The noble Empire State thus constructed lies west of the Sierra Nevada, and was wisely fashioned to avoid jurisdiction beyond the mountains. It is strongly contrasted in appearance with the sterility of the Great Basin. Crossing the Sierra Nevada at the Pass traversed by Frémont in February 1844, the traveller finds himself about four degrees south of the northern boundary of the State, and, as he looks westward down the slope of the mountains, the whole of California lies at his feet. The declivities of the Sierra, with a breadth of from forty to seventy miles, and a length from north to south of about five hundred, are heavily wooded with oak, pine, cypress and cedar, while innumerable small streams, rising in the melted snows of the lofty peaks, traverse their rugged sides. These rivulets descend through glens and gorges,—sometimes barren, sometimes luxuriant,—until they disgorge themselves into the Sacramento and San Joaquin. The first of these,—rising in the north at the base of the gigantic Shastl which lifts its snowy diadem fourteen thousand feet above the sea,—sweeps southward towards the thirty-eighth degree of latitude; while the second, oozing from the fens and marshes of lake Tulares, runs northward until it mingles with the Sacramento,—when both, swollen by their tributaries from
the Sierra Nevada, are finally discharged into the Pacific by the bay of San Francisco which bursts through a gap in a lower chain of mountains bordering the coast. This western Coast Range, averaging about two thousand feet in height, forms, with the Eastern Sierra Nevada, the intermediate sloping plain or valley which is completely drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin.
