xxxxxxThere has been a sort of worship of the Yosemite, and the worshipers have held to the old idea that nothing is worshipful but that which is difficult and far away. Gods and shrines must be understood only by the priesthood. The religion of nature, like the other religions, must not be cheapened and brought within the compass of the troubled many. Adoration of the Yosemite should be for the stout pilgrims with long purses and no ailments. The surpassing exemplification of nature's greatness must be reserved for the athletic rich.

xxxxxxSo argue the "nature cranks," as they have been dubbed by advocates of the other idea. These others want equal rights in scenery as well as in the Constitution. They argue that if Yosemite "proves the existence of God," as one devotee has put it, the consecration and conviction caused by the mingling of grandeur and beauty should be open to all mankind. They declare that the more people that can be brought to see Yosemite the better will the world become. They insist that they hold an equal measure of reverence and appreciation with their opponents, and they are very stout in sneering at selfishness and snobbery in the aristocracy of travel.

xxxxxxxxxxShall you be carried to the skies
xxxxxxxxxxOn flowery beds of ease
xxxxxxxxxxWhile others toil to win the prize
xxxxxxxxxxAnd sail through bloody seas?

xxxxxxSo misquote those who would have everything grand and beautiful in nature as remote and inaccessible as the poles; while their opponents retort that there is no reason why a man in a clean shirt cannot appreciate nature as deeply as the chap with his lungs full of dust, a crimp in his collar, and an ache in his back.

xxxxxxBut while the argument goes on and grows fiercer as it goes, there is the railroad into Yosemite, and all the arguments since Adam and Eve will not put it away. A very substantial railroad it is, too, with seventy-pound rails and steel bridges, and a road-bed that was in large part hewn through the solid rock. It is a twentieth-century fact, and even the "nature crank" may not find it entirely incompatible with his ideas of worship and veneration to leave San Francisco in the morning and sleep at the hotel in the Yosemite that night. Once there he will be a toughened soul indeed who can "gape joylessly in the home land of the beautiful," even though there are ten people at worship where there was but one before.

xxxxxxIn the grand old uncomfortable days very rugged men got glimpses of Yosemite by riding many miles on horseback, and then scrambling afoot. If salvation depended upon a visit to the great shrine by that means, the bright beyond would have been populated entirely by athletes. The first white men straggled in along an Indian trail in March, 1851. When one of the party was advised to move out rapidly else, should he be left behind, he would lose his hair, the reply was,

xxxxxx"If my hair is now required I can depart in peace, for I have seen the power and glory of a Supreme Being."

It was the throb and inspiration reported by the pioneers of the Mariposa battalion that sent other pilgrims forward on the uncertain trails to brave the grizzly and the Indian. The adventurous men of the "Southern Mines" got into.the way of glimpsing the wondrous valley when.they had pouched their gold-dust and worked out their bench or bar. The first tourists entered the valley in June, 1855, led by T. M. Hutchings, who had heard of a waterfall a thousand feet high and wished to see for himself. The place so fascinated Hutchings that he became a part of it, and his body now lies in the valley's little cemetery.

xxxxxxFrom this on the tourists multiplied, and the trails were cut to fit their demands. But it was "a hard road to travel," and it still required a good stomach, stout muscles, and a venturesome soul to secure the uplift and the glory of "seeing Yosemite." In time came a road, but at best there were over two hundred miles of hard going in and out, and the tolls were high. Then other roads were built, and at last the railroads crept up so there were only sixty miles of staging each way. But sixty miles of climbing and plunging and the eating of dust does not tend to convince the average man or woman that he or she is on the road to happiness. So many visitors swore through their dirt that they never would undergo that penance again.

xxxxxxThe number of pilgrims, however, had grown to about five thousand yearly in 1902 and last year ran up to seventy-five hundred or thereabout. The mighty scenic magnet drew people from all the world-people who stood the fatigue and the discomfort just to be able to say in the face of the world, "I have seen Yosemite." Still the journey was, as one writer aptly said, "The pilgrim who approaches this mighty shrine, like the faithful who seek Mecca, must endure somewhat."

At last this is changed. Man's money and man's ingenuity have made the path easy and the burden light. The nonathletic certainly will rejoice at this, even though those of heroic pose insist that the railroad is poking an impudent nose into nature's holy of holies. Already those who keep to the natural law of following the line of least resistance are patronizing the railroad, leaving those of the hardier legs and idyllic fancies to follow the old stageroads or the older trails.

xxxxxxThere is nothing scenically banal about this railroading toward the stupendous gorge. If it did not have so unusual a terminus-if it were not a mere curtain-raiser-its own peculiar beauties would soon have a generously heralded fame. For that railroad for the most part winds along the rushing, tumbling, kicking Merced River-fifty four miles of white water. It is carved out of the rock, and the explosion of its blasts startled many old romances that have slept along the River of Mercy since the miners rocked their cradles there in the brave days of gold.

xxxxxxThey tell you that it took 2,800,900 pounds of black powder and dynamite to force that road through the scenery. One tale is that it cost sixty-five dollars in wages to transport a light push-cart less than a mile. A great gang of men worked ten months in hewing two miles of railroad way through "The Broadhead," where the river wallows through a precipitous box canyon. So the intending traveler may know that he is not to pass through a dull state and unprofitable land when he jumps out of the San Joaquin Valley into the mountains.

xxxxxxTo those who look for guide-book information it may here be told that both the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads meet the Yosemite Valley Railroad at Merced,- county seat of a county that took its name from El Rio de la Merced-the River of the Mercy. Then this new, impudent, and irreverent road pushes right eastward across the flat lands toward the Sierras.

xxxxxxAt first there is little to see save the irrigating-ditches, wheat-fields, and pastures of a country destined to become more populous. There are flat lands about Snelling, with orchards and vineyards and a general exhalation of bounty. But not until Merced Falls is reached will there be any great necessity of craning necks from the observation-car. From that point on, however, things are worth the story-teller's attention.

xxxxxxAbove Merced Falls the Past and the Present shake hands. Modern methods of storing and utilizing water-power and modern methods of mining are seen beside the broken flumes and the piled cobbles that tell of feverish excitements, swift fortunes, and the "petulant pop of the pistol" in the times when water-power was wasted and only the richest ground was panned.

xxxxxxTumbled in a hollow will be seen the rusted remains of an old arrastre. Four roofless walls of stone with iron shutters still rattling on guard at paneless windows mark what was once a bank, where the gold dust was weighed carelessly, but always for the benefit of the banker. Just over the hills in one direction was Mt. Ophir, where the fifty-dollar "slugs" were minted at a private coinage plant-the largest gold pieces ever coined.

xxxxxxOn one bench a few seared stone chimneys are all that sorrow over what was a roaring camp of over five thousand people. Farther up the river was Hell's Hollow-a name to start the imagination. This was on the Mariposa Grant property of "The Pathfinder" Fremont. He put a quartz-mill there and called the place Benton's Mills after his wife, Jessie Benton, daughter of the great senator.

xxxxxxHell's Hollow has now become "Bagby's," named for a thorough adventurer who set up a shack saloon and bunk-house where the Mariposa Road crosses the river and where modern miners have put in a dam. That dam backs up the water to the place where, in Solomon's Gulch, the miners of an earlier day panned and cradled over two millions of " the good red gold." But all the life of that generous day has gone.

xxxxxxUp the South Fork a few miles is a mine found by an Indian woman named Lucy, who gave it and its fat fortune to John Hite, who became her husband. His efforts to disclaim the daughter of the forest constituted one of the picturesque litigations of California's early years. There are other rich mines along the road, with now and again a mill or a dam, but should the traveler desire a glimpse of the picturesque past all he has to do is to watch the inflowing streams from the gulches, and whenever he sees a spout of yellow water pouring into the white and green he will know that some man is taking a chance with pick and pan in just the way men took chances when they made California in the wilderness without stopping to ask whether God would say that it was good.

xxxxxxThere is even flare of the old life at Bagby's, with the Oakhursts and Jack Hamlin at the gaming tables and M'liss and Piney and the rest just as human as they always were even before the master hand scraped away the paint and showed the soul. It is quite in keeping with the romance of the river that power for a rock crusher is to come from the "nameless dam," and that the rock to be crushed is jasper-there is a mountain of it-and it comes down to paint unusual reds and purples in the river's flood.

xxxxxxThere is a great splurge of quartz below El Portal, end of the road and door of the valley. The prospectors passed this quartz by day and by night. It had no lure for them. There was too much of it. Such an outburst could mean nothing in the way of fortune. It was one of nature's jokes. But at last a man named Eigenhoff sat down and hammered away at some of the rock. As a result a company backed by many millions of dollars is putting a big stamp-mill on that long neglected lode. It is just the mining investment that capital seeks-an enormous quantity of low-grade ore.

xxxxxxAnd then with the stopping of the train at El Portal the Yosemite really begins. To be sure, there are still fourteen-miles of staging to the Sentinel Hotel, and there is a good climb to "the floor of the valley." But the Chinquapin Falls are right above the terminus, tumbling fretfully, and the first of the glacial erosions on the tall granitic cliffs can be seen just up the river.

xxxxxxThen the road passes cataract after cataract, fall after fall, cliff piled upon cliff. There is no moment when the eye does not command some exclamation of approval or delight. At one point the stage-road has been blasted right through a granite boulder, and this is called the O'Brien Arch, in honor of the contractor whose push and persistence carried the railroad through where it had been said no railroad could go.

xxxxxxThe Cascades, one of the most impressive of Yosemite's greater waterfalls, pours in on the left of the road, and the horses drink of its flood. The old roads and trails tumble down from this side or that. And then El Capitan and The Place.

xxxxxxThe best pens of half a century have tried to tell the rest, and they have seemed scratchy and mean, for they tried to tell the untellable. But now it is comparatively easy for man to see and feel for himself, and in that presence to wonder why he could not believe; why he cheated and lied and roistered in drunken foolery; how he could have forgotten loves and broken friendships; why he had not always clung to the beliefs and ideals of childhood.

xxxxxxFor whether you reach Yosemite afoot or in the saddle, by stage-coach or by train, you will find there an uplift and a benediction. And you will hear the voice of Faunus singing in the mountains; or it may be the voice of God.