Roughing it De Luxe Part 5

To see a group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on a pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs--it is always cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest wrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed in the especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one on the outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in her white ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped off the cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too, about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderful complexions; that detail, properly press-agented, ought to fetch the entire female population of the United States.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WOMAN NEAREST THE WALL HAS ON HER FURS--IT IS ALWAYS COOL IN THE SHADE]

For drawing the men, I would exploit the great cardinal fact that nowhere in the country--not even in Norfolk or Baltimore or New Orleans--can you get better things to eat than in San Francisco. For its size, I believe there are more good clubs and more good restaurants right there than in any other spot on the habitable globe. Particularly in the preparation of the typical dishes of the Coast do the San Francisco cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane American foundation, with a delectable suggestion of the Spanish in it, and sometimes with a traceable suggestion of the best there is in the Italian and the Chinese schools of cookery.

To one whose taste in oysters has been developed by eating the full-chested bi-valve of the Eastern seaboard and the deep-lunged, long-bodied product of the Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does not greatly appeal. A lot has been written and printed about the California oyster, but in my opinion he will always have considerable difficulty in living up to his press notices. It takes about a thousand of him to make a quart and about a hundred of him to make a taste. Even then he doesn't taste much like a real oyster, but more like an infinitesimal sc.r.a.p of sponge where a real oyster camped out overnight once.

There is a dream of a little fish, however, called a sand dab--he is a tiny, flounder-shaped t.i.tbit hailing from deep water; and for eating purposes he is probably the best fish that swims--better even than the pompano of the Gulf--and when you say that you are saying about all there is to be said for a fish. And the big crabs of the Pacific side are the hereditary princes of the crab family. They look like spread-eagles; and properly prepared they taste like Heaven. I often wonder what the crabsters buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell--which is a quotation from Omar, with original interpolations by me. The domestic cheese of the Sierras is not without its attractions also, whether you eat it fresh or whether you keep it until its general aspect and prevalent atmosphere are such as to satisfy even one of those epicurean cheese-eaters who think that no cheese is fit to eat until you can't.

Another thing worthy of mention in connection with this California school of cookery is that you can pay as little as you please for your dinner or as much as you please. There are three standbys of the exchange editor that may be counted upon to appear in the newspapers about once in so often. One is the h.o.a.ry-headed and toothless tale regarding the artist who was hired to renovate religious paintings in a church in Brussels, and turned in an itemized account including such entries as--"Correcting the Ten Commandments"; "Restoring the Lost Souls"; "Renewing Heaven"; and winding up with "Doing Several Odd Jobs for the d.a.m.ned."

The second of the set comes out of retirement at frequent intervals--whenever some trusting soul runs across a time-stained number of the Ulster Gazette giving details of the death of George Washington--I wonder how many million copies of that venerable counterfeit were printed--and writes in to his home editor about it.

And the third, the most popular clipping of the three, concerns the prices that used to govern at the mining camps in the days of the early gold rush. The story that is most commonly quoted has to do with the menu of the El Dorado Hotel, at Placerville, where bean soup was a dollar a plate; hash, lowgrade, seventy-five cents; hash, eighteen-carat, a dollar--and so on down the list to seventy-five cents for two Irish potatoes, peeled.

The cost of living may have gone down subsequently in those parts, but it has gone back up again--at certain favored spots. If the Argonauts, those hardy adventurers who flung their gold round so regardlessly and were not satisfied unless they paid outrageously big prices for everything, could come back today they would have no cause to complain at the contemptible paucity of the bill after they had dined at any one of half a dozen ultra-expensive hotels that are to be found dotted along the Coast.

I append herewith a few items selected at random from the price card of a fashionable establishment in one of the larger Coast cities: caviar imperial d'Astracan, two dollars for a double portion; buffet Russe--whatever that is--ninety cents; German asparagus, a single helping, one dollar and forty cents; blue-point oysters, fifty cents; fifty cents for clams; Gorgonzola cheese, fifty cents a portion; and, in a land where peaches and figs grow anywhere and everywhere, seventy-five cents for an order of brandied peaches and fifty cents for an order of spiced figs. Even seasoned New Yorkers have been known to breathe hard on receiving a check for a full meal at certain restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On the other hand, you can step round any corner in San Francisco and walk into that inst.i.tution which people in other large cities are forever seeking and never finding--a table-d'hote restaurant where a perfect meal is to be had at a most moderate price. The best Italian restaurant in the world--and I wish to say, after personal experience, that Sunny Italy itself is not barred--is a little place on the fringe of the Barbary Coast.

There is another place not far away where, for a dollar, you get a bottle of good domestic wine and a selection from the following range of dishes: Celery, ripe olives, green olives, radishes, onions, lettuce, sliced tomatoes, combination salad or crab-meat salad; soup--onion or consomme; fish--sole, salmon, ba.s.s, sand dabs, mussels or clams; entrees--sweetbreads with mushrooms, curry of lamb, calf's tongue, tripe with peppers, tagliatini a l'Italienne, or boiled kidney with bacon; vegetables--asparagus, string-beans and cauliflower; roast--spring lamb with green peas, broiled chicken or broiled pig's feet; dessert--rhubarb pie, ice cream and cake, apple sauce, stewed fruits, baked pear or baked apple, mixed fruits; cheese of three varieties, and coffee to wind up on.

The proprietor doesn't cut out his portions with a pair of b.u.t.tonhole scissors, either, or sauce them with a medicine-dropperful of gravy. He gives a big, full, satisfying helping, well cooked and well served.

There is some romance in the San Francisco cooking, too, if the oldtimers who bemourn the old days only realized it.

If this seeming officiousness on the part of a pa.s.sing wayfarer may be excused there is one more suggestion I should like to throw off for the benefit of the promoters of the exposition. Living somewhere in California is a man who should be looked up before the gates are opened, and he should be retained at a salary and staked out in suitable quarters as a special and added attraction. He is the most magnificent fish-liar in the known world! I do not know his name--he was so busy pouring fish stories down a party of us that he didn't take time to stop and tell his name--but no great difficulty should be experienced in finding him. There is only one of him alive--these world's wonders never occur in pairs. That would cheapen them and make them commonplace.

He swam into our ken--if a mixed metaphor may be pardoned--on a train leaving Oakland for the East. We were sitting in the club car--half a dozen or so of us--when he drifted along. At first look no one would have suspected him of being so gifted a creature as he proved himself to be. He was a round, short, tub-shaped man, with a b.u.t.ton nose, and a double chin that ran all the way round and lapped over at the back. But, though his appearance was deceiving, anybody could tell with half an eye that he excelled in extemporaneous conversation. Right off he began shadow-boxing and sparring about, waiting for an opening. In a minute he got it.

The tall man with the long face and the stiff white pompadour, who looked like a patent toothbrush, gave him his chance. The tall man happened to look out of the car window and see in an inlet a fleet of beached fishing boats, and he remarked on their picturesqueness. That was the cue.

"Speaking of fishing," said the b.u.t.ton-nosed man, "I'll tell you people something that'll maybe interest you. You may not believe it, either, me being a stranger to you; but it's the Gospel truth or I wouldn't be sitting here a-telling it. I reckon I've done more fishing in my day and more different kinds of fishing than any man alive. I come originally from a prime fishing state--Michigan--and I've lived in Colorado and Montana and Oregon and all the other good fishing states out West. But, take it from me, friends, California is the best fishing state there is.

Yes, sir; when it comes to fishing, old California lays it over 'em all--she takes the rag right off the bush! I'm the one that oughter know because I've fished her from end to end and crossways--sea fishing, creek fishing, lake fishing and all.

"Down at Catalina they'll tell you, if you ask 'em, that I'm the man that ketched the biggest tuna that ever come out of that ocean. It took me fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to land him, and during that time he towed me and an eighteen-foot boat, and the fellow I had along for boatman, over forty-four miles--I measured it afterward to be sure--and the friction of the reel spinning round wore my line down till it wasn't no thicker in places than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regular specialty--trouts and ba.s.ses are my special favorites; and up in the mountains is where I mostly do my fishing.

"I'm just sort of hanging round now waiting for the snow to move out so's I can go up there and start fishing.

"Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way luck will run fishing? Oncet when I was living up there I fished stiddy, day in and day out, for two seasons and never got a bite that you could rightly call a bite. And then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck switched and in exactly forty-five minutes by the watch--by this here very watch I'm carrying now in my pocket--I ketched seventy-two of them big old black ba.s.ses out of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!"

We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound ba.s.s in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken as a first dose from a strange pract.i.tioner. And it was hard to believe they had all been ba.s.ses; if only for the sake of variety there should have been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time for reflection--and digestion.

Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himself into the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffin drummer from Des Moines who had the round, smooth face and the round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I think he wore the bow there purposely--it simplified matters so when you were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of the air in these parts.

"You're right there, mister," broke in the b.u.t.ton-nosed man, snapping him up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but you oughter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there it would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I remember oncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting my fishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff--just so--and down below I saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them big trouts--steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots on their sides and their fins waving, and their gills working up and down.

"I figured out that it was fully a hundred feet down to the water and the water would natch.e.l.ly be tolerable deep; so I let all my line run off the reel, a hundred and sixty feet of it; and I fished and fished and fished--and didn't get a strike, let alone a nibble. Yet I could look over and see all these hungry trouts down below looking up with expectant looks in their eyes--I could see their eyes--and jumping round regardless; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait--changed from live bait to dead bait, and back again to live--and still there wasn't nothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Something's wrong, sure! This thing'll stand looking into.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: IT'S A GREAT THING OUT THERE TO BE A NATIVE SON]

"So I snoops round and finds a place where there's a sort of a sloping place in the bluff; and I braces my pole in a rock and leaves it there; and I climbs down--and then I sees what's the matter. It was that there clear air that had fooled me! It was three hundred feet if it was an inch down from the top of that there bluff to the creek, and the hole was fully a hundred feet deep--maybe more; and away down at the plumb bottom all them trouts was congregated in a circlelike, looking up mighty greedy and longing at my bait, which was a live frog, dangling two hundred and forty-odd feet up in the air. But, speaking of clear air, that wasn't nothing at all compared to some other things I could tell you about. Another time----"

At this point I rose and escaped to the diner. When I got back at the end of an hour the other survivors told me that, up to the time he got off at Sacramento, the b.u.t.ton-nosed man had been getting better and better all the time. He certainly ought to be rounded up and put on exhibition at the Fair to show those puny and feeble Eastern fish-liars what the incomparable Western climate can produce.

I almost forgot to mention San Francisco's chief product--Native Sons. A Native Son is one who has acquired special merit by being born in the state. You would think credit would be given to the subject's parents, where it belongs; but, no--that is not the California way. It's a great thing out there to be a Native Son. It counts in politics, and in society, and at the clubs.

And, after that, the next best thing is to be a Southerner, either by birth or descent. People who have Southern blood in their veins are very proud of it and can join a club on the strength of it; and some of them do a lot of talking about it. The definition is rather elastic--anybody whose ancestors worked on the Southern Pacific is eligible, I think.

Of course, there are a lot of real Southerners; but there are a whole lot more who--so it seemed to me--are giving remarkably realistic imitations of the type known in New York as the Professional Southerner.

San Francisco excels in Southerners--the regular kind and the self-made kind both.

I was out there too early in the year to meet the justly celebrated San Francisco flea. He's a Native Son, too; but there isn't so much bragging being done on his account.

_LOOKING FOR LO_

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Looking for Lo_

IF it is your desire to observe the Red Indian of the Plains engaged in his tribal sports and pastimes wait for the Wild West Show; there is sure to be one coming to your town before the season is over. Or if you are bloodthirsty by nature and yearn to see him prancing round upon the warpath, destroying the hated paleface and strewing the soil with his shredded fragments, restrain your longings until next fall and then arrange to take in the football game between Carlisle and Princeton.

But, whatever you do, do not go journeying into the Far West in the hope of finding him in great number upon his native heath, for the chances are that you won't find him there in great number; and if you do he will probably be a considerable disappointment to you; because, unless he is paid for it, the red brother absolutely declines to be picturesque.

I am reliably informed that he is still reasonably numerous in Oklahoma, in North and South Dakota, and in Montana and Washington; but my itinerary did not include those states. I did not see a live Indian--that is to say, a live Indian recognizable as such--in Nevada or in Colorado or in Utah, or in a four-hour run across one corner of Wyoming.

In upward of a thousand miles of travel through California I saw just one Indian--a bronze youth of perhaps twenty summers and, I should say, possibly half that many baths. He was wearing the scenario of a pair of overalls and a straw hat in an advanced state of decrepitude, and he was working in a truckpatch; if a native had not told me what he was I would have pa.s.sed him by for a sunburnt hired hand.

I saw a few Indians in New Mexico and a few more in Arizona, but not a great many at that; and these, as I found out later, were mainly engaged to linger in the vicinity of stations and hotels along the line for the purpose of adding a touch of color to the surroundings and incidentally selling souvenirs to the tourists.

Mind you, I'm not saying there are not plenty of Indians in those states; but they mostly stay on their reservations and the reservations unfortunately are not, as a rule, near the railroad stations. A traveler going through the average small Southern town sees practically the entire strength of the colored citizenry gathered at the depot and jumps at the conclusion that the population is from ninety to ninety-five per cent. black. In the West he sees maybe one little Indian settlement in a stretch of five or six hundred miles, and he figures that the Indian is practically an extinct species.

Of course, though, he is not extinct. In these piping commercial days of acute compet.i.tion he has no time to be gallivanting down to the depot every time a through train rolls in, especially as the depot is frequently eighty or ninety miles distant from his domicile. He is closely confined at home turning out souvenirs. It is a pity, too, that he cannot spare more of his time for this simple and inexpensive pleasure. In one week's study of the pa.s.sing tourist breed he could see enough funny sights and hear enough funny things--unintentionally funny things--to keep his family entertained on many a long winter's evening as they sit peacefully in the wigwam making knickknacks for the Eastern trade.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EACH NAVAJO SQUAW WEAVES ON AN AVERAGE NINE THOUSAND BLANKETS A YEAR]

No, sirree! Those Southwestern tribes are far from being extinct--especially the Navajos. You can, in a way, approximate the tribal strength of the Navajos by the number of Navajo blankets you see.

From Colorado to the Coast the Navajo blanket carpets the earth. I'll bet any amount within reason that in six weeks' time I saw ten million Navajo blankets if I saw one. As for other things--bows and arrows, for example--well, I do not wish to exaggerate; but had I bought all the wooden bows and arrows that were offered to me I could take them and build a rustic footbridge across the Delaware River at Trenton, with a neat handrail all the way over. Taking the figures of the last census as a working basis I calculate that each Navajo squaw weaves, on an average, nine thousand blankets a year; and while she is so engaged her husband, the metal worker of the establishment, is producing a couple of tons of silver bracelets set with turquoises. For prolixity of output I know of no female in the entire animal kingdom that can compare with the Navajo squaw--unless it is the lady Potomac shad.

Right here I wish to claim one proud distinction: I went from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again--and I did not buy a single blanket! Since the return of the Lewis & Clark expedition I am probably the only white person who has ever done this. Goodness knows the call was strong enough and the opportunities abundant enough; blankets were available for my inspection at every railroad station, at every hotel, and at every one of two hundred thousand souvenir stores that I encountered--but I was under orders from headquarters.

As we were bidding farewell to our family before starting West, our wife said to us in firm, decided accents: "I have already picked out a place where we can hide the Cheyenne war-bonnet. We can get rid of the moccasins and the stone hatchets and the beadwork breastplates by storing them in a trunk up in the attic. But do not bring a Navajo blanket back to this already crowded establishment!" So we restrained ourselves. But it was a hard struggle and took a heroic effort.

I recall one blanket, done in gray and black and red and white, and decorated with the figures of the Thunder Bird and the Swastika, the Rising Sun and the Jig Saw, and other Indian signs, symbols and emblems.

It was with the utmost difficulty that I wrenched myself away from the vicinity of this treasure. And then, when I got back home, feeling proud as Punch over having withstood temptation in all its forms, almost the first words I heard, spoken in tones of deep disappointment, were these: "Well, why didn't you bring a Navajo blanket for the den? You know we've always wanted one!" Wasn't that just like a woman?