12 PROC. COTTESWOLD CLUB vol. xiii. 



Part II. — A Gold-Bearing River in California. 



Last autumn it fell to my lot to visit in California a 

 property almost entirely owned by two friends of mine. 

 The property comprises all the gold, timber, and water 

 rights on a stream, called the Coffee Creek, some 40 miles 

 long, a tributary of the Trinity River. 



My journey there was rapid : in just a fortnight to a 

 day after starting from Westbury I reached San Francisco. 

 Yet I had time to see something of New York, including 

 the great demonstration in the harbour in honour of the 

 war fleet returning from Cuba ; and I also made a short 

 stay at Chicago, where I had the opportunity of examin- 

 ing Armour's marvellous establishment, with its many 

 and varied subsidiary industries, mainly created for the 

 purpose of dealing with some form or other of refuse 

 from the parent undertaking. 



After a few days at San Francisco, where, among other 

 things, I visited the United States Government Agri- 

 cultural College, at Berkeley, I took the train for Redding, 

 a place some 150 miles north of San Francisco. Thence 

 I travelled by coaches, of sorts, about another 80 miles to 

 Trinity Centre, a small mining town on the Trinity River. 

 Here I was met by horses and mules from the camp at 

 Coffee Creek, and I started off for my friends' property. 



The Canon down which Coffee Creek flows enters the 

 Trinity Valley some lO miles from Trinity Centre. The 

 Creek is a mountain stream of considerable volume in the 

 spring and early summer; and it rushes tumultuouslv 

 through a most romantic wild and rocky glen, the moun- 

 tains rising thousands of feet above it on either side. 

 From the Divide at the head of the valley to its mouth is 

 a distance of about 40 miles, and the stream falls 



