A thousand deaths by Jack London

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

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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