To the Golden Land; Sketches of a Trip to Southern California (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 edition. Excerpt: ... feed the town. English-like, we resolved to see for ourselves whether this could be true of a country of i4,000 square miles--i.e., twice the size of the Principality of Wales. Six weeks sufficed to convince us that the theory is absolutely belied by the facts. Our resolve was whetted by a visit we paid, under the guidance of the active British Vice-Consul, Colonel Allen, to the San Diegan Chamber of Commerce. That body is happy in the possession of Mr. Turrell, a gem of a secretary, in whose enterprising hands no idea for making widely known the resources and capabilities of the country is allowed to lie fallow. In the rooms of the Chamber is a remarkable display of mineral and vegetable products. One saw there potatoes twenty inches round, cauliflowers eighteen inches across, pumpkins four feet long, maize fifteen feet high, vine shoots of forty-five feet, and a perfectly bewildering display of oranges, lemons, apples, pears, raisins, prunes, apricots, peaches, and all kinds of vegetables; cotton, honey, wheat, and barley; granite and sandstone, lime as white as driven snow, magnetic iron ore, gold and silver-bearing quartz; sections of live oak, pine, and sycamore. And so on. Whence came the products? We determined absolutely to see this wondrous "backcountry," if it existed. Fortune made us acquainted with Mr. T. S. Vandyke, an East-country lawyer, who came here twelve or fourteen years ago, as the doctors thought, to die. He chose a pleasant home at Fallbrook, spent three years in roaming the hills and shooting deer, and stands now a living proof of what Southern California can do for those whom consumption apparently has doomed. No one knows the back-country so well as he; and his book, Southern California, written out of fulness...