[Illustration:  INDIAN RANCHERIA.]

As you ascend the Sacramento you near Mount Shasta, and when you reach Strawberry Valley, a pretty little mountain vale, you are but a short ride from its base.  It is from this point that tourists ascend the mountain.  You can hire horses, guides, and a camp outfit here, and the adventure requires three days.  You ride up to the snow-line the first day, ascend to the top the following morning, descend to your camp in the afternoon, and return to the valley on the third day.  Mount Shasta has a glacier, almost, but not quite, the only one, I believe, within the limits of the United States.  The mountain is an extinct volcano.  Its summit is composed of lava, and if your eye is familiar with the peculiar shape of volcanic peaks, you can easily trace the now broken lines of this old crater as you view the mountain from the Shasta plain on the north.

There are many extremely pretty valleys scattered through these mountains, and these are used by small farmers, and by sheep and cattle owners who in the winter take their stock into the lower valleys, but ascend into the mountains in May, and remain until October.  This is also a timber region, and as it is well watered by permanent streams you see frequent saw-mills, and altogether more improvement than one expects to find.  But, proceeding further north you come upon a large plain, the Shasta Valley, in which lies the considerable town of Yreka, notable during the last winter and spring as the point from which news came to us about the Modoc war.

From Yreka you may easily visit the celebrated “lava beds,” where the Indians made so stubborn and long-continued a defense against the United States troops; and at Yreka you may hear several opinions upon the merits of the Modocs and their war.  You will hear, for instance, that the Indians were stirred up to hostilities by mischievous and designing whites, that white men were not wanting to supply them with arms and ammunition, and that, had it not been for the unscrupulous management of some greedy and wicked whites, we should not have been horrified by the shocking incidents of this costly Indian trouble, in which the United States Government for six months waged war against forty-six half-starved Modocs.

The Shasta Valley is an extensive plain, chiefly used at present as a range for cattle and sheep.  But its soil is fertile, and the valley contains some good farms.  Beyond Yreka gold mining is pursued, and, indeed, almost the whole of the mountain region north of Redding yields “the color;” and at many points along the Upper Sacramento and the mountain streams which fall into it, gold is mined profitably.  One day, at the Soda Spring, several of us asked Mr. Fry whether he could find gold near the river.  He took a pan, and digging at random in his orchard, washed out three or four specks of gold; and he related that when he was planting this orchard ten years ago he found gold in the holes he dug for his apple-trees.  But he is an old miner, and experience has taught him that a good apple orchard is more profitable, in the long run, than a poor gold mine.