Science

History

Art &
Literature

GIS &
Mapping

Library

ChatRoom
Search
TrailHead
Base Camp
                                   






Stevenson's First View of the Sierras

From the Amateur Emigrant, we can hear in the words of the author the remarkable changes visitors to California experience in the transition between the desert lands of Nevada, the dense forest of the Sierras, and the plains that roll out to the sea in the central valley.

He describes one of the many seemingly-endless days on the train ride just before entering California by saying " I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. "

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for awhile to know if it were day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a high pine forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already colored with the fires of dawn.

I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again - home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.

Every spire of pine along the hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to me than a blood-relation. Few people have praised God more happily than I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue canyon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping thousands of feet toward sea-level as we went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like school boys, and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform, and became new creatures within and without.

The sun no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. At every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed our destination; this was the 'good country' we had been going to so long. "

From To the Golden Gates, in The Amateur Emigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson