CONTENTS

PAGE
I.The Sparrow Hawk's Own[1]
II.Mothering Mountains[25]
III.The Coasts of Adventure[45]
IV.The Port of Monterey[61]
V.Old Spanish Gardens[85]
VI.The Land of the Little Duck[105]
VII.The Twin Valleys[125]
VIII.The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country[147]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.[The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley]Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
2.[San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma]9
3.[Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range]16
4.[A Eucalyptus Grove]33
5.[Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel]40
6.[A Cañon in the Sierra Madre]49
7.[The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission]56
8.[Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon]59
9.[Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz]62
10.[Looking down on Monterey and the Bay]65
11.[Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay]72
12.[Cypress Point, near Carmel]75
13.[Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range]78
14.[The Patio, Old Spanish Residence]88
15.[The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street, San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition, 1915)]107
16.[Tamalpias]110
17.[Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay]113
18.[Waiting for Duck—Los Baños]120
19.[Mirror Lake, Yosemite]129
20.[Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys]131
21.[Clear Lake, Lake County]134
22.[Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon]136
23.[McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley]139
24.[Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail]142
25.[Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento]145
26.[Yosemite Falls]152
27.[Blue Lake, Lake County]155
28.[Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras]158
29.[Mount Shasta—Sierra Glow]161
30.[Valley of the Yosemite]163
31.[The Half Dome, Yosemite]166
32.[Shasta—Snow Clouds]168

[Sketch Map at end of Volume.]

I
THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN

For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. California was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.

There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have remembered the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall brown woman out of Tejon, and her mother was of that band of captives taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.