of the highest volcanoes, cheering the grey wilderness with their rosy bloom, and literally giving beauty for ashes.
Beyond the moraines the trail turns to the left toward Mono Lake, now in sight around the spurs of the mountains, and touches its western shore at a distance from the foot of the pass of about six miles. Skirting the lake, you make your way over low bluffs and moraine piles, and through many a tangle of snow-crinkled aspens and berry bushes, growing on the banks of fine, dashing streams that come from the snows of the summits.
Here are the favorite camping grounds of the Indians, littered with piles of pine-burrs from which the seeds have been beaten. Many of their fragile willow huts are broken and abandoned; others arch airily over family groups that are seen lying at ease, pictures of thoughtless contentment, their wild, animal eyes glowering at you as you pass, their black shocks of hair perchance bedecked with red castilleias and their bent, bulky stomachs filled with no white man knows what. Some of these mountain streams pouring into the lake have deep and swift currents at the fording places, and their channels are so roughly paved with boulders that crossing them at the time of high water is rather dangerous. That Mono Lake should have no outlet, while so many perennial streams flow into it, seems strange at first sight, before the immense waste by evaporation in so dry an atmosphere is recognized. Most of its shores being low, any considerable rise of its waters greatly enlarges its area, followed of course by a corresponding increase of evaporation, which tends towards constancy of level within comparatively narrow limit. Nevertheless, on the flanks of the mountains, drawn in well-marked lines, you may see several ancient beaches that mark the successive levels at which the lake stood toward the close of the glacial period, the highest more than six hundred feet above the present level. Then, under a climate as marked by coolness and excessive moisture as the present by devouring drought, the dimensions of the lake must have been vastly greater. Indeed, a study of the whole plateau region, named by Fremont "the Great Basin," extending from the Sierra to the Wahsatch mountains, a distance of 400 miles, shows that it was covered by inland seas of fresh water that were only partially separated by the innumerable hills and mountain ranges of the region, which then existed as islands, forming an archipelago of unrivaled grandeur.
The lake water is as clear as the snow-strearns that feed it, but intensely acrid and nauseating from the excessive quantities of salts accumulated by evaporation beneath a burning sun. Of course no fish can live in it, but large flocks of geese, ducks, and swans come from beyond the mountains at certain seasons, and gulls also in great numbers, to breed on a group of volcanic islands that rise near the center of the lake, thus making the dead, bitter sea lively and cheerful while they stay. The eggs of the gulls used to be gathered for food by the Indians, who floated to the islands on rafts made of willows; but since the occurrence of a great storm on the lake a few years ago, that overtook them on their way back from the islands, they have not ventured from the shore. Their rafts were broken up and many were drowned. This disaster, which some still living have good cause to remember, together with certain superstitious fears concerning evil spirits supposed to dwell in the lake and rule its waves, make them content with the safer and far more important product of the shores, chief of which is the larvae of a small fly that breeds in the slimy froth in the shallows. When the worms are ripe, and the waves have collected them and driven them up the beach in rich oily windrows, then old and young make haste to the curious harvest, and gather he living grain in baskets and buckets of every description. After being washed and dried in the sun it is stored for winter. Raw or cooked, it is regarded as a fine luxury, and delicious dressing for other kinds of food acorn-mush, clover-salad, grass-seed-pudding, etc. So important is this small worm to the neighboring tribes, it forms a subject of dispute about as complicated and perennial as the Newfoundland cod. After waging worm-wars until everybody is weary and hungry, the belligerents mark off boundary lines, assigning stated sections of the shores to each tribe, where the harvest may be gathered in peace until fresh quarrels have time to grow. Tribes too feeble to establish rights must needs procure their worm supply from their more fortunate neighbors, giving nuts, acorns or ponies in exchange.
This "diet of worms" is further enriched by a large, fat caterpillar, a species of silk-worm found on the yellow pines to the south of the lake; and as they also gather the seeds of this pine, they get a double crop from it--meat and bread from the same tree.
Forbidding as this grey, ashy wilderness is to the dweller in green fields, to the red man it is a paradise full of all the good things of life. A Yosemite Indian with whom I was acquainted while living in the valley, went over the mountains to Mono every year on a pleasure trip, and when I asked what could induce him to go to so poor a country when, as a hotel servant, he enjoyed all the white man's good things in abundance, he replied, that Mono had better things to eat than anything to be found in the hotel--plenty deer, plenty wild sheep, plenty antelope, plenty worm, plenty berry, plenty sagehen, plenty rabbit--drawing a picture of royal abundance that from his point of view surpassed everything else the world had to offer.
A sail on the lake develops many a fine picture--the natives along the curving shores seen against so grand a mountain background; water birds stirring the glassy surface into white dancing spangles; the islands, black, pink and grey, rising into a cloud of white wings of gulls; volcanoes dotting the hazy plain; and, grandest of all overshadowing all, the mighty barrier wall of the Sierra, heaving into the sky from the water's edge, and stretching away to north and south with its marvelous wealth of peaks and crests and deep-cutting notches keenly defined, or fading away in the soft purple distance; cumulus clouds swelling over all in huge mountain bosses of pearl, building a mountain range of cloud upon a range of rock, the one as firmly sculptured, and as grand and showy and substantial as the other.
The magnificent cluster of volcanoes to the south of the lake may easily be visited from the foot of Bloody Canyon, the distance being only about six miles. The highest of the group rises about 2,700 feet above the lake. They are all post-glacial in age, having been erupted from what was once the bottom of the south end of the lake, through stratified glacial drift. During their numerous periods of activity they have scattered showers of ashes and cinders over all the adjacent plains and mountains within a radius of twenty to thirty miles.
Nowhere within the bounds of our wonder-filled land are the antagonistic forces of fire and ice brought more closely and contrastingly together. So striking are the volcanic phenomena, we seem to be among the very hearths and firesides of nature. Then turning to the mountains while standing in drifting ashes, we behold huge moraines issuing from the cool jaws of the great canyons, marking the pathways of glaciers that crawled down the mountain sides laden with debris and pushed their frozen floods into the deep waters of the lake in thundering icebergs, as they are now descending into the inland waters of Alaska, not a single Arctic character being wanting, where now the traveler is blinded in a glare of tropical light.
Americans are little aware as yet of the grandeur of their own land, as is too often manifested by going on foreign excursions, while the wonders of our unrivaled plains and mountains are left unseen. We have Laplands and Labradors of our own, and streams from glacier-caves--rivers of mercy sacred as the Himalaya-born Ganges. We have our Shasta Vesuvius also, and bay, with its Golden Gate, beautiful as the Bay of Naples. And here among our inland plains are African Saharas, dead seas, and deserts, dotted with oases, where congregate the travelers, coming in long caravans--the trader with his goods and gold, and the Indian with his weapons--the Bedouin of the California desert.
III. The Yosemite Valley
The far-famed Yosemite Valley lies well back on the western slope of the Sierra, about a hundred and fifty miles to the eastward of San Francisco. It is about seven miles long, from half a mile to a mile wide, and nearly a mile deep, carved in the solid granite flank of the range. Its majestic walls are sculptured into a bewildering variety of forms--domes and gables, towers and battlements, and sheer massive cliffs, separated by grooves and furrows
