River Systems.— As in most arid States, the drainage of California is simple. For some 300 miles on its southeastern edge the State is bounded by the Colorado River, which rises in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and flows 1,360 miles to the Gulf of California. It has no tributaries whatever from California, all east bound streams from the Sierra Nevada being lost in the desert. On the western coast, though a few rivers reach the sea (like the Klamath, Mad, Eel and Salinas) they are relatively un. important and incidental. The real drainage system of the State has outlet through San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate, by two chief inland rivers which join about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. Both rise in the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento (370 miles long to the north, the San Joaquin (350 miles long) to the south. Their main course averages along nearly the median line, north and south, through nearly two-thirds the length of the State. They have no tributaries worthy of the name from the great westerly mountain wall, the Coast Range; their waters being fed almost exclusively from the vast Alpine chain which is in effect, though not politically, the eastern boundary of Cali fornia down to latitude 35° 30". Their import ant feeders from the Sierra are the Feather, Yuba, Cosumnes, American, Mokelumne, Kern, Kings, etc. All these are fine mountain tor rents, beloved of sportsmen, and flowing through magnificent scenery, but not of rank as water ways. The most important is the Feather, which has a large drainage area. Several streams in southern California, like the Los Angeles, Gabriel and Santa Ana, reach the sea, but all are practically exhausted by irrigation uses, except during winter flood-water. many streams from the abrupt eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada all disappear in alkaline "sinlcs,° — like Pyramid Lake, the Mojave River, Mono Lake and Death Valley,— and never even in flood reach the ocean by their great natural conduit, the Colorado River.
The total mean annual run-off (in acre-feet) of 32 chief California rivers is 59,078,200. The Colorado River is enormously largest, with 16,900,000 acre-feet •, the Sacramento next with 9,770,000; the Feather 5,880,000; American 3, 820,000; Yuba 3,050,000. The San Joaquin, Kings, McCloud, Merced, Stanislaus and Link rivers all exceed 1,000,000 acre-feet; and the Tuolumne 2,000,000. Seven others exceed 500,000.
The Sacramento and Colorado are navigable to light-draft steamers to the State capital and to Needles, respectively. The lakes of Cali fornia are not Important as to navigation. Tulare Lake, the drainage of the Kern, Kaweah and Kings rivers, is 700 square miles in area, but only 40 feet deep. In very high water its overflow reaches the San Joaquin; but ordinarily its income of waters is cared for by evaporation. Lake Tahoe in the extreme north, at an elevation of 6,200 feet, is 20 miles long and 1,500 feet deep, and famous for the purity of its waters, the beauty of its scenery and its trout. It is the largest of the glacial lakes, of which there are a great number in the Sierra, mostly at altitudes exceeding the highest moun tain summits east of Colorado. The lower-lying lakes of the State are mostly without outlet, and of various degrees of brackishness, culmi nating in the °sink° of the Amargosa River nearly 200 feet below sea-level on the eastern side of the range, where evaporation has left vast alkaline deposits, now of great commercial value.
Geology.— The main axis of the Sierra Nevada is of granite throughout. To the north there are some metamorphic peaks, and many summits are capped with volcanic materials. Mount Shasta in the far north is an extinct vol cano (14,470 feet). So also is Lassen's Peak (10,577 feet), of late years sometimes emitting smoke. This granite core is flanked by a very
heavy mass of slaty, metamorphic rocks,— mostly argillaceous, chloritic and talcose slates, — constituting the great auriferous belt of the Sierra. The Coast Range is made up almost entirely of cretaceous and tertiary marines, chiefly sandstones and bituminous shales. It is in this belt that the recent vast development of petroleum has been made.
Besides the vast reaches of alluvial soils in the lower valleys, which were first selected for agriculture, an enormous area of disinte grated granite gravels along the foothills and first acclivities has been found the most produc tive soil in the State, particularly with reference to valuable crops. These great gravel beds, which seem to the farmer from the black abot of Ohio the most unpromising of soils, are in reality rich in all the elements of plant food. The vast majority of the valuable or chards, particularly of southern California, are planted upon this granitic detritus; and with out exception the finest oranges and other citrus fruits come from this soil. The relative aridity of California, long supposed to be a curse, is now known to be a two-fold blessing. Exhaustive analyses, comparative with every portion of the Union, show these gravels to average much richer in chemical constituents than soils leached out by excessive rainfall. Furthermore, the fact that precipitation is not sufficient to ensure crops has com pelled irrigation, which does ensure them; so that farmers in the arid lands have much greater crop-certainty than those of regions with most abundant rainfall.
Agriculture.— In no item of its history has California been more unlike other States than in development and sequences of agriculture. The first (and for 60 years commercially chief) industry was cattle — derived from herds in troduced from Mexico by Viceroy Galvez, 1769, and chief wealth of the Mission establishments and Spanish colonists. It was a generation after the American occupation before agricul ture was seriously undertaken; and for another term of years it was chiefly a gigantic seasonal 'gamble with the weather') in dry-farming of cereals. The characteristic features of agri culture up to about 1870 were enormous hold ings,— reckoned by at least tens of thousands of acres,— with the single crop (almost ex clusively wheat and barley) and purchase of every other article of necessity or luxury. On areas of hundreds of square miles apiece there were an individual or corporate owner, a single crop, a few hundred hirelings at the height of the season and their temporary quarters. A few of these enormous ranchos still survive ; and Miller and Lux still farm about 1,000,000 acres, with 20,000 acres in a single field. But within a generation the typical character of agriculture in California has radically changed. The greatest record drought (1864) which not only destroyed grain but hundreds of thou sands of cattle (60,000 head being sold that year in Santa Barbara at per head), exclusion of the Chinese, who had been the chief reliance for labor on the great ranchos, the fall in wheat, and other factors, led to the breaking up of these gigantic domains. A slight idea of the change may be had from the census fact that in 1850 the average size of all California farms was 4,456.6 acres; and in 1910, 318 acres. Along with this great dry-farm gambling— for such it was — sheep became a leading industry in the State, par ticularly in southern California. But the enor mous increase in value of land has reduced sheep to a valuation of $17,000,000. The city of Pasadena (Pop. 40,000) was a sheep pasture in 1870.