408 HISTORY OF PASADENA. 



establishment of bee ranches. In the deepest thickets I found wood-rat vil- 

 lages — groups of huts four to six feet high, built of sticks and leaves in 

 rough, tapering" piles, like musk-rat cabins. I noticed a good many bees, 

 too — most of them wild. The tame honey-bees seemed languid and wing- 

 weary, as if they had come all the way up from the flowerless plain. 



" After reaching the summit I had time to make only a hasty survey of 

 the basin, now glowing in the sunset gold, before hastening down into one 

 of the tributar}' canyons in search of water. Emerging from a particularly 

 tedious breadth of chaparral, I found mj^self free and erect in a beautiful park- 

 like grove of live-oak, the ground planted with aspidiums and brier-roses, 

 w^hile the glossy foliage made a close canopy overhead, leaving the gra}^ 

 dividing trunks bare to show the beautj' of their plain, interlacing arches.* 

 The bottom of the canyon was drj' where I first reached it, but a bunch of 

 scarlet mimulus indicated water at no great distance, and I soon discovered 

 about a bucketful in the hollow of the rock. This, however, was full of 

 dead bees, wasps, beetles and leaves, well steeped and simmered in the hot 

 sunshine, and would, therefore, require boiling and filtering through fresh 

 charcoal before it could be made available. Tracing the drj^ channel about 

 a mile further down to its junction with a larger tributary canyon, [the one 

 that flows from Mount lyOwe down easterly through Grand Basin to a junc- 

 tion with Eaton canyon. — Ed.] I at length discovered a lot of boulder pools, 

 clear as cr^-stal, brimming full, and linked together by glistening streamlets 

 just strong enough to sing audibl}-. Flowers in full bloom adorned their 

 margins, lilies ten feet high, larkspurs, columbines and luxuriant ferns, 

 leaning and overarching in lavish abundance, while a noble old live-oak 

 spread its rugged arms over all. Here I camped, making my bed on smooth 

 cobble-stones." 



Judging from his account, and from what I know of the same mountain 

 region and its present local designations, I conclude that he went up across 

 Grand Basin to Muir's Peak ; then down across the basin northwestwardly 

 to near where the head of Eaton canyon is lost in a pass or gap that leads 

 through to West San Gabriel canyon ; and crossing here ; he climbed up to 

 Precipicio Peak, and thence along to Knife-Blade Ridge ; but he evidently 

 had to descend before he reached Mount Wilson, on account of nightfall, and 

 came down somewhere in the trough of Henniger's Flat. 



Dr. Carr had given college lectures on geology at Madison ; I heard 

 him myself on this theme in January, 1862, while I was there at the state 

 capital on some business connected with my army work as member for Wis- 

 consin of the United States Sanitary Commission ; and Mr. Muir, some time 

 after his Pasadena trip, told the Doctor that these were " f/ie 2vorst tumbled up 

 lot of mountai7is he had ever got into.'" This is accounted for by the fact that 

 these mountains were elevated by the crushing, jamming, mashing-together 

 process, from secular compression of the earth's crust, instead of from an 

 internal center of upheaval which produces the long, gradual incline and 

 anticline slopes of higher ranges farther inland. 



In his book on ' ' The Mountains of California, ' ' published by the Cen- 



*This was in the upper portion of the land now known as " Henniger's Flat." 



