For the coast journey the best route, because it shows you much fine scenery on your way, is by way of Soucelito, which is reached by a ferry from San Francisco.  From Soucelito either a stage or a private conveyance carries you to Olema, whence you should visit Point Reyes, one of the most rugged capes on the coast, where a light-house and fog-signal are placed to warn and guide mariners.  It is a wild spot, often enveloped in fogs, and where it blows at least half a gale of wind three hundred days in the year.

Returning from Point Reyes to Olema, your road bears you past Tomales Bay, and back to the coast of Mendocino County; and by the time you reach the mouth of Russian River you are in the saw-mill country.  Here the road runs for the most part close to the coast, and gives you a long succession of wild and strange views.  You pass Point Arena, where is another light-house; and finally land at Mendocino City.

Before the stage sets you down at Mendocino, or “Big River,” you will have noticed that the coast-line is broken at frequent intervals by the mouths of small streams, and at the available points at the mouths of these streams saw-mills are placed.  This continues up the coast, wherever a river-mouth offers the slightest shelter to vessels loading; for the redwood forests line the coast up to and beyond Humboldt Bay.

When you leave the coast for the interior, you ride through mile after mile of redwood forest.  Unlike the firs of Oregon and Puget Sound, this tree does not occupy the whole land.  It rears its tall head from a jungle of laurel, madrone, oak, and other trees; and I doubt if so many as fifty large redwoods often stand upon a single acre.  I was told that an average tree would turn out about fifteen thousand feet of lumber, and thus even thirty such trees to the acre would yield nearly half a million feet.

The topography of California, like its climate, has decided features.  As there are but two seasons, so there are apt to be sharply-drawn differences in natural features, and you descend from what appears to you an interminable mass of mountains suddenly into a plain, and pass from deep forests shading the mountain road at once into a prairie valley, which nature made ready to the farmer’s hands, taking care even to beautify it for him with stately and umbrageous oaks.  There are a number of such valleys on the way which I took from the coast at Mendocino City to the Nome Cult Indian Reservation, in Round Valley.  The principal of these, Little Lake, Potter, and Eden valleys, contain from five to twelve thousand acres; but there are a number of smaller vales, little gems, big enough for one or two farmers, fertile and easily cultivated.

A good many Missourians and other Southern people have settled in this part of the State.  The better class of these make good farmers; but the person called “Pike” in this State has here bloomed out until, at times, he becomes, as a Californian said to me about an earthquake, “a little monotonous.”