Northern California

“ Some of the most picturesque country in California lies on or near the coast north of San Francisco. The coast counties, Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, Klamath, and Del Norte, are the least visited by strangers, and yet with Napa, Lake, and Trinity, they make up a region which contains a very great deal of wild and fine scenery, and which abounds with game, and shows to the traveler many varieties of life and several of the peculiar industries of California. ”

“ The great valley of California formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in the early years of the nineteenth century was a no man's land traversed by wandering parties of Russians, British, and Americans who trapped the furs of its streams. Glimpses of these early explorers, who included French Canadian employees of the northern fur companies, flash across the pages of the journal in which John Work kept a daily record. ”

“ The Northern Pacific coast was then almost unpopulated. California a territory three times as large as New York and Oregon and the State of Washington, all now being cultivated and containing large and populous cities, and railroads connecting them with the East. Why that country should have remained uninhabited for untold ages, where universal stillness must have prevailed as far as human activity is concerned, is one of the unfathomable mysteries of nature. ”

“ The intervening space is somewhere overspread with hills and vales, but for the most part comprises an oblong plain, the Valley of California, the northern portion being called the Sacramento Valley, and the southern the San Joaquin Valley, from the names of the streams that water the respective parts. The prospect thus presented opens toward the setting sun.
Humanity here is varied. There is already round San Francisco Bay raw material enough of divers types to develop a new race, howsoever inferior the quality might be. ”

“ This flourishing city stands, in fact, with its half million or more human beings and its metropolitan activities, at the threshold of a new era. The operations of Nature change so slowly as to show almost no change at all: the Southern California of the 651 coming years will still possess her green hills and vales, her life-giving soil, her fruits, flowers and grain, and the same sun will shine upon her with the same generous warmth, out of the same blue sky, as ever. ”

“ Making your way through the mazes of the Coast Range to the summit of any of the inner peaks or passes opposite San Francisco, in the clear springtime, the grandest and most telling of all California landscapes is outspread before you. At your feet lies the great Central Valley glowing golden in the sunshine, extending north and south farther than the eye can reach, one smooth, flowery, lake-like bed of fertile soil. ”

“ The Indians were early converted to Christianity, gradually weaned from their nomadic and barbaric state, and induced to lead a settled life. They were taught farming and other civilized pursuits and became in time a peaceful and industrious people. The Spanish Government, which intended eventually to turn the mission estates into administrative districts, never acknowledged the title of the priests to the land, and in 1777 began the founding of pueblos or towns. Upper California was divided into the four provinces of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. ”

“ It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern California should be deemed to comprehend. Most of the State, leaving out the mining and lumbering districts, displays some of those tropical features in which the idea of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate climates consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounding pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the north of San Francisco. ”

“ The country lying between the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Ocean, and bounded at the north, though somewhat indefinitely, by the Oregon Territory, and at the South by the Lower California, confined by the late treaty of the two neighboring Republics to the line three miles south of San Diego, is known as Upper California, a country now engrossing the attention of the civilized world with its future importance. ”

“ The quantity of arable land in California, I believe, is much greater than has generally been supposed from the accounts of the country given by travellers who have visited only the parts on the Pacific, and some few of the missions. Most of the mountain valleys between the Sierra Nevada and the coast are exuberantly fertile, and finely watered, and will produce crops of all kinds, while the hills are covered with oats and grass of the most nutritious qualities, for the sustenance of cattle, horses, and hogs. ”

“ Of all that mighty host, not more than one in a hundred remains in California to-day. In neglected graves, in the red earth of the Sierra, in the shadow of the cross of Calvary, under the laurel and willows of Lone Mountain, in the great depths of the sea, in the trenches of innumerable battlefields, in far-off Australia or Southern Africa, in Alaska, in Arizona, in Mexico, in Nicaragua, they sleep their last sleep. ”

“ Even the hopeless stretches of alkali and sand, sinks of lost streams, in the southeastern counties, are redeemed by the delectable mountains that on all sides shut them in. Everywhere the landscape swims in crystalline ether, while over all broods the warm California sun. ”

“ Instead of returning, as the most of the gold-seekers intended to do on leaving their homes, they found California a delightful climate, with rich and fertile valleys, and many, very many of them concluded, after having a year's experience in the country, to become citizens, and a little later in the fifties, there were a great many people in the Western States who sold their homes and started with their families for the golden shores of the Pacific—in other words, for California—in view of adopting that State for their future homes. ”

“ They are the real Fathers of the Pacific. Roving over the interior, the miners leave a land as nearly ruined as human effort can render it. In the wake of these nugget-hunters, future years bring those who make the abandoned hills lovely with scattered homes. They are now hidden by orchards, vineyards, and gardens. Peaceful flocks and herds prove that the Golden Age of California is not to be these wild days of the barbaric Forty-niner.
Maxime Valois sees the land sweeping in unrivalled beauty to the Colorado. Free to the snowy peaks of the Sacramento, the rich plains roll. ”

“ The press of the nation took up the story, and the people of the United States were taught to look upon California as a land of infinite promise, abounding in agricultural and commercial possibilities, full of game, rich in timber, possessed of perfect climate, and feebly held by an effeminate people quite lacking in enterprise and disorganized among themselves. ”

“ Yet so simple and massive is the topography of the State in general views, that the main central portion displays only one valley, and two chains of mountains which seem almost perfectly regular in trend and height: the Coast Range on the west side, the Sierra Nevada on the east. These two ranges coming together in curves on the north and south inclose a magnificent basin, with a level floor more than 400 miles long, and from 35 to 60 miles wide. This is the grand Central Valley of California, the waters of which have only one outlet to the sea through the Golden Gate. ”

“ Stone, as a building material is scarce; and at several of the points where it may be desirable to establish military posts, grain for forage is out of the question, and grass can only be found in exceedingly limited quantities. I expressed a hope in my despatches to the War Department of June 30, that I would be able to make an examination of the country along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, from the source of the San Joaquin to the southern boundary of California ”

“ Certain aspects from the bay of the town of Sausalito, with strangely shaped and softly tinted houses tumbling down the hillside, certain aspects of the bay from the heights of Berkeley, with the expanses of hills and water and the inevitable fog smudging a smoky streak here and there, are more like the picture-country of the Japanese masters than any American reality.
If I were to pick the time when I should travel in California, it would be in the early summer. All the rest of the world at that moment is green. California alone is sheer gold. ”

“ The whole of Alta California comprises a seaboard strip eight hundred miles in length by one or two hundred in width, marked off from the western earth's end of the temperate zone; it was the last to be occupied by civilized man, and, to say the least, as full of fair conditions as any along the belt. The whole area is rimmed on either side, the Coast Range rolling up in stony waves along the outer edge, and for background the lofty Sierra, upheaved in crumpled folds from primeval ocean. ”

“ The great influx of emigrants to Upper California has brought the subject of the settlement of the peninsula into consideration. There is but little doubt that Lower California will, sooner or later, become the property of the United States, and then its settlement and progress will be rapid. The coast upon the gulf affords many excellent harbors, and the mountainous region of the interior gives abundant evidence of mineral wealth, as far as it has been explored. ”

“ If California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity. The abundance of wood and water, the extreme fertility of its shores, the excellence of its climate, which is as near to being perfect as any in the world, and its facilities for navigation, affording the best anchoring-grounds in the whole western coast of America, all fit it for a place of great importance ”

“ The view from seaward, up this valley, is beautiful indeed, being surrounded by high barren mountains, which is the general appearance of the whole peninsula, and gives the impression that the whole country is without soil, and unproductive. When your eye gets a view of this beautiful, fertile, cultivated, rich, green valley, producing all the fruits and vegetables of the earth, Lower California stock rises. ”

“ The remains of a vast number of villages in all the valleys of the Sierra Nevada, and among the foot-hills of that range of mountains, show that at no distant day there must have been a numerous population, where there is not now an Indian to be seen. There are a few still retained in the service of the old Californians, but these do not amount to more than a few thousand in the whole territory. ”

“ The place contained some five hundred inhabitants, the dwellings all of the adobie mud-built order of architecture, with but one road between them: for ten leagues around the land is most fertile, and the country in many respects appears to possess great advantages, and has the reputation of being the garden of Upper California. We saw quantities of fruits, peas, peaches, and grapes, very unripe, but the natives like them the better green.
Under no contingency does the natural face of Upper California appear susceptible of supporting a very large population ”

“ California has become a centre of attraction for population, wealth and trade. The grand auriferous region which has thus far been examined and partially drained of its deposits, is between four and five hundred miles long, and from forty to fifty broad, following the windings of the Sierra Nevada. ”

“ A peninsula which to the Spanish conquistadores was an island glistening in the azure web of romance; a land for which the padres gave their lives in fanatic devotion to the Cross; a land rich in history, when the timbers of the Mayflower were yet trees in the forest. Lower California, once sought and guarded for her ores and her jewels, now a veritable terra incognita, slumbering, unnoticed, at the feet of her courted child, the great State of California. Lower California, her romance nigh forgotten, her possibilities overlooked by enterprise and by the statesmen of the two republics. ”

“ Long after the individual argonauts have laid their weary brows upon the drifted pine needles in the deep eternal sleep of Death, the problem will be solved. When their lonely graves are landmarks of the Sierras; when the ephemeral tent towns have been folded up forever, the broad lands of California will support great communities. To them, these early days will be as unreal as the misty wreaths clinging around the Sierras. ”

“ Since 1885 the eight counties south of the Tehachapi Range, which are known collectively and specifically as Southern California have greatly advanced in population. In 1880 their population was 7.3, in 1890 17.2, and in 1900 20.1% of the total population of the state. The initial impulse to this increase was the beginning of the “fruit epoch” in these counties, combined with a railway “rate-war” following the completion to the coast in 1885 of the Santa Fe, and an extraordinary land boom prevailing from 1886 to 1888. ”

“ For twenty days California was a republic, then Captain Montgomery, by order of Commodore Sloat, raised the stars and stripes on the plaza at Yerba Buena. A flag was sent to Fremont, camping on the Sacramento, and was raised over Sutter's fort.
Hark! Who is this winding along the trail to California? It is Pio-pio-mox-mox, going to avenge the murder of Elijah. Warlike Walla Wallas and dark frowning Cayuses on their swift steeds bending to avoid the boughs of semi-tropic forests are following the old
trail to the South. ”