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Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."

  On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."

  On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."

  "Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."




  [Illustration: THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY]




CALIFORNIA




     _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

     THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
     A WOMAN OF GENIUS
     THE LOVELY LADY
     ETC.


     AGENTS

     America           The Macmillan Company
                         64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York

     Australasia       The Oxford University Press
                         205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

     Canada            The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
                         St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,
     Toronto

     India             Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
                         Macmillan Building, Bombay
                         309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta




     CALIFORNIA

     THE LAND OF THE SUN

     PAINTED BY
     SUTTON PALMER

     DESCRIBED BY
     MARY AUSTIN


     ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
     4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.




     _Published Autumn 1914_




CONTENTS


                                                            PAGE
  I. The Sparrow Hawk's Own                                    1
  II. Mothering Mountains                                     25
  III. The Coasts of Adventure                                45
  IV. The Port of Monterey                                    61
  V. Old Spanish Gardens                                      85
  VI. The Land of the Little Duck                            105
  VII. The Twin Valleys                                      125
  VIII. The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country          147




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  1. The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley             _Frontispiece_
                                                        FACING PAGE
  2. San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma          9
  3. Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range               16
  4. A Eucalyptus Grove                                          33
  5. Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel                         40
  6. A Canon in the Sierra Madre                                 49
  7. The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission                         56
  8. Sycamores, a Coast Range Canon                              59
  9. Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz                                  62
  10. Looking down on Monterey and the Bay                       65
  11. Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay         72
  12. Cypress Point, near Carmel                                 75
  13. Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range                      78
  14. The Patio, Old Spanish Residence                           88
  15. The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street,
      San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition,
      1915)                                                     107
  16. Tamalpias                                                 110
  17. Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay           113
  18. Waiting for Duck--Los Banos                               120
  19. Mirror Lake, Yosemite                                     129
  20. Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys              131
  21. Clear Lake, Lake County                                   134
  22. Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Canon                            136
  23. McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley                    139
  24. Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail                    142
  25. Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento                             145
  26. Yosemite Falls                                            152
  27. Blue Lake, Lake County                                    155
  28. Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras                              158
  29. Mount Shasta--Sierra Glow                                 161
  30. Valley of the Yosemite                                    163
  31. The Half Dome, Yosemite                                   166
  32. Shasta--Snow Clouds                                       168
     _Sketch Map at end of Volume._




I

THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN


For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see
always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie
of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth 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 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 primordial mud of which even the
geographers 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 discrepancy 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.

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 neatly laid out for you as they
could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south
like the quirk of an attenuated 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 <DW72>
of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos.
Seasonally they are beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
from the Gulf 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 orchard 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 benignity.

Just beyond the pilae of the broken mountains--the Pillars of Hercules
of the West--the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in
deep indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient
sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering heat-waves trick the
imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling
billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations of
growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
peering--the wild, spiny, thorny 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 things stand up, they
march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices, but
desperation is in every contorted stem of _mesquite_ and _palo verde_.
And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim the
Colorado ramps like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific
rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out,
quartz mountains disintegrate but they do not murmur.

It is odd here in a land rife with the naked struggle of great pagan
forces, to find the promontories 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 Emigrant 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 Christian is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt
the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were as rich in martyr passion as the
stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning,
thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.

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 prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
repeating the tints of the wild brodiaea 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 shrub 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 abates nothing of its social
character. Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the resinous
coating which protects it from evaporation, and a slight sticky feel,
characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the
emigrants who valued it chiefly because it could be burned green. The
spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted 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
reminder of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks and
ripples, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great
fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.

  [Illustration: SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD POINT LOMA]

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 swell, as it bides its time for the shipping 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, romping 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 brown-skirted brothers of St.
Francis to undertake the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were
accused of plotting against His Majesty, 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 patronage of Senor San
Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt.
In April the ship _San Antonio_ anchored in the placid bay, there to
await the live stock driven up from Velicata. So the old world 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 armour rust 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 founder 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 beads, and on the last hour of the last
day, far on the sea rim, behold the white wings of succour!

The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an expedient, contrived
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 steadily.

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 adobe of the Spanish occupation
to the newest shingle-stained bungalow 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 distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of
a private and peculiar affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
swift seasonal rivers, and touching 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 botanists
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 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 solitary.
Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies of
intermittent streams; and far back where the mountains break down into
foothills, and these into the lomas--little low mounds of detritus--the
sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused light and holds
them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea