Identifier: highwaysbywaysof00johnson (find matches)
Title: Highways and byways of the Pacific coast
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Johnson, Clifton, 1865-1940
Subjects:
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan company London, macmillan and co., limited
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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most brought me to a stop. Yet by climbing along on fences or resorting to the embankment of an irrigating ditch, or by cutting across a field I contrived to continue my ramble. The country was good to look at in spite of the over-abundance of mud and water. On the eastern horizon rose ranges of snowy mountains, but the lowlands were a green paradise. The grazing fields, in particular, were very beautiful with their cattle, horses, or hogs, and with their scattering ancient oaks. These oaks abounded, but never gathered in a thick wood. They were wide-spreading and stately and made the country look like a park. Other native trees were very few, except along the streams, which were apt to be thickly screened by willows and cottonwoods. Many great tracts of land were set out to regular rows of prune and peach trees, and every farmhouse seemed to have its packing shed and its great heap of wooden drying-trays. Formerly pears were a staple fruit, but some sort of ablight has put the trees out of business.
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TL A Vale of Plenty 129 The people I met and spoke with were agreed that it was an unusual condition to have too much water, and the owners of the flooded lands were not altogether happy, yet any damage they suffered was largely offset by the drowning of such pests as the gophers and ground squirrels. The local conditions therefore were on the whole satisfactory, but certain other sections had not fared so well. For instance, in the same county, there used to be a lake thirty miles broad and a hundred long. It afforded fine fishing, and the hunters resorted to it to shoot the abounding ducks and geese. Gradually it dried away and left some of the richest farmland in the world. The old lake-bed became a great wheat-producing district, but now the heavy rains had begun to fill the basin of the former lake, and the body of water was fast expanding to its former size. The wheat had grown to be waist high and was well headed out, but the lake-bed dwellers had to abandon everything except the little they co

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