and blue and yellow and white, starred the green or brown grass. The land climbed slowly for five hundred miles, until the plain was a mile above the sea. The air was very pure and clear. Fifty miles away people could see the mountains.
One morning the children climbed out of their beds in the covered wagons to see a wall of mountains. It stood nearly two miles high above the plains. Forests were up the sides, snow on the tops. It took days to cross these mountains through high, winding passes, although they were only twenty miles wide. Brown bears and black bears and grizzly bears were in those mountains, and big-horn sheep. In the wide valley behind them were elk and deer, coy-otes, a kind of small wolves, and villages of prairie dogs. After that came mountains again, and then the wide, burning desert.
Here and then, in the desert, was bunch grass for the horses and oxen, but most of the time there was nothing growing but sage brush and thorny cactus. Little rivers trickled through deep gorges. Sometimes the water was bitter with soda. Streams sank away in the sand. Coy-otes howled at night. Black buzzards circled around the sky. There were rattle-snakes and stinging scor-pions.
Whenever water was found the barrels were filled, and every drop was used carefully. Without water the horses and oxen died. Then, everything was left behind and people stumbled across the burning land. Some died on the way. Those who found water came to another steep mountain range. From the top of this they looked down a long, gentle slope. It was green with trees and bright with mountain brooks. At the bottom was a wide, green valley and a river. Gold, in little grains and lumps, was mixed with the sand and gravel in the river beds.
Mining camps sprang up all along the streams. The miners stood in the water. They scooped up pans full of gravel and sand and washed out the gold. A few men found a great deal of gold and became rich. Most of the miners found little. But very few people went home again. The journey was too hard. Besides, Cal-i-forn-ia had many other kinds of wealth. Today we call it the Wonderland of America. See California, page 308.
