66 
INDEPENDENT ELEVATION OF THE RANGE. 
At the San Buenaventura this range may he said to terminate. The hilly country lying 
east of that river and of the Santa Clara, the sierras Susanna and Monica, have an elevating 
cause different from that which raised the Santa Inez, neither are the sa'me series of brown and 
yellow sandstones repeated in them to at all the same extent. The dip of the strata do not 
correspond, and involving as they do different stratified beds, they should not be included in 
the Santa Inez range. 
It is necessary in this place to insist upon the fact that the Santa Inez range is limited 
toward the east by the rivers before mentioned, inasmuch as an opposite view has been taken 
by two writers on Californian geology. 
Mr. W. P. Blake* puts forth the view that all these strata from Point Arguello, eastward, 
have been elevated by the mass of granite forming the San Bernardino mountain, whose 
influence he believes to spread thus far to the west, and also to have produced the lone hills of 
the desert and basin upon the east. • 
It is contrary to good reasoning to adopt a remote cause when a proximate one equally 
efficacious can be found. The dip of the sandstones forming the sides and slopes of the Santa 
Inez chain is not that which could be produced by San Bernardino. The general dip is south¬ 
west, verging round to south, and occasionally to southeast; the dip should be uniformly west 
if produced by that mountain range. Again, the strata of Santa Inez range are more vertical 
than those in immediate contact with the granite of San Bernardino, that is to say, the strata 
more distant have a greater dip than those in proximity, a circumstance which should lead us to 
suspect that that enormous mountain mass was not the upheaving cause. Besides which, in 
several places on the chain, there are anticlinal axes produced by the volcanic upheavals. 
It is strange that Mr. Trask should have adopted this view, and expressed himself so 
decidedly in his report as to class the Santa Inez mountains under the name of the San Ber¬ 
nardino mountains, to the confusion of topography and Ineal names. “ The inception,” says he, 
11 of this chain on the west was stated to occur a few miles north of Point Concepcion, and to 
follow the above trend (due east and west) nearly, or perhaps quite, to the Colorado river. ”f 
From his description he must have crossed this range in two places, and how he omitted observ¬ 
ing the volcanic rocks, producing in places anticlinal axes, it is difficult to imagine. These 
hills, when viewed from the valley of Santa Inez, have their escarpments boldly looking 
toward the north, and tilted southward at a high angle, a condition of strata impossible to 
reconcile with their dependance upon San Bernardino mountain, lying 200 miles due east. 
It is much more reasonable to suppose that the elevation of this range is much posterior in 
time to that of San Bernardino, and was produced by the same forces which elevated the Santa 
Lucia and San Bafael hills, acting in a direction somewhat more east and west than the other 
ranges, yet still in a direction more northwest and southeast than due east and west. The 
shore-line is in the latter direction, while the Santa Inez range deviates considerably ; thus-, at 
Rincon and near Santa Barbara it stretches into the sea, while fifteen miles west it is several 
miles inland. The direction south 70° east, would represent the lines of force which have 
upheaved the links of the range ; the results of these upheavals we will presently consider. 
Between the disposition of the Sierra Santa Inez and that of the more easterly coast ranges 
there is this diflerence: that while the other ranges are disposed so by virtue of their axial 
forces running along the direction of that range, the Santa Inez mountains are ridges en 
echelon , interlocking with each other, and running from west to east along a land previously 
* Report of a Reconnaisance and Survey in California, in 1853 : H. Doc. 129. 
f Report on the Geology of the Coast Mountains, (State Document,) Sacramento, 1855. 
