California [antikvár]

First page: Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park. Previous pages: the California coast, and (facing page) a view south to Point Sur in BigSur.Mark Twain didn't care for California.It requires distance to give it charm, he said. In his opinion, the mountains, which he had to admit were imposing, need to be seen from far away to soften their ruggedness. The forests, monotonous as far as he was concerned, are isetter contemplated removed from their "reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine." The meadows didn't invite him to take his shoes off and run through them. He said that "the grass blades are unsociably wide apart with uncomley spots of barrens and betweens." As for San Francisco, he found it handsome at a fair distcince, but its architecture on closer inspection turned out to be "old-fashioned decaying, smoke grimed." He liked the climate there well enough, but complained that it almost never changed. "During eight months of the year," he wrote, "the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella Because you will require it Not just one day, but one-hundred-and-twenty days in hardly varying succession." He wasn't too pleased with Sacramento's climate, either. He couldn't help reminding his readers that "a very, very wicked soldier died there once and, of course, went sb-aight to the hottest comer of perdition - and the next day telegraphed back for his blankets." But he admitted that he found it interesting to "gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice cream, and wear white linen clothes and pant and perspire at eight or nine o'clock in the morning and at noon, put on your skates and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand feet alx)ve the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and m the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty cre^s ten thousand feet above the level of the sea There is transition for you! Where will you find another like it in the Western hemisphere?"It astounded him, he said, "to hear tourists from 'the States' go into ecstacies over the loveliness of ever-blooming California" Then he pointed out, "But perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Califomians, with the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer greens ofCalifornia verdure, stand astonished, and filled with worshipping admiration, in the presence of of the lavish richness, the brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spendthrift variety of form and species of foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of Paradise itself."It is pleasing to report that California survived Mark Twain.But apparently he wasn't alone in his opinion that it would never amount to much. It was one of the very first parts of the future continental United States to be discovered and explored Only three years after DeSoto trekked along the Gulf Coast from Florida to the Mississippi River, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed up the Pacific Coast in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. A storm drove him into San Diego harbor and kept him there for a week. But he had orders to follow. He had been sent to find a water route to Asia, not new territory, and as soon as the weather cleared, he was on his way e^ain. He sailed all the way up to Oregon, anticipating Mark Twain by observing California from a distance. But though he claimed eveiything he saw in the name of the Spanish king, he wasn't especially impressed. Nor were the people who read his reports. It took the Spanish another sixty years to get back to California And they might not have bothered even then if Sir Francis Drake hadn't been poking around reclaiming the coast for the English and, to add insult to injury, using it as a base for attacking Spanish treeisure ships bound for Mexico from the Philippines.Things quietened down when Drake went back to England, and the Spanish forgot about California again until 1603, when King Philip III discovered some dusty old files among his father's papers. They contained a sworn statement from the crew of a ship that had been driven ashore by a storm off the California coast and said they had seen the fabulous Golden City of Quivira with their own eyes. Coronado had spent the last several years of his life wandering through the Rocky Mountains and across the Great Plains looking for it But this seemed to be proof not only that the Golden City wasn't an Indian hoax, as many had grudgingly come to believe, but that it wasn't in Kansas, either. But when his explorers