SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
Beyond the California boundary the Southern Pacific Railway traverses the broad Colorado desert. This is a barren, sandy wilderness, growing nothing but yuccas and cactus, and is depressed far below the sea-level. It is an inland salt-water lake that has mostly dried up, the belief being that it was formerly an extension of the Gulf of California. The railway route beyond passes between the San Jacinto and San Bernardino Mountains, crossing the latter. These peaks rise over eleven thousand feet, and beyond is the pleasant fruit-growing San Bernardino Valley, originally settled by the Mormons in 1851. To the southward is Riverside, in the fertile district where the seedless navel oranges are successfully cultivated, the groves giving an attractive exhibition of orange-growing. Here is the famous Magnolia Avenue, one hundred and thirty feet wide and ten miles long, with its double rows of pepper trees, and extending all the way through orange groves. In its park is one of the finest cacti collections in existence. Adjacent is Redlands, also a flourishing orange-growing city, its sidewalks bordered by stately palms, rose-bushes, pepper trees and century plants, while everywhere are orange trees in their perpetual livery of brilliant green. Around it encircle the high San Bernardino Mountains, thoroughly protecting the fertile valley. To the southward the route then runs out to the Pacific Ocean bound to Southern California, and following down the coast near San Juan passes Dana's Point, over which, in the early Californian days, the hides were thrown for shipment, as narrated by Dana in Two Years Before the Mast. Ultimately it reaches the grand bay of San Diego, near the Mexican boundary, which, next to San Francisco, is the best harbor on the Pacific coast.
Here, spreading along the shores of the beautiful bay, is the ancient Spanish town of San Diego, long sleepy, but lately enjoying a "boom" when it found itself becoming a popular watering-place. To the northward is the old Mission of San Diego, the first settlement by white men in California, noted for its prolific olive groves. In the town of adobé houses lived "Ramona" of whom Helen Hunt Jackson has written, and there are still preserved here the original church bells sent out from Spain to the colony. The outer arm of San Diego Bay is Coronado Beach, a narrow tongue of sand, stretching twelve miles northward, and ending in spacious expansions known as the North and South Beaches. Upon the South Beach is the famous watering-place of Coronado, with its great hotel alongside the ocean, the tower commanding an extensive view, and its spacious surrounding flower-gardens being magnificently brilliant. There are Botanical Gardens, a Museum and an interesting ostrich farm, with railways for miles along the pleasant shores, and at Point Loma are the lighthouses guarding the entrance from the sea, the uppermost, elevated five hundred feet, being the highest lighthouse in the world. Down near the Mexican boundary is the suburb of National City, surrounded by olive groves, and the visitors sometimes cross over the border to visit the curious Mexican village of Tia Juana, a name which being freely translated means "Aunt Jane." Extensive irrigation works serve the country around San Diego, and the great Sweetwater Dam, ninety feet high, closing a gorge, makes one of the largest water reservoirs in existence.
This wonderful land of California into which we have come has a name the meaning of which is unknown. One Ordonez de Montalva in 1510 published a Spanish romance wherein he referred to the "island of California, on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Terrestrial Paradise." When Cortez conquered Mexico, his annalist, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, gave this name, it is said in derision, about 1535, to the lower peninsula of California, then supposed to be an island, it having been discovered the previous year by the Spanish explorer Ximenes. The Jesuit missionaries came in the seventeenth century to the lower peninsula, and in the eighteenth century to California proper. It is an enormous State, stretching nearly eight hundred miles along the Pacific, and inland for a width of two hundred or more miles. It is mainly a valley, between the Coast Range of mountains on the west and the Sierra Nevada, meaning the "snowy saw-tooth mountains," on the east. The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers flow in the central valley, which stretches north and south for five hundred miles. To the southward the mountain ranges join, and below them is the special and favored region of Southern California. When first settled, there were established from San Diego up to Sonoma twenty-one Jesuit Missions, whose ruins and old buildings are now found so interesting, and these early establishments converted the Indians, of whom it is said that the charming climate offered them no inducements to develop savagery, so that when the conversion time came they were easily made serfs for the Missions, and worked in a way that few other Indians ever did. There are two California seasons, the rainy and the dry, the former lasting from November to May, while there is almost unchanging dry weather from May till October. The rainy season, however, is not as in the tropics, where there are deluges daily, but it means that then it will rain if ever, and there are in fact days without rain at all. California is a land of climatic attractiveness, where, as it has been well said, "it is always afternoon." Through vast irrigation systems, despite the dry season, much of the surface has been made a garden. Water runs everywhere copiously down from the mountains, and the shrubbery of all parts of the world has been brought hither and successfully grown. The region presents an universal landscape of foliage and flowers, luxuriant beyond imagination. In Southern California the wild flowers, of which the golden poppy is one of the most prominent, are extraordinary in their number, variety and brilliancy. "The greatest surprise of the traveller," writes Charles Dudley Warner, "is that a region which is in perpetual bloom and fruitage, where semi-tropical fruits mature in perfection, and the most delicate flowers dazzle the eye with color the winter through, should have on the whole a low temperature, a climate never enervating, and one requiring a dress of woollen in every month."
Cloister of Mission, San Juan Capistrano
LOS ANGELES AND SAN JOAQUIN.
The metropolis of this land of sunshine, fruits and flowers, fifteen miles back from the sea, is La Puebla de la Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, or "the City of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels;" a lengthy title which the matter-of-fact Americans some time ago happily shortened into Los Angeles. From it Los Angeles River flows south to the sea at San Pedro Bay. The Spaniards founded the town in 1781, but it had only a sleepy existence until 1880, when the railways came along, and it became a centre of the pleasure and health-resorts, and the extensive fruit growing of Southern California, expanding so rapidly that it has seventy thousand people. Originally, the houses were of adobé, but now it has many fine buildings and a magnificent development of residences, the whole city being embowered in luxuriant vegetation. In the neighborhood are petroleum wells and asphalt deposits, while the adjacent district has many irrigation canals. Down on the ocean shore is San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, where the harbor has been improved by a large outlay, and twenty miles away is the beautiful mountainous island of Santa Catalina, a popular resort, which is in reality an ocean mountain top. Santa Monica Bay, to the southwest, is the coast bathing-place of Los Angeles, and near by is the popular Redondo Beach, with its spacious Chautauqua Assembly Building. Pasadena is a charming suburb of the city off to the northeast, a perpetual garden and favorite place of residence. It is in San Gabriel Valley, over which rises the great Sierra Madre Range, eleven thousand feet high, the glossy green orange groves on its sides gradually melting into the white snow-capped summits of this towering mountain wall. A railway ascends Echo Mountain north of Pasadena, on which is the Lowe Observatory. To the southeast is the old San Gabriel Mission in the valley, surrounded by vineyards and orchards.
San Buenaventura was another Mission, and is now a health-resort at the coast outlet of Ventura valley, and beyond is Santa Barbara, the "American Mentone," one of the most charming California resorts. The old Spanish Mission, with its towers and corridors, is famous, and was built in 1786, being well-preserved and having a few of the Franciscan monks yet in charge. A curiosity of the neighborhood is La Parra Grande, the "Great Vine," having a trunk four feet in diameter and covering a trellis sixty feet square, its annual product being eight thousand pounds of grapes. Farther along the coast is the charming Bay of Monterey, with the Spanish town of Monterey on its southern shore. In 1770 the Mission of San Carlo de Monterey was founded here, and it was the Mexican capital of California until the American conquest in 1846, then depending chiefly on a trade in tallow and hides. It has not grown much since, however, and the old adobé buildings have not undergone change in a half-century. It is now a popular resort, having the noted Hotel Del Monte, the "Hotel of the Forest," located in spacious and exquisite grounds, the park embracing seven thousand acres. Upon the northern side of Monterey Bay is Santa Cruz, its chief town, also a summer-resort, having a background made by the Santa Cruz Mountains. This was a Mission founded in 1791, and five miles northward is the Santa Cruz grove of big trees, containing a score of redwoods or sequoias, of a diameter of ten feet or more, the largest being twenty-three feet. Within a hollow in one of these trees General Fremont encamped for several days in 1847. To the northward is the prolific fruit region, the Santa Clara Valley, where Mission Santa Clara was founded in 1777. The city of this valley is San José, with twenty thousand people, distantly surrounded by mountains, and, like all these places, a popular resort. The Calaveras Mountains are to the eastward, and here, on Mount Hamilton, twenty-six miles southeast, is the Lick Observatory, at forty-two hundred feet elevation. It was founded by a legacy of $700,000 left by James Lick, of San Francisco, and is attached to the University of California, being among the leading observatories of the world. It has one of the largest and most powerful refracting telescopes in existence, the object-glass being thirty-six inches in diameter. Mr. Lick is buried in the foundation pier of this great telescope which he erected. There is a magnificent view from the Observatory, which is exceptionally well located, its white buildings, shining in the sunlight, seen from afar.