Peters, in his "Life of Carson," tells the story of two expeditions
which Carson led against the Indians, while they trapped upon the
Sacramento, which give proof of his courage, and thorough education in
the art of Indian warfare, which had become a necessity to the
_voyageur_ on the plains, and in the mountains of the western wilds.
With his quick discrimination of character, and familiarity with the
habits of the race, he could not but know the diggers were less bold
than the Apaches and Camanches, with whom he was before familiar.
The Indians at the Mission San Gabriel, were restive under coerced
labor, and forty of them made their escape to a tribe not far away.
The mission demanded the return of these fugitives, and being refused,
gave battle to the neighboring tribe, but were defeated. The Padre sent
to the trappers for assistance to compel the Indians not to harbor their
people. Carson and eleven of his companions volunteered to aid the
mission, and the attack upon the Indian village resulted in the
destruction of a third of its inhabitants, and compelled them to
submission. Capt. Young found at this mission a trader to take his furs,
and from them purchased a drove of horses. Directly after his return, a
party of Indians contrived to drive away sixty horses from the trappers,
while the sentinel slept at night. Carson with twelve men were sent in
pursuit. It was not difficult to follow the fresh trail of so large a
drove, yet he pursued them a hundred miles, and into the mountains,
before coming up with them. The Indians supposed themselves too far away
to be followed, and were feasting on the flesh of the stolen horses they
had slaughtered. Carson's party arranged themselves silently and without
being seen, and rushing upon the Indian camp, killed eight men, and
scattered the remainder in every direction. The horses were recovered,
except the six killed, and partly consumed, and with three Indian
children left in camp, they returned to the joyful greetings of their
friends.
Early in the autumn of 1829, Mr. Young and his party of trappers set out
on their return home. On their route they visited Los Angelos, formerly
called Pueblo de los Angelos, "the city of the angels," a name which it
received on account of the exceedingly genial climate, and the beauty of
the surrounding country. It is situated on a small river of the same
name, 30 miles from its mouth, and on the road between the cities of San
Jose and San Diego. It is about three hundred and fifty miles east of
San Francisco, and a hundred miles to the south.
Although to very many thousands of readers, anything on the subject of
the climate of California may seem superfluous, yet there are as many
thousands who have no really distinct idea of the country or the
climate, and we therefore quote from Rev. Dr. Bushnell, whose article on
those topics in the "New Englander," in 1858, attracted justly such
universal attention:
"The first and most difficult thing to apprehend respecting California
is the climate, upon which, of course, depend the advantages of health
and physical development, the growths and their conditions and kinds,
and the _modus operandi_, or general cast, of the seasons. But this,
again, is scarcely possible, without dismissing, first of all, the word
_climate_, and substituting the plural, climates. For it cannot be said
of California, as of New England, or the Middle States, that it has a
climate. On the contrary, it has a great multitude, curiously pitched
together, at short distances, one from another, defying too, not seldom,
our most accepted notions of the effects of latitude and altitude and
the defences of mountain ranges. The only way, therefore, is to dismiss
generalities, cease to look for a climate, and find, if we can, by what
process the combinations and varieties are made; for when we get hold of
the manner and going on of causes, all the varieties are easily
reducible.
"To make this matter intelligible, conceive that Middle California, the
region of which we now speak, lying between the head waters of the two
great rivers, and about four hundred and fifty or five hundred miles
long from north to south, is divided lengthwise, parallel to the coast,
into three strips, or ribands of about equal width. First, the
coast-wise region, comprising two, three, and sometimes four parallel
tiers of mountains from five hundred to four thousand, five thousand, or
even ten thousand feet high. Next, advancing inward, we have a middle
strip, from fifty to seventy miles wide, of almost dead plain, which is
called the great valley; down the scarcely perceptible slopes of which,
from north to south, and south to north, run the two great rivers, the
Sacramento and the San Joaquim, to join their waters at the middle of
the basin and pass off to the sea. The third long strip, or riband, is
the slope of the Sierra Nevada chain, which bounds the great valley on
the east, and contains in its foot-hills, or rather in its lower half,
all the gold mines. The upper half is, to a great extent, bare granite
rock, and is crowned at the summit, with snow, about eight months of the
year.
"Now the climate of these parallel strips will be different almost of
course, and subordinate, local differences, quite as remarkable, will
result from subordinate features in the local configurations,
particularly of the seaward strip or portion. For all the varieties of
climate, distinct as they become, are made by variations wrought in the
rates of motion, the courses, the temperature, and the dryness of a
single wind; viz., the trade wind of the summer months, which blows
directly inward all the time, only with much greater power during that
part of the day when the rarefaction of the great central valley comes
to its aid; that is, from about ten o'clock in the morning, to the
setting of the sun. Conceive such a wind, chilled by the cold waters
that have come down from the Northern Pacific, perhaps from Behring's
Straits, combing the tops and wheeling round through the valleys of the
coastwise mountains, crossing the great valley at a much retarded rate,
and growing hot and dry, fanning gently the foot-hills and sides of the
Sierra, still more retarded by the piling necessary to break over into
Utah, and the conditions of the California climate, or climates, will be
understood with general accuracy. Greater simplicity in the matter of
climate is impossible, and greater variety is hardly to be imagined.
"For the whole dry season, viz., from May to November, this wind is in
regular blast, day by day, only sometimes approaching a little more
nearly to a tempest than at others. It never brings a drop of rain,
however thick and rain-like the clouds it sometimes drives before it.
The cloud element, indeed, is always in it. Sometimes it is floated
above, in the manner commonly designated by the term _cloud_. Sometimes,
as in the early morning, when the wind is most quiet, it may be seen as
a kind of fog bank resting on the sea-wall mountains or rolling down
landward through the interstices of their summits. When the wind begins
to hurry and take on less composedly, the fog becomes blown fog, a kind
of lead dust driven through the air, reducing it from a transparent to a
semi-transparent or merely translucent state, so that if any one looks
up the bay, from a point twenty or thirty miles south of San Francisco,
in the afternoon, he will commonly see, directly abreast of the Golden
Gate where this wind drives in with its greatest power, a pencil of the
lead dust shooting upwards at an angle of thirty or forty degrees,
(which is the aim of the wind preparing to leap the second chain of
mountains, the other side of the bay,) and finally tapering off and
vanishing, at a mid-air point eight or ten miles inland, where the
increased heat of the atmosphere has taken up the moisture, and restored
its complete transparency. This wind is so cold, that one who will sit
upon the deck of the afternoon steamer passing up the bay, will even
require his heaviest winter clothing. And so rough are the waters of the
bay, landlocked and narrow as it is, that sea-sickness is a kind of
regular experience, with such as are candidates for that kind of
felicity.
"We return now to the middle strip of the great valley where the engine,
or rather boiler power, that operates the coast wind in a great part of
its velocity, is located. Here the heat, reverberated as in a forge, or
oven (whence _Cali--fornia_) becomes, even in the early spring, so much
raised that the ground is no longer able, by any remaining cold there is
in it, to condense the clouds, and rain ceases. A little further on in
the season, there is not cooling influence enough left to allow even the
phenomena of cloud, and for weeks together, not a cloud will be seen,
unless, by chance, the skirt of one may just appear now and then,
hanging over the summit of the western mountains. The sun rises, fixing
his hot stare on the world, and stares through the day. Then he returns
as in an orrery, and stares through another, in exactly the same way.
The thermometer will go up, not seldom, to 100° or even 110°, and
judging by what we know of effects here in New England, we should
suppose that life would scarcely be supportable. And yet there is much
less suffering from heat in this valley than with us, for the reason
probably that the nights are uniformly cool. The thermometer goes down
regularly with the sun, and one or two blankets are wanted for the
comfort of the night. This cooling of the night is probably determined
by the fact that the cool sea wind, sweeping through the upper air of
the valley, from the coast mountains on one side, over the mountains
and mountain passes of the Sierra on the other, is not able to get down
to the ground of the valley during the day, because of the powerfully
steaming column of heat that rises from it; but as soon as the sun goes
down, it drops immediately to the level of the plain, bathing it for the
night with a kind of perpendicular sea breeze, that has lost for the
time a great part of its lateral motion. The consequence is that no one
is greatly debilitated by the heat. On the contrary, it is the general
testimony, that a man can do as much of mental or bodily labor in this
climate, as in any other. And it is a good confirmation of this opinion,
that horses will here maintain a wonderful energy, traveling greater
distances, complaining far less of heat, and sustaining their spirit a
great deal better than with us. It is also to be noted that there is no
special tendency to fevers in this hot region, except in what is called
the _tule_ bottom, a kind of giant bulrush region, along the most
depressed and marshiest portions of the rivers.
"Passing now to the eastern strip or portion, the slope of the Nevada,
the heat, except in those deep cañons where the reverberation makes it
sometimes even insupportable, is qualified in degree, according to the
altitude. A gentle west wind, warmer in the lower parts or foothills by
the heat of the valley, fans it all day. At points which are higher, the
wind is cooler; but here also, on the slope of the Nevada, the nights
are always cool in summer, so cool that the late and early frosts leave
too short a space for the ordinary summer crop to mature, even where the
altitude is not more than 3,000 or 4,000 feet. Meantime, at the top of
the Sierra, where the west wind, piling up from below, breaks over into
Utah, travelers undertake to say that in some of the passes it blows
with such stress as even to polish the rocks, by the gravel and sand
which it drives before it. The day is cloudless on the slope of the
Sierra, as in the valley; but on the top there is now and then, or once
in a year or two, a moderate thunder shower. With this exception, as
referring to a part uninhabitable, thunder is scarcely ever heard in
California. The principal thunders of California are underground.
"We return now to the coast-wise mountain region, where the multiplicity
and confusion of climates is most remarkable. Their variety we shall
find depends on the courses of the wind currents, turned hither and
thither by the mountains; partly also on the side any given place
occupies of its valley or mountain; and partly on the proximity of the
sea. Sprinkled in among these mountains, and more or less inclosed by
them, are valleys, large and small, of the highest beauty. But a valley
in California means something more than a scoop, or depression. It means
a rich land-lake, leveled between the mountains, with a sharply defined,
picturesque shore, where it meets the sides and runs into the
indentations of the mountains. What is called the Bay of San Francisco,
is a large salt water lake in the middle of a much larger land-lake,
sometimes called the San Jose valley. It extends south of the city forty
miles, and northward among islands and mountains, about twenty-five
more, if we include what is called San Pueblo Bay. Three beautiful
valleys of agricultural country, the Petaluma, Sonora, and Napa valleys,
open into this larger valley of the bay, on the north end of it, between
four mountain barriers, having each a short navigable creek or inlet.
Still farther north is the Russian River valley, opening towards the
sea, and the Clear Lake valley and region, which is the Switzerland of
California. East of the San Jose valley, too, at the foot of Diabola,
and up among the mountains, are the large Amador and San Ramon valleys,
also the little gem of the Suñole. Now these valleys, which, if we
except the great valley of the two rivers, comprise the plow-land of
Middle California, have each a climate of its own, and productions that
correspond. We have only to observe further, that the east side of any
valley will commonly be much warmer than the west; for the very
paradoxical reason that the cold coast-wind always blows much harder on
the side or steep slope even, of a mountain, opposite or away from the
wind, than it does on the side towards it, reversing all our notions of
the sheltering effects of mountain ridges."