The California Palestine [pp. 13-25]

The California Palestine.
homes. Rockbound it is for miles, but
desolate it will not be. The ridges of
the mountains, clad with grass and trees,
thrust themselves down to the very
waves, and are already fit for plow and
spade.
"It is a strange land," said an English
tourist to me once. "Do you know,
people have lied to me. I thought there
were plains, like Australia, you know,
with mountains of course, away off after
a week's journey. But here I've been
trips all about, and as far as I can see,
the hills are pretty nearly everywhere.
It's a wonderfully interesting country,
but then it's not what I expected to
see."
gardener. Some of the finest of these
are in San Mateo on the San Jos6 road;
but Suiol, the Livermore foothills, and
the Napa, Sonoma, and Solano borders
of the valley show the same fine charm
of natural copses and oak masses. It is
rare to find a farm in the coast or Sierra
counties of California that has not some
commanding site on which to build,
some hill, or ridge, or "head of a gulch,"
or some bluff edge overlooking a lower
level. The opportunities for "commanding sites" about every valley and on
every river, impress the traveler forcibly.
It is easy to see that when the California foothills are fully settled, they will
retain much of their present wild charm
A MESA IN SUMMER.
Whoever wants to arrive at a primary conception of California, will
please remember that although it contains fifty-two counties, covers an area
of I58,360 square miles, and stretches
through nine and a half degrees of latitude, it is only in the central valley that
one can be more than a few miles from
the hills; even in the great valley, which
at its widest part is sixty miles across,
the land is far from having a monotonous level. The charm of California and
the secret of its climate and productions
may be found in a study of its broken
and diversified hill surfaces.
Where the foothills break into the
valleys, natural groves of oaks are found,
parklike as if planted by a landscape
in ravines and rocks, while they add the
effect of cultivated fields, vineyards, and
homesteads. And the slow, costly subduing of these hillsides is really the
problem before California. The level
principalities will divide and subdivide;
but only the full conquest of the whole
beautiful and wonderfully rich "hillcountry" of the State can make possible
the horticultural development which
Californians predict. The best wines,
the olive oil, and the finer fruits, must
come from the foothills.
Illustrations of the way in which the
hill life colors everything in California
are impossible to escape, so thick they
lie on every hand. Every wagon sold in
San Francisco has brakes calculated for
1889.]
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