"What do you think?" said a lawyer who was travelling with me. "It's a new world to you; isn't it?"
"No. It's quite familiar. I was never out of England; it's as if I saw it all."
Quick as light came the answer: "'Yes, they lived once thus at Venice when the miners were the kings.'"
I loved that lawyer on the spot. We drank to Bret Harte who, you remember, "claimed California, but California never claimed him. He's turned English."
Lying back in state, I waited for the flying miles to turn over the pages of the book I knew. They brought me all I desired—from the Man of no Account sitting on a stump and playing with a dog, to "that most sarcastic man, the quiet Mister Brown." He boarded the train from out of the woods, and there was venom and sulphur on his tongue. He had just lost a lawsuit. Only Yuba Bill failed to appear. The train had taken his employment from him. A nameless ruffian backed me into a corner and began telling me about the resources of the country, and what it would eventually become. All I remember of his lecture was that you could catch trout in the Sacramento River—the stream that we followed so faithfully.
Then rose a tough and wiry old man with grizzled hair and made inquiries about the trout. To him was added the secretary of a life–insurance company. I fancy he was travelling to rake in the dead that the train killed. But he, too, was a fisherman, and the two turned to meward. The frankness of a Westerner is delightful. They tell me that in the Eastern States I shall meet another type of man and a more reserved. The Californian always speaks of the man from the New England States as a different breed. It is our Punjab and Madras over again, but more so. The old man was on a holiday in search of fish. When he discovered a brother–loafer he proposed a confederation of rods. Quoth the insurance–agent, "I'm not staying any time in Portland, but I will introduce you to a man there who'll tell you about fishing." The two told strange tales as we slid through the forests and saw afar off the snowy head of a great mountain. There were vineyards, fruit orchards, and wheat fields where the land opened out, and every ten miles or so, twenty or thirty wooden houses and at least three churches. A large town would have a population of two thousand and an infinite belief in its own capacities. Sometimes a flaring advertisement flanked the line, calling for men to settle down, take up the ground, and make their home there. At a big town we could pick up the local newspaper, narrow as the cutting edge of a chisel and twice as keen—a journal filled with the prices of stock, notices of improved reaping and binding machines, movements of eminent citizens—"whose fame beyond their own abode extends—for miles along the Harlem road." There was not much grace about these papers, but all breathed the same need for good men, steady men who would plough, and till, and build schools for their children, and make a township in the hills. Once only I found a sharp change in the note and a very pathetic one. I think it was a young soul in trouble who was writing poetry. The editor had jammed the verses between the flamboyant advertisement of a real–estate agent—a man who sells you land and lies about it—and that of a Jew tailor who disposed of "nobby" suits at "cut–throat prices." Here are two verses; I think they tell their own story:—
The thin–lipped, keen–eyed men who boarded the train would not read that poetry, or, if they did, would not understand. Heaven guard that poor pine in the desert and keep "its top in the sky"!
When the train took to itself an extra engine and began to breathe heavily, some one said that we were ascending the Siskiyou Mountains. We had been climbing steadily from San Francisco, and at last won to over four thousand feet above sea–level, always running through forest. Then, naturally enough, we came down, but we dropped two thousand two hundred feet in about thirteen miles. It was not so much the grinding of the brakes along the train, or the sight of three curves of track apparently miles below us, or even the vision of a goods–train apparently just under our wheels, or even the tunnels, that made me reflect; it was the trestles over which we crawled,—trestles something over a hundred feet high and looking like a collection of match–sticks.
"I guess our timber is as much a curse as a blessing," said the old man from Southern California. "These trestles last very well for five or six years; then they get out of repair, and a train goes through 'em, or else a forest fire burns 'em up."
This was said in the middle of a groaning, shivering trestle. An occasional plate–layer took a look at us as we went down, but that railway didn't waste men on inspection duty. Very often there were cattle on the track, against which the engine used a diabolical form of whistling. The old man had been a driver in his youth, and beguiled the way with cheery anecdotes of what might be expected if we fouled a young calf.
"You see, they get their legs under the cow–catcher and that'll put an engine off the line. I remember when a hog wrecked an excursion–train and killed sixty people. 'Guess the engineer will look out, though."
There is considerably too much guessing about this large nation. As one of them put it rather forcibly: "We guess a trestle will stand for ever, and we guess that we can patch up a washout on the track, and we guess the road's clear, and sometimes we guess ourselves into the deepot, and sometimes we guess ourselves into Hell."
The descent brought us far into Oregon and a timber and wheat country. We drove through wheat and pine in alternate slices, but pine chiefly, till we reached Portland, which is a city of fifty thousand, possessing the electric light of course, equally, of course, devoid of pavements, and a port of entry about a hundred miles from the sea at which big steamers can load. It is a poor city that cannot say it has no equal on the Pacific coast. Portland shouts this to the pines which run down from a thousand–foot ridge clear up to the city. You may sit in a bedizened bar–room furnished with telephone and clicker, and in half an hour be in the woods.