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is large and increasing. Its central delta region leads in all truck crops and field vegetables except lima beans and sugar-beets, although for the latter it has immense capacity and excellent adaptation. The Great Valley raises nearly all the rice and its southerly extensions, both the San Joaquin and the Imperial valleys, produce all the rapidly increasing cotton crop. The diversity and the producing capacity of the interior valley region of the State are beyond description and estimate.

The Mountain and Plateau region.

It has been found by observation during many years that what are known as valley conditions prevail to an elevation of about fifteen hundred feet over the rolling region known as the foothills, which are the steps up to the high ranges. Above this elevation winter temperatures fall lower, rainfall increases, snow flurries begin, and thence upward mountain valleys and plateaux are found at different levels to six thousand feet, which is about the top of California's agricultural lands, and above four thousand feet such lands are used principally for summer pasturage. This mountain region has a winter like that of the eastern states with precipitation of rain and snow ample to cause great rivers to flow down the west side of the Sierra and give the State its invaluable water supply for power and irrigation. In the valleys among the great snow mountains there are farming districts of considerable present production and great future promise. The most marked charac

ter of these high lands is the limitations placed on cropping by the short growing season and the frequency of frosts during the spring and, at the higher elevations, even during the summer months. Therefore, this division differs most markedly from other California regions and has closer resemblance to some of the interior states than to the coast and valley areas. In this region there is a modification of temperatures from the north to the south, as it is more open to the influence of north and south latitude and is not so fully dominated by local topography and ocean influences, which give to the remainder of the State its unique climatic characters.

CHAPTER II

THE SOILS OF CALIFORNIA

THE soil of California was a puzzle to the pioneers. Their first conclusions and comments on its character and value varied according to the time of the year at which they first viewed it, but their conclusions were similar. If they came to California early in the rainy season, they saw valleys and hillsides covered with grasses, clovers and flowering plants in such areas that the whole country resembled a park. If they arrived late in the rainy season, they saw wild oats and other plants so tall that they could be tied across the horns of their saddles. Early in the dry season there was no verdure, except in the moist river-bottoms, and the plains and hillsides were yellow or brown with plants dried to death as they stood-hay made without hands, curing where and as it grew, nutritious because untouched by rain and eagerly eaten by horses and the wild herbivora with which the country abounded. If the pioneers came late in the dry season or later (until the rains began) they beheld bare landscapes, hill and valley uniformly sere and yellow with vestiges of sun-parched vegetation largely wind-swept into water-runs-mile after mile of bare soil seeming also to move with the

wind and the wide plains and hill slopes apparently barren and inhospitable to plants. The limitless park of him who came early in the year had changed to the boundless desert of him who came late in the

same year.

From the two points of view the conclusion was at first similar-that such a country was of no agricultural account. Those who saw the park of the rainy season condemned the country for agriculture because the plants died in June and left the summer verdure-less just at the time of the year when the humid lands whence they came were green-clothed most abundantly. Those who beheld only the desert of the autumn did not know that the country was ever green and when told of it were not deeply impressed for, supposing that it had been green, what farming value had a country which would not stay green? And so California passed at first, in the minds of the tens of thousands who came seeking gold, as a country hopeless for husbandry, and the soil was chiefly blamed for it. Was not the soil which they crossed in their rush from the landings at San Francisco to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the gold was, largely shifting sand and was it not like the shifting sand which those who rode for gold across the Great American Desert told them about, as the two streams of weary people met in the gold diggings? And are not all deserts caused by shifting sand, when the same sky covers both the deserts and the lands of permanent pastures which they all knew from childhood? So it was that the pioneers, no mat

ter whence they came, concluded at first that California was not a farming country because the soil either could not sustain permanent verdure or would not keep plants green just at the time of the year when the landscape should be green.

These first general conclusions about the agricultural unsuitability of California were not seriously shaken by the observation of other newcomers who sought the gold after visits at the Missions, ranchos of the Spaniards who had gained Mexican land grants or the farms and gardens of the Americans who had established themselves before the gold discovery. At all these places these visitors saw in the dry season nothing green except alongside ditches in which water was running, and the trees and plants were largely unfamiliar to them. The demonstration that strange plants would grow in a way strange to them was taken to be a demonstration that away from these ditches, which could be provided of course only in a small way, the land would not support plant growth and surely would not grow those crops indispensable to American farming as they knew it. It is true that ample evidence was at hand at the Missions and elsewhere that the country would grow live-stock without irrigation. However, that fact was not very significant, for cattle-ranging was not then fully recognized as a phase of American agriculture and a piece of land with cattle-pens but no barns, hay-stacks nor cowsheds could not be counted a farm. They blamed the deficiency chiefly to the soil, which was obviously that of a desert and not of a farming country.

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