Till-; NATIONAL FokKSTS OF CALIFORNIA 



3 



The old Spanish civilization lay near the seacoast, and the Spanish 

 settlers knew little of California's wealth. The Camino Real, or 

 King's Highway, linked their white-walled abode churches from the 

 Mission Dolores in San Francisco to the Mission San Diego de 

 Alcala in San Diego. Between and around these missions the mili- 

 tary officers obtained grants from the Spanish crown and founded 

 a feudal aristocracy on ranchos whose area was measured in square 

 leagues and whose boundaries lay on the distant hills. It was a 

 pastoral society of the Old World — easygoing, pleasure loving — 

 living in a country of magnificent distances, where the mountains 

 came down to the blue waters of the Pacific. 



The great central basins of California, formed by the valleys of 

 the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, were practically untouched 

 by the Spanish. Nor did the Spanish colonists dream that the 



IN THE DAYS OF '49 



Washing out gold with a rocker. California's forests have produced far greater wealth 

 than the combined output of her world-famous mines 



wealth of gold which Cortez had once sought lay in the ancient 

 gravels of the foothill streams or was folded into the quartz ledges 

 of the mountains, or that the rivers flowing down from 30,000 

 square miles of forests on the slopes of the Coast Range and the 

 Sierra Nevada would one day produce power for industry and 

 irrigate millions of acres of land. The steady trickle of 'immi- 

 grants, who had been coming over the Sierra since 1827, saw in this 

 country an empire bounded on the north and east by mountains, on 

 the south by a desert, and on the west by the Pacific and realized 

 the value of the spacious harbors and the "great valleys. The covet- 

 ous eyes of the modern world looked upon an Arcadian civilization 

 and envied it its possessions. 



War with Mexico was declared by the United States in 1846, and 

 in 1848 the State was surrendered by the Mexican governor. Then 



