A Truthful Woman in Southern California

by Kate Sanborn

  “O southland! O dreamland! with cycles of green; O moonlight enchanted by mocking-bird’s song; Cool sea winds, fair mountains, the fruit-lands between, The pepper tree’s shade, and the sunny days long.”

  Los Angeles is the chief city of Southern California, and truly venerable in comparison with most places in the State—founded in 1781, now one hundred and twelve years old. Its full name, “Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles,” “musical as a chime of bells,” would hardly do in these days, and “The City of the Angels,” as it is sometimes called, scarcely suits the present big business-y place, which was started by those shrewd old padres when everything west of the Alleghanies was an almost unknown region, and Chicago and St. Louis were not thought of. These Fathers were far-sighted fellows, with a keen eye for the beautiful, sure to secure good soil, plenty of water, and fine scenery for a settlement. Next came the Hispano-American era of adobe, stage-coaches, and mule teams, now replaced by the purely American possessions, with brick, stone, vestibule trains, and all the wonders of electricity. It is now a commercial centre, a railroad terminal, with one hundred miles of street-car track within the city limits, carrying twelve million passengers yearly. It has outgrown the original grant of six miles square, and has a city limit, and the first street traversed this square diagonally. It lies on the west bank of the Los Angeles River, one of those peculiar streams which hides itself half the year only to burst forth in the spring in a most assertive manner. There are fine public buildings, fifty-seven churches, to suit all shades of religious belief, two handsome theatres, several parks, and long streets showing homes and grounds comparing favorably with the best environs of Eastern cities. It is well to drive through Adams and Figueroa streets before you leave. There are no attractive hotels at present; but one is so greatly needed and desired that it will soon be designed and realized.

  Madame de Staël was right when she said she greatly preferred meeting interesting men and women to admiring places or scenery. Among my pleasantest memories of Los Angeles are my visits to Madame Fremont in her pretty red cottage, presented by loving friends. It is a privilege to meet such a clever, versatile woman. Her conversation flashes with epigrams and pithy sayings, and her heart is almost as young as when it was captured by the dashing “Pathfinder.”

  I believe there are men still existing who keep up the old absurd fallacy that women are deficient in wit and humor! She would easily convert all such.

  The Coronels, to whom Mrs. Jackson was so indebted and of whom she wrote so appreciatively, are still in the same home, cherishing her memory most fondly, her photograph being placed in a shrine where the sweet-faced madame kneels daily, and her books and knick-knacks are preserved as precious souvenirs.

  Don Antonio Coronel is truly a most interesting personage, the last specimen of the grand old Spanish régime. His father was the first schoolmaster in California, and the son has in his possession the first schoolbook printed on this coast, at Monterey in 1835, a small catechism; also the first book printed in California, a tiny volume dated 1833, the father having brought the type from Spain.

  I was taken to the basement to see a rare collection of antiquities. In one corner is a cannon made in 1710, and brought by Junipero Serra. Ranged on shelves is a collection such as can be found nowhere else, of great value: strange stone idols, a few specimens of the famous iridescent pottery, queer ornaments, toys, and relics. In another corner see the firearms and weapons of long ago: old flintlocks, muskets, Spanish bayonets, crossbows, and spears. There are coins, laces, baskets, toys, skulls, scalps, and a sombrero with two long red pennons, on which each feather represents a human scalp. Upstairs there are early specimens of Mexican art; one of the oldest pictures of Junipero Serra; groups in clay modelled by the Dona Mariana of Mexican scenes; feather pictures made from the plumage of gorgeous birds—too much to remember or describe here. But I do believe that if asked to say what they valued most, they would point to the little wooden table where their dear friend sat when she wrote the first pages of “Ramona.”

  For the stranger Los Angeles is the place to go to to see a new play, or marvel at the display of fruits seen at a citrus fair—forts made of thousands of oranges, and railroad stations and crowns of lemons, etc.—and admire a carnival of flowers, or for a day’s shopping; but there are better spots in which to remain. I found the night air extremely unpleasant last winter, and after hearing from a veracious druggist, to whom I applied for a gargle, that there was an epidemic of grip in the city, and that many died of pneumonia and that a small majority of the invalids got well, I packed my trunk hastily and started for Pasadena.

  Those who live in the city and those who do not dislike raw, bracing winds from the ocean pronounce Los Angeles to be the only place worth living in in all Southern California. Each place has its supporters ignoring all other attractions, and absolutely opposite accounts of the weather have been seriously given me by visitors to each. For those who must be “high and dry” to improve, the rainy season is certainly unsafe.

  Los Angeles is also a place to go from to the beach at Santa Monica, and Redondo, or that wondrous island, “Santa Catalina,” which has been described by Mr. C. F. Holder in the Californian so enthusiastically that I should think the “Isle of Summer” could not receive all who would unite to share his raptures—with a climate nearer to absolute perfection than any land, so near all the conveniences of civilization, and everything else that can be desired. His first jew-fish or black sea-bass weighed 342½ pounds, and a dozen other varieties are gamy and plentiful; fine sport with the rifle in the upland region, wealth of verdure along the trail; below, good hotel, beaches, bathing, evening concerts—”the true land of sweet idleness, where one can drift around with all nature to entertain.” To be strictly truthful, I must add that the hotel was built just over an old Indian burying-ground, therefore cases of typhoid fever are not unknown.

  CHAPTER VI.

  PASADENA.

  “If there be an Elysium upon earth, It is this, it is this.”

  For my own taste, I prefer Pasadena, the “Crown of the Valley”—nine miles from Los Angeles, but eight hundred feet higher and with much drier air, at the foot of the Sierra Madre range, in the beauteous San Gabriel Valley. Yes, Pasadena seems to me as near Eden as can be found by mortal man.

  Columbus in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella said, “I believe that if I should pass under the equator in arriving at this higher region of which I speak, I should find there a milder temperature and a diversity in the stars and in the waters…. I am convinced that there is the Terrestrial Paradise.”

  Poor persecuted Columbus! I wish he could have once seen Pasadena, the very spot he dreamed of. Can I now write calmly, critically, judicially of what I see, enjoy, admire and wonder over? If I succeed it will be what no one else has done. I was here last year and gave my impressions then, which are only strengthened by a second visit, so that I will quote my own words, which read like the veriest gush, but are absolutely true, came straight from my heart, and, after all, didn’t half tell the story.

  I am fascinated and enthralled by your sun-kissed, rose-embowered, semi-tropical summer-land of Hellenic sky and hills of Hymettus, with its paradoxical antitheses: of flowers and flannels; strawberries and sealskin sacks; open fires with open windows; snow-capped mountains and orange blossoms; winter looking down upon summer—a topsy-turvy land, where you dig for your wood and climb for your coal; where water-pipes are laid above ground, with no fear of Jack Frost, and your principal rivers flow bottom side up and invisible most of the time; where the boys climb up hill on burros and slide down hills on wheels; where the trees are green all the year, and you go outdoors in December to get warm; where squirrels live in the ground with owls for chums, while rats build in the trees, and where water runs up hill; where anything unpleasant, from a seismic disturbance to mosquitoes in March, is “exceptional” and surprising. A land where there are no seasons, but where sunshine and shade are so distinctly marked that
one can be easily half baked on one side and dangerously chilled on the other.

  Then the Climate—spell it with a capital, and then try to think of an adjective worthy to precede it. Glorious! Delicious! Incomparable! Paradisaical!!! To a tenderfoot straight from New Hampshire, where we have nine months of winter and three of pretty cold weather, where we have absolutely but three months that are free from frost, this seems like enchanted ground.

  A climate warm, with a constant refreshing coolness in its heart; cool, with a latent vivifying warmth forever peeping out of its coat-tail pocket.

  June does not define it, nor September. It has no synonym, for there is nothing like it. I am glad that I have lived to see hedges of heliotrope, of geraniums and calla-lilies. I remember, in contrast, solitary calla plants that I have nursed with care all winter in hopes of one blossom for Easter. And I do not feel sure that I can ever tear myself away. I am reminded of good old Dr. Watts, who was invited by Lady Abney to pass a fortnight at her home, and remained for forty years.

  Here we all unconsciously eat the lotus in some occult fashion, are straightway bewitched and held willing captives. I have looked up the lotus, about which so much is said or sung and so little definitely known, and find it is a prickly shrub of Africa, bearing a fruit of a sweet taste, and the early Greeks knew all about its power. Homer in the Odyssey says that whoever ate of the fruit wished never to depart nor again to see his native land. Many of Ulysses’ sailors ate this fruit, and lost all desire for home.

  The last letter received by me from New Hampshire, April 3d, begins in this way: “It is like the middle of winter here, good sleighing and still very cold.” And then comes a sad series of announcements of sickness and deaths caused by the protracted rigors of the season. And here, at the same date, all the glories of the spring, which far exceeds our summer—Spanish breezes, Italian sky and sunsets, Alpine mountains, tropical luxuriance of vegetation, a nearly uniform climate, a big outdoor conservatory. There is no other place on earth that combines so much in the same limits. You can snowball your companions on Christmas morning on the mountain-top, pelt your lady friends with rose leaves in the foothills three hours later, and in another sixty minutes dip in the surf no cooler than Newport in July; and the theatre in the evening. As a bright workman said, you can freeze through and thaw out in one day.

  An electric railroad will soon connect Los Angeles with Pasadena and Mount Wilson, and a fine hotel is to be placed on the top of Echo Mountain, 3500 feet high, and this will then certainly be the ideal health and pleasure resort of the world.

  Pasadena’s homes, protected on three sides by mountain ranges, are surrounded by groves and gardens, trees and hedges from every clime. Everything will grow and flourish here. Capitalists from the East seem engaged in a generous rivalry to create the ideal paradise. Passion vines completely cover the arbors, roses clamber to the tops of houses and blossom by tens of thousands. I notice displays fit for a floral show in the windows of butcher shops and shoe stores. The churches are adorned with a mantle of vines and flowers.

  Are there no “outs,” no defects in this Pasadena? One must not forget the rainy days, the occasional “hot spells” of August and September, a wind now and then that blows off steeples and tears down fragile structures, bringing along a good deal more sand than is wanted. And every year an earthquake may be expected. I have experienced two, and they are not agreeable.

  Aside from these drawbacks and dust in summer, all else is perfection, except that the weather is so uniformly glorious that there is seldom a day when one is willing to stay at home. I feel just now like a “deestrick” schoolboy who has been “kept in” on a summer afternoon.

  The wildflowers are more fascinating to me than all those so profusely cultivated. I weary of five thousand calla-lilies in one church at Easter, and lose a little interest in roses when they bloom perennially and in such profusion that I have had enough given me in one morning to fill a wash-tub or clothes-basket!

  The wealth of color on the hills and mesas in springtime can never be described or painted. The State flower, the yellow poppy with the name that would floor any spelling-match hero—the eschscholtzia—is most conspicuous, and can be seen far away at sea; but there are dozens of others, that it is better to admire and leave unplucked, as they wilt so soon. “The ground is literally dolly-vardened with buttercups, violets, dodecatheons, gilias, nemophilas, and the like. And yet these are the mere skirmish line of the mighty invading hosts, whose uniforms surpass the kingly robes of Solomon, and whose banners of crimson and yellow and purple will soon wave on every hilltop and in every valley.

  “In April and May the lover of nature may pass into the seventh heaven of botanical delight. Then in favored sections the display reaches a gorgeousness and a profusion that surpass both description and imagination.”

  No one can paint the grain fields as they look when the sun puts into every blade a tiny golden ray and it is no longer every-day common grain, but an enchanted carpet of living, radiant, golden green. We tourists call it grass, but there is no grass to be proud of in California.

  No one can paint the sky; no one would accept it as true to nature if once caught on the canvas.

  I will not attempt to describe the mountains with their many charms. I listened to a lecture lately where a man was struggling to do this, and it was positively painful. The flowery verbiage, the accumulated adjectives, the poetical quotations were overpowering. I seemed actually sinking into luscious mellifluousness. I shook it off my fingers, as if it were maple syrup. Then, as he climbed higher and higher, on and up, never getting away from the richest verdure and the sweetest flowers, scenes for an artist to paint with rapture, and a poet to sing in ecstasy, I found myself pushing up my forehead to improvise a mansard roof for my brain to swell in sympathy. And when he reached the summit and the panorama burst upon his enraptured vision, it was too much for my strained emotions, and I quietly slipped out.

  And the strangest part is that every word is true, and, say what one will, one never gets near the reality. In this respect, you see, it differs from a floral catalogue sent out in early spring, or a hotel pamphlet with illustrations.

  The cable road is 3000 feet long, with a direct ascent of 1400 feet, and the Echo Mountain House will be 1500 feet higher than the Catskill hotels overlooking the Hudson, and it is estimated that not less than 60,000 fares will be collected upon this mountain railroad the first year.

  All this was designed and executed by Professor Lowe, of aeronaut fame, a scientist and banker, the inventor of water-gas and artificial ice, and a man of great business ability.

  One of the best proofs of the health-giving power of this air is the fact that the physicians practising here, with one exception, came seriously ill and have not only recovered, but are strong enough to keep very busy helping others.

  Pasadena has no ragged shabby outskirts; the poorer classes seem to be able to own or rent pretty little homes, some like large birdcages, all well kept and attractive. Some gentlemen from Indianapolis came here in 1873 and started the town, planting their orange orchards under the shadows of the mountains.

  Each portion has its own attractions. Orange Grove Avenue, a street over a mile long, is described by its name. Great trees stand in the centre of the street, a fine road on either side, and the homes are embowered in flowers and palms, while hedges are made of the pomegranate, the honeysuckle, and even the heliotrope. Marengo Avenue is lined on either side by splendid specimens of the pepper, the prettiest and most graceful of all trees here. Colorado Street, with its homes and shops and churches, leads out to the foothills and “Altadena,” which is often spoken of as recalling the handsome residences along the Riviera.

  The street cars which go from the station toward the mountains bear on each the words, “This Car for the Poppy Fields,” and they are a sight worth seeing. Mrs. Kellog describes this flower more perfectly than any artist could paint it: “Think of finest gold, of clearest lemon, of deepest ora
nge on silkiest texture, just bedewed with a frost-like sheen, a silvery film, and you have a faint impression of what an eschscholtzia is. Multiply this impression by acres of waving color.” And in February this may sometimes be seen. It has been well chosen for the State flower.

  If consumptives must go away from the comforts of home, this is a haven of rest for them. In a late Medical Record I see that a physician deprecates the custom of sending hopeless cases to the high altitudes of Colorado, where the poor victim gasps out a few weeks or months of existence. “If such cases as the above must be sent from home, as we sometimes think here, to rid their home physicians of the annoyance of their presence, they should be sent to Florida or Southern California, where at least they may be chloroformed off into eternity by a soothing climate, and not suffer an actual shortening of their days from a climate acting on a radically different principle and entirely unsuited to them.”

  This is a bit of the shady side after all the sunlight. It is a place for the invalid to rejoice in, and those in robust health can find enough to do to employ all their energies.

  The “Tournament of Roses” last winter was a grand success, praised by all. The “Pageant of Roses” was celebrated here lately, and I cannot give you a better idea of it than by copying the synopsis.

  Imagine the opera-house trimmed inside with wreaths and festoons and bouquets of roses—a picture in itself; audience in full evening dress, each lady carrying roses, each man with a rose for a boutonnière.

  The dancing in costume was exquisitely graceful, and the evolutions and figures admirably exact—no mistake, nothing amateurish about the whole performance.

  PART FIRST.

  Los Flores, a garden in the Crown of the Valley. Goddess Flora and her pages asleep. Harlequin, the magic spirit, enters, produces by incantation the rain and summons the maiden Spring, who rouses the Goddess and her pages. The Goddess commands the Harlequin to usher in the Pageant of Roses. Enter the Red or Colonial Roses; march and form for the reception and dance of the Ladies of the Minuet. Retire. Harlequin, at the request of the Goddess, summons the Gold of Ophirs, bearing urn as offering to the Goddess, when is performed the dance of the Orient, including solo. Curtain falls on tableau.