The end of the trail

In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus and peopled Europe. By caravel and...

If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in that region which lies between the G...

You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone across—with walls as steep and smooth a...

Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradition seem to have agreed for once that the original Acoma stood on the top of the _Mesa Encantada_, or Katzimo, as the Indians call i...

But to return to the highway of narrative from which I find that I have inadvertently wandered. When a girl is old enough to get married, which is usually about the time that sh...

More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona than about any other region on the continent. The reclamation phase of its development has been so emphasised and advertised that...

Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In the foot-hills of the Catalina...

From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight or passenger traffic between t...

It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch-house famous as the home of _...

The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by the concerns engaged i...

Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped, with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which corresponds to the tail, being connected w...

High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The Foot-hills. It is an unpretending...

“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the _padres_ to shield themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they were not permitted to ride but...

If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is the fifty-mile-long one which meanders up the Santa Clara Valley, for there are more schoolhouses scattered along it than th...

I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were possessed with a mania for things Egyptian. Some people were unkind enough to say that they were “dotty” on the subject, but that...

I think that the most significant thing that I saw in Sacramento was Sutter’s Fort, or, to be quite accurate, the restored remnants of it. Three quarters of a century ago this l...

The factory whistles were raucously reminding the workers that it was time to take the covers off their dinner pails when we swung into the plaza of the city whose name perpetua...

Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great Valley, a few miles south of it the converging ranges of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the Tehachapi, which is the recognise...

We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed to know whereof they spoke, that, if we persisted in taking this unconventional and therefore perfectly ridiculous route, we w...

“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn’t arouse any overwhelming ent...

The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland, Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portla...

Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has christened “The Ma...

The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfectio...

“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly, I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a man has a better chance. What with...

If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than to put your car on a steamer at Seattle...

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in palatial hostelries, have y...

“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now that we’ve cleared some m...

It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly behind the forge in t...

I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous country village, with...

The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the strangest cemeteries in the world, over each grave being erected a grave house of grotesquely carved and gaudily painted wood, which...

Santa Clara Valley, the, 8, 190-210; air in, 206; blossom-time in, 192, 193; climate, 200, 201; land values, 204, 205; productiveness of, 193-5; schools in, 196; ultrafashionabl...