144 Audubon's Western Journal 



asking hundreds of questions, many of the girls 

 had pretty Indian faces, and beautiful teeth and 

 hair. Great quantities of peaches grow in the 

 valleys and irrigated gardens, but what comfort 

 there is is very primitive. Plenty of the Cali- 

 fornia partridge are here, but the black-breasted 

 is nowhere to be seen ; the California quail is found, 

 and Gamble's blue partridge. 



I saw yesterday the most wonderful rainbow, or 

 rather mass of prismatic mist; a heavy thunder- 

 storm, one of the most furious we have encoun- 

 tered, took us just as we had left a rancho, formerly 

 an old Mission, with a very fine reservoir two 

 hundred yards square, built of stone and the 

 exhaust arch of brick, and we rode on in drenching 

 rain for nearly an hour. The storm abated just 

 before sunset, leaving all of the west, below the 

 lifting clouds, of that indescribable, furious red, 

 which follows such blows, and the receding storm 

 receiving the light and blending into an immense 

 mass of rainbow haze. 



The people here are not at all friendly to us, 

 and instead of having them come out to see us 

 at our camp, as at other places, often in such num- 

 bers as to be a nuisance, we find them cold, and 

 almost uncivil. We are not looked upon with the 

 same interest as heretofore, and could neither buy 

 nor beg what we required for our use. We, how- 

 ever, succeeded with some difficulty in getting 



