Lights and Shadows of Yosemite
Lights and Shadows of Yosemite

Author: Katherine Ames Taylor

Publisher:

Published: 1926

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Yosemite Valley According to geologists, Yosemite Valley is nearly in the center of the State of California, north and south, and in the middle of the Sierra, which is seventy miles wide at this point. It is described in Government documents as being a "cleft, or gorge" in the Sierra range, which suggests, erroneously, some deep canyon. Valley, on the other hand, conjures up an image of flatness, broad meadows, and meandering streams. As a matter of fact, Yosemite is a rare combination of both. The floor of the Valley, three thousand feet below its rim, runs in an easterly and westerly direction, and is seven miles long and about a mile across at its widest point. It alternates flowery meadows, through which the Merced River winds, with fragrant groves of pines, firs, spruces, and incense cedars. On all sides sheer granite cliffs rise almost perpendicularly to a height of from 2500 to 5000 feet. These form at times sheer shafts of granite, as in the Sentinel Rock, and Cathedral group; at others they round into vast domes, or group themselves in gigantic piles of sculpturing. Over their sides appear glistening ribbons of cascades or the thundering falls of Yosemite, Bridal Veil, Vernal, and Nevada. The wonder of Yosemite does not lie in its bewildering heights and overpowering distances, but in its amazing harmony of magnitude and fragile beauty. Single features so blend into the magnificent whole that it takes days to appreciate it all. Waterfalls five hundred to one or two thousand feet high are so subordinated to the mighty cliffs over which they pour that their own significance is blurred. Mighty trees fringe these walls like waving grain. Broad meadows at their feet appear but narrow strips of lawn. "Things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meet here and blend into countless forms, as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures."

Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest
Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest

Author: Anonymous

Publisher: Library of Alexandria

Published:

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 146554125X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the beginning of the New-making, the ancient fathers lived successively in four caves in the Four fold-containing-earth. The first was of sooty blackness, black as a chimney at night time; the second, dark as the night in the stormy season; the third, like a valley in starlight; the fourth, with a light like the dawning. Then they came up in the night-shine into the World of Knowing and Seeing. So runs the Zuni myth, and it typifies well the mental development, insight, and beauty of speech of the Indian tribes along the Pacific Coast, from those of Alaska in the far-away Northland, with half of life spent in actual darkness and more than half in the struggle for existence against the cold and the storms loosed by fatal curiosity from the bear's bag of bitter, icy winds, to the exquisite imagery of the Zunis and other desert tribes, on their sunny plains in the Southland. It was in the night-shine of this southern land, with its clear, dry air and brilliant stars, that the Indians, looking up at the heavens above them, told the story of the bag of stars of Utset, the First Mother, who gave to the scarab beetle, when the floods came, the bag of Star People, sending him first into the world above. It was a long climb to the world above and the tired little fellow, once safe, sat down by the sack. After a while he cut a tiny hole in the bag, just to see what was in it, but the Star People flew out and filled the heavens everywhere. Yet he saved a few stars by grasping the neck of the sack, and sat there, frightened and sad, when Utset, the First Mother, asked what he had done with the beautiful Star People. The Sky-father himself, in those early years of the New-making, spread out his hand with the palm downward, and into all the wrinkles of his hand set the semblance of shining yellow corn-grains, gleaming like sparks of fire in the dark of the early World-dawn. "See," said Sky-father to Earth-mother, "our children shall be guided by these when the Sun-father is not near and thy mountain terraces are as darkness itself. Then shall our children be guided by light." So Sky-father created the stars. Then he said, "And even as these grains gleam upward from the water, so shall seed grain like them spring up from the earth when touched by water, to nourish our children." And he created the golden Seed-stuff of the corn.