VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE
"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky, what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush," though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, Artemisia tridentata. It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to which the artemesia gives its name, coleogeny, pursia, dalia, "creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows, the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes" of the painted desert.
White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that man, at least, has found no other use for.
It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe. It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older, lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain, it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward, almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border, like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.