Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/40

4 him across the continent headed down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. "At every turn we could look further into the land of our happy future. At every turn the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this indeed was our destination—this was 'the good country' we have been going to so long."

It required little literary artifice to spin legends of an earthly Utopia so real that men would risk toil, hunger, and even death to seek it in the West. The diarists of the early expeditions, the newly settled immigrants who wrote back home, the enthusiastic globetrotters who recorded their travels—all extolled the virtues of El Dorado, and after them a growing throng of professional boosters—newspaper lyricists, real-estate promoters, chamber-of-commerce press agents—swelled the chorus.

"I love you, California, you're the greatest State of all," begins the semiofficial State song; it closes with the solemn declaration:

"And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh For my sunny California."

When the first white men came by foot into California in 1769, they failed to recognize the Bay of Monterey, so overenthusiastically described by the chronicler of Sebastian Vizcaino's expedition, and passed by. Since their time, similar panegyrics have misled others, for California is both more and less than its eulogists have claimed it to be. There is something more to it than sunshine and vineyards and orange orchards, bathing beaches and redwood trees and movie studios—more than the hurried visitor to a few chosen showplaces may glimpse. For California, in more than one sense, is all things to all men. The ballyhooers have called it a sun-kissed garden spot cooled by gentle zephyrs from the sea. The description is appropriate enough for the sloping valley plains along the coast. They might also call it a sun-scorched waste of boulder-scarred mountains and desert plains, or a rain-drenched highland of timbered gorges and snow-capped granite peaks. Or they might describe the vast spreading plains of its Central Valley, or the smooth-worn brown slopes of its undulating oak-dotted foothills, or the lava crags and juniper forests of its volcanic plateaus. Its seashore has stretches of smoothly curving sandy beach and of saw-toothed, rock-strewn coast; its plains are checkered with fertile fields and pastures, and desolate with crags and alkali; its rivers brim with water between fringes of greenery and lose their flow underground in sandy washes. California's contrasts are extreme. It has fierce heat and bitter cold, some of the country's wettest regions and some of its driest, the continent's lowest point and the country's second highest. Its landscape is so variegated that when the Californian goes traveling,