Here, too, still later, General Vallejo built a fort, which still
stands–one of the finest examples of Spanish adobe that remain to
us. And here, at the old fort, to bring the chronicle up to date,
our horses proceeded to make peculiarly personal history with
astonishing success and dispatch. King, our peerless, polo-pony
leader, went lame. So hopelessly lame did he go that no expert,
then and afterward, could determine whether the lameness was in
his frogs, hoofs, legs, shoulders, or head. Maid picked up a nail
and began to limp. Milda, figuring the day already sufficiently
spent and maniacal with manger-gluttony, began to rabbit-jump.
All that held her was the bale-rope. And the Outlaw, game to the
last, exceeded all previous exhibitions of skin-removing, paint-
marring, and horse-eating.
At Petaluma we rested over while King was returned to the ranch
and Prince sent to us. Now Prince had proved himself an excellent
wheeler, yet he had to go into the lead and let the Outlaw retain
his old place. There is an axiom that a good wheeler is a poor
leader. I object to the last adjective. A good wheeler makes an
infinitely worse kind of a leader than that. I know . . . now. I
ought to know. Since that day I have driven Prince a few hundred
miles in the lead. He is neither any better nor any worse than
the first mile he ran in the lead; and his worst is even extremely
worse than what you are thinking. Not that he is vicious. He is
merely a good-natured rogue who shakes hands for sugar, steps on
your toes out of sheer excessive friendliness, and just goes on
loving you in your harshest moments.
But he won’t get out of the way. Also, whenever he is reproved
for being in the wrong, he accuses Milda of it and bites the back
of her neck. So bad has this become that whenever I yell
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“Prince!” in a loud voice, Milda immediately rabbit-jumps to the
side, straight ahead, or sits down on the lead-bar. All of which
is quite disconcerting. Picture it yourself. You are swinging
round a sharp, down-grade, mountain curve, at a fast trot. The
rock wall is the outside of the curve. The inside of the curve is
a precipice. The continuance of the curve is a narrow, unrailed
bridge. You hit the curve, throwing the leaders in against the
wall and making the polo-horse do the work. All is lovely. The
leaders are hugging the wall like nestling doves. But the moment
comes in the evolution when the leaders must shoot out ahead.
They really must shoot, or else they’ll hit the wall and miss the
bridge. Also, behind them are the wheelers, and the rig, and you
have just eased the brake in order to put sufficient snap into the
manoeuvre. If ever team-work is required, now is the time. Milda
tries to shoot. She does her best, but Prince, bubbling over with
roguishness, lags behind. He knows the trick. Milda is half a
length ahead of him. He times it to the fraction of a second.
Maid, in the wheel, over-running him, naturally bites him. This
disturbs the Outlaw, who has been behaving beautifully, and she
immediately reaches across for Maid. Simultaneously, with a fine
display of firm conviction that it’s all Milda’s fault, Prince
sinks his teeth into the back of Milda’s defenceless neck. The
whole thing has occurred in less than a second. Under the
surprise and pain of the bite, Milda either jumps ahead to the
imminent peril of harness and lead-bar, or smashes into the wall,
stops short with the lead-bar over her back, and emits a couple of
hysterical kicks. The Outlaw invariably selects this moment to
remove paint. And after things are untangled and you have had
time to appreciate the close shave, you go up to Prince and
reprove him with your choicest vocabulary. And Prince, gazelle-
eyed and tender, offers to shake hands with you for sugar. I
leave it to any one: a boat would never act that way.
We have some history north of the Bay. Nearly three centuries and
a half ago, that doughty pirate and explorer, Sir Francis Drake,
combing the Pacific for Spanish galleons, anchored in the bight
formed by Point Reyes, on which to-day is one of the richest dairy
regions in the world. Here, less than two decades after Drake,
Sebastien Carmenon piled up on the rocks with a silk-laden galleon
from the Philippines. And in this same bay of Drake, long
afterward, the Russian fur-poachers rendezvous’d their bidarkas
and stole in through the Golden Gate to the forbidden waters of
San Francisco Bay.
Farther up the coast, in Sonoma County, we pilgrimaged to the
sites of the Russian settlements. At Bodega Bay, south of what
to-day is called Russian River, was their anchorage, while north
of the river they built their fort. And much of Fort Ross still
stands. Log-bastions, church, and stables hold their own, and so
well, with rusty hinges creaking, that we warmed ourselves at the
hundred-years-old double fireplace and slept under the hand-hewn
roof beams still held together by spikes of hand-wrought iron.
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We went to see where history had been made, and we saw scenery as
well. One of our stretches in a day’s drive was from beautiful
Inverness on Tomales Bay, down the Olema Valley to Bolinas Bay,
along the eastern shore of that body of water to Willow Camp, and
up over the sea-bluffs, around the bastions of Tamalpais, and down
to Sausalito. From the head of Bolinas Bay to Willow Camp the
drive on the edge of the beach, and actually, for half-mile
stretches, in the waters of the bay itself, was a delightful
experience. The wonderful part was to come. Very few San
Franciscans, much less Californians, know of that drive from
Willow Camp, to the south and east, along the poppy-blown cliffs,
with the sea thundering in the sheer depths hundreds of feet below
and the Golden Gate opening up ahead, disclosing smoky San
Francisco on her many hills. Far off, blurred on the breast of
the sea, can be seen the Farallones, which Sir Francis Drake
passed on a S. W. course in the thick of what he describes as a
“stynking fog.” Well might he call it that, and a few other
names, for it was the fog that robbed him of the glory of
discovering San Francisco Bay.
It was on this part of the drive that I decided at last I was
learning real mountain-driving. To confess the truth, for
delicious titillation of one’s nerve, I have since driven over no
mountain road that was worse, or better, rather, than that piece.
And then the contrast! From Sausalito, over excellent, park-like
boulevards, through the splendid redwoods and homes of Mill
Valley, across the blossomed hills of Marin County, along the
knoll-studded picturesque marshes, past San Rafael resting warmly
among her hills, over the divide and up the Petaluma Valley, and
on to the grassy feet of Sonoma Mountain and home. We covered
fifty-five miles that day. Not so bad, eh, for Prince the Rogue,
the paint-removing Outlaw, the thin-shanked thoroughbred, and the
rabbit-jumper? And they came in cool and dry, ready for their
mangers and the straw.
Oh, we didn’t stop. We considered we were just starting, and that
was many weeks ago. We have kept on going over six counties which
are comfortably large, even for California, and we are still
going. We have twisted and tabled, criss-crossed our tracks, made
fascinating and lengthy dives into the interior valleys in the
hearts of Napa and Lake Counties, travelled the coast for hundreds
of miles on end, and are now in Eureka, on Humboldt Bay, which was
discovered by accident by the gold-seekers, who were trying to
find their way to and from the Trinity diggings. Even here, the
white man’s history preceded them, for dim tradition says that the
Russians once anchored here and hunted sea-otter before the first
Yankee trader rounded the Horn, or the first Rocky Mountain
trapper thirsted across the “Great American Desert” and trickled
down the snowy Sierras to the sun-kissed land. No; we are not
resting our horses here on Humboldt Bay. We are writing this
article, gorging on abalones and mussels, digging clams, and
catching record-breaking sea-trout and rock-cod in the intervals
A Collection of Stories
29
in which we are not sailing, motor-boating, and swimming in the
most temperately equable climate we have ever experienced.
These comfortably large counties! They are veritable empires.
Take Humboldt, for instance. It is three times as large as Rhode
Island, one and a half times as large as Delaware, almost as large
as Connecticut, and half as large as Massachusetts. The pioneer
has done his work in this north of the bay region, the foundations
are laid, and all is ready for the inevitable inrush of population