THE SOILS OF CALIFORNIA 29 



wind and the wide plains and hill slopes apparently 

 barren and inhospitable to plants. The limitless park 

 of him who came early in the year had changed to 

 the boundless desert of him who came late in the 

 same year. 



From the two points of view the conclusion was 

 at first similar that such a country was of no agri- 

 cultural account. Those who saw the park of the 

 rainy season condemned the country for agriculture 

 because the plants died in June and left the summer 

 verdure-less just at the time of the year when the 

 humid lands whence they came were green-clothed 

 most abundantly. Those who beheld only the desert 

 of the autumn did not know that the country was 

 ever green and when told of it were not deeply im- 

 pressed for, supposing that it had been green, what 

 farming value had a country which would not stay 

 green ? And so California passed at first, in the minds 

 of the tens of thousands who came seeking gold, as 

 a country hopeless for husbandry, and the soil was 

 chiefly blamed for it. Was not the soil which they 

 crossed in their rush from the landings at San Fran- 

 cisco to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the 

 gold was, largely shifting sand and was it not like the 

 shifting sand which those who rode for gold across 

 the Great American Desert told them about, as the 

 two streams of weary people met in the gold dig- 

 gings? And are not all deserts caused by shifting 

 sand, when the same sky covers both the deserts and 

 the lands of permanent pastures which they all knew 

 from childhood ? So it was that the pioneers, no mat- 



