Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/410

 390 them with which he may have started. Let us hope that laborers of the better class, by whom they are to be succeeded, may at least have as many praiseworthy traits.

The town of Fresno is as yet chiefly a supply and market point for the numerous colonies by which it is environed. These colonies straggle out in various directions, beginning within a mile or two of the town. The intervening land still lies in its natural condition for settlement. It is difficult to convey an idea of its seemingly, hopeless barrenness. Instead of complaining of dry grass here one would be grateful for a blade of grass of any kind. The surface is as arid as that of a gravelled school-yard. It is even worse, for it is undermined with' holes of gophers, owls, jack-rabbits, and squirrels. To ride at any speed is certain to bring one to grief through the entangling of his horse's legs in these pitfalls. As the traveller passes there is a scampering on all sides. The gray squirrels speed for their holes with flying leaps, the jack-rabbits with kangaroo-like bounds. They run toward us, if they chance to have been absent from home in an opposite direction. Not one considers himself safe from our clearly malicious designs till he has dived headlong into his own proper tenement.

Here and there are tracts white with alkali. Flakes of this substance, at once bitter and salt to the taste, can be taken up in an almost pure condition. Elsewhere we pass through tracts of wild sunflower a tall weed, charming in flower, but now thoroughly desiccated, and rattling together like dry bones.

This description applies, for the greater part of the year, not only to Fresno, but in an almost equal degree to Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and nearly the whole of Southern California. Without it the wonders which have been produced by human agency could not be un-