Accidents are frequent in a logging camp, and good surgeons are in demand in all the saw-mill ports, for there is much more occasion for surgery than for physic.  Men are cut with axes, jammed by logs, and otherwise hurt, one of the most serious dangers arising from the fall of limbs torn from standing trees by a falling one.  Often such a limb lodges or sticks in the high top of a tree until the wind blows it down, or the concussion of the wood-cutter’s axe, cutting down the tree, loosens it.  Falling from such a height as two hundred or two hundred and fifty feet, even a light branch is dangerous, and men sometimes have their brains dashed out by such a falling limb.

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.

[Illustration:  PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON TERRITORY.]

CHAPTER IX.

DAIRY-FARMING IN CALIFORNIA.

The great valleys of California do not produce much butter, and probably never will, though I am told that cows fed on alfalfa, which is a kind of lucerne, yield abundant and rich milk, and, when small and careful farming comes into fashion in this State, there is no reason why stall-fed cows should not yield butter, even in the San Joaquin or Sacramento valleys.  Indeed, with irrigation and stall-feeding, as one may have abundance of green food all the year round in the valleys, there should be excellent opportunity for butter-making.

But it is not necessary to use the agricultural soil for dairy purposes.  In the foot-hills of the Sierras, and on the mountains, too, for a distance of more than a hundred miles along and near the line of the railroad, there is a great deal of country admirably fitted for dairying, and where already some of the most prosperous butter ranchos, as they call them here, are found.  And as they are near a considerable population of miners and lumber-men, and have access by railroad to other centres of population, both eastward and westward, the business is prosperous in this large district, where, by moving higher up into the mountains as summer advances, the dairy-man secures green food for his cows the summer through, without trouble, on the one condition that he knows the country and how to pick out his land to advantage.

Another dairy district lies on the coast, where the fogs brought in by the prevailing north-west winds keep the ground moist, foster the greenness and succulence of the native grasses during the summer, at least in the ravines, and keep the springs alive.