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We dismounted and drove the horses down a bridle-path which I think was fully as crooked as a corkscrew, which I know to be as steep as the downward sweep of a rainbow, and which I believe to be the worst piece of road in the geography, except one in the Sandwich Islands, which I remember painfully, and possibly one or two mountain trails in the Sierra Nevadas.
Mills came in with another train of emigrants, not having seen an Indian on the trip, and from this time on there was no danger of such trains going from that region through Beckwith Pass, and as the road was now broken by the other train, these emigrants could cross the Sierra Nevadas without a guide. About this time four men with pack animals came along who claimed to be from Salt Lake.
"No kid is a road-kid until he has gone over 'the hill'" such was the law of The Road I heard expounded in Sacramento. All right, I'd go over the hill and matriculate. "The hill," by the way, was the Sierra Nevadas. The whole gang was going over the hill on a jaunt, and of course I'd go along. It was French Kid's first adventure on The Road. He had just run away from his people in San Francisco.
THE PACIFIC COAST. Tertiary deposits with marine fossils occur along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and are crumpled among the mountain masses of the Coast Ranges; it is hence inferred that the Great Valley of California was then a border sea, separated from the ocean by a chain of mountainous islands which were upridged into the Coast Ranges at a still later time.
And then we reached beautiful Lake Tahoe, set in the midst of the Sierra Nevadas, surrounded by a dozen snow-capped peaks, the staunch, unflinching satellites of one of God's wondrous treasures. It reflects a picture to be surpassed nowhere else in the world.
The sources of this river are in the Shanalin mountains, that separate Corea from Manjouria, and are ten or twelve thousand feet high. They resemble the Sierra Nevadas in having a lake twelve miles in circumference as high in air as Lake Tahoe. The affluents of the Songaree run through a plateau in some places densely wooded while in others it has wide belts of prairie and marshy ground.
At the first streak of dawn he tumbled quietly from his berth, and, putting on his clothes, stepped out to the front platform, where he took a long breath of the fresh morning air. The train was climbing a long grade in the Sierra Nevadas and the car couplings were groaning under the weight put upon them.
Beyond the Sierra Nevadas there was another civilization. In San Francisco hotel lobbies men and women passed and repassed one another dressed in Eastern fashions some months late, but Eastern fashions none the less. Newspapers proclaimed the latest tidings from the East in large type.
"Nary trouble," said Señor Buck Johnson, blandly, "all went off quiet and serene." The Sierra Nevadas of California are very wide and very high. Kingdoms could be lost among the defiles of their ranges. Kingdoms have been found there. One of them was Bright's Cove. It happened back in the seventies. Old Man Bright was prospecting.
Another myth, or rather pair of myths, in which geographers placed sufficient faith to give a place on the maps of the time, was the great Buenaventura River, and that semi-tropical Mary's Lake, the waters from which found their way through the Sierra Nevadas to San Francisco Bay.
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