




































75 
THE CANTILLAS OF NORTHERN 
LOWER CALIFORNIA. 
LTHOUGH known to Cortes, who 
spent a million of dollars in its 
exploration in the fifteenth cen- 
turv, Baja California is still largely a 
“terra incognito.’’ Possessing the dis- 
advantages of Mexican rule, a formerly 
unpromising northern frontier and a bar- 
ren coast, it offered few inducements for 
its exploration or the development of its 
agricultural and mineral wealth; yet 
travel in this strange land becomes irre- 
sistibly fascinating to the naturalist, as 
every step gives new forms of animal and 
vegetable life, till the productions of the 
temperate zone merge into those of the 
tropics about two hundred miles south of 
San Diego. 
Nearly one hundred miles southeast of 
the city of San Diego lies the forest of 
Parry’s graceful pinyone pine (Pinus 
Parryana Engelm), bordered on the east. 
by the broken peninsular range of moun- 
tains, consisting of gigantic masses of 
coarse granite devuid of vegetation other 
than the pretty Ivesia Baileyi, ornament- 
ing the crevices of the rocks with its 
fern-like leaves, or occasional shrubs and 
trees that find a precarious existence in 
the scanty soil among the huge boulders 
and in the crevices of rocks, formed 
principally by the decomposing granite. 
- These sierras were made famous with the 
surrounding region by the botanical col- 
lections of Dr. Edward Palmer in 1876 
who called them the Tantillas-—a name 
unrecognized by the Mexicans and In- 
dians, who call them the Cantillas or 
Castillo Blanco—the ‘‘precipices”’ or the 
“‘white castle,’—and the great canyon 
at their base the ‘‘Canyono de la Bajada.”’ 
These mountains are situated about 
forty miles south of the United States 
boundary and sixty miles west of the 
Colorado river near its mouth. The ap- 
proach from the boundary line at Campo 
is over a natural wagon road: for thirty 
miles through a rolling country of a sim- 
ilar granitic formation, the soil largely 
compcsed of the decomposed granite. 
The sparse vegetation, mainly consisting 
of Arctostaphylos, Adenostoma and other 
similar shrubs, with now and then a 
small cluster of Quercus agrifolia, is sim- 
ilar to that of San Diego county ; toward 
the end of the thirty miles, however, and 
for the remainder of the distance, stran- 
ger shrubs and trees make their appear- 
ance. Among others, Quercus Palmeri, 
Q. pungens and Q. Emoryi take the 
place of Q. dumosa (the common shrub 
oak of Southern California), and strag- 
gling bushes of Juniperus Californicus 
with Pinus Parryana, Nolina Palmeri 
(the sotole of this district) and many 
other less prominent plants, changes the 
aspect of the country on entering the 
region of the Cantillas. 
The granitic rocky soil is here found 
overlying a strata of gold-bearing clay 
which yields to the patient miners of 
Indian, Greek, Spanish, English and 
American nationalities a scanty reward 
for their labor. Dozens of log huts have 
been erected throughout the forest, coy- 
ered with shakes or thatched with Nolina 
leaves and plastered with mud, and hun- 
dreds of acres have been dug over, the 
miners digging large pits, five or more 
feet deep and eight or ten feet square, 
and often hauling the dirt several miles 
to water (or hauling the water tothe dirt) 
to wash for the usually fine grains, 
though the gold is sometimes found in 
coarse grains or nuggets. 
The forest of Parry’s pinyone, occupy- 
ing the stretch of table lands to the west 
of the Cantillas, extends northerly to the 
United States, a few trees straggling 
across the line, while on the east at the 
broken Cantillas it is abruptly displaced 
by Pinus monophylla that forms an ex- 
tension of the pinyone forest to the hills 
bordering the desert, where it is more 

