24 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



ern slope of the great San Gabriel range, which 

 skirting, the party managed with less hardship than 

 might be expected, to reach the "Spanish trail" 

 that led from Los Angeles to Sante Fe. Here, their 

 faces toward home, we may leave them a pictur- 

 esque party, the humor of whose appearance was not 

 lost on Fremont, himself. It stretched over a quar- 

 ter of a mile from van to rear guard, and included 

 Americans, French, Germans, and Indians, every- 

 body bearing firearms and speaking four or five lan- 

 guages at once. A hundred half-wild horses and 

 mules, besides pack animals, the baggage and the 

 horned cattle, were clustered in the center of the 

 caravan, with scouts ahead and on the flanks, so 

 that "we looked," as their gallant leader puts it in 

 his quaint Southern way, "more like we belonged to 

 Asia than to the United States of America. ' ' 



There is a small tree, somewhat resembling a 

 fig tree, peculiar to the foothill region of the Sierra 

 Nevada, that blooms in May and June with so 

 prodigal an expenditure of yellow mallow-like 

 flowers, that the dry rocky ridges which it in- 

 habits both those overlooking the great valley and 

 those that give upon the desert seem set with 

 tents of gold. The mountain folk call it slippery 

 elm because of its mucilaginous bark. It is, how- 

 ever, too rare a tree to be made to shine by any re- 



