IN CALIFORNIA 77 



kins of yellow bloom swing themselves, in golden 

 tassels, from twigs of the previous year, all abuzz 

 with hordes of nectar foragers. In July the trees 

 are hanging heavy with the slender beans which 

 follow the flowers, and dropping in their yellow age, 

 make rich feed for cattle and horses. 



The mesquit, indeed, was to the aborigines of the 

 California desert something of what the date palm 

 has always been to the Arab a kind of mother-tree 

 yielding of her beneficence a living to the children 

 of the desert the answer of God to their prayer for 

 daily bread. The beans, five or six inches long and 

 growing in large bunches, are full of nutrition, and 

 were until recently a mainstay of aboriginal desert 

 diet. Before the Indians got to buying indifferent 

 wheat flour of the white traders, they used for ages 

 to harvest these sweet, ripened beans that were the 

 free largesse of the Lord, store them in their bas- 

 ket granaries, and grind them as. needed into a meal 

 of high nutrition, about quarter sugar. Even to- 

 day, some of the older people like to gather the ripe 

 legumes, remove the seeds, and mash pulp and pod 

 into a dulce, which they mold into thick round cakes 

 like cheeses, and esteem as they do mescal. Fur- 

 thermore, the mesquit wood, being hard as oak, sup- 

 plied a capital fuel and the most substantial of tim- 

 bers for the frame work of wickiups and corrals. 



