AN EQUINE ADVENTURE

In 1911, an Englishman named Joseph Smeaton Chase set out on a 2,000-mile horseback ride the length of California. Accompanied by his friend Carl Eytel, the duo sought to experience the beauty and communities of California before progress and industrialization changed them forever. Along the way Chase took notes on the state’s topography, botany and culture. In 1913 he turned his notes into a book, California Coast Trails: A Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon, which became one of the seminal works of California travel literature.

The following is an excerpt of Chase and Eytel’s visit to the Santa Cruz Mountains. Though they enjoyed the spectacular scenery, they were less than pleased with the resort atmosphere of Big Trees Grove:

“The mountain belt that rises to the north of Santa Cruz carries a particularly fine forest of redwoods. I could not think of missing these noble giants, so once more I abandoned the coast for a few days and struck directly into the mountains. The road followed the course of the beautiful San Lorenzo River, and I was soon again in the companionship of the trees, -- a mingling of sequoia, spruce, alder, bay, box-elder, and maple. The canon is a deep one, and the narrow road is cut into its western side, giving fine views up and down the wooded gorge."

"Automobiles were unusually numerous and irresponsible, charging down on us round the sharpest curves with no formalities of horn-blowing. After Anton had passed through various stages of indignation and alarm, he could see nothing for it but to turn and bolt from every car we met, and I had some exciting moments while we pirouetted about on the edge of the five-hundred foot chasm."
 

"As I was eating my lunch by a spring beside the road, a sound of shouting began to come up out of the canon. It was in a peculiar sing-song drawl, and came nearer and nearer until, when it arrived close to where I sat, I stood up to see what phenomenon was about to appear. There was a creaking and crackling of underbrush, and then the heads of a yoke of oxen rose above the level of the road, and so remained while two pairs of solemn eyes took stock of me and my companion. Gradually six yoke emerged, followed by a man with a goad, who was the author of the melancholy music, and then by a wagon and trailer on which was a single huge log of redwood. They went quartering about from side to side of the road, and when four similar processions had followed them, and they had all come to anchor, the hubbub ceased, half the oxen lay down, and the drivers gathered at the spring for the noon meal. They were swarthy, bullet-headed fellows, and proved all to be Portuguese, speaking no English, so that our conservation was limited. However, it was full of good-will, expressed in a friendly interchange of wine and tobacco."

"Just beyond, a side road led off to a grove of exceptionally fine sequoias. I found the spot given up to picnic arrangements, and the trees themselves bespattered with business cards and unsightly scrawlings. One or two of the largest bore inscriptions, -- 'Dedicated to the Los Angeles Produce Exchange by the San Francisco Dairy and Fruit Exchange'; and 'Dedicated to Reading Commandery No. 42 Knights Templars of Pennsylvania.' I pondered these inexplicable labels for some time, and could only conclude that they were examples of the same pitiful ambition that Hamlet observed in a certain kind of players."

"The great trees themselves, if one could get them free of these trivialities, are wonderful and stately enough, the tall, tapering shafts rising in superb grace and power, flecked with purple and gold along their fluted [channelings]. A forest of their kind surrounds them, mingled with a few other species, and the clear, bright river ripples or steals along as seductively as river can do. But I can never enjoy these spots 'dedicated' to beer and sandwiches, or even to Masons and butter-men, and I was soon glad to turn away."

Sources: California Coast Trails; A Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon by J. Smeaton Chase, 1913; “California Coast Trails: A Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon,” The Double Cone Register (Journal of the Ventana Wilderness Alliance), Volume VII, Number 1, Fall 2005, https://www.ventanawild.org/news/fall05/chase/.

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