44 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



vicinity on the 29th of November, 1852. The low grounds 

 near the Colorado cracked open with long, wide fissures, from 

 which water, sand, and mud, spouted up. The fissures were 

 in some places so large, that they turned the river from its 

 course ; and the change was so sudden, that great multitudes 

 of fish were left to die in the mud. At the same time, the 

 mud-volcanoes of Lower California, distant forty-five miles 

 southwestward from Fort Yuma, resumed their activity ; for, 

 although tliere is no record of their previous action, yet they 

 probably existed before. A pool of hot, sulj^hurous water had 

 been observed at the place by Americans since 1849. Imme- 

 diately after the shock of 1852, the officers at Fort Yuma saw 

 a great body of steam shoot up at least one thousand feet in 

 the desert to the southwest ; and when, soon afterward, some 

 of them went out to examine into the cause of it, they found 

 the mud-volcanoes on the site of the old pool, throwing up 

 steam, boiling water, and mud, very much like the salses far- 

 ther north. 



Earthquakes, according to the common theory of Califor- 

 nians, are electrical in their origin, or closely connected with 

 electrical influences. Many of the strongest shocks have been 

 preceded by a condition of the atmosphere veiy similar to that 

 which precedes thunder-storms in other lands. When the 

 weather is sultry and oppressive in San Francisco, people say, 

 " Look out for an earthquake !" And it usually comes — per- 

 haps so faint as to be barely perceptible, and sometimes not 

 until several hours after a change in the weather. 



The frequency of earthquakes in California has caused a 

 number of persons, perhaps a hundred or more, to leave the 

 state, and return to their former homes on the Atlantic side 

 of the continent. And yet there they are in more danger from 

 lightning than here from earthquakes, for there are fifty killed 

 by lightning in the Mississippi valley for one killed by an 

 earthquake in California. A year rarely passes that a dozen 

 persons are not struck by thunderbolts within three hundred 

 miles of St. Louis. [See Appendix, p. 464.] 



