Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/232

journey, and we come to Shasta, a mining town of one thousand people, possessing few attractions outside of a business locality. The road, approaching Yreka, winds near the northern base of Mount Shasta, a frowning snow peak, fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. Though grand and majestic, it does not compare favorably in either respect with Mount Hood—the father of all snow peaks on the Pacific. From Shasta a ride of a day brings us to Red Bluff—to which point steamers of light draught are still running from Sacramento, but with so many delays and uncertainties that the traveler prefers to continue the journey by the stage. At this point, however, we finally emerge from the mountains of California and enter upon the broad swelling prairie which constitutes the norther portion of the Sacramento Valley—where, though the country is mostly a waste, dotted here and there with clumps of oak, or openings of the same growth, yet where many large and inviting farming sections are had. At Tehama we cross the Sacramento, by a buoy-ferry, and, in a few miles, enter upon one of the most choice agricultural districts the eye ever rested upon—where grain fields are not measured by the acre, nor yet by the mile, but by the league. By a day's drive we passed through the extensive and rich fields of Major Bidwell, where eleven thousand acres of grain were being threshed—where his own mill stood ready to convert into flour the produce of his own fields; where his own mammoth store furnished hundreds of his employés with all the wants of life; where his own energy was opening, with his own means, a wagon road from the Sacramento River to the Humboldt mines; and where his own purse has already paid out $35,000, and backed by a willingness to pay as much more, in order to open up a new market for the exuberant products of so rich a soil as he himself possesses. The center of his large