Red Bluff is one of the oldest towns in the valley; it stands at the head of navigation on the Sacramento, and was, therefore, a place of importance before the railroad was built.  The river here is narrow and shoal, and it is crossed by one of those ferries common where the rapid current, pushing against the ferry-boat, drives it across the stream, a wire cable preventing it from floating down stream.  The main street of the town consists mainly of bar-rooms, livery-stables, barber-shops, and hotels, with an occasional store of merchandise sandwiched between; and, if you saw only this main street, you would conceive but a poor opinion of the people.  But other streets contain a number of pleasant, shady cottages; and, as I drove out into the country, the driver pointed with pride to the school-house, a large and fine building, which had just been completed at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, and seemed to me worth the money.  The town has also water-works; and the people propose to bridge the Sacramento at a cost of forty thousand dollars, and to build a new jail, to cost fifteen thousand dollars.  Such enterprises show the wealth of the people in this State, and astonish the traveler, who imagines, in driving over the great plain, that it is almost uninhabited, but sees, in a thirty-thousand dollar school-house in a little town like Red Bluff, that not only are there people, but that they have the courage to bear taxation for good objects, and the means to pay.

From Red Bluff two of the great mountain peaks of Northern California are magnificently seen—­Lassen’s Peaks and Shasta.  The latter, still one hundred and twenty miles off to the north, rears his great, craggy, snow-covered summit high in the air, and seems not more than twenty miles away.  Lassen’s Peaks are twins, and very lonely indeed.  They are sixty miles to the east, and are also, at this season, glistening with snow.  Between Lassen’s and the Sacramento, some thirty miles up among the mountains, there is a rich timber country, whose saw-mills supply the northern part of the valley with lumber, sugar-pine being the principal tree sawed up.  The valley begins to narrow above Red Bluff, and the foot-hills and mountains still abound in wild game.  Hunters bring their peltries hither for sale; and this has occasioned the establishment at this point of a thriving glove factory, which turned out—­from an insignificant looking little shop—­not less than forty thousand dollars’ worth of gloves last year.  Two enterprising young men manage it, and they employ, I was told, from fifty to eighty women in the work, and turn out very excellent buckskin gloves, as well as some finer kinds.  Such petty industries are too often neglected in California, where every body still wants to conduct his calling on a grand scale, and where dozens of ways to prosperity, and even wealth, are constantly neglected, because they appear too slow.