August in the Sierras [pp. 170-173]

August in the Sierra.
with red paper charms against evil, and prayers to the manes of departed relatives; piles
of rice-sacks heap the stone floor, and twenty or more Chinese, who carry on a little
mining and have vegetable gardens along
the river, are owners and occupants of the
building. Sometimes it seems a camp from
which all life has long before departed with
the gold and miners of forty years ago-forgotten miners who died unrecorded deaths,
and fill unmarked graves on rain-washed
hillsides. You can find the marks of their
work for miles about the place, along the
ancient gold-bearing channels, and on the
highest ridges of the tempest-torn land.;
stumps of pine in the forest show where
sawyers and loggers worked; prospect holes
on the ledges tell a story of uncounted struggles and failures.
Yet somehow, through all its, vicissitudes,
the true camp keeps much that is homelike
and unique. Slip quietly away from the
hulking business houses, where the stock that
suffices to supply fifty inhabitants is vainly
trying to occupy the shelves of once-gorgeous
establishments that supplied ten times that
population, and you will discover that there
is home-life, though no business life. For
almost always a few families that would grace
the society of far more populous places remain to watch their rose gardens and prune
their vines. They keep ample communication with the outside world: chiefly for them
the mail-bags come and go, the lumbering
stage-coaches and light wagons climb the
dusty slopes from distant towns. Crooked
streets wind up the hill, trees line them with
deep shade; cottages stand back from the
street, and gardens are everywhere. Pretty
women in white summer gowns stand on
wide porches overhung with roses, and children run and frolic on terraced grass plots.
Neighborly people slip in and out, by gates
hidden in hedges, to make twilight visits;
the sound of music and laughter and friendly
talk mingle, and one falls in love with the
place, and is disposed to write himself forever a dweller in this lotus-land.
How varied are the uses men make of
water in the mountains; how abundantly it
flows by roadside and trail. It is used in
small orchards, grass-plots, alfalfa and red
clover fields, gardens and vineyards. In even
the smallest "camp" the dusty street is
kept wet and hard from one end of the village to the other. Almost every half mile,
as one travels through the Sierra, there is a
trough or barrel by the roadside, and cool
water flows in and seeps over the edge again,
and so away, keeping a trail of green grass
quite across the road, and a rod of blossoms
below. Springs are numerous, and water is
near the surface. You cannot ride far in any
direction before you come upon a scooped
out place in the gravel-bank, or almost hid
in bushes, where a spring bubbles up or
drips out of a rock, most clear and ice-cold.
In nine cases out of ten you will also find
that a tin can for a cup has been hung on a
bush, or stands in a narrow niche cut in the
bank-some friendly teamster's forethought
has provided it so that you need nor go down
on your knees in the wet grass, and dip your
nose in the water, or lap like Gideon's three
hundred, or scoop the water hastily with
bent palm.
From the top of my hill, and it is not far
thither, I should see the valley in its cloudy
distance. I should see the State House at
Sacramento, and the two largest rivers of
California, and the Coast Range, and the
peak of Mount Diablo. I should be able to
count ten towns and fifty villages, and a hundred landmarks of interest. The level plain,
checker-boarded with inch-square farms, and
the sea-green wastes of tule along the rivers,
represent the realm of the lowlands. There
are towns lying level as floors of a house;
there are long, monotonous roads, deep dust,
sweltering heat, toiling men, threshing machines, from whose hoppers the golden grain
runs. There men are busy enough, in a
thousand modes of activity-building, gathering grapes, shipping fruit, putting out fires
in wheat fields, arranging for their county
fairs as becomes easy, comfortable, and
prosperous lowlanders. If I could see it all,
from Reading to Tejon Pass, with such minuteness that I could count the spears of
grass in each farmyard, I would not hasten
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