among trees, and flanked by young orchards.  You will not find a great variety of crops, for wheat and barley are the staple products of this valley; and though the farms here are in general of 640 acres or less, there are not wanting some of those immense estates for which California is famous; and a single farmer in this valley is said to have raised on his own land last year one-twentieth of the entire wheat crop of the State.

Northwest of Marysville the plain is broken by a singularly lovely range of mountains, the Buttes.  They rise abruptly from the plain, and their peaks reach from two to three thousand feet high.  It is an extremely pretty miniature mountain range, having its peaks, passes, and canons—­all the features of the Sierra—­and it is well worth a visit.  Butte is a word applied to such isolated mountains, which do not form part of a chain, and which are not uncommon west of the Mississippi.  Shasta is called a butte; Lassen’s Peaks are buttes; and the traveler across the continent hears the word frequently applied to mountain.  It is pronounced with the u long.

Along the banks of the Sacramento there are large quantities of land which is annually overflowed by the river, and much of which is still only used for pasturage during the dry season, when its grasses support large herds of cattle and sheep, which are driven to the uplands when the rains begin to fall.  But much of this swamp and tule land has been drained and diked, and is now used for farm land.  It produces heavy crops of wheat, and its reclamation has been, and continues to be, one of the successful speculations in land in this State.  It will not be long before the shores of the Sacramento and its tributaries will be for many miles so diked that these rivers will never break their bounds, and thus a very considerable area will be added to the fertile farming lands of the State.

Already, however, the Yuba, the Feather, and the American rivers, tributaries of the Sacramento, have been leveed at different points for quite another reason.  These rivers, once clear and rapidly flowing within deep banks, are now turbid, in many places shallow, and their bottoms have been raised from twenty to thirty feet by the accumulation of the washings from the gold mines in the foot-hills.  It is almost incredible the change the miners have thus produced in the short space of a quarter of a century.  The bed of the Yuba has been raised thirty feet in that time; and seeing what but a handful of men have effected in so short a period, the work of water in the denudation of mountains, and the scouring out or filling up of valleys during geological periods becomes easily comprehensible.