66 INDEPENDENT ELEVATION OF THE RANGE. 



At the San Buenaventura this range may he said to terminate. The hilly country lying 

 east of that river and of the Santa Clara, the sierras Susanna and Monica, have an elevating 

 cause different from that which raised the Santa Inez, neither are the same series of brown and 

 yellow sandstones repeated in them to at all the same extent. The dip of the strata do not 

 correspond, and involving as they do different stratified beds, they should not he included in 

 the Santa Inez range. 



It is necessary in this place to insist upon the fact that the Santa Inez range is limited 

 toward the east by the rivers before mentioned, inasmuch as an opposite view has been taken 

 by two writers on Californian geology. 



Mr. W. P. Blake* puts forth the view that all these strata from Point Arguello, eastward, 

 have been elevated by the mass of granite forming the San Bernardino mountain, whose 

 influence he believes to spread thus far to the west, and also to have produced the lone hills of 

 the desert and basin upon the east. 



It is contrary to good reasoning to adopt a remote cause when a proximate one equally 

 efficacious can he found. The dip of the sandstones forming the sides and slopes of the Santa 

 Inez chain is not that which could be produced by San Bernardino. The general dip is south- 

 west, verging round to south, and occasionally to southeast ; the dip should be uniformly west 

 if produced by that mountain range. Again, the strata of Santa Inez range are more vertical 

 than those in immediate contact with the granite of San Bernardino, that is to say, the strata 

 more distant have a greater dip than those in proximity, a circumstance which should lead us to 

 suspect that that enormous mountain mass was not the upheaving cause. Besides which, in 

 several places on the chain, there are anticlinal axes produced by the volcanic upheavals. 



It is strange that Mr. Trask should have adopted this view, and expressed himself so 

 decidedly in his report as to class the Santa Inez mountains under the name of the San Ber- 

 nardino mountains, to the confusion of topography and Inoal names. " The inception," says he, 

 " of this chain on the west was stated to occur a few miles north of Point Concepcion, and to 

 follow the above trend (due east and west) nearly, or perhaps quite, to the Colorado river, "f 

 From his description he must have crossed this range in two places, and how he omitted observ- 

 ing the volcanic rocks, producing in places anticlinal axes, it is difficult to imagine. These 

 hills, when viewed from the valley of Santa Inez, have their escarpments boldly looking 

 toward the north, and tilted southward at a high angle, a condition of strata impossible to 

 reconcile with their dependance upon San Bernardino mountain, lying 200 miles due east. 



It is much more reasonable to suppose that the elevation of this range is much posterior in 

 time to that of San Bernardino, and was produced by the same forces which elevated the Santa 

 Lucia and San Kafael hills, acting in a direction somewhat more east and west than the other 

 ranges, yet still in a direction more northwest and southeast than due east and west. The 

 shore-line is in the latter direction, while the Santa Inez range deviates considerably ; thus, at 

 Eincon and near Santa Barbara it stretches into the sea, while fifteen miles west it is several 

 miles inland. The direction south 70° east, would represent the lines of force which have 

 ui^heaved the links of the range ; the results of these upheavals we will presently consider. 



Between the disposition of the Sierra Santa Inez and that of the more easterly coast ranges 

 there is this difference : that while the other ranges are disposed so by virtue of their axial 

 forces running along the direction of that range, the Santa Inez mountains are ridges en 

 echelon, interlocking with each other, and running from west to east along a land previously 



<■' Report of a Reconnaisance and Survey in California, in 1853 : H. Doc. 129. 



t Report on the Geology of the Coast Mountains, (State Document,) Sacramento, 1855. 



