ON THE SAN JOAQUIN. 



It was in the latter part of the month 

 of March that we started out from Fres- 

 no for a day's outing on the San Joaquin 

 river, hunting for hawk and owl eggs. 

 The day was bright and warm, and we 

 keenly enjoyed the ride of nine miles 

 across the plains. Out past the old, 

 deserted Holland Colony, where stumps 

 of vines showed that the settlers had once 

 made an honest attempt to win their daily 

 bread out of the hard pan. The last 

 half of the way lay across the hog-wallow 

 country, that peculiar effect which has 

 puzzled many scientists, but which all 

 attribute to the action of water in long 

 past ages. The rolling motion of rising 

 over and descending these mounds was 

 like the riding of a small boat over the 

 waves of the sea. Here and there a bur- 

 row in the top of one of the mounds, the 

 domicile of the frisky ground-squirrel or 

 the billy owl, gave the landscape the ap- 

 pearance of a dish of mush cooking, with 

 the air bubbles swelling up, and some 

 bursting, leaving the little holes. On 

 across canals, past a wheat country, and 

 then the virginal hog-wallow lands that 

 no plowshare has ever touched, covered 

 with a short green growth which gives 

 nourishment to bands of sheep, dirty, and 

 with numerous lambkins, guarded by a 

 few sagacious shepherd dogs and lonely, 

 and equally dirty, bearded Mexican herd- 

 ers. 



The mounds grow higher and the hol- 

 lows deeper until we wonder if they 

 stretch on forever and if we are lost 

 among them, when all at once we come 

 out right on the top of a high bluff over- 

 looking the San Joaquin. The unexpect- 

 edness is quite startling. One could not 

 possibly have suspected a moment before 

 that we were within miles of a great river 

 bed more than a mile wide, with steep 

 bluffs more than 300 feet high on either 

 side and a swift river sweeping down its 

 channel in the center, but here we were 



right on the edge of it. We can look 

 down almost perpendicularly and see, 

 three or four hundred feet below us, great 

 green meadows stretching to the north 

 and south and to the trees and thickets 

 that edge the river. The river from this 

 distance and height seems but a thread in 

 its once vast bed. What a sight — what 

 a power it must have been when once it 

 filled all this vast bed, which often is more 

 than a mile across from bluff to bluff. 

 On the further side a few trees grow 

 right on the edge of the water, and then 

 the bluff rises abruptly even higher than 

 on our side. Buzzards and hawks are 

 sweeping around us in the air, and dark 

 spots in the tops of far-off trees betoken 

 the presence of the objects of our search, 

 the nests of the hawks. We begin the 

 descent, which at first seems extremely 

 hazardous, and even on further trial suf- 

 ficiently steep to make walking down 

 more of a pleasure than riding, as we 

 find. The road or path winds around and 

 around, as necessarily it must unless one 

 would go head-first to the bottom. It is 

 narrow and steep and the ruts deeply 

 worn in places by the action of water. 

 About half way down we come upon 

 what was once a canal, and we can see 

 the level ridge of its embankment stretch- 

 ing away above and below us along the 

 side of the bluff, as it curves in and out. 

 What a vast undertaking it must have 

 been to build this great waterway along 

 the face of the bluff. As we near the bot- 

 tom clumps of elderberry and scraggly 

 greasewood appear, and we come upon 

 two little white eggs of the dove, laid in 

 a hollow in the ground — an early bird 

 surely. 



At last we are safely down in the val- 

 ley and across the meadow, which is one 

 vast bed of poppies, a field of the cloth 

 of gold. Then we come down among the 

 huge cottonwoods and river oaks that 

 line the river bank and unharness our 



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