For a graphic1 and memorable2 report of the contours of any country, see always the aboriginal3 account of its making. That will give you the lie of the land as no geographer4 could sketch5 it forth6 for you. California was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.
There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have remembered [4] the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall brown woman out of Tejon, and her mother was of that band of captives taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.
Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro under the heavens, said to the Little Duck that it was time there should be mountains; so the Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial7 mud of which even the geographers9 are agreed mountains are made.
As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a round beautiful ring of mountains enclosing a quiet space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I choose this side," coming up with his bill full of mud toward the west. Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk built the other side higher. When it was all done and the Little Duck surveyed it, he observed, as people will to this day, the discrepancy10 between the low western hills and the high Sierras, and he thought the builder had not played him fair. "Very well, then," said the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to be so greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras with his bill, and threw them over his shoulder. [5]
You can see the bites still deep and sharp about Mt. Whitney.
But the Little Duck would not be satisfied; he took hold by the great bulk of Shasta and began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side until the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long oval and began to break on the west where the bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were forced to divide the mountain range north and south and make what they could of it. But the Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had thrown over his shoulder, chose the south, where you can still see him sailing any clear day about four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
There you have the bones of the land as neatly11 laid out for you as they could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the high, bitten, westward12 peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south like the quirk13 of an attenuated14 Q.
They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the outposts of habitableness between the sea wind and the forces of pure desertness. Always there is skirmish and assault going on about them. Showers rush up the slope of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts15 of wind [6] roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos. Seasonally17 they are beleaguered18 by stealthy rushes of the fogs that from the Gulf19 hear the peaks about Whitney calling, or by the yellow murk of sand-storms on which the whole face of the desert is lifted up as it travels toward its destiny in orchard20 row and vineyard. Always the edge of the wind is against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces of saints must with benignity21.
Just beyond the pilæ of the broken mountains—the Pillars of Hercules of the West—the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in deep indented22 bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering23 heat-waves trick the imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations24 of growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging, peering—the wild, spiny25, thorny26 things of the desert to enter the rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting to take the unfriended sandy spaces. They creep a little forward or back as the years run wet or dry. The green [7] things stand up, they march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices27, but desperation is in every contorted stem of mesquite and palo verde. And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim8 the Colorado ramps28 like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out, quartz29 mountains disintegrate30 but they do not murmur31.
It is odd here in a land rife32 with the naked struggle of great pagan forces, to find the promontories33 so lend themselves to the gentle names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so far from nature as one thinks; in the southerly range which, with San Bernardino on the north, sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed Emigrant34 trail enters the coast valleys, they rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto—St. Hyacinth—was he ever anything but a Christianised memory of a Grecian myth, or does it matter at all so long as there are men to see, in the deep purple light that dies along the heights, the colour of blood that is shed for love? Perhaps the best thing beauty can say to Greek or Christian35 is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt the veins36 of Padre Jayme Bravo were [8] as rich in martyr37 passion as the stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning, thinning at noon to pure aerial blues38.
Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour as of some huge creature risen from the sea, with low hills about it like dolphins playing; but the prevailing39 note of the landscape is always blue, repeating the tints40 of the wild brodiæa that may be found on the lomas early in April, sending up its clustered heads between two slender curving spears.
Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be green, the dark olivaceous green of the chamisal. Nowhere does one get the force of the Spanish termination al—the place where—as in that word. The chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles and miles of it, with scarcely another shrub41 allowed, spread over the mesa and well up into laps and bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high in the favoured regions; but even where under the influence of drouth and altitude it creeps to the knees, it abates42 nothing of its social character. Its ever-green foliage43 has a dull shining from the resinous44 coating which protects it from evaporation45, and a slight sticky feel, characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the emigrants46 who valued it chiefly because it [9] could be burned green. The spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted47 surface to a froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little as the wind shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the imagination with the continual reminder48 of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks49 and ripples50, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.
All the human interest of this region centres about the city on the bay of San Diego, a low locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking the mild Pacific swell52, as it bides53 its time for the shipping54 of the south-western world. It has already waited longer than most people suppose. Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on the Bahamas, Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis Drake, romping55 up that coast with his buccaneers, must have seen it though he left no note of any visit, and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored there and gave it its present name. Just about the time the mixed Dutch and English on the Atlantic coast were beginning to think of themselves as Americans and to act accordingly, the Franciscan Frailes settled on San Diego bay. Nobody will know why it was reserved for the [10] brown-skirted brothers of St. Francis to undertake the subjugation56 of Alta California, until it is known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were accused of plotting against His Majesty57, but in those days it was possible to accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without going very far wrong in the popular estimate. I have my own opinion about it, which is that a great land, like a great lady, has her way with men. And no land has called its own as has California:—poet or painter or pioneer, the world's rim under. No better patron could be found for this blossoming West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his little brothers of the air and would have made a convert of the coyote. Perhaps the first settlers of a country leave their stripe on all the land's later offspring: if it was a way the West took to breed fervour and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young generation, who shall say she has not succeeded?
In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and sea set forth in the name of God and the King of Spain, under the patronage58 of Señor San Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt. In April the ship San Antonio anchored in the placid59 bay, there to await the live stock driven up from Velicatá. So the old world [11] came to the new with a whole collocation of sainted personages flocking like doves to her banners.
But it was not saints that the land wanted so much as the stuff that goes to make them. The expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part of the expedition, made a long pasear on foot to find the lost port of Monterey, and came back, with armour60 rust61 on his doublet sleeves and nothing much gained beside, to declare the expedition a failure. But Padre Serra—Junipero Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of God's own planting, sapling of that stock of which the founder62 of the order had wished for a whole forest full—Padre Serra claimed a churchman's privilege. He demanded time for a novena, a nine days' cycle of prayer to the patron who was so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my belief that the Padre chose the novena simply because it was the longest possible time he could hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine days they drew in their belts and told their beads64, and on the last hour of the last day, far on the sea rim, behold65 the white wings of succour!
The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an [12] expedient66, contrived67 that the ship should lose an anchor which compelled it to put in at San Diego, where they had no expectation of finding any of the party. It was so that the land tried them out and approved, for from that day the founding went forward steadily68.
There is a fine growing city now on the site of the early landing, regularly stratified through all the architectural periods of California, from the low thick-walled adobe69 of the Spanish occupation to the newest shingle-stained bungalow70 of the latest one-lunged millionaire; but the land has not lost, in a century and a half, one mark by which the brown-skirted Frailes found their way about in it. It has its distinctive71 mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of a private and peculiar72 affection. Here about the mouth of one of its swift seasonal16 rivers, and touching73 as with a finger-tip the opposing shore of the island of Santa Rosa, is the habitat of the Torrey pine. Japanesque, unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading inland, it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as though, as some botanists74 believe, the species came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water and the spirit of the desert dust.
It is also possible to think of it as a relict of [13] the land of which the broken Channel Islands were made, but in any case it is a pity that science could not have retained for this lonely, restricted species the name the Frailes gave to its fostering waters, Soledad—the solitary75. Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly76, knife-cut by the gullies of intermittent77 streams; and far back where the mountains break down into foothills, and these into the lomas—little low mounds78 of detritus—the sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused79 light and holds them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea from which they rose.
In April of the year of the Occupation the white panicles of the chamise would be tossing here and there, and the yellow violets run thin lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not believe there were so many yellow violets in the world as a day's riding will still show you. At this season, islay, the wild cherry, will be shaking out its fine white spray of bloom, the button willow80 begins, the sycamore, the buckthorn, cascara sagrada; the great berried manzanita, which shed its waxen bells as early as December, ............