As you go north in California the amount of rain-fall increases. In San Diego County they are happy with ten inches per annum, and fortunate if they get five; in Santa Barbara, twelve and a half inches insure their crops; the Sacramento Valley has an average rain-fall of about twenty inched, and eighteen inches insure them a full crop on soil properly prepared. In 1873 they had less, yet the crops did well wherever the farmers had summer-fallowed the land. This practice is now very general, and is necessary, in order that the grain may have the advantage of the early rains. When a farmer plows and prepares his land in the spring, lets it lie all summer, and sows his grain in November just as the earliest rain begins, he need not fear for his crop.
There is less difference in climate than one would suppose between the Sacramento and the San Joaquin valleys. Cattle and sheep live out-of-doors, and support themselves all the year round in the Shasta Valley on the north as constantly as in Los Angeles or any other of the southern counties. The seasons are a little later north than south, but the difference is slight; and as far north as Red Bluff, in the interior, they begin their harvest earlier than in Monterey County, far south but on the coast. Snow rarely lies on the ground in the northern counties more than a day. The best varieties of the foreign grapes are hardy everywhere. Light frosts come in December; and in the flower-gardens the geranium withers to the ground, but springs up from the roots again in March. The eucalyptus flourishes wherever it has been planted in Northern California; and as far north as Redding, at the head of the valley, the mercury very rarely falls below twenty-five degrees, and remains there but a few hours.
As you travel from Marysville, either northward or southward, you will see before and around you a great wide plain, bounded on the west by the blue outlines of the Coast Range, and on the east by the foot-hills of the Sierra: a great level, over which as far as your eye can reach are scattered groves of grand and picturesque white oaks, which relieve the solitude of the plain, and make it resemble a well-planted park. Wherever the valley is settled, you will see neat board fences, roomy barns, and farm-houses nestling among trees, and flanked by young orchards. You will not find a great variety of crops, for wheat and barley are the staple products of this valley; and though the farms here are in general of 640 acres or less, there are not wanting some of those immense estates for which California is famous; and a single farmer in this valley is said to have raised on his own land last year one-twentieth of the entire wheat crop of the State.
Northwest of Marysville the plain is broken by a singularly lovely range of mountains, the Buttes. They rise abruptly from the plain, and their peaks reach from two to three thousand feet high. It is an extremely pretty miniature mountain range, having its peaks, passes, and cañons—all the features of the Sierra—and it is well worth a visit. Butte is a word applied to such isolated mountains, which do not form part of a chain, and which are not uncommon west of the Mississippi. Shasta is called a butte; Lassen's Peaks are buttes; and the traveler across the continent hears the word frequently applied to mountain. It is pronounced with the u long.
Along the banks of the Sacramento there are large quantities of land which is annually overflowed by the river, and much of which is still only used for pasturage during the dry season, when its grasses support large herds of cattle and sheep, which are driven to the uplands when the rains begin to fall. But much of this swamp and tule land has been drained and diked, and is now used for farm land. It produces heavy crops of wheat, and its reclamation has been, and continues to be, one of the successful speculations in land in this State. It will not be long before the shores of the Sacramento and its tributaries will be for many miles so diked that these rivers will never break their bounds, and thus a very considerable area will be added to the fertile farming lands of the State.
Already, however, the Yuba, the Feather, and the American rivers, tributaries of the Sacramento, have been leveed at different points for quite another reason. These rivers, once clear and rapidly flowing within deep banks, are now turbid, in many places shallow, and their bottoms have been raised from twenty to thirty feet by the accumulation of the washings from the gold mines in the foot-hills. It is almost incredible the change the miners have thus produced in the short space of a quarter of a century. The bed of the Yuba has been raised thirty feet in that time; and seeing what but a handful of men have effected in so short a period, the work of water in the denudation of mountains, and the scouring out or filling up of valleys during geological periods becomes easily comprehensible.
All our Northern fruits thriftily in the Sacramento Valley, and also the almond, of which thousands of trees have been planted, and a few considerable orchards are already in bearing. The cherry and the plum do remarkably well, the latter fruit having as yet no curculio or blight; and the canning and drying of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and pears are already, as I shall show in detail farther on, a considerable as well as very profitable business. Dried plums, in particular, sell at a price which makes the orchards of this fruit very valuable. Excellent raisins have also been made, and they sell in the open market of San Francisco for a price very little less than that of the best Malaga raisins. The climate, with its long dry summer, is very favorable to the drying and curing of every fruit: no expensive houses, no ovens or other machinery, are needed. The day is not distant when the great Sacramento plain will be a vast orchard, and the now unoccupied foot-hills will furnish a large part of the raisins consumed in the United States. For the present the population is scant, and cattle, horses, and especially sheep, roam over hundreds of thousands of acres of soil which needs only industrious farmers to make it bloom into a garden.