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Show CHAPTER X. ' THE WONDERS OF CALIFORNIA. ALL aboard for Yosemite and the Big Trees ! How the mind swells as these words are called through the hotel,, and the fancy paints what is to come : giant vegetation and wondrous woods ; the work of riotous nature in a tropical clime and fertile soil, exceeding all the wonders of romance with growing reality; rocky canons and happy valleys; glacier- hewn cliffs, reared thousands of feet in the air; waterfalls and mirror lakes ; immense flumes, cut by living streams in the solid granite; majestic falls, and crystal cascades, foaming from a hundred hills. But between us and these wonders intervene many miles of weari-some travel, days of toil and nights of broken rest. Before my visit I wondered that so many excursionists visited California, and never went to Yosemite or the Big Trees. I wonder no longer; for the trip is one which may well make the most hardy hesitate, though truly as-sured that in the end he shall see wonders that have no equal upon this planet. Two hundred and fifty miles of staging upon the rocky Sierras, beneath an August sun, and half the time enveloped in red dust, are enough to make one seriously ask, Does it pay to visit Yosemite? We leave chilly " Frisco " at 4 P. M., and spend the night at Stock-ton, experiencing in that short distance about as great a change of climate as if we should go in April from Chicago to New Orleans. Thence at daylight we take the Stockton and Copperopolis Railroad, which runs to Milton, where the foothills begin. In California, every thing under two thousand feet high is called a hill ; if it leads up to a mountain, a foothill. At 8 o'clock, of a sultry morning, we take the stage at Milton and strike north- east, over a dusty road, cheered at rare intervals by a transient breath of wind. Copperopolis is one of the dead mining towns of the Sierras, built in " the great copper excitement." Its history is like that of other mining towns which did not happen to be located in the right place ; all summed up in the Piiite Indian's comment: " Koshbannim! heap money spend ; goddam, no ketch ' um." ( 140) |
