Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/364

 344 live to be old, and note his faculties failing) to retire in order to renew his youth. And but seventy-five miles farther south are the summer resorts—and winter resorts as well—of Santa Cruz and Monterey.

I set out in mid-autumn, the time of the county fairs, when the products of an agricultural country should be seen to particular advantage. There was held at San José the combined fair of the counties of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, and that I made my first objective point.

There are no means of exit from San Francisco by land except to the southward, the long, narrow peninsula on which it lies being surrounded on all other sides by water. One may cross, however, by ferry to Oakland—the Jersey City and Hoboken, as well as Brooklyn, of the place—and go around the bay on that side by a road which reaches San José also. In doing so you traverse Alameda County, which raises nearly a million bushels of wheat a year from a single township, together with tons of sugar-beets, and more hay than any other county in the State. It comes third also in rank for grape-vines, and has tropical pretensions of its own, making an exhibit of orange and lemon trees in certain favored nooks. But the more direct way is the coast division of the Southern Pacific Railway, down the peninsula.

Let us glance at topography a moment. California is fenced off into valleys by two long north and south ranges—the Sierra Nevadas, immensely high, and the lower Coast Range. These meet in acute points, north at Shasta, and south at the Tejon Pass, and become one. They enclose between them the vast central space known in its upper portion as the Sacramento Valley, and its lower as the San Joaquin Valley, from the two main rivers by which it is drained. The granite Sierra Nevadas 