John L. Stoddard's Lectures Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: MUTILATED STATUES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BAPTISMAL FONT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAN GABRIEL, FROM THE SOUTHEAST.]

Most of the Californian Missions are really dead, and near that of La Purissima may still be seen the rent in the ground made by the earthquake which destroyed it. Others, like San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano, are dragging out a moribund existence, under the care of only one or two priests, who move like melancholy phantoms through the lonely cloisters, and pray among the ruins of a n.o.ble past. The Mission of Santa Barbara, however, is in fairly good repair, and a few Franciscan Fathers still reside there and carry on a feeble imitation of their former life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DEGENERATE.]

It is on his way to this Mission that the traveler pa.s.ses the reputed residence of Ramona. There is, it is true, another structure near San Diego which, also, claims this distinction; but the ranch on the route from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara perfectly corresponds to "H.H.'s" descriptions of her heroine's home, with its adjoining brook and willows, and hills surmounted by the cross. The house is almost hidden by the trees with which a Mexican ordinarily surrounds his dwelling, and is, as usual, only one story high, with a projecting roof, forming a porch along the entire front. As we learn in "Ramona," much of the family life in those old days--sewing, visiting, and siesta-taking--went on in the open air, under the shade of the porticos which were wide and low. Here it was that Alessandro brought Felipe back to health, watching and nursing him as he slept outdoors on his rawhide bed; and we may see the arbor where the lovers met, the willows where they were surprised by Senora Moreno, and the hills on which the pious lady caused wooden crosses to be reared, that pa.s.sers-by might know that some good Catholics were still left in California.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CROSS ON THE HILL.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA BARBARA MISSION.]

The Mission of Santa Barbara is of solid brick and stone, with walls six feet in thickness. Its cloisters look sufficiently ma.s.sive to defy an earthquake, and are paved with enormous bricks each twelve inches square. The huge red tiles of the roof, also, tell of a workmanship which, although rude, was honest and enduring. The interior, however, is of little interest, for the poor relics which the Fathers keep are even less attractive than those displayed at the Mission of San Gabriel; yet there are shown at least two enormous missals which are no less than four feet long by two feet wide, and beautifully inscribed on parchment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA BARBARA MISSION FROM THE FARM.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE THE FATHERS WALKED.]

"What is the Mission's income?" I asked the gentle monk who acted as my guide.

"Alas!" he answered, "we have very little. You know our lands are gone. We have barely twenty-five acres now. Moreover, we are outside the village; and, as there is another church, most Catholics go there. We receive, indeed, occasional offerings from travelers; but we are very poor."

"Who cultivates your twenty-five acres?" I inquired.

"According to our ability, we are all busy," was the answer, "some till the garden; others train young men for the priesthood; one of our number is a carpenter; and another," he added, evidently laughing at his own expense, "knows just enough about machinery to make a bad break worse."

"And the Indians?" I said.

"Not one is left," was the reply. "Though once the Mission counted them by thousands, they are all dead and gone. There are their monuments," he added, pointing to the fragments of a mill and one or two industrial shops.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA.]

I looked and saw the remnants of a giant wheel which formerly had been turned by water, brought from the hills to feed the Fathers'

lands. The water was still flowing, but the wheel lay, broken,--symbolic of the link which bound the Mission to the vanished past.

The first Roman Catholic Bishop of California and some of the early Fathers are buried in the chapel of the monastery, but interments are now made in a neighboring cemetery, strictly reserved for members of the Mission, each of whom has there his predestined place. Yet even in this humble Campo Santo life will not yield entirely to death. The hum of droning insects breaks the stillness of the empty cloisters; occasionally a lizard darts like a tongue of flame along the walls; gra.s.ses and trailing plants adorn impartially the ground containing human dust, and that which still awaits an occupant; while round a stately crucifix, which casts its shadow like a benediction on the sleeping dead, sweet wild flowers bloom throughout the year, and from their swinging censers offer incense to the figure of the Saviour with each pa.s.sing breeze. The hush of melancholy broods over the entire place. The mountains, gazing down upon it in stony silence, are haggard and forbidding; below it lies the modern town; while from a neighboring hillside the inmates of a villa look directly into the monastery garden, on which the earlier Fathers little dreamed a female eye would ever rest. A little life, however, was still visible about this Santa Barbara Mission. Two brown-robed monks were hoeing in the field; occasionally, visitors came and went; and, just as I was leaving, one of the priests, in obedience to a summons, hurried away to minister to the sick; yet over all there hung an atmosphere of unreality and sadness. I felt myself the guest of an anachronism.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DREAMING OF OTHER DAYS.]

A fashionable city has risen at the feet of these old monks, but they regard it not. A trolley car brings curious tourists to their doors; but the ways of the Santa Barbara Fathers are those of long ago. Like aged pilgrims, dreaming by their firesides, they seem to be living in the past; they certainly have no present worthy of the name; and when I sought to draw forth from my priestly guide some idea of their future, he answered me by pointing to a grave.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

GRAND CAnON OF THE COLORADO RIVER

[Ill.u.s.tration]

While the Old World is better able than the New to satisfy the craving of the mind for art and history, no portion of our globe can equal the North American continent in certain forms of natural scenery which reach the acme of sublimity. Niagara, the Yosemite, the Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Canon of the Colorado in Arizona are the four great natural wonders of America. Niagara is Nature in the majesty of liquid motion, where, as the outlet of vast inland seas, a mighty river leaps in wild delirium into a gorge two hundred feet below, and boils and seethes tumultuously till its heart is set at rest and its fever cooled by the embrace of Lake Ontario. The Yosemite is Nature pictured, in a frame of granite precipices, as reclining on a carpet woven with a million flowers, above which rise huge trees three centuries old, which, nevertheless, to the spectator, gazing from the towering cliffs, appear like waving ferns. The Yellowstone Park is the arena of an amphitheatre in which fire and water, the two great forces which have made our planet what it is, still languidly contend where formerly they struggled desperately for supremacy. But the Grand Canon of Arizona is Nature wounded unto death, and lying stiff and ghastly with a gash, two hundred miles in length and a mile in depth, in her bared breast, from which is flowing fast a stream of life-blood called the Colorado.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PETRIFIED FOREST, ARIZONA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PACK-MULES OF THE DESERT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: EVIDENCES OF EROSION.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NAVAJO CHURCH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FANTASTIC FORMS.]

The section of country through which one travels to behold this last-named marvel is full of mystery and fascination. It is a land where rivers frequently run underground or cut their way through gorges of such depth that the bewildered tourist, peering over their precipitous cliffs, can hardly gain a glimpse of the streams flowing half a mile below; a land of colored landscapes such as elsewhere would be deemed impossible, with "painted deserts," red and yellow rocks, petrified forests, brown gra.s.s and purple grazing grounds; a land where from a sea of tawny sand, flecked here and there with bleached bones, like whitecaps on the ocean, one gazes upon mountains glistening with snow; and where at times the intervals are so brief between aridity and flood, that one might choose, like Alaric, a river-bed for his sepulchre, yet see a host like that of Pharaoh drowned in it before the dawn. In almost every other portion of the world Nature reveals her finished work; but here she partially discloses the secrets of her skill, and shows to us her modes of earth-building. Thus, the entire country is dotted with _mesas_, or table-lands of sandstone, furrowed and fashioned in a tremendous process of erosion, caused by the draining through this area of a prehistoric ocean, whose rushing, whirling, and receding waters molded the mountains, carved the canons, and etched innumerable grotesque figures and fantastic forms. A feeling of solemnity steals over us, as we reflect upon the lapse of geologic time which such a record covers, unnumbered ages before man's advent on this planet; and these deep canons and eroded valleys, whose present streams are only miniature representatives of those which formerly wrought havoc here, teach lessons of patience to the restless mortals who behold them; while some of the singular formations on the cliffs present perplexing problems which Nature, as it were in mocking humor, bids us solve.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SPECIMEN OF NATURE'S HANDIWORK.]

Was Nature ever really sportive? In the old days, when she produced her uncouth monsters of the deep, was she in manner, as in age, a child? Did she then play with her continents, and smile to see them struggle up from the sea only to sink again? Was it caprice that made her wrap her vast dominions in the icy bands of glaciers, or pour upon them lava torrents, and frequently convulse them with a mighty earthquake? If so, New Mexico and Arizona must have been her favorite playgrounds. At many points her rock formations look like whimsical imitations of man's handicraft, or specimens of the colossal vegetation of an earlier age. Some are gigantic, while others bear a ludicrous resemblance to misshapen dwarfs, suggesting, as they stand like pygmies round their mightier brethren, a group of mediaeval jesters in a court of kings. In the faint dusk of evening, as one flits by them in the moving train, their weird, uncanny forms appear to writhe in pain, and he is tempted to regard them as the material shapes of tortured souls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MESA.]

The _mesas_ of New Mexico and Arizona are, usually, regular in outline, sometimes resembling in the distance cloud-banks on the edge of the horizon, but oftener suggesting mighty fortresses, or ramparts to resist invasion, like the wall of China. These are not only beautiful in form and color, but from the fact that they recall the works of man, we gaze at them with wonder, and find in them a fascinating interest. They prove that Nature needs some human a.s.sociation to appeal strongly to us, and how man's history of smiles and tears gives pathos, mystery, and romance to scenes which otherwise would be merely coldly beautiful or terribly sublime. It is for this reason, doubtless, that we are always endeavoring to personify Nature. We think of solitary trees as lonely, of storm-tossed waves as angry, and of a group of mountains as members of one family. Thus some of the Arizona mountains are called brothers. No doubt their birth was attended by the same throes of Mother Earth, and they possess certain family resemblances in their level summits, huge square shoulders, and the deep furrows in their rugged cheeks; while all of them evince the same disdain for decoration, scorning alike the soft rich robes of verdure and the rough storm-coats of the pines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GROUP OF MESAS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE OLD SANTA Fe TRAIL.]

The idea of companionship in Nature is not wholly fanciful. Is not the fundamental law of the universe the attraction which one ma.s.s of matter has for another? Even the awful distances in interstellar s.p.a.ce form no exception to this rule; for telescopic scrutiny reveals the fact that planets, suns, and systems move in harmony, on paths which indicate that they are all a.s.sociated in the stupendous drama of the skies. The human interest connected with the mountains and the _mesas_ of New Mexico and Arizona is not very great. No mediaeval mystery haunts these castles sculptured by the hand of Nature. No famous romancer has lighted on their cliffs the torch of his poetic fancy. No poet has yet peopled them with creatures of his imagination. We can, unfortunately, conjure up from their majestic background no more romantic picture than that of some Pueblo Indian wooing his dusky bride. Yet they are not without some reminiscences of heroism; for valiant men, a half century ago, following the westward moving star of empire, braved almost inconceivable hardships in their shadow, when, after four thousand years, American pioneers repeated the old, old story, begun upon the plains of Shinar, as the "Sons of the East" went westward in their quest of fortune. How few of us think of those unrecorded heroes now, as we cross this region in luxurious cars! To most of us the dead, whose bones once whitened many of these lonely plains, are nothing more than the last winter's snowdrifts melted by the sun; yet how effectively the Saxon has succeeded in his conquest of the continent we have continual evidence as we glide swiftly, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through glowing grain fields, prosperous cities, and states that rival empires in size. Where formerly the Spanish conquerors, in their fruitless search for the reputed Seven Cities glittering with gold, endured privations and exhibited bravery which have hardly been surpa.s.sed in the entire history of the world; and where, too, as if it were but yesterday, the American Argonauts toiled painfully for months through tribes of hostile Indians, across desert wastes and over cloud-encompa.s.sed mountains, we find ourselves the inmates of a rolling palace, propelled by one of Nature's tireless forces, and feel at times in our swift flight as if we were the occupants of a cushioned cannon-ball of gla.s.s. Even the crossing of one of the many viaducts along our route is a reminder of how science has been summoned to a.s.sist the invader in his audacious enterprise of girdling a continent with steel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ARIZONA CLOUD-EFFECT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD HOME OF KIT CARSON, TAOS, N.M.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRAVE OF KIT CARSON, TAOS, N.M.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRIDGE OF CAnON DIABLO.]

The art of bridge-building in some form or other is one of the earliest necessities of civilization. Even the apes in equatorial regions will link themselves together, and swing their living line across a stream to trees on the opposite bank, thus forming a connected path of bodies along which other monkeys pa.s.s in safety.

Bridges of ropes or reeds are, also, made by the most primitive of men; while viaducts of stone rose gradually in perfection, from the rude blocks heaped up by savages to the magnificent structures fashioned by the Romans. But with the introduction of iron and steel into their composition, bridges are now constructed quickly, with consummate skill, and in a mult.i.tude of different forms a.s.sist in making possible the safe and rapid transit of our great Republic.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOMES OF CLIFF DWELLERS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SKULLS OF CLIFF DWELLERS.]