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"Keep not standing fix'd and
rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam;
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,
And stout heart are still at home.
In each land the sun does visit
We are gay, whate'er betide:
To give room for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide."
THE tendency nowadays to
wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired,
nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to
the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain
parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and
irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying
effects of the vice of over- industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they
are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with
those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and
roaming, some are washing off sins and cobweb cares of the devil's spinning
in all day storms on mountains; sauntering in rosiny pinewoods or in gentian
meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting sweet, flowery
sprays; tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch with the nerves of
Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning
the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep,
long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine and natural and full of
promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of
forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens
of towns. Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with
spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than
scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas, - even this
is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times.
All the Western mountains are
still rich in wildness, and by means of good roads are being brought nearer
civilization every year. To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary
to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for
they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be. Like Thoreau they see
forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds
and drops of dew. Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or
free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much
good and making so much money, - or so little, -they are no longer good for
themselves. When, like
a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are
glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind is still unspoiled.
Looking at our continent as scenery when it was all wild, lying between
beautiful seas, the starry sky above it, the starry rocks beneath it, to
compare its sides, the East and the West, would be like comparing the sides
of a rainbow. But it is no longer equally beautiful. The rainbows of to-day
are, I suppose, as bright as those that first spanned the sky; and some of
our landscapes are growing more beautiful from year to year, notwithstanding
the clearing, trampling work of civilization. New plants and animals are
enriching woods and gardens, and many landscapes wholly new, with divine
sculpture and architecture, are just now coming to the light of day as the
mantling folds of creative glaciers are being withdrawn, and life in a
thousand cheerful, beautiful forms is pushing into them, and newborn rivers
are beginning to sing and shine in them. The old rivers, too, are growing
longer, like healthy trees, gaining new branches and lakes as the residual
glaciers at their highest sources on the mountains recede, while the
rootlike branches in their flat deltas are at the same time spreading
farther and wider into the seas and making new lands.
Under the control of the vast mysterious forces
of the interior of the earth all the continents and islands are slowly
rising or sinking. Most of the mountains are diminishing in size under the
wearing action of the weather, though a few are increasing in height and
girth, especially the volcanic ones, as fresh floods of molten rocks are
piled on their summits and spread in successive layers, like the wood- rings
of trees, on their sides. New mountains, also, are being created from time
to time as islands in lakes and seas, or as subordinate cones on the slopes
of old ones, thus in some measure balancing the waste of old beauty with
new. Man, too, is making many far- reaching changes. This most influential
half animal, half angel is rapidly multiplying and spreading, covering the
seas and lakes with ships, the land with huts, hotels, cathedrals, and
clustered city shops and homes, so that soon, it would seem, we may have to
go farther than Nansen to find a good sound solitude. None of Nature's
landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild; and much, we can say
comfortingly, must always be in great part wild, particularly the sea and
the sky, the floods of light from the stars, and the warm, unspoilable heart
of the earth, infinitely beautiful, though only dimly visible to the eye of
imagination. The geysers, too, spouting from the hot underworld; the steady,
long-lasting glaciers on the mountains, obedient only to the sun; Yosemite
domes and the tremendous grandeur of rocky canons and mountains in general,
- these must always be wild, for man can change them and mar them hardly
more than can the butterflies that hover above them. But the continent's
outer beauty is fast passing away, especially the plant part of it, the most
destructible and most universally charming of all.
Only thirty years ago, the great Central Valley
of California, five hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, was one bed of
golden and purple flowers. Now it is ploughed and pastured out of existence,
gone forever, - scarce a memory of it left in fence corners and along the
bluffs of the streams. The gardens of the Sierra, also, and the noble
forests in both the reserved and unreserved portions are sadly hacked and
trampled, notwithstanding the ruggedness of the topography, - all excepting
those of the parks guarded by a few soldiers. In the noblest forests of the
world, the ground, once divinely beautiful, is desolate and repulsive, like
a face ravaged by disease. This is true also of many other Pacific Coast and
Rocky Mountain valleys and forests. The same fate, sooner or later, is
awaiting them all, unless awakening public opinion comes forward to stop it.
Even the great deserts in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, which offer
so little to attract settlers, and which a few years ago pioneers were
afraid of, as places of desolation and death, are now taken as pastures at
the rate of one or two square miles per cow, and of course their plant
treasures are passing away, the delicate abronias, phloxes, gilias, etc.
Only a few of the bitter, thorny, unbitable shrubs are left, and the sturdy
cactuses that defend themselves with bayonets and spears.
Most of the wild plant wealth of the East also
has vanished, - gone into dusty history. Only vestiges of its glorious
prairie and woodland wealth remain to bless humanity in boggy, rocky,
unploughable places. Fortunately, some of these are purely wild, and go far
to keep Nature's love visible. 'White water-lilies, with rootstocks deep and
safe in mud, still send up every summer a Milky Way of starry, fragrant
flowers around a thousand jakes, and many a tuft of wild grass waves its
panicles on mossy rocks, beyond reach of trampling feet, in company with
saxifrages, bluebells, and ferns. Even in the midst of farmers' fields,
precious sphagnum bogs, too soft for the feet of cattle, are preserved with
their charming plants unchanged, - chiogenes, andromeda, kalmia, linnaa,
arethusa, etc. Calypso borealis still hides in the arbor-vitie swamps of
Canada, and away to the southward there are a few unspoiled swamps, big
ones, where miasma, snakes, and alligators, like guardian angels, defend
their treasures and keep them as pure as paradise. And beside a' that and a'
that, the East is blessed with good winters and blossoming clouds that shed
white flowers over all the land, covering every scar and making the saddest
landscape divine at least once a year.
The most extensive, least spoiled, and most
unspoilable of the gardens of the continent are the vast tundras of Alaska.
In summer they extend smooth, even, undulating, continuous beds of flowers
and leaves from about latitude 62° to the shores of the Arctic Ocean; and in
winter sheets of snowflowers make all the country shine, one mass of white
radiance like a star. Nor are these Arctic plant people the pitiful
frost-pinched unfortunates they are guessed to be by those who have never
seen them. Though lowly in stature, keeping near the frozen ground as if
loving it, they are bright and cheery, and speak Nature's love as plainly as
their big relatives of the South. Tenderly happed and tucked in beneath
downy snow to sleep through the long, white winter, they make haste to bloom
in the spring without trying to grow tall, though some rise high enough to
ripple and wave in the wind, and display masses of color, - yellow, purple,
and blue, - so rich that they look like beds of rainbows, and are visible
miles and miles away.
As early as June one may find the showy Geum giaciale in flower, and the
dwarf willows putting forth myriads of fuzzy catkins, to be followed
quickly, especially on the dryer ground, by mertensia, eritrichium,
polemonium, oxytropis, astragalus, lathyrus, lupinus, myosotis, dodecatheon,
arnica, chrysanthemum, nardosmia, saussurea, senecio, erigeron, matrecaria,
caltha, valeriana, stellaria, tofieldia, polygonum, papaver, phlox, lychnis,
cheiranthus, linnaa, and a host of drabas, saxifrages, and heathworts, with
bright stars and bells in glorious profusion, particularly cassiope,
andromeda, ledum, pyrola, and vaccinium, - cassiope the most abundant and
beautiful of them all. Many grasses also grow here, and wave fine purple
spikes and panicles over the other flowers, - poa, aira, calamagrostis,
alopecurus, trisetum, elymus, festuca, glyceria, etc. Even ferns are found
thus far north, carefully and comfortably unrolling their precious fronds, -
aspidium, cystoptens, and woodsia, all growing on a sumptuous bed of mosses
and lichens; not the scaly lichens seen on rails and trees and fallen logs
to the southward, but massive, round-headed, finely colored plants like
corals, wonderfully beautiful, worth going round the world to see. I should
like to mention all the plant friends I found in a summer's wanderings in
this cool reserve, but I fear few would care to read their names, although
everybody, I am sure, would love them could they see them blooming and
rejoicing at home. On
my last visit to the region about Kotzebue Sound, near the middle of
September, 1881, the weather was so fine and mellow that it suggested the
Indian summer of the Eastern States. The winds were bushed, the tundra
glowed in creamy golden sunshine, and the colors of the ripe foliage of the
heathworts, willows, and birch - red, purple, and yellow, in pure bright
tones - were enriched with those of berries which were scattered everywhere,
as if they had been showered from the clouds like hail. When I was back a
mile or two from the shore, reveling in this color- glory, and thinking how
fine it would be could I cut a square of the tundra sod of conventional
picture size, frame it, and hang it among the paintings on my study walls at
home, saying to myself, "Such a Nature painting taken at random from any
part of the thousand-mile bog would make the other pictures look dim and
coarse," I heard merry shouting, and, looking round, saw a band of Eskimos -
men, women, and children, loose and hairy like wild animals - running
towards me. I could not guess at first what they were seeking, for they
seldom leave the shore; but soon they told me, as they threw themselves
down, sprawling and laughing, on the mellow bog, and began to feast on the
berries. A lively picture they made, and a pleasant one, as they frightened
the whirring ptarmigans, and surprised their oily stomachs with the
beautiful acid berries of many kinds, and filled sealskin bags with them to
carry away for festive days in winter.
Nowhere else on my travels have I seen so much
warm-blooded, rejoicing life as in this grand Arctic reservation, by so many
regarded as desolate. Not only are there whales in abundance along the
shores, and innumerable seals, walruses, and white bears, but on the tundras
great herds of fat reindeer and wild sheep, foxes, hares, mice, piping
marmots, and birds. Perhaps more birds are born here than in any other
region of equal extent on the continent. Not only do strong-winged hawks,
eagles, and water-fowl, to whom the length of the continent is merely a
pleasant excursion, come up here every summer in great numbers, but also
many short-winged warblers, thrushes, and finches, repairing hither to rear
their young in safety, reinforce the plant bloom with their plumage, and
sweeten the wilderness with song; flying all the way, some of them, from
Florida, Mexico, and Central America. In coming north they are coming home,
for they were born here, and they go south only to spend the winter months,
as New Englanders go to Florida. Sweet-voiced troubadours, they sing in
orange groves and vine-clad magnolia woods in winter, in thickets of dwarf
birch and alder in summer, and sing and chatter more or less all the way
back and forth, keeping the whole country glad. Oftentimes, in New England,
just as the last snow-patches are melting and the sap in the maples begins
to flow, the blessed wanderers may be heard about orchards and the edges of
fields where they have stopped to glean a scanty meal, not tarrying long,
knowing they have far to go. Tracing the footsteps of spring, they arrive in
their tundra homes in June or July, and set out on their return journey in
September, or as soon as their families are able to fly well.
This is Nature's own reservation, and every
lover of wildness will rejoice with me that by kindly frost it is so well
defended. The discovery lately made that it is sprinkled with gold may cause
some alarm; for the strangely exciting stuff makes the timid bold enough for
anything, and the lazy destructively industrious. Thousands at least half
insane are now pushing their way into it, some by the southern passes over
the mountains, perchance the first mountains they have ever seen, -
sprawling, struggling, gasping for breath, as, laden with awkward, merciless
burdens of provisions and tools, they climb over rough-angled boulders and
cross thin miry bogs. Some are going by the mountains and rivers to the
eastward through Canada, tracing the old romantic ways of the Hudson Bay
traders; others by Bering Sea and the Yukon, sailing all the way, getting
glimpses perhaps of the famous fur- seals, the ice-floes, and the
innumerable islands and bars of the great Alaska river. In spite of frowning
hardships and the frozen ground, the Klondike gold will increase the
crusading crowds for years to come, but comparatively little harm will be
done. Holes will be burned and dug into the hard ground here and there, and
into the quartz-ribbed mountains and hills; ragged towns like beaver and
muskrat villages will be built, and mills and locomotives will make
rumbling, screeching, disenchanting noises; but the miner's pick will not be
followed far by the plough, at least not until Nature is ready to unlock the
frozen soil-beds with her slow-turning climate key. On the other hand, the
roads of the pioneer miners will lead many a lover of wildness into the
heart of the reserve, who without them would never see it.
In the mean time, the wildest health and
pleasure grounds accessible and available to tourists seeking escape from
care and dust and early death are the parks and reservations of the West.
There are four national parks, [There are now (1916) fourteen parks and one
hundred and fifty-three forest reservations, besides thirty-three "national
monuments."] - the Yellowstone, Yosemite, General Grant, and Sequoia, - all
within easy reach, and thirty forest reservations, a magnificent realm of
woods, most of which, by railroads and trails and open ridges, is also
fairly accessible, not only to the determined traveler rejoicing in
difficulties, but to those (may their tribe increase) who, not tired, not
sick, just naturally take wing every summer in search of wildness. The forty
million acres of these reserves are in the main unspoiled as yet, though
sadly wasted and threatened on their more open margins by the axe and fire
of the lumberman and prospector, and by hoofed locusts, which, like the
winged ones, devour every leaf within reach, while the shepherds and owners
set fires with the intention of making a blade of grass grow in the place of
every tree, but with the result of killing both the grass and the trees.
In the million acre Black Hills Reserve of South
Dakota, the easternmost of the great forest reserves, made for the sake of
the farmers and miners, there are delightful, reviving sauntering-grounds in
open parks of yellow pine, planted well apart, allowing plenty of sunshine
to warm the ground. This tree is one of the most variable and most widely
distributed of American pines. It grows sturdily on all kinds of soil and
rocks, and, protected by a mail of thick bark, defies frost and fire and
disease alike, daring every danger in firm, calm beauty and strength. It
occurs here mostly on the outer hills and slopes where no other tree can
grow. The ground beneath it is yellow most of the summer with showy Wythia,
arnica, applopappus, solidago, and other sun- loving plants, which, though
they form no heavy entangling growth, yet give abundance of color and make
all the woods a garden. Beyond the yellow pine woods there lies a world of
rocks of wildest architecture, broken, splintery, and spiky, not very high,
but the strangest in form and style of grouping imaginable. Countless towers
and spires, pinnacles and slender domed columns, are crowded together, and
feathered with sharp-pointed Engelmann spruces, making curiously mixed
forests, - half trees, half rocks. Level gardens here and there in the midst
of them offer charming surprises, and so do the many small lakes with lilies
on their meadowy borders, and bluebells, anemones, daisies, castilleias,
comandras, etc., together forming landscapes delightfully novel, and made
still wilder by many interesting animals, -elk, deer, beavers, wolves,
squirrels, and birds. Not very long ago this was the richest of all the red
man's hunting-grounds hereabout. After the season's buffalo hunts were over,
- as described by Parkman, who, with a picturesque cavalcade of Sioux
savages, passed through these famous hills in 1846, - every winter
deficiency was here made good, and hunger was unknown until, in spite of
most determined, fighting, killing opposition, the white gold- hunters
entered the fat game reserve and spoiled it. The Indians are dead now, and
so are most of the hardly less striking free trappers of the early romantic
Rocky Mountain times. Arrows, bullets, scalping-knives, need no longer be
feared; and all the wilderness is peacefully open.
The Rocky Mountain reserves are the Teton,
Yellowstone, Lewis and Clark, Bitter Root, Priest River and Flathead,
comprehending more than twelve million acres of mostly unclaimed, rough,
forest-covered mountains in which the great rivers of the country take their
rise. The commonest tree in most of them is the brave, indomitable, and
altogether admirable Pinus contorta, widely distributed in all kinds of
climate and soil, growing cheerily in frosty Alaska, breathing the damp salt
air of the sea as well as the dry biting blasts of the Arctic interior, and
making itself at home on the most dangerous flame- swept slopes and ridges
of the Rocky Mountains in immeasurable abundance and variety of forms.
Thousands of acres of this species are destroyed by running fires nearly
every summer, but a new growth springs quickly from the ashes. It is
generally small, and yields few sawlogs of commercial value, but is of
incalculable importance to the farmer and miner; supplying fencing, mine
timbers, and firewood, holding the porous soil on steep slopes, preventing
landslips and avalanches, and giving kindly, nourishing shelter to animals
and the widely outspread sources of the life-giving rivers. The other trees
are mostly spruce, mountain pine, cedar, juniper, larch, and balsam fir;
some of them, especially on the western slopes of the mountains, attaining
grand size and furnishing abundance of fine timber.
Perhaps the least known of all this grand group
of reserves is the Bitter Root, of more than four million acres. It is the
wildest, shaggiest block of forest wildness in the Rocky Mountains, full of
happy, healthy, storm- loving trees, full of streams that dance and sing in
glorious array, and full of Nature's animals, - elk, deer, wild sheep,
bears, cats, and innumerable smaller people.
In calm Indian summer, when the heavy winds are
hushed, the vast forests covering hill and dale, rising and falling over the
rough topography and vanishing in the distance, seem lifeless. No moving
thing is seen as we climb the peaks, and only the low, mellow murmur of
falling water is heard, which seems to thicken the silence. Nevertheless,
how many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the
woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal
people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing,
are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours: beavers are
building and mending dams and huts for winter, and storing them with food;
bears are studying winter quarters as they stand thoughtful in open spaces,
while the gentle breeze ruffles the long hair on their backs; elk and deer,
assembling on the heights, are considering cold pastures where they will be
farthest away from the wolves; squirrels and marmots are busily laying up
provisions and lining their nests against coming frost and snow foreseen;
and countless thousands of birds are forming parties and gathering their
young about them for flight to the southlands; while butterflies and bees,
apparently with no thought of hard times to come, are hovering above the
late-blooming goldenrods, and, with countless other insect folk, are dancing
and humming right merrily in the sunbeams and shaking all, the air into
music. Wander here a
whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild blessings will search you
and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted.
If you are business-tangled, and so burdened with duty that only weeks can
be got out of the heavy- laden year, then go to the Flathead Reserve; for it
is easily and quickly reached by the Great Northern Railroad. Get off the
track at Belton Station, and in a few minutes you will find yourself in the
midst of what you are sure to say is the best care-killing scenery on the
continent, - beautiful lakes derived straight from glaciers, lofty mountains
steeped in lovely nemophila-blue skies and clad with forests and glaciers,
mossy, ferny waterfalls in their hollows, nameless and numberless, and
meadowy gardens abounding in the best of everything. When you are calm
enough for discriminating observation, you will find the king of the
larches, one of the best of the Western giants, beautiful, picturesque, and
regal in port, easily the grandest of all the larches in the world. It grows
to a height of one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, with a diameter at
the ground of five to eight feet, throwing out its branches into the light
as no other tree does. To those who before have seen only the European larch
or the Lyall species of the eastern Rocky Mountains, or the little tamarack
or hackmatack of the Eastern States and Canada, this Western king must be a
revelation. Associated
with this grand tree in the making of the Flathead forests is the large and
beautiful mountain pine, or Wetern white pine (Pinus monticola), the
invincible contorta or lodge-pole pine, and spruce and cedar. The forest
floor is covered with the richest beds of Linnwa borealis I ever saw, thick
fragrant carpets, enriched with shining mosses here and there, and with
clintonia, pyrola, moneses, and vacciniuin, weaving hundred-mile beds of
bloom that would have made blessed old Linnus weep for joy.
Lake McDonald, full of brisk trout, is in the
heart of this forest, and Avalanche Lake is ten miles above McDonald, at the
feet of a group of glacier-laden mountains. Give a month at least to this
precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life.
Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly
immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again
fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven.
The vast Pacific Coast reserves in Washington
and Oregon - the Cascade, Washington, Mount Rainier, Olympic, Bull Run, and
Ashland, named in order of size - include more than 12,500,000 acres of
magnificent forests of beautiful and gigantic trees. They extend over the
wild, unexplored Olympic Mountains and both flanks of the Cascade Range, the
wet and the dry. On the east side of the Cascades the woods are sunny and
open, and contain principally yellow pine, of moderate size, but of great
value as a cover for the irrigating streams that flow into the dry interior,
where agriculture on a grand scale is being carried on. Along the moist,
balmy, foggy, west flank of the mountains, facing the sea, the woods reach
their highest development, and, excepting the California redwoods, are the
heaviest on the continent. They are made up mostly of the Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga
taxifolia), with the giant arbor-vite, or cedar, and several species of fir
and hemlock in varying abundance, forming a forest kingdom unlike any other,
in which limb meets limb, touching and overlapping in bright, lively,
triumphant exuberance, two hundred and fifty, three hundred, and even four
hundred feet above the shady, mossy ground. Over all the other species the
Douglas spruce reigns supreme. It is not only a large tree, the tallest in
America next to the redwood, but a very beautiful one, with bright green
drooping foliage, handsome pendent cones, and a shaft exquisitely straight
and round and regular. Forming extensive forests by itself in many places,
it lifts its spiry tops into the sky close together with as even a growth as
a well-tilled field of grain. No ground has been better tilled for wheat
than these Cascade Mountains for trees: they were ploughed by mighty
glaciers, and harrowed and mellowed and outspread by the broad streams that
flowed from the ice-ploughs as they were withdrawn at the close of the
glacial period. In
proportion to its weight when dry, Douglas spruce timber is perhaps stronger
than that of any other large conifer in the country, and being tough,
durable, and elastic, it is admirably suited for ship-building, piles, and
heavy timbers in general; but its hardness and liability to warp when it is
cut into boards render it unfit for fine work. In the lumber markets of
California it is called "Oregon pine." When lumbering is going on in the
best Douglas woods, especially about Puget Sound, many of the long, slender
boles are saved for spars; and so superior is their quality that they are
called for in almost every shipyard in the world, and it is interesting to
follow their fortunes. Felled and peeled and dragged to tidewater, they are
raised again as yards and masts for ships, given iron roots and canvas
foliage, decorated with flags, and sent to sea, where in glad motion they go
cheerily over the ocean prairie in every latitude and longitude, singing and
bowing responsive to the same winds that waved them when they were in the
woods. After standing in one place for centuries they thus go round the
world like tourists, meeting many a friend from the old home forest; some
traveling like themselves, some standing head downward in muddy harbors,
holding up the platforms of wharves, and others doing all kinds of hard
timber work, showy or hidden.
This wonderful tree also grows far northward in
British Columbia, and southward along the coast and middle regions of Oregon
and California; flourishing with the redwood wherever it can find an
opening, and with the sugar pine, yellow pine, and libocedrus in the Sierra.
It extends into the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, and San Jacinto Mountains
of southern California. It also grows well on the Wasatch Mountains, where
it is called "red pine," and on many parts of the Rocky Mountains and short
interior ranges of the Great Basin. But though thus widely distributed, only
in Oregon, Washington, and some parts of British Columbia does it reach
perfect development. To
one who looks from some high standpoint over its vast breadth, the forest on
the west side of the Cascades seems all one dim, dark, monotonous field,
broken only by the white volcanic cones along the summit of the range. Back
in the untrodden wilderness a deep furred carpet of brown and yellow mosses
covers the ground like a garment, pressing about the feet of the trees, and
rising in rich bosses softly and kindly over every rock and mouldering
trunk, leaving no spot uncared for; and dotting small prairies, and fringing
the meadows and the banks of streams not seen in general views, we find,
besides the great conifers, a considerable number of hardwood trees, - oak,
ash, maple, alder, wild apple, cherry, arbutus, Nuttall's flowering dogwood,
and in some places chestnut. In a few favored spots the broad-leaved maple
grows to a height of a hundred feet in forests by itself, sending out large
limbs in magnificent interlacing arches covered with mosses and ferns, thus
forming lofty sky-gardens, and rendering the underwoods delightfully cool.
No finer forest ceiling is to be found than these maple arches, while the
floor, ornamented with tall ferns and rubus vines, and cast into hillocks by
the bulging, moss-covered roots of the trees, matches it well.
Passing from beneath the heavy shadows of the
woods, almost anywhere one steps into lovely gardens of lilies, orchids,
heathworts, and wild roses. Along the lower slopes, especially in Oregon,
where the woods are less dense, there are miles of rhododendron, making
glorious masses of purple in the spring, while all about the streams and the
lakes and the beaver meadows there is a rich tangle of hazel, plum, cherry,
crab-apple, cornel, gaultheria, and rubus, with myriads of flowers and
abundance of other more delicate bloomers, such as erythronium, brodiaa,
fritillaria, calochortus, clintonia, and the lovely hider of the north,
calypso. Beside all these bloomers there are wonderful ferneries about the
many misty waterfalls, some of the fronds ten feet high, others the most
delicate of their tribe, the maidenhair fringing the rocks within reach of
the lightest dust of the spray, while the shading trees on the cliffs above
them, leaning over, look like eager listeners anxious to catch every tone of
the restless waters. In the autumn berries of every color and flavor abound,
enough for birds, bears, and everybody, particularly about the stream-sides
and meadows where sunshine reaches the ground: huckleberries, red, blue, and
black, some growing close to the ground, others on bushes ten feet high;
gaultheria berries, called "sal-al" by the Indians; salmon berries, an inch
in diameter, growing in dense prickly tangles, the flowers, like wild roses,
still more beautiful than the fruit; raspberries, gooseberries, currants,
blackberries, and strawberries. The underbrush and meadow fringes are in
great part made up of these berry bushes and vines; but in the depths of the
woods there is not much underbrush of any kind, - only a thin growth of
rubus, huckleberry, and vine-maple.
Notwithstanding the outcry against the
reservations last winter in Washington, that uncounted farms, towns, and
villages were included in them, and that all business was threatened or
blocked, nearly all the mountains in which the reserves lie are still
covered with virgin forests. Though lumbering has long been carried on with
tremendous energy along their boundaries, and home-seekers have explored the
woods for openings available for farms, however small, one may wander in the
heart of the reserves for weeks without meeting a human being, Indian or
white man, or any conspicuous trace of one. Indians used to ascend the main
streams on their way to the mountains for wild goats, whose wool furnished
them clothing. But with food in abundance on the coast there was little to
draw them into the woods, and the monuments they have left there are
scarcely more conspicuous than those of birds and squirrels; far less so
than those of the beavers, which have dammed streams and made clearings that
will endure for centuries. Nor is there much in these woods to attract
cattle-keepers. Some of the first settlers made farms on the small bits of
prairie and in the comparatively open Cowlitz and Chehalis valleys of
Washington; but before the gold period most of the immigrants from the
Eastern States settled in the fertile and open Willamette Valley of Oregon.
Even now, when the search for tillable land is so keen, excepting the
bottom-lands of the rivers around Puget Sound, there are few cleared spots
in all western Washington. On every meadow or opening of any sort some one
will be found keeping cattle, raising hops, or cultivating patches of grain,
but these spots are few and far between. All the larger spaces were taken
long ago; therefore most of the newcomers build their cabins where the
beavers built theirs. They keep a few cows, laboriously widen their little
meadow openings by hacking, girdling, and burning the rim of the
close-pressing forest, and scratch and plant among the huge blackened logs
and stumps, girdling and killing themselves in killing the trees.
Most of the farm lands of Washington and Oregon,
excepting the valleys of the Willamette and Rogue rivers, lie on the east
side of the mountains. The forests on the eastern slopes of the Cascades
fail altogether ere the foot of the range is reached, stayed by drought as
suddenly as on the west side they are stopped by the sea; showing strikingly
how dependent are these forest giants on the generous rains and fogs so
often complained of in the coast climate. The lower portions of the reserves
are solemnly soaked and poulticed in rain and fog during the winter months,
and there is a sad dearth of sunshine, but with a little knowledge of
woodcraft any one may enjoy an excursion into these woods even in the rainy
season. The big, gray days are exhilarating, and the colors of leaf and
branch and mossy bole are then at their best. The mighty trees getting their
food are seen to be wide-awake, every needle thrilling in the welcome
nourishing storms, chanting and bowing low in glorious harmony, while every
raindrop and snowflake is seen as a beneficent messenger from the sky. The
snow that falls on the lower woods is mostly soft, coming through the trees
in downy tufts, loading their branches, and bending them down against the
trunks until they look like arrows, while a strange muffled silence
prevails, making everything impressively solemn. But these lowland
snowstorms and their effects quickly vanish. The snow melts in a day or two,
sometimes in a few hours, the bent branches spring up again, and all the
forest work is left to the fog and the rain. At the same time, dry snow is
falling on the upper forests and mountain tops. Day after day, often for
weeks, the big clouds give their flowers without ceasing, as if knowing how
important is the work they have to do. The glinting, swirling swarms thicken
the blast, and the trees and rocks are covered to a depth of ten to twenty
feet. Then the mountaineer, snug in a grove with bread and fire, has nothing
to do but gaze and listen and enjoy. Ever and anon the deep, low roar of the
storm is broken by the booming of avalanches, as the snow slips from the
overladen heights and rushes down the long white slopes to fill the fountain
hollows. All the smaller streams are hushed and buried, and the young groves
of spruce and fir near the edge of the timber-line are gently bowed to the
ground and put to sleep, not again to see the light of day or stir branch or
leaf until the spring.
These grand reservations should draw thousands of admiring visitors at least
in summer, yet they are neglected as if of no account, and spoilers are
allowed to ruin them as fast as they like. A few peeled spars cut here were
set up in London, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where they excited wondering
attention; but the countless hosts of living trees rejoicing at home on the
mountains are scarce considered at all. Most travelers here are content with
what they can see from car windows or the verandas of hotels, and in going
from place to place cling to their precious trains and stages like wrecked
sailors to rafts. When an excursion into the woods is proposed, all sorts of
dangers are imagined, - snakes, bears, Indians. Yet it is far safer to
wander in God's woods than to travel on black highways or to stay at home.
The snake danger is so slight it is hardly worth mentioning. Bears are a
peaceable people, and mind their own business, instead of going about like
the devil seeking whom they may devour. Poor fellows, they have been
poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother
man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians, most
of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence. No American wilderness
that I know of is so dangerous as a city home" with all the modern
improvements." One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.
Lewis and Clark, in their famous trip across the continent in 1804-05, did
not lose a single man by Indians or animals, though all the West was then
wild. Captain Clark was bitten on the hand as he lay asleep. That was one
bite among more than a hundred men while traveling nine thousand miles.
Loggers are far more likely to be met than Indians or bears in the reserves
or about their boundaries, brown weather-tanned men with faces furrowed like
bark, tired-looking, moving slowly, swaying like the trees they chop. A
little of everything in the woods is fastened to their clothing, rosiny and
smeared with balsam, and rubbed into it, so that their scanty outer garments
grow thicker with use and never wear out. Many a forest giant have these old
woodmen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping, they too are leaning
over and tottering to their fall. Others, however, stand ready to take their
places, stout young fellows, erect as saplings; and always the foes of trees
outnumber their friends. Far up the white peaks one can hardly fail to meet
the wild goat, or American chamois, - an admirable mountaineer, familiar
with woods and glaciers as well as rocks, - and in leafy thickets deer will
be found; while gliding about unseen there are many sleek furred animals
enjoying their beautiful lives, and birds also, notwithstanding few are
noticed in hasty walks. The ouzel sweetens the glens and gorges where the
streams flow fastest, and every grove has its singers, however silent it
seems, - thrushes, linnets, warblers; humming-birds glint about the fringing
bloom of the meadows and peaks, and the lakes are stirred into lively
pictures by water-fowl.
The Mount Rainier Forest Reserve should be made
a national park and guarded while yet its bloom is on; for if in the making
of the -West Nature had what we call parks in mind, -places for rest,
inspiration, and prayers, - this Rainier region must surely be one of them.
In the center of it there is a lonely mountain capped with ice; from the
ice-cap glaciers radiate in every direction, and young rivers from the
glaciers; while its flanks, sweeping down in beautiful curves, are clad with
forests and gardens, and filled with birds and animals. Specimens of the
best of Nature's treasures have been lovingly gathered here and arranged in
simple symmetrical beauty within regular bounds.
Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons,
once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest in form,
has the most interesting forest cover, and, with perhaps the exception of
Shasta, is the highest and most flowery. Its massive white dome rises out of
its forests, like a world by itself, to a height of fourteen thousand to
fifteen thousand feet. The forests reach to a height of a little over six
thousand feet., and above the forests there is a zone of the loveliest
flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely
planted and luxuriant that it seems as if Nature, glad to make an open space
between woods so dense and ice so deep, were economizing the precious
ground, and trying to see how many of her darlings she can get together in
one mountain wreath, - daisies, anemones, geraniums, columbines,
erythroniums, larkspurs, etc., among which we wade knee-deep and waist-deep,
the bright corollas in myriads touching petal to petal. Picturesque detached
groups of the spiry Abies lasiocarpa stand like islands along the lower
margin of the garden zone, while on the upper margin there are extensive
beds of bryanthus, cassiope, kalmia, and other heathworts, and higher still
saxifrages and drabas, more and more lowly, reach up to the edge of the ice.
Altogether this is the richest subalpine garden I ever found, a perfect
floral elysium. The icy dome needs none of man's care, but unless the
reserve is guarded the flower bloom will soon be killed, and nothing of the
forests will be left but black stump monuments.
The Sierra of California is the most openly
beautiful and useful of all the forest reserves, and the largest excepting
the Cascade Reserve of Oregon and the Bitter Root of Montana and Idaho. It
embraces over four million acres of the grandest scenery and grandest trees
on the continent, and its forests are planted just where they do the most
good, not only for beauty, but for farming in the great San Joaquin Valley
beneath them. It extends southward from the Yosemite National Park to the
end of the range, a distance of nearly two hundred miles. No other
coniferous forest in the world contains so many species or so many large and
beautiful trees, - Sequoia gigantea, king of conifers, "the noblest of a
noble race," as Sir Joseph Hooker well says; the sugar pine, king of all the
world's pines, living or extinct; the yellow pine, next in rank, which here
reaches most perfect development, forming noble towers of verdure two
hundred feet high; the mountain pine, which braves the coldest blasts far up
the mountains on grim, rocky slopes; and five others, flourishing each in
its place, making eight species of pine in one forest, which is still
further enriched by the great Douglas spruce, libocedrus, two species of
silver fir, large trees and exquisitely beautiful, the Paton hemlock, the
most graceful of evergreens, the curious tumion, oaks of many species,
maples, alders, poplars, and flowering dogwood, all fringed with flowery
underbrush, manzanita, ceanothus, wild rose, cherry, chestnut, and
rhododendron. Wandering at random through these friendly, approachable
woods, one comes here and there to the loveliest lily gardens, some of the
lilies ten feet high, and the smoothest gentian meadows, and Yosemite
valleys known only to mountaineers. Once I spent a night by a camp-fire on
Mount Shasta with Asa Gray and Sir Joseph Hooker, and, knowing that they
were acquainted with all the great forests of the world, I asked whether
they knew any coniferous forest that rivaled that of the Sierra. They
unhesitatingly said: "No. In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees,
and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all
others." This Sierra
Reserve, proclaimed by the President of the United States in September,
1893, is worth the most thoughtful care of the Government for its own sake,
without considering its value as the fountain of the rivers on which the
fertility of the great San Joaquin Valley depends. Yet it gets no care at
all. In the fog of tariff, silver, and annexation politics it is left wholly
unguarded, though the management of the adjacent national parks by a few
soldiers shows how well and how easily it can be preserved. In the mean
time, lumbermen are allowed to spoil it at their will, and sheep in
uncountable ravenous hordes to trample it and devour every green leaf within
reach; while the shepherds, like destroying angels, set innumerable fires,
which burn not only the undergrowth of seedlings on which the permanence of
the forest depends, but countless thousands of the venerable giants. If
every citizen could take one walk through this reserve, there would be no
more trouble about its care; for only in darkness does vandalism flourish.
The reserves of southern California, - the San
Gabriel, San Bernardino, San Jacinto, and Trabuco, - though not large, only
about two million acres together, are perhaps the best appreciated. Their
slopes are covered with a close, almost impenetrable growth of flowery
bushes, beginning on the sides of the fertile coast valleys and the dry
interior plains. Their higher ridges, however, and mountains are open, and
fairly well forested with sugar pine, yellow pine, Douglas spruce,
libocedrus, and white fir. As timber fountains they amount to little, but as
bird and bee pastures, cover for the precious streams that irrigate the
lowlands, and quickly available retreats from dust and heat and care, their
value is incalculable. Good roads have been graded into them, by which in a
few hours lowlanders can get well up into the sky and find refuge in
hospitable camps and club-houses, where, while breathing reviving ozone,
they may absorb the beauty about them, and look comfortably down on the busy
towns and the most beautiful orange groves ever planted since gardening
began. The Grand Caņon
Reserve of Arizona, of nearly two million acres, or the most interesting
part of it, as well as the Rainier region, should be made into a national
park, on account of their supreme grandeur and beauty. Setting out from
Flagstaff, a station on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, on the
way to the caņon you pass through beautiful forests of yellow pine, - like
those of the Black Hills, but more extensive, - and curious dwarf forests of
nut pine and juniper, the spaces between the miniature trees planted with
many interesting species of eriogonum, yucca, and cactus. After riding or
walking seventy-five miles through these pleasure-grounds, the San Francisco
and other mountains, abounding in flowery parklike openings and smooth
shallow valleys with long vistas which in fineness of finish and arrangement
suggest the work of a consummate landscape artist, watching you all the way,
you come to the most tremendous caņon in the world. It is abruptly
countersunk in the forest plateau, so that you see nothing of it until you
are suddenly stopped on its brink, with its immeasurable wealth of divinely
colored and sculptured buildings before you and beneath you. No matter bow
far you have wandered hitherto, or how many famous gorges and valleys you
have seen, this one, the Grand Caņon of the Colorado, will seem as novel to
you, as unearthly in the color and 'grandeur and quantity of its
architecture, as if you had found it after death, on some other star; so
incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other canons
in our fire-moulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and
glacier sculptured world. It is about six thousand feet deep where you first
see it, and from rim to rim ten to fifteen miles wide. Instead of being
dependent for interest upon waterfalls, depth, wall sculpture, and beauty of
parklike floor, like most other great caflons, it has no waterfalls in
sight, and no appreciable floor spaces. The big river has just room enough
to flow and roar obscurely, here and there groping its way as best it can,
like a weary, murmuring, overladen traveler trying to escape from the
tremendous, bewildering labyrinthine abyss, while its roar serves only to
deepen the silence. Instead of being filled with air, the vast space between
the walls is crowded with Nature's grandest buildings, - a sublime city of
them, painted in every color, and adorned with richly fretted cornice and
battlement spire and tower in endless variety of style and architecture.
Every architectural invention of man has been anticipated, and far more, in
this grandest of God's terrestrial cities. |
