Part 6

Fate and flowers have carried me to California, and I have reveled and luxuriated amid its plants and mountains nearly four months. I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains, and, were it not for a thought now and then of loneliness and isolation, the pleasure of my existence would be complete.

I have forgotten whether I wrote you from Cuba or not. I spent four happy weeks there in January and February.

I saw only a very little of the grandeur of Panama, for my health was still in wreck, and I did not venture to wait the arrival of another steamer. I had but half a day to collect specimens. The Isthmus train rushed on with camel speed through the gorgeous Eden of vines and palms, and I could only gaze from the car platform and weep and pray that the Lord would some day give me strength to see it better.

After a delightful sail among the scenery of the sea I arrived in San Francisco in April and struck out at once into the country. I followed the Diablo foothills along the San José Valley to Gilroy, thence over the Diablo Mountains to valley of San Joaquin by the Pacific pass, thence down the valley opposite the mouth of the Merced River, thence across the San Joaquin, and up into the Sierra Nevada to the mammoth trees of Mariposa and the glorious Yosemite, thence down the Merced to this place.

The goodness of the weather as I journeyed towards Pacheco was beyond all praise and description, fragrant and mellow and bright. The air was perfectly delicious, sweet enough for the breath of angels; every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve ever tasted better in their balmiest nook.

The last of the Coast Range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty, and they were robed with the greenest grass and richest light I ever beheld, and colored and shaded with millions of flowers of every hue, chiefly of purple and golden yellow; and hundreds of crystal rills joined songs with the larks, filling all the valley with music like a sea, making it an Eden from end to end.

The scenery, too, and all of Nature in the pass is fairly enchanting,--strange and beautiful mountain ferns, low in the dark cañons and high upon the rocky, sunlit peaks, banks of blooming shrubs, and sprinklings and gatherings of [ ] flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. And oh, what streams are there! beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go in the shadow and light, onward upon their lovely changing pathways to the sea; and hills rise over hills, and mountains over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in most glorious, overpowering, unreadable majesty; and when at last, stricken with faint like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you, for there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foothills is laid a grand, smooth outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance. That plain is the valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the great Sierra Nevadas. The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains. Florida is indeed a land of flowers, but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places more than a hundred are living here. Here, here is Florida. Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between, as in our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled in the flowers; not, as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers heaped and gathered into deep, glowing masses, but side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, but free and separate, one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petaled flowers between.

Before studying the flowers of this valley, and their sky and all of the furniture and sounds and adornments of their home, one can scarce believe that their vast assemblies are permanent, but rather that, actuated by some plant purpose, they had convened from every plain, and mountain, and meadow of their kingdom, and that the different coloring of patches, acres, and miles marked the bounds of the various tribe and family encampments. And now just stop and see what I gathered from a square yard opposite the Merced. I have no books and cannot give specific names:--

Orders Open flowers Species Compositæ 132,125 2 yellow, 3305 heads Leguminosæ 2620 2 purple and white Scrophulariaceæ 169 1 purple Umbellaceæ 620 1 yellow Geraniaceæ 22 1 purple Rubiaceæ 40 1 white 85 Natural order unknown 60 Plants unflowered Polemoniaceæ 407 2 purple Gramineæ 29,830 3; stems about 700; spikelets 10,700 Musci 10,000,000 2 purples, Dicranum, Tunar

Total of open flowers, 165,912 “ “ flowers in bud, 100,000 “ “ withered, 40,000 “ “ natural orders, 9-11 “ “ species, 16-17

The yellow of these Compositæ is extremely deep and rich and bossy, as though the sun had filled their petals with a portion of his very self. It exceeds the purple of all the others in superficial quantity forty or fifty times their whole amount, but to an observer who first looks downward and then takes a more distant view, the yellow gradually fades and purple predominates because nearly all of the purple flowers are higher. In depth the purple stratum is about ten or twelve inches, the yellow seven or eight, and second purple of mosses one.

I’m sorry my page is done. I have not told anything. I thought of you, Mrs. Carr, when I was in the glorious Yosemite and of the prophecy of “the Priests” that you would see it and worship there with your Doctor and Priest and I. It is by far the grandest of all of the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter. It must be the sanctum sanctorum of the Sierras, and I trust that you will all be led to it.

Remember me to the Doctor. I hope he has the pleasure of sowing in good and honest hearts the glorious truth of science to which he has devoted his life. Give my love to all your boys and my little Butler.

Adieu. J. MUIR.

Address: Hopeton, Merced Co., Cala.

At a sheep ranch between the Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers, November 1st, [1868.]

I was extremely glad to receive yet one more of your ever welcome letters. It found me two weeks ago. I rode over to Hopeton to seek for letters. I had to pass through a bed of Compositæ two or three miles in diameter. They were in the glow of full prime, forming a lake of the purest Compositæ gold I ever beheld. Some single plants had upwards of three thousand heads. Their petal-surface exceeded their leaf-surface thirty or forty times. Because of the constancy of the winds all these flowers faced in one direction (southeast), and I thought, as I gazed upon myriads of joyous plant beings clothed in rosy golden light, What would old Linnæus or Mrs. Carr say to this?

I was sorry to think of the loss of your letters, but it is just what might be expected from the wretched mail arrangements of the South.

I am not surprised to hear of your leaving Madison and am anxious to know where your lot will be cast. If you go to South America soon, I shall hope to meet you, and if you should decide to seek the shores of the Pacific in California before the end of the year, I shall find you and be glad to make another visit to the Yosemite with your Doctor and Priest, according to the old plan. I know the way up the rocks to the falls, and I know too the abode of many a precious mountain fern. I gathered plenty for you, but you must see them at home. Not an angel could tell a tithe of these glories.

If you make your home in California, I know from experience how keenly you will feel the absence of the special flowers you love. No others can fill their places; Heaven itself would not answer without Calypso and Linnæa.

I think that you will find in California just what you desire in climate and scenery, for both are so varied. March is the springtime of the plains, April the summer, and May the autumn. The other months are dry and wet winter, uniting with each other, and with the other seasons by splices and overlappings of very simple and very intricate kinds. I rode across the seasons in going to the Yosemite last spring. I started from the Joaquin in the last week of May. All the plain flowers, so lately fresh in the power of full beauty, were dead. Their parched leaves crisped and fell to powder beneath my feet, as though they had been “cast into the oven.” And they had not, like the plants of our West, weeks and months to grow old in, but they died ere they could fade, standing together holding out their branches erect and green as life. But they did not die too soon; they lived a whole life and stored away abundance of future life-principle in the seed.

After riding for two days in this autumn I found summer again in the higher foothills. Flower petals were spread confidingly open, the grasses waved their branches all bright and gay in the colors of healthy prime, and the winds and streams were cool. Forty or fifty miles further into the mountains, I came to spring. The leaves on the oak were small and drooping, and they still retained their first tintings of crimson and purple, and the wrinkles of their bud folds were distinct as if newly opened, and all along the rims of cool brooks and mild sloping places thousands of gentle mountain flowers were tasting life for the first time.

A few miles farther “onward and upward” I found the edge of winter. Scarce a grass could be seen. The last of the lilies and spring violets were left below; the winter scales were still shut upon the buds of the dwarf oaks and alders; the grand Nevada pines waved solemnly to cold, loud winds among rushing, changing stormclouds. Soon my horse was plunging in snow ten feet in depth, the sky became darker and more terrible, many-voiced mountain winds swept the pines, speaking the dread language of the cold north, snow began to fall, and in less than a week from the burning plains of the San Joaquin autumn was lost in the blinding snows of mountain winter.

Descending these higher mountains towards the Yosemite, the snow gradually disappeared from the pines and the sky, tender leaves unfolded less and less doubtfully, lilies and violets appeared again, and I once more found spring in the grand valley. Thus meet and blend the seasons of these mountains and plains, beautiful in their joinings as those of lake and land or of the bands of the rainbow. The room is full of talking men; I cannot write, and I only attempt to scrawl this note to thank you for all the good news and good thoughts and friendly wishes and remembrances you send.

My kindest wishes to the Doctor. I am sure you will be directed by Providence to the place where you will best serve the end of existence. My love to all your family.

Ever yours most cordially, J. M.

Near Snellings, Merced Co., [Cal.] February 24th, 1869.

Your two California notes from San Francisco and San Mateo reached me last evening, and I rejoice at the glad tidings they bring of your arrival in this magnificent land. I have thought of you hundreds of times in my seasons of deepest joy, amid the flower purple and gold of the plains, the fern fields in gorge and cañon, the sacred waters, tree columns, and the eternal unnameable sublimities of the mountains. Of all my friends you are the only one that understands my motives and enjoyments. Only a few weeks ago a true and liberal-minded friend sent me a large sheetful of terrible blue-steel orthodoxy, calling me from clouds and flowers to the practical walks of politics and philanthropy. Mrs. Carr, thought I, never lectured thus. I am glad, indeed, that you are here to read for yourself these glorious lessons of sky and plain and mountain, which no mortal power can ever speak. I thought when in the Yosemite Valley last spring that the Lord had written things there that you would be allowed to read some time.