The Valley of the Giants
P >>
Peter B. Kyne >> The Valley of the Giants
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS
BY
PETER B. KYNE
AUTHOR OF CAPPY RICKS, THE LONG CHANCE, Etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY DEAN CORNWELL
TO MY WIFE
THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS
CHAPTER I
In the summer of 1850 a topsail schooner slipped into the cove under
Trinidad Head and dropped anchor at the edge of the kelp-fields.
Fifteen minutes later her small-boat deposited on the beach a man
armed with long squirrel-rifle and an axe, and carrying food and
clothing in a brown canvas pack. From the beach he watched the boat
return and saw the schooner weigh anchor and stand out to sea before
the northwest trades. When she had disappeared from his ken, he swung
his pack to his broad and powerful back and strode resolutely into
the timber at the mouth of a little river.
The man was John Cardigan; in that lonely, hostile land he was the
first pioneer. This is the tale of Cardigan and Cardigan's son, for
in his chosen land the pioneer leader in the gigantic task of hewing
a path for civilization was to know the bliss of woman's love and of
parenthood, and the sorrow that comes of the loss of a perfect mate;
he was to know the tremendous joy of accomplishment and worldly
success after infinite labour; and in the sunset of life he was to
know the dull despair of failure and ruin. Because of these things
there is a tale to be told, the tale of Cardigan's son, who, when his
sire fell in the fray, took up the fight to save his heritage--a tale
of life with its love and hate, its battle, victory, defeat, labour,
joy, and sorrow, a tale of that unconquerable spirit of youth which
spurred Bryce Cardigan to lead a forlorn hope for the sake not of
wealth but of an ideal. Hark, then, to this tale of Cardigan's
redwoods:
Along the coast of California, through the secret valleys and over
the tumbled foothills of the Coast Range, extends a belt of timber of
an average width of thirty miles. In approaching it from the Oregon
line the first tree looms suddenly against the horizon--an outpost,
as it were, of the host of giants whose column stretches south nearly
four hundred miles to where the last of the rear-guard maintains
eternal sentry go on the crest of the mountains overlooking Monterey
Bay. Far in the interior of the State, beyond the fertile San Joaquin
Valley, the allies of this vast army hold a small sector on the west
slope of the Sierras.
These are the redwood forests of California, the only trees of their
kind in the world and indigenous only to these two areas within the
State. The coast timber is known botanically as sequoia sempervirens,
that in the interior as sequoia gigantea. As the name indicates, the
latter is the larger species of the two, although the fibre of the
timber is coarser and the wood softer and consequently less valuable
commercially than the sequoia sempervirens--which in Santa Cruz, San
Mateo, Marin, and Sonoma counties has been almost wholly logged off,
because of its accessibility. In northern Mendocino, Humboldt, and
Del Norte counties, however, sixty years of logging seems scarcely to
have left a scar upon this vast body of timber. Notwithstanding sixty
years of attrition, there remain in this section of the redwood belt
thousands upon thousands of acres of virgin timber that had already
attained a vigorous growth when Christ was crucified. In their vast,
sombre recesses, with the sunlight filtering through their branches
two hundred and fifty feet above, one hears no sound save the
tremendous diapason of the silence of the ages; here, more forcibly
than elsewhere in the universe, is one reminded of the littleness of
man and the glory of his creator.
In sizes ranging from five to twenty feet in diameter, the brown
trunks rise perpendicularly to a height of from ninety to a hundred
and fifty feet before putting forth a single limb, which frequently
is more massive than the growth which men call a tree in the forests
of Michigan. Scattered between the giants, like subjects around their
king, one finds noble fir, spruce, or pines, with some Valparaiso
live oak, black oak, pepper-wood, madrone, yew, and cedar.
In May and June, when the twisted and cowering madrone trees are
putting forth their clusters of creamy buds, when the white blossoms
of the dogwoods line the banks of little streams, when the azaleas
and rhododendrons, lovely and delicate as orchids, blaze a bed of
glory, and the modest little oxalis has thrust itself up through the
brown carpet of pine-needles and redwood-twigs, these wonderful
forests cast upon one a potent spell. To have seen them once thus in
gala dress is to yearn thereafter to see them again and still again
and grieve always in the knowledge of their inevitable death at the
hands of the woodsman.
John Cardigan settled in Humboldt County, where the sequoia
sempervirens attains the pinnacle of its glory, and with the lust for
conquest hot in his blood, he filed upon a quarter-section of the
timber almost on the shore of Humboldt Bay--land upon which a city
subsequently was to be built. With his double-bitted axe and crosscut
saw John Cardigan brought the first of the redwood giants crashing to
the earth above which it had towered for twenty centuries, and in the
form of split posts, railroad ties, pickets, and shakes, the fallen
giant was hauled to tidewater in ox-drawn wagons and shipped to San
Francisco in the little two-masted coasting schooners of the period.
Here, by the abominable magic of barter and trade, the dismembered
tree was transmuted into dollars and cents and returned to Humboldt
County to assist John Cardigan in his task of hewing an empire out of
a wilderness.
At a period in the history of California when the treasures of the
centuries were to be had for the asking or the taking, John Cardigan
chose that which others elected to cast away. For him the fertile
wheat and fruit-lands of California's smiling valleys, the dull
placer gold in her foot-hill streams, and the free grass, knee deep,
on her cattle and sheep-ranges held no lure; for he had been first
among the Humboldt redwoods and had come under the spell of the
vastness and antiquity, the majesty and promise of these epics of a
planet. He was a big man with a great heart and the soul of a
dreamer, and in such a land as this it was fitting he should take his
stand.
In that wasteful day a timber-claim was not looked upon as valuable.
The price of a quarter-section was a pittance in cash and a brief
residence in a cabin constructed on the claim as evidence of good
faith to a government none too exacting in the restrictions with
which it hedged about its careless dissipation of the heritage of
posterity. Hence, because redwood timber-claims were easy to acquire,
many men acquired them; but when the lure of greener pastures gripped
these men and the necessity for ready money oppressed, they were wont
to sell their holdings for a few hundred dollars. Gradually it became
the fashion in Humboldt to "unload" redwood timber-claims on thrifty,
far-seeing, visionary John Cardigan who appeared to be always in the
market for any claim worth while.
Cardigan was a shrewd judge of stumpage; with the calm certitude of a
prophet he looked over township after township and cunningly
checkerboarded it with his holdings. Notwithstanding the fact that
hillside timber is the best, John Cardigan in those days preferred to
buy valley timber, for he was looking forward to the day when the
timber on the watersheds should become available. He knew that when
such timber should be cut it would have to be hauled out through the
valleys where his untouched holdings formed an impenetrable barrier
to the exit! Before long the owners of timber on the watersheds would
come to realize this and sell to John Cardigan at a reasonable price.
Time passed. John Cardigan no longer swung an axe or dragged a cross-
cut saw through a fallen redwood. He was an employer of labour now,
well known in San Francisco as a manufacturer of split-redwood
products, the purchasers sending their own schooners for the cargo.
And presently John Cardigan mortgaged all of his timber holdings with
a San Francisco bank, made a heap of his winnings, and like a true
adventurer staked his all on a new venture--the first sawmill in
Humboldt County. The timbers for it were hewed out by hand; the
boards and planking were whipsawed.
It was a tiny mill, judged by present-day standards, for in a
fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut
more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan
looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on
tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which
he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull-
whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels
could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty
feet of water at low tide. Also this dock was sufficiently far up the
bay to be sheltered from the heavy seas that rolled in from Humboldt
Bar, while the level land that stretched inland to the timber-line
constituted the only logical townsite on the bay.
"Here," said John Cardigan to himself exultingly when a long-drawn
wail told him his circular saw was biting into the first redwood log
to be milled since the world began, "I shall build a city and call it
Sequoia. By to-morrow I shall have cut sufficient timber to make a
start. First I shall build for my employees better homes than the
rude shacks and tent-houses they now occupy; then I shall build
myself a fine residence with six rooms, and the room that faces on
the bay shall be the parlour. When I can afford it, I shall build a
larger mill, employ more men, and build more houses. I shall
encourage tradesmen to set up in business in Sequoia, and to my city
I shall present a church and a schoolhouse. We shall have a volunteer
fire department, and if God is good, I shall, at a later date, get
out some long-length fir-timber and build a schooner to freight my
lumber to market. And she shall have three masts instead of two, and
carry half a million feet of lumber instead of two hundred thousand.
First, however, I must build a steam tugboat to tow my schooner in
and out over Humboldt Bar. And after that--ah, well! That is
sufficient for the present."
CHAPTER II
Thus did John Cardigan dream, and as he dreamed he worked. The city
of Sequoia was born with the Argonaut's six-room mansion of rough
redwood boards and a dozen three-room cabins with lean-to kitchens;
and the tradespeople came when John Cardigan, with something of the
largeness of his own redwood trees, gave them ground and lumber in
order to encourage the building of their enterprises. Also the dream
of the schoolhouse and the church came true, as did the steam tugboat
and the schooner with three masts. The mill was enlarged until it
could cut forty thousand feet on a twelve-hour shift, and a planer
and machines for making rustic siding and tongued-and-grooved
flooring and ceiling were installed. More ox-teams appeared upon the
skid-road, which was longer now; the cry of "Timber-r-r!" and the
thunderous roar of a falling redwood grew fainter and fainter as the
forest receded from the bay shore, and at last the whine of the saws
silenced these sounds forever in Sequoia.
At forty John Cardigan was younger than most men at thirty, albeit he
worked fourteen hours a day, slept eight, and consumed the remaining
two at his meals. But through all those fruitful years of toil he had
still found time to dream, and the spell of the redwoods had lost
none of its potency. He was still checker-boarding the forested
townships with his adverse holdings--the key-positions to the timber
in back of beyond which some day should come to his hand. Also he had
competition now: other sawmills dotted the bay shore; other three-
masted schooners carried Humboldt redwood to the world beyond the
bar, over which they were escorted by other and more powerful steam-
tugs. This competition John Cardigan welcomed and enjoyed, however,
for he had been first in Humboldt, and the townsite and a mile of
tidelands fronting on deep water were his; hence each incoming
adventurer merely helped his dream of a city to come true.
At forty-two Cardigan was the first mayor of Sequoia. At forty-four
he was standing on his dock one day, watching his tug kick into her
berth the first square-rigged ship that had ever come to Humboldt Bay
to load a cargo of clear redwood for foreign delivery. She was a big
Bath-built clipper, and her master a lusty down-Easter, a widower
with one daughter who had come with him around the Horn. John
Cardigan saw this girl come up on the quarter-deck and stand by with
a heaving-line in her hand; calmly she fixed her glance upon him, and
as the ship was shunted in closer to the dock, she made the cast to
Cardigan. He caught the light heaving-line, hauled in the heavy
Manila stern-line to which it was attached, and slipped the loop of
the mooring-cable over the dolphin at the end of the dock.
"Some men wanted aft here to take up the slack of the stern-line on
the windlass, sir," he shouted to the skipper, who was walking around
on top of the house. "That girl can't haul her in alone."
"Can't. I'm short-handed," the skipper replied. "Jump aboard and help
her."
Cardigan made a long leap from the dock to the ship's rail, balanced
there lightly a moment, and sprang to the deck. He passed the bight
of the stern-line in a triple loop around the drum of the windlass,
and without awaiting his instructions, the girl grasped the slack of
the line and prepared to walk away with it as the rope paid in on the
windlass. Cardigan inserted a belaying-pin in the windlass, paused
and looked at the girl. "Raise a chantey," he suggested. Instantly
she lifted a sweet contralto in that rollicking old ballad of the
sea--"Blow the Men Down."
For tinkers and tailors and lawyers and all,
Way! Aye! Blow the men down!
They ship for real sailors aboard the Black Ball,
Give me some time to blow the men down.
Round the windlass Cardigan walked, steadily and easily, and the
girl's eyes widened in wonder as he did the work of three powerful
men. When the ship had been warped in and the slack of the line made
fast on the bitts, she said:
"Please run for'd and help my father with the bow-lines. You're worth
three foremast hands. Indeed, I didn't expect to see a sailor on this
dock."
"I had to come around the Horn to get here, Miss," he explained, "and
when a man hasn't money to pay for his passage, he needs must work
it."
"I'm the second mate," she explained. "We had a succession of gales
from the Falklands to the Evangelistas, and there the mate got her in
irons and she took three big ones over the taffrail and cost us eight
men. Working short-handed, we couldn't get any canvas on her to speak
of--long voyage, you know, and the rest of the crew got scurvy."
"You're a brave girl," he told her.
"And you're a first-class A. B.," she replied. "If you're looking for
a berth, my father will be glad to ship you."
"Sorry, but I can't go," he called as he turned toward the companion
ladder. "I'm Cardigan, and I own this sawmill and must stay here and
look after it."
There was a light, exultant feeling in his middle-aged heart as he
scampered along the deck. The girl had wonderful dark auburn hair and
brown eyes, with a milk-white skin that sun and wind had sought in
vain to blemish. And for all her girlhood she was a woman--bred from
a race (his own people) to whom danger and despair merely furnished a
tonic for their courage. What a mate for a man! And she had looked at
him pridefully.
They were married before the ship was loaded, and on a knoll of the
logged-over lands back of the town and commanding a view of the bay,
with the dark-forested hills in back and the little second-growth
redwoods flourishing in the front yard, he built her the finest home
in Sequoia. He had reserved this building-site in a vague hope that
some day he might utilize it for this very purpose, and here he spent
with her three wonderfully happy years. Here his son Bryce was born,
and here, two days later, the new-made mother made the supreme
sacrifice of maternity.
For half a day following the destruction of his Eden John Cardigan
sat dumbly beside his wife, his great, hard hand caressing the auburn
head whose every thought for three years had been his happiness and
comfort. Then the doctor came to him and mentioned the matter of
funeral arrangements.
Cardigan looked up at him blankly. "Funeral arrangements?" he
murmured. "Funeral arrangements?" He passed his gnarled hand over his
leonine head. "Ah, yes, I suppose so. I shall attend to it."
He rose and left the house, walking with bowed head out of Sequoia,
up the abandoned and decaying skid-road through the second-growth
redwoods to the dark green blur that marked the old timber. It was
May, and Nature was renewing herself, for spring comes late in
Humboldt County. From an alder thicket a pompous cock grouse boomed
intermittently; the valley quail, in pairs, were busy about their
household affairs; from a clump of manzanita a buck watched John
Cardigan curiously. On past the landing where the big bull donkey-
engine stood (for with the march of progress, the logging donkey-
engine had replaced the ox-teams, while the logs were hauled out of
the woods to the landing by means of a mile-long steel cable, and
there loaded on the flat-cars of a logging railroad to be hauled to
the mill and dumped in the log-boom) he went, up the skid-road
recently swamped from the landing to the down timber where the
crosscut men and barkpeelers were at work, on into the green timber
where the woods-boss and his men were chopping.
"Come with me, McTavish," he said to his woods-boss. They passed
through a narrow gap between two low hills and emerged in a long
narrow valley where the redwood grew thickly and where the smallest
tree was not less than fifteen feet in diameter and two hundred and
fifty feet tall. McTavish followed at the master's heels as they
penetrated this grove, making their way with difficulty through the
underbrush until they came at length to a little amphitheatre, a
clearing perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, oval-shaped and
surrounded by a wall of redwoods of such dimensions that even
McTavish, who was no stranger to these natural marvels, was struck
with wonder. The ground in this little amphitheatre was covered to a
depth of a foot with brown, withered little redwood twigs to which
the dead leaves still clung, while up through this aromatic covering
delicate maidenhair ferns and oxalis had thrust themselves. Between
the huge brown boles of the redwoods woodwardia grew riotously, while
through the great branches of these sentinels of the ages the
sunlight filtered. Against the prevailing twilight of the surrounding
forest it descended like a halo, and where it struck the ground John
Cardigan paused.
"McTavish," he said, "she died this morning."
"I'm sore distressed for you, sir," the woods-boss answered. "We'd a
whisper in the camp yesterday that the lass was like to be in a bad
way."
Cardigan scuffed with his foot a clear space in the brown litter.
"Take two men from the section-gang, McTavish," he ordered, "and have
them dig her grave here; then swamp a trail through the underbrush
and out to the donkey-landing, so we can carry her in. The funeral
will be private."
McTavish nodded. "Any further orders, sir?"
"Yes. When you come to that little gap in the hills, cease your
logging and bear off yonder." He waved his hand. "I'm not going to
cut the timber in this valley. You see, McTavish, what it is. The
trees here--ah, man, I haven't the heart to destroy God's most
wonderful handiwork. Besides, she loved this spot, McTavish, and she
called the valley her Valley of the Giants. I--I gave it to her for a
wedding present because she had a bit of a dream that some day the
town I started would grow up to yonder gap, and when that time came
and we could afford it, 'twas in her mind to give her Valley of the
Giants to Sequoia for a city park, all hidden away here and
unsuspected.
"She loved it, McTavish. It pleased her to come here with me; she'd
make up a lunch of her own cooking and I would catch trout in the
stream by the dogwoods yonder and fry the fish for her. Sometimes I'd
barbecue a venison steak and--well, 'twas our playhouse, McTavish,
and I who am no longer young--I who never played until I met her--I--
I'm a bit foolish, I fear, but I found rest and comfort here,
McTavish, even before I met her, and I'm thinking I'll have to come
here often for the same. She--she was a very superior woman,
McTavish--very superior. Ah, man, the soul of her! I cannot bear that
her body should rest in Sequoia cemetery, along with the rag tag and
bobtail o' the town. She was like this sunbeam, McTavish. She--she--"
"Aye," murmured McTavish huskily. "I ken. Ye wouldna gie her a common
or a public spot in which to wait for ye. An' ye'll be shuttin' down
the mill an' loggin'-camps an' layin' off the hands in her honour for
a bit?"
"Until after the funeral, McTavish. And tell your men they'll be paid
for the lost time. That will be all, lad."
When McTavish was gone, John Cardigan sat down on a small sugar-pine
windfall, his head held slightly to one side while he listened to
that which in the redwoods is not sound but rather the absence of it.
And as he listened, he absorbed a subtle comfort from those huge
brown trees, so emblematic of immortality; in the thought he grew
closer to his Maker, and presently found that peace which he sought.
Love such as theirs could never die... The tears came at last.
At sundown he walked home bearing an armful of rhododendrons and
dogwood blossoms, which he arranged in the room where she lay. Then
he sought the nurse who had attended her.
"I'd like to hold my son," he said gently. "May I?"
She brought him the baby and placed it in his great arms that
trembled so; he sat down and gazed long and earnestly at this flesh
of his flesh and blood of his blood. "You'll have her hair and skin
and eyes," he murmured. "My son, my son, I shall love you so, for now
I must love for two. Sorrow I shall keep from you, please God, and
happiness and worldly comfort shall I leave you when I go to her." He
nuzzled his grizzled cheek against the baby's face. "Just you and my
trees," he whispered, "just you and my trees to help me hang on to a
plucky finish."
For love and paternity had come to him late in life, and so had his
first great sorrow; wherefore, since he was not accustomed to these
heritages of all flesh, he would have to adjust himself to the
change. But his son and his trees--ah, yes, they would help. And he
would gather more redwoods now!
CHAPTER III
A young half-breed Digger woman, who had suffered the loss of the
latest of her numerous progeny two days prior to Mrs. Cardigan's
death, was installed in the house on the knoll as nurse to John
Cardigan's son whom he called Bryce, the family name of his mother's
people. A Mrs. Tully, widow of Cardigan's first engineer in the mill,
was engaged as housekeeper and cook; and with his domestic
establishment reorganized along these simple lines, John Cardigan
turned with added eagerness to his business affairs, hoping between
them and his boy to salvage as much as possible from what seemed to
him, in the first pangs of his loneliness and desolation, the
wreckage of his life.
While Bryce was in swaddling clothes, he was known only to those
females of Sequoia to whom his half-breed foster mother proudly
exhibited him when taking him abroad for an airing in his
perambulator. With his advent into rompers, however, and the
assumption of his American prerogative of free speech, his father
developed the habit of bringing the child down to the mill office, to
which he added a playroom that connected with his private office.
Hence, prior to his second birthday, Bryce divined that his father
was closer to him than motherly Mrs. Tully or the half-breed girl,
albeit the housekeeper sang to him the lullabys that mothers know
while the Digger girl, improvising blank verse paeans of praise and
prophecy, crooned them to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her
tribal tongue. His father, on the contrary, wasted no time in
singing, but would toss him to the ceiling or set him astride his
foot and swing him until he screamed in ecstasy. Moreover, his father
took him on wonderful journeys which no other member of the household
had even suggested. Together they were wont to ride to and from the
woods in the cab of the logging locomotive, and once they both got on
the log carriage in the mill with Dan Keyes, the head sawyer, and had
a jolly ride up to the saw and back again, up and back again until
the log had been completely sawed; and because he had refrained from
crying aloud when the greedy saw bit into the log with a shrill
whine, Dan Keyes had given him a nickel to put in his tin bank.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23