A Summer's Outing Part 4

The still and apparently unchangeable incrustations at Mammoth Hot Springs, were looked upon on our final visit without awe or surprise.

A large party of us left the hotel for Cinnabar closely packed in the coaches and surreys on a bright sunny afternoon, glad we had seen the wonderland, but quite satisfied to leave our labors behind us. As we dashed down the defile near the park line, we doffed our hats and bade adieu to the eagle sitting on its eyrie as we had seen him on our entrance. The downward ride was quite rapid, and some of us who had been drawn into somewhat close communion during the past week were almost sorry when we so soon reached Livingston--some to go eastward and others westward, all to part most probably forever.

From Livingston to Helena the run was made at night. We found the latter a bustling place and well worth a visit. There is an air about a mining camp which can be seen in no old country, and Helena though now full of city airs yet has many of the characteristics of the camp.

Its foundations rest upon gold bearing earth, and even now in digging cellars, quite in the town, pay dirt is found. Nearly the entire site of the city has been dug over by the miner. It was in one of its gulches, now a street, that a prospector wearied out by unsuccessful tramps and reduced to his last dollar, stuck in his pick to try for a "last chance." He had no expectation of reward, but dug down in sheer desperation before going off a pauper. The result was "The last chance mine," one of the richest ever discovered.

We stopped at the Helena hotel and found it quite equal to any in large eastern cities.

The Broadwater Hotel, however, some three to four miles out of town, is now the lion of the place. It is a cottage-built house, with 200 fine rooms, all finished in hardwoods and elegantly furnished. Its bathrooms, with huge porcelain tubs and large dressing-rooms attached to each, are especially fine and the baths are said to be medicinally good.

THE SWIMMING BATH OF THE WORLD.

But these dwindle when compared with its huge swimming bath. The natatorium building is about 350 feet long by 150, with a roof 100 feet high, supported by light arches in single spans. The tank is 300 feet by 100; at one end about four feet deep, and running to ten or more at the other. Natural hot and cold waters pour over a precipice of cyclopean ma.s.ses of granite at one end, about fifty feet wide and forty high. This precipice is pierced by three large openings over which the water pours in great sheets, and so artistically that one would easily believe it a series of natural falls. The flow is so large that the tank is replenished several times a day. The temperature was to me rather high--about 80 degrees. A swim in its deep waters, however, was very fine. The whole is lighted by day through windows high up, of cathedral gla.s.s in different tints, terra cotta predominating. The hotel, with its 200 rooms, and the tank-house and grounds are illuminated at night by incandescent lights. We saw it only by day, but could easily imagine how beautiful it must look and how gay a scene it must offer when 300 or 400 people are in at night--men and gay ladies. Very decorous bathing suits are furnished to bathers, and those bringing their own, are compelled to have them of conventional modesty. I was told that 300 bathers of an evening is not an unusual number, and that it is largely frequented during nine months of the year and by the very best people of the city. The charge is fifty cents for an entrance, so as to keep out the riff-raff. Col.

Broadwater has expended half a million on the house and grounds, bringing his hot water from a mineral hot spring some four miles up a gorge, and a large supply of cold pure water also from the hills. The hotel was full. We took lunch with the Colonel and some friends, and found it like everything else, first cla.s.s. A steam and an electric motor road leads from the city to the hotel. By the way, why do the street car people not put in electrical motors in Chicago? At St.

Paul, Helena and Spokane we have ridden upon them and were delighted.

A car looks as if it were out fishing with a fishing rod springing from its top, bent just as if it were playing a gamy fish.

The hospitalities of the Broadwater very nearly cost us our connection at the railroad. We gave ourselves but little time, expecting to find a carriage ordered to be in waiting at the electric road city terminus. It was not there and we walked to our hotel to find we had but eleven minutes to get our luggage on a carriage and to reach the railroad station a mile and a half away. The porter said it was impossible to reach it in time. We ordered our traps brought down and rushed to our rooms for our small pieces. At the office were a crowd of newly arrived travelers. I called to the clerk saying I had no time to pay hotel bills. He smiled. Taking advantage of his good humor we mounted the carriage telling the driver to make the train or die. He said he would land us on the train or in--naming a rather hot place.

He tore through the town at a full gallop. People in shop doors looked at us and smiled. Possibly they suspected an old gray beard was getting away with a young girl. The jehu and his horses were plucky.

The station house as we drove up hid the train from us, and hid us from it. We turned the building, the train was well in motion, the engineer checked up but the train continued to move. We jumped down; the driver threw our trunk into the baggage car; I landed my valise on the platform of the next car; my daughter got her satchel on the next and she climbed up on the third. I caught on and climbed the fourth and threw the fare to the driver. Quite a crowd of people about the station admired our pluck, and when our driver yelled out "Hurrah for Chicago" a generous response went up from a score or more of throats.

Success is admired everywhere, but out west it is the cure all. Every man at that station would at that moment have voted for me for--pound master. Shortly after leaving Helena the climb is commenced in scaling the real Rocky Mountains. The road bends and winds over many magnificent curves and loops, rapidly climbing upward. Now we look far above us, at a locomotive slowly creeping along the mountain side, and we look down upon the road we had a few moments before puffed along, but already hundreds of feet immediately under us. The mountains towered above us, covered by great black precipices, and mighty detached rocks standing alone or in groups. This is the true backbone of the continent, and the black scattered rocks might be vertebrae pushing through the worn cuticle. We could understand here why these are called the _rocky_ mountains. Rough towers and jagged turrets black with the weather wear of ages are the salient features of the heights and slopes. Here they are in great groups, there isolated. Now they are compacted into ma.s.sive precipices, frowning and repellent, and then scattered as if dropped by icebergs. They are, however, not mighty loose boulders, but are moored to and are a part of the mountain's foundation rocks.

We crossed some lofty trestle bridges and looked down upon a stream thick with mud from a gold washing camp near by. At length we reached the summit. Our extra locomotive was side tracked and we breathed an atmosphere perceptibly different from that we had left on the eastern side of the range. We were now upon the Pacific slope.

We halted for a few minutes at Missoula. The fine valley was bathed in the glowing red of sunset. We lost at night much beautiful wooded scenery which I once before enjoyed so much. To one simply going to Puget Sound it is worth while to stop over at Missoula and then to run down Clark's Fork by day. But we wished to have a full day at our next stopping place.

Of all the cities we have seen, the busiest was Spokane--p.r.o.nounced as if there were no "e" at the end and the "a" quite broad. Seven years ago I was there. Then it had but 800 dwellers. Now there are in the neighborhood of 25,000. There are several streets with elegant business blocks, finished or being completed, of four, five, and six stories in height, comparing favorably with those of any Eastern city in architectural design and finish. The heart of the city reminds one of Chicago the spring after the great fire, and the people seem to have the same pluck, and energy, and confidence that so marked our people at that time. Some of the private houses on the steep, hugely-bowldered slope of a high hill on one side of the city are models of elegance. We visited two which were real chefs d'oeuvres of architectural design--one a Swiss chalet, the other Mooresque in design. Everything was after the original models, even to much of the furniture. I have never seen except in some model houses abroad such complete specimens. The outside of several others which we did not visit are quite as fine. Mrs. Cutter, the proud mother of the architect, exhibited her house with great hospitality, and Mrs. Moore seemed to feel that she had no right to hide her gem of a residence.

At evening we were invited to a fete champetre on a fine lake some forty miles north of the city and 800 feet elevated above it. About 300 of the elite of the town went out by rail, danced, and had supper, returning to town by 1 o'clock in the morning. The young girl with me enjoyed it greatly. A severe cold just caught forbade my appreciating anything but the sweet, sincere hospitality shown us. Judge Kinnaird, the son of one of the friends of my early Kentucky boyhood, got us the entree of Spokane's "four hundred." This is destined to continue a thriving city, but lots at $1,000, four miles from the heart of the city, will burn badly some real estate speculators. It is said a mining trade of nearly $50,000 a day naturally belongs to the town. I fear, however, there will be a bursting of a bubble when the burnt district shall be restored. A large trade will be necessary to support the great number of mechanics and laborers now lifting the town from its ashes. Hotel Spokane is a very large and good house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD FAITHFUL, AT UPPER GEYSER BASIN. (SEE PAGE 36.)]

Very fine crops are grown in the Spokane Valley. The crops of oats and wheat sown for hay was being harvested and proved a very heavy yield.

Washington claims she will harvest over 20,000,000 bushels of wheat this year. I was surprised to see fine fields of grain on the rolling plains in the great bend of the Columbia river. I remember speaking of the richness of this soil in the "Race with the Sun," but thought artificial irrigation would be necessary to make it yield. This year there are fine crops where only nature's watering can ever be availed of. One of the stations, quite removed from any water course, has grown into a thriving town, showing that the country around is prosperous.

I suspect that a fair rainfall cannot be relied upon from year to year. It will, however, become more and more reliable, for it has been the rule throughout the world and probably through all ages, that rains follow cultivation, and man's presence and industry calls down Heaven's aid. The answer of Hercules to the cartman would be the reply of Ceres as well to the prayers of her votaries.

The ash colored sage bush was thought by the early men of the great plains to be poison to the land. It however was one of G.o.d's bounties to man. It prevented the soil from being blown away and where it grew the most lavishly, is now found to be the best of soils. Sage bush not only keeps the winds away, but when dead and rotten fills up sand pockets with material rich for all of the small grains. The people of the Yakima valley on the eastern slope of the Cascade mountains, boast that theirs is the garden spot of the Pacific country. They certainly do produce fine fruits, melons and garden vegetables, but I have not been struck favorably with the outlook of the locality in either of my trips through the land.

The run from Ellensburg over the Cascades is a magnificent ride. The enormous ma.s.s of forest, prevents many extended views, but those seen are very fine. Every break in the forests would reveal lofty mountains' slopes clothed in forests of marvelous richness, and now and then snowy heights would tower aloft. Once a fine view of Renier is caught, the monarch of the grand range. Robed in his snowy ermine he stands out a sceptered hermit wrapped in his isolation. Seen from the sound he is one of the most picturesque peaked mountains of the world, and from all inland points of view he is a grand towering ma.s.s of ever living snow and ice.

ARKANSAS HOT SPRINGS, RIVALED.

Having done considerable hard work on the trip so far, we resolved to take a rest at the hot springs, three and-a-half hours from Tacoma, on Green River. Three years ago my boys and I fished here pleasantly for several days. The place is unpretentious, but the waters possess apparently the same properties as those of the Arkansas hot springs.

The place is some fourteen hundred and fifty feet above Tacoma. During our present three days stop, an overcoat has been comfortable in the evenings, and we sleep under three blankets. A cold batch of air drops down the valley from Mount Reniers (Tacoma calls him Mount Tacoma; Renier is his name), 14,400 feet of snowy peak, driving away all summer sultriness. A bath in the medicinal waters of seven minutes and then a pack causes the perspiration to flow from one quite as heavily as the same course would do in Arkansas. Before leaving home I had a large and painful carbuncle on the back of my neck. The sign of the cross was cut deeply into it, and as it healed it proved a nest-egg for several smaller jewels near by. These I cauterized with pure carbolic in the park, but still they annoyed me much. Four baths here have at least temporarily dried them up. Men who came here three or four weeks ago on crutches from rheumatism, are walking about freely and feel themselves able to buckle down to work.

A WONDERFUL GROWTH OF TIMBER.

A sight of the magnificent cedar and fir forests here would amply repay an Easterner for a day's stop-over. I have been among them before several times, yet at each visit they surprise me as they did at first. Fifty thousand shingles are made from a single cedar. I counted twenty-one firs on a s.p.a.ce considerably less than a quarter of an acre. The owner, a sawyer, a.s.sured me they would cut over five thousand feet of board each. He owns a quarter of a section about his mill and expects to market 15,000,000 feet of lumber from his land. He said the railroad company had cut 30,000,000 feet from its right of way of 400 feet by ten miles in this locality. I saw on a quarter of an acre a cl.u.s.ter of twenty odd trees from four and-a-half feet to over six in diameter and 300 high. They ran up about 150 feet before reaching a limb. Mighty logs lie upon the ground so thickly that even a good woodsman can walk but little over a mile an hour. Cedar logs, moss-covered and sodden, stretch 100 feet in the tangled undergrowth, and have lain there so long that one often sees a fir tree, growing with its roots straddled over them 50 to 100 years old.

We were pleased to find among the guests of the springs one of Chicago's fairest daughters, now living at Tacoma, whose pulled-candy tresses three years ago out-glistened the fiber of her bridal veil, and whose eyes are bluer than the turquoise in her talismanic ring. I like little unpretentious Green River, Hot Springs, even if its table is not of the Delmonico order.

MALT LIQUORS IN THE ORIGINAL PACKAGE.

A pretty drop of fourteen hundred and odd feet through wild rocky gorges and thickly treed glades, along the rapid green waters of the river, in which trout abound, between lofty heights, brought us to the world-famous hop yards of the Puyallup Valley. What ma.s.ses of green lift upon the closely-set hop-poles! I involuntarily cried "Prosit und Gesundheit" as we whizzed through them. Twenty-three or four years ago, the first hop root was planted in the soil of this marvelous valley. Now in this valley and others in this locality, two hundred and fifty thousand acres are giving forth each year crops unknown in any other hop land. Two thousand pounds to the acre are not unusual, and some yields have been nearly if not quite double that. Thousands of barrels of malt liquors were green about us in original packages.

When we alighted at Tacoma, from which I date this letter, I was most agreeably surprised to find that Mr. Winston and his two fair daughters were on the same train. They had intended going with us into the Yellowstone Park, but were unavoidably detained. They have _done_ the Park more rapidly than we did and here overtook us. To-morrow we will be fellow-pa.s.sengers for Uncle Sam's ice-bound Eldorado, Alaska.

Tacoma has been and is growing with great rapidity. A great suburb covers a wide slope on the upper end of the town, which at night, when I was here three years ago, had the appearance of a t.i.tanic camp-fire.

Fires gleamed along great logs; fires burnt on sides and tops of lofty stumps, and fires belched forth from burning trees fifty and more feet from the ground. Diagonal auger holes had been bored near the root into the heart of a tree. Two holes meet at the heart thus causing a draught. Fire was put in, igniting the inflammable pitch, always richest near the ground. It then bored its way up the heart to break out as from a flue, often a hundred feet from the roots.

Tacoma was a cl.u.s.ter of shanties with a small population, barely among the thousands, seven years ago. It was a dusty, scattered, ungainly big village of 12,000 three years ago. Now the census gives it about 40,000 population. The Northern Pacific company is filling the five-mile flat marsh along the Puyallup River which empties into the bay, in front of the town. A large part of this belongs to the Indian Reservation, and is covered by several feet of water during the high tides, which come up the Sound. The filling is being done by a powerful pumping dredge, which pours each day a vast quant.i.ty of sand and silt from the deeper part of the river upon the flats to be filled. My friends Christy and Wise of the Illinois Club, Chicago, are part owners of the powerful dredge, and I suspect are making a big thing of it. The reclaimed land will, when high and dry, be worth millions, and will be the seat of the best business portion of the future city. The _generous_ way in which this great railroad company has taken possession of and is appropriating the fat of this place reminds one forcibly of what is or may be going on in a city between this and the Atlantic. Columbian World's Fair Commissioners, Directors, and City Councils may possibly be sometimes just a little too generous, as Congresses are and have been. The people may sometimes permit their patriotic fervor to make them somewhat un.o.bservant of the wide reach and tenacious grasp of monopoly. Corporations are said to have no souls. Railroad corporations are as voracious as their iron horses and have consciences as cold as their iron rails.

The big hotel here is now crowded with travelers, the most of them just returned from or about to sail for Alaska. Cots are doubled up in many rooms. The wide veranda, overlooking the sound, last night was full of gay promenaders from many quarters of the Union; they enjoyed very fair music from the house band, while they watched with delight the unique spectacle of what appeared to be a new moon arising in the east with its crescent bent downward instead of upward. Fair Luna arose to us immediately over the sharp rounded pinnacle of lofty Mount Tacoma. She presented a narrow silver crescent--a mere thread at first, but waxing by a rapid crescendo movement, she showed her first, her second, and her third quarter, and then her full rounded self in all of her cold glory many degrees up in the sky. The proud mountain having played his short role of eclipsing a planet at once sank into gray nothingness. It seemed a pity the moon's movement was so rapid. She is a cold, fickle jade and is said to be from rim to core hard in eternal frost. It was but fitting she should rest awhile on yonder pinnacled home of eternal ice and snow.

During the afternoon of yesterday after our arrival, all of the mountain's lower ma.s.s, more than two-thirds of its height, was absolutely invisible, veiled in translucent, unclouded haze. No one could have guessed a mountain was there, but high up some four to five thousand feet of his ice-locked lofty summit hung like a gigantic balloon, thinly silvered and delicately burnished, floating on airy nothingness some ten degrees above the horizon. To those who have never seen this effect of a snow-clad mountain, the picture was startling and to all was weird in the extreme. Few mountain chiefs in the world are seen to such advantage as Tacoma from this point on a clear day. The beholder standing on a level of the sea sees the whole of the cone in all of the majesty of fourteen thousand four hundred and odd feet, over 6,000 feet of this being clothed in eternal snow. We were lucky in seeing the floating summit yesterday, for a change of wind has since then brought the smoke from forest fires down into the valley to-day, and a compa.s.s is necessary to fix the great mountain's exact location.

He may keep himself impenetrably veiled for several weeks. If I be not mistaken, I was told he was invisible last year for nearly if not quite three months.

Mr. Clint Snowden, the Secretary of the Board of Trade, has been our cicerone, as the board was our host, in showing us about the city to-day. Its growth one could scarcely comprehend from the information as the increase of population. Seeing has shown the naked truth. The great kindness to me in the past of friends in Seattle has made me rather a Seattler. But I tremble lest it may not be able to keep pace with its pushing rival. Will the country be able to support two big cities? I have great faith in the country. Three years ago I said there would be a mighty empire along the Pacific slope--that is, a mighty part of the great Nation of the continent. Each visit here more and more impresses me that my prophecy will be fulfilled. I recalled the fact that we once thought it an outrage that "the Father of his country" should have his state-namesake off in an out of the way corner of the country, and that corner a mountainous ma.s.s of worthless land; but now one can realize that Washington will be the most picturesque state in the Union, and when America becomes densely populated, it will be one of the richest. The yield of all kinds; lumber, coal, hops, wheat and oats, fish and fruits will this year equal that of many of the eastern states. The state will ere many years have gone by, prove a magnificent namesake of the Father of his country.

Dust is one of the most serious impedimenta of the Pacific slope; for three months of the year it makes one's throat and lungs a sort of mortar bed, but the soil which so easily turns to impalable powder and in such quant.i.ties as to be almost solid along some of the roads, is of marvelous richness. The trees are nearly as imposing monarchs as are the mountains; the flowers are as beautiful as the rivers are clear and pearly; the fruits are glorious and the climate is delicious. Though the noon-day sun is so hot as to make a broad-brimmed hat or an umbrella a necessity, yet the nights are so cold that one gets chilled under less than three blankets. Speaking of fruits, we must say that excepting in the Caucasus the world has no equal for the cherries of this locality--so pulpy and so big. A peddler selling some, captured his purchaser when he cried out: "But, then, sir; them's cherries, not apples." While writing this the sun marches deeply into the West. We must soon board the steamer which sails before day to-morrow.

LETTER VI.

THRIVING AND PICTURESQUE SEATTLE. TWO CURIOUS MEETINGS. VICTORIA AND ITS FLOWERS. ESQUIMAULT AND THE WARSPITE. TWO BROKEN HEARTED GIRLS.

CHARMING SAIL ON THE INLAND SEA. PICTURESQUE MOUNTAINS. GROWTH OF ALASKA. WHALES AND THEIR SPORTS. NATIVE ALASKANS. THEIR HOMES, HABITS, FOOD, FEASTS AND WILD MUSIC. BASKETS AND BLANKETS. SALMON FISHERIES.

MINES AND DOGS.

STEAMER QUEEN, Aug. 10, 1890.

I wrote voluminously from the Yellowstone National Park, quite at large on the run on the Northern Pacific railroad, and expected to make a big letter on the Alaskan excursion. But I am discouraged. If all the pencils seen making copious notes and extracting from route and other books on this steamer were preparing letters, and if a like proportion on the other regular steamers do the same, then the thing will be written into the ground during this season alone. I will, however, commence a short letter; the humor of my pen may make it a long one.

We boarded the "Queen" at Tacoma the night of the 31st of July. Before morning we cleared the port, and at six landed at Seattle for a two hours stop. It was too early for us to see any of our friends, but giving us time to mark the wonderful growth of the last three years.

In my last, the possibility of Tacoma taking the lead of Seattle was expressed. When one sees the elegant houses going up or gone up here since the fire of a year ago; looks over the hills which were three years since clothed with forests but now are covered with beautiful residences; drives over paved streets where he so short a time since was choked by dust; and glides in cable and electric cars smoothly up grades which make a walk laborious and caused the horses in his carriage to pant and blow--when one sees all these things and recalls the pluck of these people when they let the world know they wanted no help from outside when their city lay in ashes, then he feels Tacoma will have a mighty struggle even with the Northern Pacific's help to catch and lead Seattle.

The Tacoma people claim that the United States census gives them the larger population. This the Seattleite denies, and I suspect with justice. He claims his city will have over 43,000 population, all within the compact boundaries of the town, and several thousands in the suburbs. Many may be there helping to build the place up out of its ashes. The greater proportion of them will probably remain permanently, for Seattle has a great trade. Before the fire a year ago it was rather over crowded. The large warehouses and hotels now gone up, are not in advance of the demand. I was, the day before while driving about Tacoma, almost a Tacoma man. But as our ship bent out of her rival's harbor, I was again a Seattler.

The view of the city perched upon its terraced hills is very imposing from the bay, and recalls a long ago prospect from the sea at Genoa.

While the Queen was steaming out of the bay into the open sound, I mounted to the hurricane deck for a parting view of the picturesque place. At the foot of the upper gang way I paused to let a gentleman and lady pa.s.s me on their descent from above. The gentleman held out his hand saying "Mr. Harrison, I think; we never met but once before.

We were vis-a-vis at the dinner table in Colombo, Ceylon. My wife and I had just landed from the "Rome" on our way from Australia. You were about to embark on her for Suez." Indeed if I be not mistaken I got the state room he had vacated. Mr. Sargent and his wife, had a few days ago arrived at San Francisco from j.a.pan and were then on their way to Alaska before going to their home in New Haven, from which they had been absent for several years. This meeting made a singular co-incidence with another of the day before at Tacoma. As I was crossing the rotunda of the Tacoma hotel, a stranger accosted me, and at the same time held out his hand, saying "This is Mr. Harrison of Chicago, is it not?" I replied "Yes". "We never met but once Mr.

Harrison, and that was at the supper table at Agra, India. We sat side by side and talked of the Taj." This gentleman was from New York and was too, on his way to Alaska. He had just come from the East and had expected to sail on the Queen, but not being able to secure a berth, was about to go aboard the George W. Elder, which had been crippled on a rock the week before, and sailed from Tacoma the evening of the 31st. It was pleasant thus to meet these people--utter strangers to each other, whom I had encountered on the other side of the world. It is remarkable how often such chance meetings come to voyagers in distant regions. It shows how the love of travel grows upon one.

Seeing begets a desire for seeing. A large number of our fellow pa.s.sengers on this excursion have been world wanderers.