CHAPTER I

LEAVING EL MONTE—OBJECTS OF THE RIDE—OUR HORSES AND EQUIPMENT—EL MONTE—THE FIRST MISSION SAN GABRIEL—FRIENDLY MEXICANS—A RANCH-HOUSE OF OLD CALIFORNIA—DOWNEY—A FARMER OF CALIFORNIA’S BEST TYPE—SLEEPY HOLLOWS—CAMP ON THE SAN JOAQUIN—COYOTES AND SULPHUREOUS COFFEE—LAGUNA CAÑON—WARFARE OF SUN AND FOG—THE COAST: LAGUNA BEACH.

“HELLO!” SAID A LITTLE GIRL in a sunbonnet, in shy response to my own salutation. (I did not know her, but I like shy little girls in sunbonnets.)

“Hello! travellin’ or jest goin’ somewheres?” said a pumpkin-faced boy, grinning at us over a gate.

To this ingenious witticism we deigned no reply.

“Hello!—goin’ campin’?” said a rancher, jolting on a load of hay behind two serious horses.

The rancher, with no very wonderful feat of discernment, had hit the mark. Carl Eytel the painter and I were riding down the south road from El Monte one midsummer morning, with our blankets rolled behind our saddles and other appurtenances of outdoor living slung about us. Ever since I had lived in California I had been waiting for an opportunity to explore the coast regions of the State. At last the time had come when I could do it; and Eytel, my companion on other journeys in the mountains and deserts of the West, was free to join me for the southern part of the expedition.

Our object was to view at our leisure this country, once of such vast quiescence, now of such spectacular changes. Especially we wished to see what we could of its less commonplace aspects before they should have finally passed away: the older manner of life in the land; the ranch-houses of ante-Gringo days; the Franciscan Missions, relics of the era of the padre, and the don, the large, slow life of the sheep and cattle ranges, and whatever else we could find lying becalmed in the backwaters of the hurrying stream of Progress.

As we meant to camp wherever night might find us, we carried with us everything we needed to make us free of cooks and chambermaids. At the same time we determined not to be encumbered with pack animals. A description of our equipment may interest the reader who wonders how this could be done on a trip which, in my own case, ran to something not far short of two thousand miles.

To begin with the horses: My companion’s mount was a hardy and experienced Arizona pony, round of build, sedate of temper, and serviceable to the last ounce. He owned the straightforward name of Billy, and looked it. For years he and his master had haunted the outposts of Western civilization, from the coast as far as to the lands of the Navajos and Moquis, in that picturesque region which the Spanish explorers named El Desierto Pintado. Nothing came amiss to Billy, either in forage or incident. He ate alternately of mesquit and tules, dozed equally well under palm or pine, and viewed burro-train or automobile with impartial eye.

My own horse I had bought for this trip from a Los Angeles dealer, and knew nothing of him except that he was said to hail from some Nevada stock range. As neither the dealer nor he could tell me his name, it was needful to fit him with another; so, from a trifling incident of the purchase, I called him Chino. He had a good head and limbs, intelligent eyes, and the lean body lines of a racehorse. I believe there was a strain of “blood” in him somewhere. He was gentle in temper, and, though excitable, was afraid of nothing, except that some unlucky experience had left him nervous of his picket-rope. After a few proofs of this drawback I got him a pair of hobbles, and had no further trouble.

For saddles we both had the excellent McClellan or army pattern, which are light, strong, and fitted with rings and fastenings front and rear for blankets, holsters, and other matters. We had had saddlebags built of stout waterproofed canvas, fourteen inches long, twelve deep, and five “in the box.” These were invaluable, rode well, and held a surprising quantity. In one side of one pair went our mess-kit and cooking-tackle, the articles all arranged to “nest,” and made with detachable handles. The stove consisted of merely two little strips of wrought-iron, which, laid across a couple of stones or even across a hole scooped in the ground, made a quite serviceable cooking-place. In the other side were note-books, maps, ammunition, toilet things, and so forth. There was room for some odd articles of provision as well, and even for a small volume or two.

The other pair of saddle-bags accommodated the bulk of the provisions, of which the staples were rice, flour, oatmeal, sugar, tea, coffee, and the invaluable erbswurst, a compacted ration of pulverized split-peas and bacon. These items were supplemented as occasion offered with bread, cheese, canned meats, vegetables, and fruit, while the gun provided rabbits and such other game as was in season.

To complete the list of our traps,—I carried on one side of my saddle-horn a small hatchet in a sheath, and on the other a camera and light tripod. Eytel had the gun, slung in a holster, and his sketching-things. Our blankets, with a few extra pieces of clothing, were rolled compactly and fitted above the saddle-bags behind the saddles. I suppose my horse carried, rider included, about two hundred pounds, and Eytel’s possibly a little less. These were good loads for our rather light animals; but our stages were meant to be short, and in the nature of the case they would be often broken, since the whole object was to look about us at our ease, as tourists stroll about Paris or London, seeing the sights.

The road we were riding along might have been in Surrey or Virginia, so tall were the hedges that half hid the fence in their wild sweet tangle. You will not see much of verdure in travelling California roads by midsummer. Our sun is a thirsty one, and for half the year the landscape at close range is one of dry brown earth and shrivelled herbage, though distance may wash it over with amethyst, as Memory does with the unhappy landscapes of the mind. But the land about El Monte is damp and low-lying: green meadows and fields of alfalfa stretched on either hand, and the road was triple-bordered, first with vivid ribbons of grass starred with dandelions, next with rustling bulrushes or arrowy evening-primroses, and then with a fifteen-foot thicket of bushes over which rolled a flood tide of wild grapevines, their tendrils reaching far up into the air in the determination to grasp their fill of summer.

The village of El Monte is a rather pretty little place, not too much modernized, with plenty of big poplar and eucalyptus trees swaying above the modest cottages. (I venture to hope that the reader agrees with me in finding, as I always do, the dwellings of the rustic poor, with their democratic marigolds and nasturtiums, more charming to the sympathies, and even to the eyes, than those elaborations of self-conscious modesty that line our streets in these almost too elegant days. I seriously think that humble things ought to please us best.) The place stands near the bank of the San Gabriel River, a dozen miles or so east of Los Angeles, and four miles from San Gabriel, that dusty little hamlet the long drowse of whose one street of adobes is broken nowadays by half-hourly convulsions when the electric car comes clanging with its load of tourists to “do” the venerable Mission.

Not many, however, even of Californians, are aware that the crumbling old building, with the ponderous green bells that threaten at every ringing to wreck the cracked campanile, is not the original building of its name. The first Mission San Gabriel was built in the year 1771, close to the river, and about five miles south of the present church. It was abandoned after five years, by reason of some disability of site, and a second building was consecrated, in the present position, in the fateful year of 1776. It, also, was temporary, and in 1796 the third and permanent structure took its place.

As the site of the first building was but a short distance off our road, we diverged to see what might remain to keep the memory of its brief existence. Passing a little huddle of dwellings, half house, half shed, we stopped to ask for directions of the unmistakably Irish head of an apparently Mexican family. He could give us little help: had lived there a long time, and had “heerd some thin’ about an old ’dobe,” but evidently was no antiquarian. Inquiry of a Mexican woman who lived a little farther on resulted in the identification of a spot near the bank of the river, where we thought we could trace the outline of a rectangle, marked by a slight inequality of the surface of the ground, which might indicate the ruins of adobe walls that had sunk back, literally “earth to earth,” to their original clay. It was in the middle of a field of yellowed grass sprinkled with gray bushes of horehound and defiled with the carcass of a dead buzzard. Hum of bees, murmur of summer wind, twinkle of river shallows, these were all as of old. The rest was silence.

The morning had been cloudy, with a high fog, when we started, but by the time we were a few miles on the road the fog melted away, leaving a sky of light, sensitive blue, dappled with faint clouds that were like the sighs of a sleeping child. The hills on our left, under which lay the little Quaker town of Whittier, passed from gray to fawn, and behind us the rocky barrier of the Sierra Madre was streaked here and there with...