CHARACTER OF SOIL, ETC. 



381 



vada, is a tract of high table land, about one hundred miles in 

 length, surrounded on all sides by mountains, and called by Fre- 

 mont the Upper Valley of the Sacramento. Here the growth of 

 timber is vigorous and immense, for the climate and productions 

 are modified by altitude as well as latitude. The Sacramento river, 

 rising in the mountains at its northern extremity, reaches the Lower 

 Valley through a gorge or canon on the line of Shastl Peak, falling 

 two thousand feet in twenty miles. 



The Lower Valley is subdivided, as we have stated, into the 

 valleys of the two great rivers, both of which are, at most, only a 

 few hundred feet above the level of the sea, and gradually slope 

 towards the bay. The foot hills of the Sierra Nevada limiting 

 the valleys, make a woodland country diversified with undulating 

 grounds and pretty vales or glens watered by numerous small 

 streams. These afford many advantageous spots for farms, occa- 

 sionally forming large bottoms of rich, moist land. Below 39° of 

 latitude, and west of the foot hills, the forests are limited to scat- 

 tering groves of oak in the valleys and on the borders of streams ; 

 or, of red wood on the ridges and in the gorges. With these ex- 

 ceptions, the whole region presents a surface without shrubbery 

 or trees, though a few hills are shaded by dwarfed and stunted 

 groves which may be used as fuel. California is covered, how- 

 ever, with various kinds of grasses and with wild oats, which grow 

 luxuriantly in the valleys for many miles from the coast, but, ripen- 

 ing early in the season, they soon cease to protect the soil from the 

 sun's scorching rays. As summer advances, the moisture in the 

 atmosphere, and to a considerable depth in the earth, is completely 

 exhausted, and the radiation of heat from the parched plains and 

 naked hill sides becomes insufferable. North of the Bay of San 

 Francisco, between the Sacramento and Joaquin valley and the 

 coast, the country is cut up by mountain ridges and rolling hills, 

 with many fertile, watered valleys. Immediately along the coast, 

 lie open prairies, belted or broken by occasional forests, and inter- 

 spersed with extensive fields of wild grain. Around the southern 

 arm of the bay, a low, alluvial bottom land, sometimes overgrown 

 by oaks, borders the western foot of the Coast Range, terminating, 

 on a breadth of thirty miles, in the valley of San Jose. In this 

 neighborhood, too, is the lovely valley of San Juan, which is pro- 

 bably the garden of the new State. These two valleys form a con- 

 tinuous plain of fifty-five miles in length, and from one to twenty 

 miles in breadth, opening with smaller valleys among the hills. 

 The balmy region, enclosed between the coast range and the lower 

 2w 



