CHAPTER XIX. 
Jesus Maria River and Valley—Sierra Nevadas—Clamet River and 
Valley—The Coast Belt—Climate of the Californias—'Agricultural 
Capabilities—Condition and Wealth of the Californias. 
The Jesus Maria River is a small stream which rises at 
the distance of twenty miles from the Ocean, among that part 
of the Snowy Mountains immediately southwest of Cape 
Mendocino. Its head-springs are among the perpetual snows 
of those highlands ; and flowing about three hundred miles, 
over precipices and through prairies, it falls into the north¬ 
west part of the Bay San Francisco. This stream, in its 
upper course, runs among barren rocks till its rivulets gather 
into a current of some magnitude, when it enters a forest 
region of pines, cedars, and other terebinthine trees, and lower 
down is bordered by oaks of various species, chestnut, hickory, 
walnut, oak, and plane trees. 
This region, embracing the wide tract between the Sacra¬ 
mento valley and the sea, and between the Bay San Fran¬ 
cisco and the Snowv Mountains, is not less desirable than the 
country on the Sacramento. It is, however, very different 
Instead of six or seven hundred miles of continuous plains and 
forests, with mighty streams, coursing down to a common 
outlet, it is a country of hills and plains, rising one above 
another northwardly, from the sweet prairies at the Bay to 
the bare and lofty mountains in Latitude 40° N. The portion 
in the vicinity of the Bay, forty miles square, is chiefly 
prairie, broken by lines of forest and woody ridges; the next 
forty miles northward, and of a like width, consists princi¬ 
pally of extensive plains covered with various kinds of timber 
and high precipitous hills, clad with forests of white pines, 
whose trunks vary from nine to fifty feet in circumference, 
and from one to nearly three hundred feet in height, hanging 
