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On the way to Buckeye we again encountered the Sacramento, here dwindled to a narrow mountain-stream, with bold precipitous banks and a rock bottom, a smooth and deep, but rapid current, and full of trout and salmon. We crossed it on a rope-ferry, and climbed the steeps on the other side, but did not leave it. Thenceforward to Shasta Peak we were never out of its neighborhood.
Simultaneously with the Castle's appearance, our leafy covert parted before us, and disclosed in level light, which made its snow opalescent, and bathed its vast, rugged masses of stone and earth in one inclusive winy glow, the glorious giant of California which had drawn us hither through the wilderness. The height of Shasta is variously stated.
The mining district is all in the western end of the county, along the banks of the Klamath River and its tributaries, the Scott and Shasta Rivers. The Klamath runs through a deep canon; the Scott and Shasta Rivers, have pleasant open valleys, but the diggings along their banks are chiefly among the canons near the Klamath. Hydraulic and tunnel claims are rare.
But Shasta is always at home to those who love her, and is ever in a thrill of enthusiastic activity burning fires within, grinding glaciers without, and fountains ever flowing. Every crystal dances responsive to the touches of the sun, and currents of sap in the growing cells of all the vegetation are ever in a vital whirl and rush, and though many feet and wings are folded, how many are astir!
Thus the Shasta River issues from a large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two thirds of the volume of the McCloud River gushes forth suddenly from the face of a lava bluff in a roaring spring seventy-five yards wide. These spring rivers of the north are of course shorter than those of the south whose tributaries extend up to the tops of the mountains.
He noticed the peculiar character of the place in which Shasta had run the canoe. It was a small indentation covered with overhanging limbs and shrubbery in such manner that while the whites could peer out upon the river there was no danger of their being seen by any passers-by, unless particular suspicion was directed toward the spot.
But Shasta was not satisfied. He told them, in his manner, to lie down; and not until the three had so arranged themselves as to be invisible from both shores, did he dip his paddle and resume his journey. "This means danger," said Elwood. "He doesn't wish any one to know we are in the boats." "And we must be sure and obey him."
Shasta himself seemed to have gained rather than lost in majesty by our forty and now steadily increasing miles of distance. Either from atmospheric effect, or because we now saw a new and more irregular portion of his crown, the snow upon it became opalescent to a degree which I have never seen surpassed by any such effect.
Snow lies in it the year round at an elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet, and in sheltered spots a thousand feet lower. Tracing this wild changing channel-gorge, gully, or canyon, the sections will show Mount Shasta as a huge palimpsest, containing the records, layer upon layer, of strangely contrasted events in its fiery-icy history.
I have no information about the situation of the two built since that time. The principal mining towns are Yreka, Scott's Bar, Hawkinsville, Johnson's Bar, Deadwood and Cottonwood. Trinity and Shasta. South of the western part of Siskiyou and the eastern part of Klamath, lies Trinity county, ninety miles long from north to south, and about twenty miles wide on an average.
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