Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Roughing it De Luxe
On the other hand, you can step round any corner in San Francisco and walk into that institution which people in other large cities are forever seeking and never finding—a table-d'hôte 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 consommé; fish—sole, salmon, bass, sand dabs, mussels or clams; entrées—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 buttonhole 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 passing 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 button 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 button-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 basses 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 basses out of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!"
We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound bass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken as a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believe they had all been basses; 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 button-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 natchelly 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.'
"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 button-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
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 passed 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 competition 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 passing 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.
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?
Though I refrained from seeking bargains in the blankets of the aborigine, I sought diligently enough for the aborigine himself. I had my first glimpse of him in Northern New Mexico just after we had come down out of Colorado. Accompanied by his lady, he was languidly reposing on the platform in front of a depot, with his wares tastefully arranged at his feet. As a concession to the acquired ideals of the Eastern visitor he had a red sofa tidy draped round his shoulders, and there was a tired-looking hen-feather caught negligently in his back hair; and his squaw displayed ornamented leggings below the hems of her simple calico walking skirt. But these adornments, I gathered, constituted the calling costume, so to speak.
When at home in his village the universal garment of the Pueblo male is the black sateen shirt of commerce. He puts it on and wears it until it is taken up by absorption, and then it is time to put on another. These shirts do not require washing; but, among the best Pueblo families, I understand it is customary—once in so often—to have them searched. And thus is the wild life of the West kept down.
Farther along the line, in Arizona, we met the Hopi and the Navajo—delegations from both of these tribes having been imported from the reservations to give an added touch of picturesqueness to the principal hotel of the Grand Cañon. The Hopi, who excels at snake dancing and pottery work, is a mannerly little chap; and his daughter, with her hair done up in elaborate whorl effects in fancied imitation of the squash blossom—the squash being the Hopi emblem of purity—is a decidedly attractive feature of the landscape.
The Hopi women are industrious little bodies, clever at basket weaving—and the men work, too, when not engaged in attending lodge; for the Hopis are the ritualists of the Southwest, and every Hopi is a confirmed joiner. Their secret societies exist to-day, uncorrupted and unchanged, just as they have survived for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. In the Hopi House at Grand Cañon there is a reproduction of a kiva or underground temple. It isn't underground—it is located upstairs; but in all other regards it is supposed to conform exactly to one of the real ceremonial chambers of the Hopis. The dried-mud walls are covered thickly with symbolic devices, painted on; and there is an altar tricked out with totems of the Powamu clan, one of the biggest of these societies.
Just in front of the altar, with its wooden figures of the War God, the God of Growing Things, and the God of Thunder, is a sand painting set in the floor like a mosaic. When one of the clans is getting ready for a service the official high priest or medicine man of that particular clan sprinkles clean brown sand upon the flat earth before the altar and upon this foundation, by trickling between his thumb and forefinger tiny streams of sands of other colors, he makes the mystic figures that he worships. After the rites are over he obliterates the design with his hand, leaving the space bare for the next clan.
In the Hopi House at Grand Cañon a sand painting sacred to the Antelope clan is preserved under glass for the benefit of visitors. The manager of the establishment, a Mr. Smith, who has spent most of his life among the tribes of Arizona, told us a story about this.
Two years ago this summer, a party of Mystic Shriners on an excursion visited the cañon. Mr. Smith chaperoned one group of them on their tour through the Hopi House. In the sand painting of the kiva they seemed to find something that particularly interested them. They put their heads together, talking in undertones and pointing—so Smith said—first at one design and then at another. An old Hopi buck, a priest of the Antelope clan, was lounging in the low doorway watching them. What the Shriners said to one another could have had no significance for him, even admitting that he heard them, for he did not understand a word of English; but suddenly he reached forth a withered hand and plucked Smith by the sleeve. I am letting Smith tell the rest of the tale just as he told it to us:
"The Hopi pointed to one of the Shriners, an elderly man who came, I think, from somewhere in Illinois, and in his own tongue he said to me: 'That man with the white hair is a Hopi—and he is a member of my clan!' I said to him: 'You speak foolishness—that man comes from the East and never until to-day saw a Hopi in his whole life!' The medicine man showed more excitement than I ever saw an Indian show.
"'You are lying to me!' he said. 'That white-haired man is a Hopi, or else his people long ago were Hopis.' I laughed at him and that ruffled his dignity and he turned away, and I couldn't get another word out of him.
"As the Shriners were passing out I halted the white-haired man and said to him: 'The Hopi medicine man insists that you are a Hopi and that you know something about his clan.' 'Well,' he said, 'I'm no Hopi; but I think I do know something about some of the things he seems to revere. Where is this medicine man?'
"I pointed to where the old Indian was squatted in a corner, sulking; he walked right over to him and motioned to him, and the Hopi got up and they went into the kiva together. I do not know what passed between them—certainly no words passed—but in about ten minutes the Shriner came out, and he had a puzzled look on his face.
"'I've just had the most wonderful experience,' he said to me, 'that I've ever had in my whole life. Of course that Indian isn't a Mason, but in a corrupted form he knows something about Masonry; and where he learned it I can't guess. Why, there are lodges in this country where I actually believe he could work his way in.'"
Not being either a Mason or a Hopi, I cannot undertake to vouch for the story or to contradict it; but Smith has the reputation of being a truthful man.
The Navajos are the aristocrats of the Southwestern country. They are dignified, cleanly in their personal habits, and orderly; and they are wonderful artisans. In addition to being wonderful weavers and excellent silversmiths, they shine at agriculture and at stock raising and sheep raising. They are born horse-traders, too, and at driving a bargain it is said a buck Navajo can spot a Scotchman five balls any time and beat him out; but they have the name of being absolutely honest and absolutely truthful.
This same Mr. Smith, who has lived several years on the Navajo reservation and who is an adopted member of the tribe, took several of us to pay a formal call upon a Navajo subchief, who spends the tourist season at the Grand Cañon. The old chap, long-haired and the color of a prime smoke-cured ham, received us with perfect courtesy into his winter residence, the same being a circular hut contrived by overlapping timbers together in a kind of basket design and then coating the logs inside and out with adobe clay.
The place was clean and free from all unpleasant odors. In the middle of the floor a fire burned, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. At one side was the primitive forge, where the head of the house worked in metals; and against the far wall his squaw was hunkered down, weaving a blanket on her wooden loom. A couple of his young offspring were playing about, dressed simply in their little negligee-strings. The mud walls were hung with completed blankets. Long, stringy strips of dried beef and mutton—the national dishes of the tribe—were dangling from cross-pieces overhead; and on a rug upon the earthen floor lay a glittering pile of bracelets and brooches that had been made by the old man out of Mexican dollars. When we came away, after spending fifteen minutes or so as their guests, the whole family came with us; but the old man tarried a minute to fasten a small brass padlock through a hasp upon his wattled wooden door.
"Up on the reservation, away from the railroads and the towns, there are no locks upon the doors," Smith said.
"Why is that?" I asked.
Smith grinned. "I'll tell the old man what you said and let him answer."
He clucked in guttural monosyllables to the chief, and the chief clucked back briefly, meanwhile eyeing me with a whimsical squint out of his puckered old eyes. And then Smith translated:
"Why should we lock our doors in the place where we live? There are no white men there!"
I will confess that as a representative of the dominant Caucasian stock I had, for the moment, no apt reply ready. Later I thought of a very fitting retort, which undoubtedly would have flattened that impertinent Indian as flat as a flounder; unfortunately, though, it only came to me after several days of study, and by that time I was upward of a thousand miles away from him. But I am saving it to use on him the next time I go back to the Grand Cañon. No mere Indian can slander our race, even if he is telling the truth—not while I'm around!
Down in Southern California I rather figured on finding a large swarm of Mission Indians clustering about every Mission; but, alas! they weren't there, either. We saw a few worshipers and plenty of tourists, but no Indians—at least, I didn't see any personally. There is something wonderfully impressive about a first trip to any one of those old gray churches; everything about it is eloquent with memories of that older civilization which this Western country knew long before the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon breeds came over the Divide and down the Pacific Slope, filled with their lust for gold and lands, craving ever more power and more territory over which to float the Stars and Stripes.
The vanished day of the Spaniard now lives only within the walls of the early Missions, but it invests them with that added veneration which attaches to whatever is old and traditional and historic. We haven't a great deal that is very old in our own country; maybe that explains why we fuss over it so when we come across it in Europe.
There is one Mission which in itself, it seemed to me, is almost worth a trip clear across the continent to see—the one at Santa Barbara. It is up the side of a gentle foothill, with the mountains of the Coast Range behind it. Down below the roofs and spires of a brisk little city show through green clumpage, and still farther beyond the blue waters of the Pacific may be seen.
Parts of this Mission are comparatively new; there are retouchings and restorations that date back only sixty or seventy years, but most of it speaks to you of an earlier century than this and an earlier race than the one that now peoples the land. You pass through walls of solid masonry that are sixteen feet thick and pierced by narrow passages; you climb winding stairs to a squat tower where sundry cracked brazen bells, the gifts of Spanish gentlemen who died a hundred years ago perhaps, swing by withes of ancient rawhide from great, worm-gnawed, hand-riven beams; you walk through the Mission burying-ground, past crumbly old family vaults with half-obliterated names and titles and dates upon their ovenlike fronts, and you wander at will among the sunken individual graves under the palms and pepper trees.
Most convincing of all to me were the stone-flagged steps at the door of the church itself, for they are all worn down like the teeth of an old horse—in places they are almost worn in two. Better than any guidebook patter of facts and figures—better than the bells and the graves and the hand-made beams—these steps convey to the mind a sense of age.
You stand and look at them, and you see there the tally of vanished generations—the heavy boot of the conquistador; the sandaled foot of the old padre; the high heel of a dainty Spanish-born lady; the bare, horny sole of the Indian convert—each of them taking its tiny toll out of stone and mortar—each of them wearing away its infinitesimal mite—until through years and years the firm stone was scored away and channeled out and left at it is now, with curves in it and deep hollows.
Given a dime's worth of imagination to start on, almost any one could people that spot with the dead-and-gone figures of that shadowy past; could forget the trolley cars curving right up to the walls; the electric lights strung in globular festoons along the ancient ceilings of the porticoes; the roofs of the new, shiny modern bungalows dotting the gentle slopes below—could forget even that the brown-cowled, rope-girthed father who served as guide spoke with a strong German accent; could almost forgive the impious driver of the rig that brought one here for referring to this place as the Mish. But be sure there would be one thing to bring you hurtling back again to earth, no matter how far aloft your fancy soared—and that would be the ever-present souvenir-collecting tourist, to whom no shrine is holy and no memory is sacred.
There is no charge for admission to the Mission. All comers, regardless of breed or creed, are welcomed; and on constant duty is a gentle-voiced priest, ready to lead the way to the inner rooms where priceless relics of the day when the Spaniards first came to California are displayed; and into the church itself, with its candles burning before the high altar and the quaint old holy pictures ranged thick upon the walls; and through the burying-ground—and to all the rest of it; and for this service there is nothing to pay. On departing the visitor, if he chooses, may leave a coin behind; but he doesn't have to—it isn't compulsory.
There is a kind of traveler who repays this hospitality by defiling the walls with his inconsequential name, scratched in or scrawled on, and by toting away as a souvenir whatever portable object he can confiscate when nobody is looking. Up in the bell tower the masonry is all defaced and pocked where these vandals have dug at it with pocketknives; and as we were coming away, one of them—a typical specimen—showed me with deep pride half of a brick pouched in his coat pocket. It seemed that while the priest's back was turned he had pried it loose from the frilled ornamentation of a vault in the burying-ground at the cost only of his self-respect—admitting that he had any of that commodity in stock—and a broken thumbnail. It was, indeed, a priceless treasure and he valued it accordingly. And yet, at a distance of ten feet in an ordinary light, no one not in the secret could have said offhand whether that half-brick came out of a Mission tomb in California or a smokehouse in Arkansas.
