36 PACIFIC STATES FLORAL CONGRESS. 



for the flowers and plants of the vast, unfenced wilderness, stretching 

 from Texas to Oregon, and one finds its expression in hundreds of books 

 of travel, in ponderous government reports, in forgotten periodicals, 

 and, to some extent, in the whole outdoor literature of Europe and 

 America during the exciting period of the gold rush to California. 



We once had, as you know, many and very quaint publications in 

 California, all dead and forgotten now, but still worth studying in the 

 libraries. There was the old Alia California, the California Farmer, 

 the Golden Era, the Hesperian, the Pioneer, Hutchings' Pioneer Mag- 

 azine. They contained stilted essays, sketches, and stories, often mod- 

 eled after forgotten literary patterns of New York and Paris. But 

 their descriptive writings first broke away from these hampering tra- 

 ditions, and shaped themselves anew under our own California skies. 

 Ewer, "Shirley," Hutchings, Wadsworth, Dr. Kellogg, and a few others 

 wrote of things as they saw them, and in some degree caught the out- 

 door charm of the new land as it was slowly yielding to spade and plow. 



But there had been a still earlier discovery of the floral wealth of 

 the Pacific Coast. Long before Marshall's mill-race gleamed with that 

 fateful flake of gold, the botanists and collectors who visited the coast 

 had sent forth a cry of delight that stirred the pulses of Europe. If 

 the letters, journals, and various contributions to descriptive and scien- 

 tific literature, made by the long line of botanical explorers who visited 

 this coast between 1790 and 1848, be not a part of this record, then I 

 know not what justly belongs here. Among these enthusiasts were 

 men like Langsdorf, who accompanied that unfortunate Count Kezan- 

 off, of Bret Harte's beautiful poem, and Chamisso and Eschscholtz. 

 The last two, friends, close-linked in literature and science, gave our 

 orange-hued poppy its consonantal name. 



The starting-point, however, for most students is with the exten- 

 sive work done by David Douglas (1825-1833), under the auspices of 

 the Eoyal Horticultural Society of England. In. the proceedings of 

 that society one finds some of his reports and the first colored plates 

 ever issued of many of our California bulbs. The second volume of 

 Hooker's Companion to the Botanical Magazine contains his fascinat- 

 ing letters. After Douglas came Coulter, Nuttall, Hartweg, and others, 

 and then the famous groups of botanical explorers, whose work appears 

 in government publications, such as the Pacific Eailroad and Boundary 

 Survey reports. Men like Gray, Thurber, Newberry, Torrey, Engel- 

 mann, and Parry wrote much that was a real gift to the literature of 

 the period, and in many cases they had for illustrations those wonderful 

 pen-and-ink drawings made by T. C. Hilgard. 



But you will say that government reports are only the "raw 

 material" of outdoor literature. Then turn to Edinburgh, in 1859- 



