"Los Angeles forms the main centre of these three passes, and lies within three hours by rail of each of them, while San Bernardino, forming the immediate base of forces defending Cajon and San Jacinto passes, is within one hour by rail of both passes.
"The mountain-chains encompassing the inhabited regions of southern California might be compared to a great wall thousands of feet in height, within whose enclosures are those fertile regions which have made the name of this state synonymous with all that is abundant in nature. These mountains, rugged and inaccessible to armies from the desert side, form an impregnable barrier except by the three gateways mentioned.
"Standing upon Mt. San Gorgonio or San Antonio one can look westward and southward down upon an endless succession of cultivated fields, towns and hamlets, orchards, vineyards and orange groves; upon wealth amounting to hundreds of millions; upon as fair and luxuriant a region as is ever given man to contemplate; a region wherein shall be based the Japanese forces defending these passes. To the north and east across the top of this mountain-wall are forests, innumerable streams, and abundance of forage. But suddenly at the outward rim all vegetation ceases; there is a drop—the desert begins.
"The Mojave is not a desert in the ordinary sense of the word, but a region with all the characteristics of other lands, only here Nature is dead or in the last struggle against death. Its hills are volcanic scoria and cinders, its plains bleak with red dust; its meadows covered with a desiccated and seared vegetation; its springs, sweet with arsenic, are rimmed, not by verdure, but with the bones of beast and man. Its gaunt forests of yucca bristle and twist in its winds and brazen gloom. Its mountains, abrupt and bare as sun-dried skulls, are broken with cañons that are furnaces and gorges that are catacombs. Man has taken cognizance of this deadness in his nomenclature. There are Coffin Mountains, Funeral Ranges, Death Valleys, Dead Men's Cañons, dead beds of lava, dead lakes, and dead seas. All here is dead. This is the ossuary of Nature; yet American armies must traverse it and be based upon it whenever they undertake to regain southern California. To attack these fortified places from the desert side is a military undertaking pregnant with greater difficulties than any ever attempted in all the wars of the world."
Now after so easily taking California away from us because we stolidly refused, like the English people, to heed repeated warnings, what would the Japanese do? Southern California they would simply occupy with a military force and continue to occupy it. Its irrigable lands in the coast basin are already all reclaimed and densely populated.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys would be the paradise that they would develop into a new Japan.
Already we have shown how they could duplicate the 12,500,000 acres of irrigated and cultivated land in Japan in the drainage Basin of the Colorado River.
They could do it again in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California. There are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world in those valleys and within two years after they had taken possession of it they would have several million Japanese reclaiming and cultivating it. They would bring their people over as fast as all the steamers of Japan could carry them. And long before we had got real good and ready to reconquer California they would have peopled its great central valley with a dense Japanese population who would fight us, the original owners of the country, to defend their homes from invasion.
What should the United States do to prevent all this?
It should immediately, with just the same energy and expedition that it would act if an invading Armada had actually sailed from Japan, buy 100,000 acres of land in the San Joaquin Valley that can be irrigated from the Calaveras River and from the Calaveras Reservoir if it were built. It should subdivide that tract into one acre Homecrofts and put 100,000 Homecroft Reservists on it. It should go to work and build, right now and without any dilly-dallying or delay, the Calaveras Reservoir. Those 100,000 Homecroft Reservists should be set to work to build the Calaveras Reservoir and the irrigation system necessary to irrigate that particular Homecroft Reserve tract, and all the works necessary to protect the entire delta of the San Joaquin River from overflow and protect the channel of the river and broaden it below Stockton—"open the neck of the bottle" as they say in that locality.