Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/43

Rh, by three or four generations of human effort, of the bounties of nature. The aggressive energy of the Yankees, against which the leisure-loving ways of the easy-going Californios could not prevail (with some few exceptions in the south) still moves a people who have built aqueducts from faraway mountains to reclaim whole deserts, strung power lines from mighty dams across inaccessible wilderness to distant cities, dredged one of the Nation's great harbors from mud flats and flung the world's biggest bridges across a bay. The wild wastes of a century ago are dotted now with lumber mills, mine shafts and smelters, power plants and factories. The valleys are squared off in grain field and pasture, vegetable patch, vineyard and fruit orchard, watered with a labyrinth of irrigation ditches and criss-crossed with highways and railroads. Mountain streams have been dammed for electric power; plains and slopes drilled for oil. Under the earth extends a network of pipelines for oil and natural gas and above it, a network of high-tension wires for electric current. The canneries and packing houses, oil refineries, aircraft factories and movie studios ship their products to every corner of the Nation and beyond. The Californian of today feels a personal pride in the State's gargantuan public works: highways, bridges, dams, and aqueducts. And most of all, of course, he exults in the region's "happy future."

The days when the American people finally reached land's end on the Pacific are almost within the memory of living men. If Californians seem to display the brash boastfulness of adolescents, perhaps they deserve charitable forgiveness; for after all, they are citizens of a young State. And boastfulness is not the only telltale sign of its youth. The restlessness of the men who made the westward trek persists in the unquenchable wanderlust with which their descendants have taken to the automobile, thronging the highways with never-ending streams of traffic bound for seashore, deserts, forests and mountains. And the sturdy instinct for independence that inspired the rough-and-ready democracy of the mining camps and towns has lasted too; quiescent at intervals, it has always revived in time to save Californians from unprotesting resignation to hardship. They hope, perhaps, that the stubborn search for a better land that brought their grandfathers here to the shores of the Pacific has not spent itself. They hope, in fact, that they can yet make of El Dorado the promised land that has fired men's imaginations for four hundred years.