While the landscape of the Mojave is often awe-inspiring, a desert sunset caught at just the right moment provides a fleeting image of splendor that shines like a precious stone.
J. Smeaton Chase describes the glowing beauty and trance-like solitude that converged just for him into a real gem of a sunset.
By some peculiarity of the light, the landscape had much the quality of a wash drawing in black and white, seen thorough a thin purplish haze. The line of palms made a charming foreground, each one a study of an airy grace; beyond rose the Bullion Mountains, dark dull gray with splashes of white where sand had lodged far up, as if it were snow; farther to the east another range, the Sheepholes, of the dead hue of volcanic ash, and over all the luminous arch, infinitely remote, with flecks of snowy cloud like sheep straying in the blue pastures of the sky. Spaciousness and solitude were the elements of the scene, and reacted with trance-like spell upon the mind.
As the sun went down a blood-red light suddenly came over all the view. I never saw anything more startling and instantaneous in its coming, or more theatric in its intensity of hue. For the few seconds that it lasted I held my breath. The mountains burned as if they were incandescent: Bullion? No, the lava of rubies. Then in a moment it had paled and like an expiration was gone.
"A Vista in Our Araby," frontispiece for Our Araby, 1920. Larger.
The City of Palm Springs boasts a winter population of 75,000 people, world-class golf links, and sunny skies 350 days of the year. Except for the sunshine, however, it wasn't always so.
Englishman J. Smeaton Chase loved the outdoors, loved the desert, and treasured rural simplicity, all of which he found in a romantic Palm Springs that no longer exists.
Electric lights are here for those who like them, yet to some of us nothing seems so homelike for the dining table as shaded candles, or for fireside reading a good kerosene lamp, while if you want to call on a neighbor after dark, we find that a lantern sheds light where you need it, instead of illuminating mainly the upper air. Telephones? No, thanks: we are here to possess our souls and live all day in the open. How can we do that if anybody and everybody who so wishes can jerk us back with a telphone wire, as if we were parrots tied to a perch with a string? Cement sidewalks would be to us a calamity: we may be dusty, but dust is natural and we prefer it. After all, the pepper- or cottonwood-shaded streets of our Garden of the Sun are really only country lanes, and who wants a country lane cemented. . . ?
J. Smeaton Chase's 1923 book Our Araby captures a Palm Springs long before it gained fame as a famous resort destination.
"At Twenty-Nine Palms," illustration from California Desert Trails, 1919.
Today the desert city Twentynine Palms is home to over 28,000 people. But when English transplant J. Smeaton Chase stopped by in 1918, there were only two, and they weren't high on the place.
After a persistent search for the one-time mining "camp of renown," Chase finally arrives in Twentynine Palms where he makes the acquaintance of the whole town.
The population of Twentynine Palms at the time of my visit numbered two, so that my arrival, on the eve of the Fourth of July, seemed to cast an air of festivity over the scene. The two, one a prospector and old haunter of the locality, the other a consumptive from "inside" who was sacrificing every comfort of life for the sake of the dry air of this lonely spot, received me cordially enough, but remained convinced, I think, in spite of my plain story, that I was "lookin' up mineral, ain't you now?" They felt it an insult to their intelligence to be asked to believe that any one would come to Twentynine Palms in July for the sake of seeing the country and "them old pa'ms." "Country?" said the sick man, waving towards a sunset that would have thrown Turner into a frenzy—"Country? Th' ain't no country round here to 'mount to nuthin'. You ever see any, Mac?" And Mac sententiously replied, "Durned if I ain't forgot what real country looks like, anyway."
J. Smeaton Chase traveled all over California on horseback, recording his experinces in three travel books. California Desert Trails appeared in 1919.
Thanks to the automobile, we take for granted our ability to tour in comfort through California's backcountry. But back in 1911 when Englishman J. Smeaton Chase wanted to explore Big Sur country, he had to buy a horse.
Starting in El Monte, Chase rode his companion Anton along the California Coast clear to the Oregon border. He recorded his impressions in California Coast Trails, a classic of California travel writing and a volume rich with powerful descriptions of our coastal regions. Here, J. Smeaton Chase guides Anton along a trail somewhere in the Santa Lucias south of Big Sur.
Higher still, and near the crest, I came into a region of magnificent yellow pines and redwoods. It was sundown, and the view was a remarkable one. The sun shone level, and with a strange bronze hue, through a translucent veil of fog. Below the fog the surface of the ocean was clear, and was flooded with gorgeous purple by the sunset. On the high crest where I stood, a clear, warm glory bathed the golden slopes of grass and lighted the noble trees as if for some great pageant. There was a solemnity in the splendor, an unearthly quality in the whole scene; that kept me spellbound and bareheaded until, fatefully, imperceptibly, the sun had set.
Chase wrote two other California travel books, Yosemite Trails and California Desert Trails.
If it's true that what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, then according to one California travel writer, the Giant Sequoia redwoods are even mightier than they look.
It's not clear what brought Englishman J. Smeaton Chase to California in 1890, but it is clear what kept him here: an attraction to the natural world which he indulged--rain or shine--by traveling the state on horseback, including a trip to the the
Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias.
Suddenly a heavy wind roared overhead, from which the firs and pines recoiled; but I noticed that the Sequoias stood stately and unmoving, only their foliage was roughly tossed. Then came a wild slither of lightning, then a crash of thunder, and then the rain came tearing down. For ten minutes the eleā ments were in a paroxysm; lightning thrust and parried, thunder roared incoherent applause, and the rain fell savagely as if it were flung by an angry hand. Then with another burst of wind, that filled the air with sodden tassels of foliage, the storm passed on, and the only sound was that of a hundred rills trilling tiny carillons. When one considers how many times the thunderbolts must have hurtled about these ancient trees it is astonishing that one of them is left standing.
J. Smeaton Chase's 1911 travel book Yosemite Trails contains close observations of memorable Sierra terrain and the sometimes memorable people who live on it.
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