Moreover, while he has great ingenuity in his methods, the farmer of the Sacramento plain has but little originality in his planting.  He raises wheat and barley.  He might raise a dozen, a score, of other products, many more profitable, and all obliging him to cultivate less ground, but it is only here and there you meet with one who appreciates the remarkable capabilities of the soil and climate.  Near Tehama some Chinese have in the last two years grown large crops of pea-nuts, and have, I was told, realized handsome profits from a nut which will be popular in America, I suppose, as long as there is a pit or a gallery in a theatre; but the pea-nut makes a valuable oil, and as it produces enormously here, it will some day be raised for this use, as much as for the benefit of the old women who keep fruit-stands on the street corners.  It would not be surprising if the Chinese, who continue to come over to California in great numbers, should yet show the farmers here what can be done on small farms by patient and thorough culture.  As yet they confine their culture of land mainly to vegetable gardens.

To the farmer the valley and foot-hill lands of the Sacramento will be the most attractive; and there are still here thousands of acres in the hands of the Government and the railroad company to be obtained so cheaply that, whether for crops or for grazing, it will be some time before the mountainous lands and the pretty valleys they contain, north of Redding, the present terminus of the railroad, will attract settlers.  But for the traveler the region north of Redding to the State line offers uncommon attractions.

The Sacramento Valley closes in as you journey northward; and at Red Bluff, which is the head of navigation on the river, you have a magnificent view of Lassen’s Peaks on the east—­twin peaks, snow-clad, and rising high out of the plain—­and also of the majestic snow-covered crag which is known as Shasta Butte, which towers high above the mountains to the north, and, though here 120 miles off, looks but a day’s ride away.

Redding, thirty miles north from Shasta, lies at the head of the Sacramento Valley.  From there a line of stage-coaches proceeds north into Oregon, through the mass of mountains which separates the Sacramento Valley in California from the Willamette Valley in Oregon.  The stage-road passes through a very varied and picturesque country, one which few pleasure travelers see, and which yet is as well worth a visit as any part of the western coast.  The Sacramento River, which rises in a large spring near the base of Mount Shasta, has worn its way through the high mountains, and rushes down for nearly a hundred miles of its course an impetuous, roaring mountain stream, abounding in trout at all seasons, and in June, July, and August filled with salmon which have come up here through the Golden Gates from the ocean to spawn.  The stage-road follows almost to its source the devious course of the river, and you ride along sometimes nearly on a level with the stream, and again on a road-bed cut out of the steep mountain side a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the river; through fine forests of sugar-pines and yellow pines many of which come almost up to the dimensions of the great sequoias.