"By Northern Rivers" illustration from The Overland Monthly, 1894. Larger.
Teddy Roosevelt once declared that northern California's Burney Falls was the "eighth wonder of the world," a claim that nobody would deny who's ever been to see it.
Travel writer Ninetta Eames loved exploring northern California's inland waterways. In "By Northern Rivers," written for an 1894 issue of the Overland Monthly, she celebrates the unique beauty of Burney Falls.
McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park. Larger.
The background of Burney Falls is a shallow concave of slated lava tufted and padded with rock mosses and ferns, and sharp-shorn at the top, down which the parted torrent pours either side a mimic turret. Next these streaming rivers of foam, and half way up the crescent wall, the water bursts from under fringed eaves, and descends in a swift falling veil, behind which ferns drip and long grasses pull and flatten. The great overflowing bowl at the foot of the falls has not light enough to reflect the spiked plants on its brim, nor yet the rocking tiger-lillies, whose audacious brilliancy glows like stars in the rainbow spray.
For all this perfected beauty the pines make a fit setting, lifting their motionless javelins into the golden ether, and barring from sight their hosts on the near, circling mountains.
California boasts a rich heritage of self-reliance and individuality. But sometimes such estimable qualities are taken way too far.
A frequent contributor to the Overland Monthly, Ninetta Eames was fascinated with the lumbering regions of northern California, including Mendocino City, a place, she discovered, that appeals to the eye as it assaults the ears.
Viewed from a distance on shore or at sea, the city seems to have an imposing array of cupolas, which are in reality water tanks, with windmills of every known pattern. There is in fact an individuality about the waterworks of this town not found in any other place of its size. Every family or group of families has its separate well and windmill, thus obviating the necessity of a general source of water supply. One sees windmills painted in red, white, or blue, or dark shades of maroon and yellow, and still others so ancient and wind tortured that their distinctive color can only be guessed.
When the wind blows, and there is rarely a day here that it does not, these various windmills set up a medley of discordant creaks and groans, each pitched in a different key, and whether heard singly or collectively, all equally nerve-rending.
Ninetta Eames didn't only write for the Overland Monthly, for a time she was its editor. "Staging in the Mendocino Woods" appeared there in 1892.
below to hear radio segment.
