Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/185

BAY AND UPPER COAST COUNTIES 151 trees, the bared feet and brilliant kerchiefs speak of Italy. At Asti is the oft-quoted wine-well which is capa- ble of holding half a million gallons, or ten times as much as the still more noted tun at Heidelberg. Besides the 2000 acres planted here to grapes, the Swiss-Italian Company has other vineyards further south. Near Ukiah, in Mendocino County, is the home of a naturalist whose life-work is the study of lilies. His garden is a paradise of slender growths springing from the hearts of bulbs. Carl Purdy has still another hobby the mythology and mechanics of Indian basketry. In Potter Valley there is a settlement of Poma 3 Indians, the People of the Red Earth, which name is applied to a score or more affiliated tribes. Authorities dispute their supremacy as basket- makers: there are tribes in southwestern counties which are marvelously expert. But when found by the Americans, Mr. Purdy contends, the Pomas were making baskets " of the highest perfection ever attained anywhere." The woven receptacles carried their babies, their seeds, their water and their fire-wood. Bam-tush traps caught their game, and in mortars woven of dark sedge-roots and gleaming grasses upon a frame of willow- shoots, they ground their atole. The designs of 3 Sometimes wrongly spelled Porno.