Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/366

 346 contain the peaks of from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet elevation which have obtained an extensive fame in the world. The Coast Range, of softer materials, averages only from two to six thousand feet.

The Sierra Nevadas do not greatly divide their strength, but the Coast Range throws out frequent spurs parallel to itself. These take separate names, as Sierra Morena, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz mountains, and form numerous long, narrow valleys and benches of table-land between themselves and the Pacific Ocean. Down the large Santa Clara Valley, one of those formed in this way in the midst of a diversified region, our first excursion takes us.

By the time the files of freight-cars constituting the immediate environs of all American cities are passed we find ourselves running through a tract of small vegetable gardens and windmills. Clusters of buildings in white enclosures, that looked from town, on their hills, like Mexican haciendas, are "institutions" of various sorts. A long arm of San Francisco Bay accompanies us thirty miles south, and is seen gleaming to the left, with a wide stretch of marsh between. Ark-like structures on piles, at intervals along the water's edge, are guard-houses, keeping watch over beds of the small California oyster, which has never yet been either coaxed or driven into a grandeur commensurate with the pretensions of everything else about it.

The conception that has gone out about Southern California is that it is an earthly Paradise. I will say at once that it is very charming, even in the dry season, but it is an earthly Paradise very different from the best idea of it one has been able to get by previous investigation. I found myself there, in short, in the dry season, and most writers have spoken of it only as viewed in the season of rains and verdure.