fall. All the main features of interest are within a ten-mile circuit, and the three days will give us ample time to see them comfortably.

Another week may be also profitably spent in the high Sierras around the Yosemite Valley. Here, amid peaks from eight to thirteen thousand feet high, we find beautiful lakes and bright rivers, grand rock and mountain scenery, and a repetition in miniature of the Yosemite Valley itself, called the Hetch-Hetchy Valley ; and if we choose to prolong our ride down the Nevada side of the mountains to Mono Lake, we shall find in that sheet of water, fourteen miles long by nine wide, truly a Sea of Death. No living thing can exist in it; its waters will consume leather, and will thoroughly decompose the human body in a few weeks ; and though it receives various pure streams from the mountains, like Salt Lake it has no apparent outlet, and is even more of a puzzle to geologists and chemists than that better known inland sea.

We should make the return trip from the Yosemite by the Coulterville trail and road, keeping our original outfit with us. There are ten miles more of horseback riding on this route ; but it introduces us to a change of scenery, and a remarkable cave, called Bower’s Cave, and invites us by a short detour to visit the Calaveras grove of Big Trees, the first-discovered and best known of these forest wonders. There are some eight groves of these mammoth trees scattered along the Sierra Mountains in a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. The tallest trees yet measured are full three hundred and twenty-five feet high, and are in the Calaveras grove ; the largest in circumference are in the Mariposa grove, and measure over ninety feet; while the greatest age that any yet scientifically tested in that respect can claim is about one thousand three hundred years. Their beauty of shape and color is as striking as their size ; and no visitor to California will omit them in his tour of its curiosities.

Though the mining interests of California have fallen behind those of agriculture and manufactures, and seem destined to still greater decay, there are some features of them decidedly worth a stranger’s study. Grass Valley is the centre of the most extensive successful gold-quartz mining ; and its operations are not dissimilar to those of Central City in Colorado, and Virginia City in Nevada. But the excavation of the “ dead rivers ” of California for the loose deposits of gold left in their beds by the convulsions of nature in ages long past, and the grand hydraulic processes resorted to in the work, justly rank among the marvels of the State. These dead rivers are not dry, open beds; but huge strata of sand, gravel, and quartz, filing up what were once river channels, and lying now from a hundred to a thousand feet beneath the foot hills of the mountains. They lie parallel with the mountains and diagonally to the rivers now coming out of the mountains; their channels were filled up by the upheaval of the mountains ; and their place was made known by the modern streams cutting down through them, revealing on the walls of the canyon the peculiar goldbearing materials that now occupy their beds. Out of these dead rivers, three hundred millions in gold have been taken, and they still yield eight millions a year. Much capital and labor are requisite to carry on mining operations in them ; tunnels are run along their lines; and great streams of water are brought down from the mountains through miles of ditches and troughs, and poured by the aid of hose, with many times more force than the streams from a steam fire-engine, upon a hillside, to tear it to pieces and get at the gold materials, or into the gold-beds themselves, to wash out the precious particles. The ruin that such operations spread around is frightful; rivers are choked up with the sands and stones sent down by these washings, and broad, fertile valleys are laid waste by the hills thus set afloat.

But it is no longer proper to consider California as especially a mining State. Many of the mining villages and camps along under the mountains have been wholly deserted, nearly all are decreasing in population ; and it is very sad and very odd to see so new a country exhibiting these aspects of age and decay. The agriculture, commerce, and manufactures of the State are each, even now, in advance of the mining interest in wealth and productiveness. The mining counties have fallen off twenty-five per cent in population since i860, while the population of the agricultural counties has been doubled, and that of San Francisco trebled, in the same time. The agricultural products of 186S footed up sixty millions of dollars against twenty-six millions in metals. There are thirty millions of grapevines growing in the State; the wine made in 1866 amounted to from three to four millions of gallons, and in 1868 to eight millions. The wine was at first crude and coarse, but, as the rankness of the soil is tempered by use, and greater care and science are used in making it, its quality rapidly improves. Finer kinds of grapes than the old Mission are coming rapidly into cultivation, and will still more surely improve the quality and add to the variety of the wine. The wheat crop of California in 1868 was fifteen millions of bushels ; the barley, eight millions, — this grain being fed freely to horses on the Pacific coast; the wool, seven millions of pounds; the butter, five millions, and the cheese, three millions, and still much butter and cheese are imported from the East. The exports of domestic produce, aside from metals, amounted to seventeen millions in 1868, the chief item being wheat, of which no other State in the Union raised so large a surplus in that year; and, with a surplus contribution of four millions from Oregon, she is holding over for higher prices, or against the contingency of a bad year, probably enough wheat to supply her own wants for two years.

With such suddenly developed yet securely held wealth as these few facts illustrate, the future of California looms before the visitor in proportions that astound and awe. In her, nature is as boundless in its fecundity and variety, as it is strange and startling in its forms. While Switzerland has only four mountains that rise to a height of thirteen thousand feet, California has one or two hundred, while Mount Whitney soars to fifteen thousand feet, and is the highest peak of the Republic. She has a waterfall fifteen times as high as Niagara. All climates are her own ; what variety her long stretch north and south does not present, her mountains and valleys introduce. Dead volcanoes and sunken rivers abound in her mountains ; the largest animal of the continent makes his covert in her chaparrals ; the largest bird floats over her plains for carrion ; the remains of the Oldest Inhabitant, so far as identified, have been dug out of her depths ; the biggest nugget of gold (weighing one hundred and ninety-five pounds and worth thirty-seven thousand fourhundred dollars) has been found among her gold deposits ; she has lakes so voracious that they will eat up a man, boots, breeches and all, in thirty days, and rich enough in borax, sulphur, and soda to supply the world’s apothecaries ; she has mud volcanoes and the Yosemite Valley ; she grows beets of one hundred and twenty pounds, cabbages of seventy-five, onions of four, turnips of twenty-six, and watermelons of eighty pounds, and has a grape-vine fifteen inches thick, and bearing sixty-five hundred pounds in one season. Her men are the most enterprising and audacious, her women the most self-reliant and the most richly dressed, and her children the stoutest, sturdiest, and sauciest in all the known world. Let us worship and move on !

VIII.

To us of the East, the Sandwich Islands are a remote, foreign kingdom, where our whalers refit, and to the conversion of whose heathen we dedicated all our sanctified pennies in childhood. But here in California, they are counted as neighbors, dependencies, ay, surely and soon possessions of the American Republic. We have converted their heathen, we have occupied their sugar plantations ; we furnish the brains that carry on their government, and the diseases that are destroying their people; we want the profit on their sugars and their tropical fruits and vegetables; why should we not seize and annex the islands themselves ? At any rate, the familiarity with which the Eastern visitor finds " the Islands ” spoken of in California, and the accounts he receives of their strange scenery, their wonderful volcanoes, their delightful climate, will strongly invite him to make them a visit. Indeed, though his portfolio may have been enriched with the rarest harmonies of tint, new suggestions and novelties of form, during his sojourn among the mountains and parks of Colorado, or in the deep canyons of the Sierra, yet he must not close it feeling that he has exhausted the revelations that this western world has to make to him, until he has added a few sketches at least of the yet more unique scenery of the Hawaiian Islands. So, if time permits, let us see the utmost possibilities and varieties of the Republic, and devote to these at least a couple of months.

This little group of breezy, sunny islands, standing like an outpost of the great army of islands, little and big, that guards the eastern coast of Asia, yet offering itself as a kind of neutral ground on which the eastern and western worlds have met and joined hands, lies about two thousand miles southwest of San Francisco, and is brought into close communication with it by means of a semimonthly steamer. A voyage of ten days, — days of uninterrupted sunshine and serenity on this most smiling of seas,—and the passenger will find himself rounding the bold, bare headland of Diamond Point, which stands guard over the little bay and city of Honolulu. The first view of this miniature capital of a petty kingdom can hardly fail to be disappointing ; it is but a village of unpretending, wooden houses, clustered for the most part around the bay, and stretching out, here and there, toward the hills. But you have not come so many thousand miles from home to see a counterpart of Boston or New York, and the first walk on shore will offer a suggestion at least of the pleasure that awaits you in the thousand novel shapes and aspects of a changed hemisphere. After two or three weeks here, — spent in early morning or evening gallops into the wonderful valleys of the range of hills that cuts the island in two, and in climbs to the different summits, from which, on each side of you, the little island seems to roll away and leap and tumble in great billows of green into the sea ; with the days rounded in on cool and fragrant verandas, among these intelligent, hospitable people, with whom kindness to the stranger is the first of duties, — one will find it hard to believe that the other islands can promise greater attractions.

The first expedition usually made is to the active volcano Kilauea, situated on the island of Hawaii, the easternmost of the group. The indispensable articles by way of outfit for this are a waterproof (a lady should carry a bloomer dress of heavy woollen material) and a saddle, as all the journeying must be made on horseback ; to these may be added whatever articles of comfort or convenience the individual taste may suggest; but it is desirable that all should not exceed the capacity of a pair of saddle-bags. To sail direct to Hilo, which is the most common course, instead of landing at Kewaihae, on the other side of Hawaii and making a partial circuit of the island, is to rob one’s self of an experience full of novel enjoyment. It is a journey of three or four days, and attended with some fatigue and discomfort; but to the enthusiastic sight-seer the annoyances will be counterbalanced by the pleasures. After a day of monotonous scenery, the road winds round the base of Mauna-Kea, and comes out close to the sea. Then begins the romantic part of it, —a succession of precipices, or great crevices as they might be called, from one hundred to five hundred feet deep. But these palls, as the natives call them, are as beautiful as they are perilous of descent; their steep sides are covered with every shade of green, from the silver-leaved kukui to the dark purple fronds of the pulu fern, — masses and tangles of vines and trees, — and at the bottom of each is a roaring, tumbling brook, or narrow arm of the sea. On this side of the island, also, lie the rich sugar plantations under the hospitable roofs of whose owners the traveller must look to find his shelter and his victual.

But Hilo will not suffer him to pass her by without stopping to pay a tribute of admiration to her beautiful bay and cultivated and generous inhabitants, giving him at the same time the opportunity to take breath before the last day of his journey. The crater of Kilauea opens at a height of four thousand feet on the side of the lofty Mauna Loa, and a gradual ascent of thirty miles lands you suddenly on the edge of this enormous, yawning chasm. So vast is it that it is impossible to get any idea of its gigantic proportions till you have clambered down its almost perpendicular walls, and crossed the interior, which measures ten miles round. Its condition varies greatly at different times: sometimes the molten mass forms a chain of fiery lakes, connected by subterraneous channels, sometimes it overleaps its barriers, and floods the floor of the crater with fire. No words can depict the awful fascination of those fiery caldrons, boiling and hissing and roaring, and tossing up fountains of liquid flame. The most effective time to see them is the evening. Then the whole sky is lighted up with the reflection of the fire, and the surrounding darkness serves to heighten the splendor of the glowing, seething mass.

In striking contrast with Kilauea stands the stupendous extinct volcano of Haleakala, almost the greater wonder of the two. It occupies the eastern half of the island of Maui, and is a cone ten thousand feet high. Its crater is three times as large as Kilauea, — that is, it is thirty miles in circumference,—and more than a thousand feet deep. Parties visiting this crater are accustomed to take their camping equipage, and to pass a night on the top of the mountain, not only because the excursion would be too fatiguing for a single day, but also because through the day the crater is filled with light clouds and mist, which only depart with the setting sun. No scene could possibly combine more elements of the grand and the beautiful than this does; the soft, flocculent masses of clouds silently rolling in and out of these Tartarean depths, through the great gap in the mountain-wall, toward the sea, occasionally breaking to reveal the frightful blackness beneath ; the sun as it sinks, touches the whole cloud-landscape with a rose-gray glow ; long lines of trade-wind cloudlets, like fleets of phantom ships, go scudding over the sea ; the three lofty summits of Hawaii, and the lesser heights of the islands surrounding Maui repeat the sunset tints, and the whole seems like a scene of enchantment. Maui can also boast of a valley that deserves to be mentioned by the side of the Yosemite, though so different in outline and in coloring as to allow of no comparison ; and this, together with the most picturesque mountain group of all the islands, the richest sugar plantations, and the most generous and free-handed proprietors, make Maui the greenest spot in the memory of every traveller.

It is impossible, in the limits of such a brief sketch as this, to do more than roughly outline the chief points of interest in these far-off islands. The climate, too, lends its subtle attraction, a deliciously blended heat and coolness in which you are puzzled to know whether you are comfortably warm or pleasantly refreshed. One who has two or three months of leisure cannot better bestow it than in going to see all this for himself, and he will obtain from the warm-hearted islanders every possible help and suggestion he may need to make his journey easy and profitable, with only one drawback, namely, that at every place he may stop, with the exception of Honolulu, he must accept the freely offered hospitality of the foreign residents, nor dare to make any return except in friendship’s coin.

IX.

A visit to the islands, however, cannot be included in the two or three months’ plan with which we left home. But Oregon, the Columbia River, and Idaho can ; and if you please, we will go home that way. It will take but two weeks longer than the straight railroad line back, and even the most careless tour of our new West will be incomplete without it. Good ocean steamers will carry us to Portland, Oregon, in two days ; but if the roads are tolerable, and the stage service what it should be, we shall prefer to go over land. The cars take us up the grand valley of the Sacramento through Marysville to Oroville, and leave about five hundred miles for the stage. We ride then through broad alluvial meadows, golden-brown with wheat, and enlivened by frequent old oak groves ; past Chico, where, if possible, we should linger to see General Bidwell and his twentythousand-acre farm, with its vast gardens and orchards ; past Red Bluffs, the head of navigation on the Sacramento River, where the widow and daughters of old John Brown live in quiet and usefulness, nursing the sick, teaching the young, and honored by the whole village ; into narrowing valleys, where the Coast Range and the Sierras meet and kiss each other; over pleasant hills, with occasional plantations of the pear, apple, and vine, growing most luxuriantly here ; along under the grand shadows of Mount Shasta, monarch of the Northern Sierras, and the Mont Blanc of California ; over higher hills and into the cross valleys of Northern California and Southern Oregon, the Trinity, Klamath, Rogue, and Umpqua Rivers coursing wildly through them to the sea ; by many a grove of oak, with the green mistletoe and the gray moss pendent from the branches, and the gay madrone-tree lighting up the scene; through many a broad interval of grass and grain, welcoming flocks or reapers ; through and in sight of forests of pines, cedars, spruces, balsams, birches, and ash, greener and more diversified than those of California, and grander in individual size and collective extent than those of the Alleghanies or the White Hills. We stop in the Umpqua Valley to have an hour’s chat on the philosophy and practice of politics with Jesse Applegate, a wise old pioneer of Oregon, and come out at last into the garden of Oregon, the Willamette Valley. Nowhere else was ever a scene of picturesque rural beauty like that spread before us, as the stage comes out of the hills and woods, and we overlook the broad meadows, with their wide, open groves, rising and falling in softly undulating lines, and the hills standing far apart to frame the picture. The parks of Old England, the valleys of New England, the prairies of Illinois, the mountains of Colorado and California, all seem to have contributed their special attractions to make up this scene. Through this valley, one hundred and twenty-five miles long and fifty miles wide, the railroad or the steamboat may quicken our speed ; but we shall wish to linger over its wealth of beauty and wealth of agriculture. Prosperous villages lie along the river, and sixty thousand people already live upon the soil. Wheat, corn, and fruit are the chief products ; and there is no stint in the return.

Portland lies on the Willamette, just before it enters the Columbia, has from eight to nine thousand inhabitants, who pay almost a New England respect to the Sabbath, and dreams sometimes that it is a rival to San Francisco. It would be well if, now we are here, we could run across Washington Territory, — a two days’ ride through thicker forests of larger trees than we have yet seen, always excepting the mammoth groves of California,— and see Puget’s Sound. Steamboats carry us to Victoria, on Vancouver’s Island, and back, and the excursion is a revelation of new beauties and new wealth. Magnificent forests line the shores, close to which the largest ships can move ; there is lumber here for all nations and all time ; snow-covered mountains, grand in form, smiling in aspect, rise on the right and left; and we come back penetrated with a new wonder at the far-reaching bounty of our Northwest, and a trifle impatient that the British drum-beat is even temporarily sounded over a portion of such waters, over an acre of such excellent forests for ship timber and profitable lumber generally. A week would suffice to make this excursion from Portland to Victoria and back, and a most recompensing investment would it prove.

But we promised to return homeward by the Columbia River. Elegant steamers convey us up the broad stream. Soon we pass Fort Vancouver, where Grant, Hooker, and McClellan all served apprenticeship, and Grant distinguished himself by raising a crop of potatoes ; and it was here, too, that our new President left the army, to come back in the hour of national distress, rescued himself, rescuing us. Mount Hood appears next, — a grand pyramid of snow in the distance, — the pride of Oregon, and the rival to California’s Shasta. We now enter the exciting theatre of conflict between river and rock, that distinguishes the Columbia from all other known rivers. Our boat cannot pass these rapids, but there are railroads to carry freight and passengers to boats of equal excellence beyond.

East of the mountains, the close, rich forests disappear, the hills are bare and brown as in Nevada, and the boat-ride grows monotonous. At Umatilla, or Walla-Walla, some three hundred miles above Portland, we come to the present head of navigation, and take stages for a five hundred miles’ ride over the Blue Mountains, through the Grande Ronde Valley, along the valley of the Snake River, where steamboats will probably soon help us over another hundred and fifty miles of the way, into and through Idaho, and on to Salt Lake and the railroad again. The ride over the Blue Mountains and through the Grande Ronde Valley is the most satisfactory for scenery. The ascent and descent of the mountains are easy, the roads hard and smooth, and the views, near and remote, very grand and inspiring. Gorges and parks, forests and meadows, alternate with fine effect; and a bath in the warm sulphur springs by the roadside will relieve the weariness of the body. Through Idaho, whose gold mines seem exhausted and whose towns are either decaying or at a standstill, and along the Upper Snake, the country presents a dull, barren uniformity of aspect; and high, volcanic table-lands begin to appear.

Within some hundred and thirty miles of the north end of Salt Lake, are several peculiar freaks of nature, which the traveller should leave the stage for a day or two to observe. The first on the east is the canyon of the Malade River, a branch of the Snake ; for miles it flows through a narrow gorge of solid lava rock, in some places fifty feet deep, and yet only eight or ten feet wide, the confined waters coursing rapidly and angrily below. Next, at Snake River Ferry, the waters of the Lost River branch, having sunk beneath the ground a long distance back, emerge to light again just at the point of junction, and pour from rocks one hundred and fifty feet high into the main stream. Ten or fifteen miles from this point, though only seven miles from the stage road at another place, are the Shoshone Falls, on the Snake River. They rank next to Niagara in the list of waterfalls, and by some visitors are held to be entitled to the first rank in majesty of movement and grandeur of surrounding features. All about are wide lava fields, and the river, two hundred yards wide, deep and swift, has worn itself a channel one hundred feet down into the rock ; then, as if in preparation for the grand leap, it indulges in a series of cascades of from thirty to sixty feet in height, and at last, gathering into an unbroken mass, swoops — in a grand horse-shoe twelve hundred feet across — down two hundred and ten feet into the pit below. The river is not as wide as Niagara, nor the volume of water so great, but the fall is higher and quite as beautiful. It is difficult to get near to the falls, because of the high, rough, and perpendicular walls of rock that guard the stream; but they can be reached by hard climbing. A perpendicular pillar of rock rises one hundred feet in the midst of the rapids ; islands rise from the stream just above the cataract ; and two huge rocky columns stand on each side of the falls. Either by a day’s detour in the trip from the Columbia River to Salt Lake, as we have suggested, or by a special journey of three or four days from the railroad at the latter point, these marvels of nature will soon be generally visited by Pacific Railroad travellers, and the details of their sublimity more thoroughly catalogued by pen and reproduced by photograph for the general public.

Finding ourselves again at Salt Lake, — time, money, and disposition holding out, and the season being favorable, — we shall be greatly tempted to round our travel with the stage-ride through Montana to Fort Benton on the Upper Missouri, and follow down that river in one of its steamboats to Omaha again. It is about three hundred miles by stage to Virginia City, Montana, four hundred and twenty-five to Helena, and near sixhundred to Fort Benton, and the fare through a hundred and forty dollars. The roads are excellent, the stage service the best on the continent, and the scenery across the high open plains, along the fertile valleys, and through the passes in the Upper Rocky Mountain ranges, fresh, picturesque, and every way inviting. Colorado is scarcely more favorable for farming and stockgrowing purposes than this region. The ride is among the head waters of the Missouri River, and grand mountains rise to guide and guard, not to obstruct, along the entire pathway. In Montana, too, we can see, more readily than perhaps anywhere else, mining in all its phases,— panning, “ long toms,” sluicing, hydraulics, and quartz mills. The boat-ride down the Missouri will be long, slow, and tedious ; the stream is muddy, the banks for the most part barren and uninviting; the time will perhaps be ten days or two weeks ; but the experience will prove most valuable, and the journey will afford time for arranging the information gathered during the summer.

Or, postponing Montana for a “more convenient season,” and indulging our unsatisfied curiosity in another peep over Brigham Young’s garden and harem wall, and our weary bodies in a bath in the warm pools of fresh sulphur water in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, we close our Pacific Railroad excursion by a two days’ ride in the cars back over the mountains and across the plains to Omaha, where we stand on the threshold of the East and of home.

This vast region, through which we have so hastily travelled, the hand of science has only touched here and there as yet. Professor Whitney has done much to map the past and present of California, and inventory its varied resources ; if sustained by the State, he will complete a work that will be of incalculable benefit to its people, and a great contribution to scientific knowledge. Several young graduates of his survey, with aid from the general government, are fast completing a thorough examination and report of a belt across the continent along the fortieth parallel, or the line of the Pacific Railroad. This will prove of great interest and value. Professor Powell, an enthusiast in geology and natural history, from Illinois, spent last summer, with a party of assistants, in a scientific exploration of the parks and mountains of Colorado; and, after wintering in the wilds of Western Colorado, he proposes this season to extend his observations into the almost unknown land of Southwestern Colorado and Northeastern Arizona, and perhaps test the safety of the passage of the great canyon of the Colorado of the West. Plere lies, as yet, the grand geographical secret of our Western empire. For three hundred miles, this river, which drains the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, is for several hundred miles confined within perpendicular rock walls averaging three thousand feet in height, down which there is no safe descent, up which there is no climbing, between which the stream runs furiously. One man is reported to have gone through the canyon and come out alive. To explore it is the dangerous yet fascinating undertaking of Professor Powell. For the rest, our scientific knowledge of the mountains and plains and deserts of our Far West is founded upon the reports of government engineers and the railroad surveys, — valuable, indeed, but incomplete, and provoking rather than allaying curiosity.

The Indians are not likely to interfere with Pacific Railroad travel. The fears of travellers on that account are needless. Neither among the Colorado parks and mountains, nor in the valleys of California and Oregon, nor in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, shall we be likely to meet Indians, save as humble, peaceful supplicants for food and tobacco. They may appear on the routes through Idaho and Montana. But greater danger is to be apprehended from the “road agents,” or highway robbers. In Nevada and California, and in Idaho, they have occasionally introduced the Mexican banditti style of operating on travellers, rarely killing their victims, and only making sure to get all their money and watches, and whatever treasure the express messenger on the stage may have on hand. The Western country is destined, probably, to go through an era of this sort of crime. The vicious and vagrant population that followed the progress of the railroad in its building, and has been set loose by its completion, and the similar elements turned adrift by the failure of mining enterprises, furnish the needy and desperate characters for the business. Not unlikely they may grow bold enough to stop, and “ go through,” a railroad train. Short and sharp should be the dealing with this class of marauders. But the chance of becoming their victims is not great enough to excuse any of us for staying at home, when the Pacific Railroad — open — offers to us all such inviting pleasures and such wide-reaching experiences.

These are but scant outlines of the new and larger half of our Republic. Arizona, New Mexico, and Lower California— three territories as remarkable perhaps in natural wonders and resources as any in our new West — have not been mentioned ; but only speculators or adventurers will be readily tempted into their difficulties and dangers now ; and we fear the early travellers by the new pathway of iron will be appalled by the variety of entertainment to which we have here invited them. But if they start with the protest that we have promised too much, they will return with the confession that the half was not told them. We hope they will also return with a new conception of the magnitude, the variety, and the wealth, in realization and in prospect, of the American Republic, — a new idea of what it is to be an American citizen.

OUTLINE FOR A TWO MONTHS’ JOURNEY TO THE PACIFIC STATES BY THE PACIFIC ROAD.

From Omaha to Cheyenne and Denver 2 days.

Excursions in Colorado . . . 9 “

To Salt Lake City ..... 2 “

Stay in Salt Lake City . . . . 2 “

To Virginia City ..... 2 “

To San Francisco, with two days to stop on the way ... “

In and about San Francisco . . . 7 “

Yosemite Valley and Big Trees . . .10 “

Overland to Oregon .... 6 days.

From Portland to Victoria, through Washington Territory and Puget’s Sound and back . . . . . • 7 “

From Portland to Salt Lake by Columbia River, Idaho, and Shoshone Fails . S “

From Salt Lake to Omaha . . 2 “

—

Total , . 60 days.

This is obviously a short allowance for so comprehensive a journey ; but every traveller can enlarge it to suit his comfort and convenience. He cannot advantageously cut down Colorado or San Francisco and its neighborhood, or the Yosemite, but he may well add a week to the time assigned for each. Another month would allow the traveller to return through Montana and down the Upper Missouri, and to give an extra week to different points in the earlier parts of his journey. Two months more—or from June I to November I — would include, with all the above, a liberal allowance of time for an excursion to the Sandwich Islands. And the weather during these five months would be favorable for every part of the grand trip ; only in the islands would water-proofs and umbrellas be needed. For the two months’ journey we would recommend July and August; for the three, July, August, and September. California is in its summer glory in April and May ; but that is too early for its mountains or the Yosemite; and the parks and mountains of Colorado, though passable in June, are much more acessible in July and August.