San Diego County CA Archives History - Books .....The Interior 1888 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/copyright.htm http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/ca/cafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com February 20, 2006, 7:18 pm Book Title: The City And County Of San Diego CHAPTER VIII. THE INTERIOR. THE general character of all the coast of Southern California is about the same, a long" line of table-lands, more or less wavy and sloping away from the sea, more or less cut with valleys, ravines, creeks, or rivers,; or interrupted by some range of low hills. This table-land, or mesa, as it is generally called from the Spanish for table, is the part of the country which was last; lifted from the sea, and in the deeper valleys there is: still some salt and alkali, though the slopes and top of the mesa proper are very free from it. The formation is generally sand, gravel, bowlder, clay, and silt in all sorts of alternations beneath; but the top soil is nearly always of fine gray or red granite, sometimes both, though sometimes an adobe, which again is often mixed with fine granite. These mesas reach from five to twelve or fifteen miles from the coast, and are often found far in the interior as benches around some broad valley or plain. Where irrigable they command the highest price of all lands. Their value is generally dependent upon their elevation above the valleys or sea, the higher ones being generally more desired, and their value, not only for residences, but for fruit-growing, is constantly rising. Over such a table-land you pass for some twelve miles in going from San Diego to the interior. Some of it looks hard and sterile, but nearly all of it is good land, needing only good plowing to equal the best valley land. Its climate, free by its elevation from frosts in winter nights, is tempered by the coast breezes from the heat of summer noons. Yet most of it is far enough from the coast to be free from the freshness of the sea, and is lifted to a point that gives a grand, far-reaching view of ocean and mountain. This mesa reaches far away to the north, broken by the canon of the San Diego River, and far away into the south to the Mexican line, broken by the Sweetwater and Otay Valleys. Some twelve miles back of San Diego, this mesa falls suddenly off about two hundred and fifty feet into a broad valley called El Cajon. In and around this valley and its connections are some twenty thousand acres of fine rich land. The valley land proper is well suited to the raisin grape, and Cajon raisins have within four years won an almost national reputation, and shown what the county can do. Around the main valley and its branches are thousands of acres of slope and small mesa, which are as fine orange and lemon lands as can be found, and unexcelled for residence property. El Cajon has a population of nearly three hundred and is rapidly growing. Having seen El Cajon, the average tourist thinks he has seen the whole county; for the girdle of high, rugged hills by which it is embraced gives little indication of anything around or beyond it, yet valleys of various sizes lie just over the hills on all sides, with small mesas or slopes leading up to the higher hills. Six miles up a winding mountain road brings us to another broad valley of some fifteen thousand acres of fine plain and slope, twelve hundred feet above El Cajon, which averages only four hundred feet above the sea. This is the Santa Maria, an old Spanish grant. Here again the land breaks on the sides into hills, some quite smooth and rolling, others high, sharp, and heavily studded with bowlders. You notice that the roads show plenty of travel, but you see few people or houses, or cultivated farms; a feature you may note all over the county. This is because the large grants are as yet quite unsettled, many of them being still closed to settlement, while most of those that are open have been upon the market but a few months. The land is, however, being fast taken up, as you see here and as you saw in El Cajon, but the great majority of the settlers are on Government land around these large grants. As remarked before, these dark chaparral -clad hills or bowlder-studded ridges that seem to bound all that is tillable, are full of pockets, little valleys and parks in every direction, and in the . girdle of hills around this one valley are stowed away over fifty farms whose presence one would never suspect, while just over the ridge on the right are about four thousand acres of fine plow land, between us and the tall mountain of granite that seems so near,—the rancho San Vicente. Here you begin to see more timber than on the lower levels. The hills and slopes around this valley once abounded with great live oaks, but fire and the ax have swept away the most of them. But you can see a great change in the general appearance of the country. In almost everyone of the larger ravines, and on the larger hill-sides, you may now find living springs, which you could not do along the coast. Everything indicates a land of much more rain than you have yet seen. And such is the fact, this valley being upon the second rain-belt of the county, where the winter rains are always ample for full crops. The new town Ramona lies near its eastern edge, in a fine location. Leaving the Santa Maria by the Julian road, you pass through a series of smaller valleys, constantly rising one above another. Here you find running water in all the little brooks, timber increasing, and farms more like Eastern farms than you have yet seen; in short, evidences of more rain even than in Santa Maria. Soon the road runs into a larger valley of about two thousand acres including slopes and all. This is known as Ballena, and is the center of quite a settlement of some six thousand acres, of which, as before, the surrounding hills show no sign. It is twenty-five hundred feet above the sea, and about one thousand feet above the Santa Maria. Still up we go, passing again through small valleys, and among hills in whose hidden pockets whole farms may be stowed away, until at an elevation of three thousand feet we come into the valley of the Rancho Santa Ysabel. This is the central valley of the rancho, containing, with its branches and slopes, some four thousand acres of fine land, but used with the adjoining hills only for stock range, dairy, and cheese-making. Here are still more evidences of a heavy rainfall. Springs are on almost every hill-side, little streams in every ravine, while nearly across the center runs a creek that in the driest time of the year runs a large stream of the purest water. All these surrounding hills, like the main valley, are splendid stock range, affording abundance of feed. In fact, the very best feed is in those bad years when the winter rains along the coast have been little but light storms of drizzling mist. Yet scarce anything would appear less fit for general farming. It will be worth your while, however, to spend a whole day on that range of high rolling hills on the northwest dotted with live oak timber, and yellow with ripe wild oats and grass. Up a long grade the road winds, until some five hundred feet above the main valley you reach a broad tract of several miles in width, rolling and tumbling in great swells of alternate hill and valley from thirty-five hundred to forty-five hundred feet above the sea. Part of this belongs to the Rancho Santa Ysabel, and is still held in stock range, but beyond the rancho line on the Government land you will find some thirty farms. This tract is called Mesa Grande, and contains some six thousand acres of splendid plow land. Here too you find plenty of springs and running brooks. The farms are still more like Eastern farms than those of Ballena, a scarcity of rain is unknown, all crops and fruits are a certainty, and the farmers have no anxiety except the fear of too much rain. The whole now looks like an eastern country with no resemblance whatever to the land thirty miles west, and three thousand feet below us; the country from which nearly all impressions of San Diego County are taken. A glance at the distant sea shows that we are well up in the world, but almost as high again in the east loom rolling slopes, covered with grass and timber like those of Mesa Grande, and topped by dark, pine-clad hills. You have already seen enough of what hills may contain to warn you against assuming that you have reached the limits of settlement. Those hills too are worth inspection. Crossing again the main valley of Santa Vsabel we take the road to Julian, and attain our way leads upward. Through a few miles of tumbling- hills containing abundance of grass, but otherwise of little use, we go where the land again opens into valleys and slopes covered with rank grass and scattered timber. The proportion of arable land is much greater than before, farms open upon every hand, but, as before, dozens more are hidden by intervening ridges. High hills, yellow with dried grass, and higher ones blue with timber, still rise ahead, and soon we roll into the little town of Julian, forty-two hundred feet above the sea. In and around the Julian region are some twenty thousand acres of tillable land, though most of it is partly covered by timber. The population of the town and immediate surroundings is about six hundred. Taking the short cut known as "Tally's road," from here to the Cuyamaca Rancho, we soon enter denser timber growing on gently rolling slopes, broken at intervals by open meadows clad in deep grass. Here you notice in abundance a new oak, much like the Eastern red oak, though this first appears as low down as thirty-five hundred feet. You also find an entirely new live oak, stately and shining, with trunk and bark much like the Eastern white oak. This is the mountain variety of the white live oak you have seen lower down, which now disappears. Through some miles of oak timber, mixed with an occasional pine, we ride until the road suddenly runs out into a broad open flat of several thousand acres, part of the Cuvamaca Rancho. At the lower end of this is one of the reservoirs of the San Diego Flume Co., covering about one thousand acres with a dam thirty-five feet high. On the east the timber now disappears, but on the west it bristles darker, taller, and denser on the three tall peaks that rise from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet above us, the elevation of this flat being about forty-six hundred feet above tide water. Once here it will well repay the trouble to climb the tallest of these peaks, it being very easily ascended. A wagon may be driven to within a thousand feet or so of the top. The road winds through rich meadows, and then through timber until you reach the "cold spring," a spring flowing about one hundred gallons a minute of the purest and coldest water. From here the way to the top on foot is quite easy. As you ascend, the common live oak of the lowlands disappears and only the red oak and white live oak are left. The "bull pine," whose massive trunks have hitherto lined our path, begins to disappear, and sugar pines as large as six feet in diameter take its place. The silver fir and the cedar, bright, stately trees with tall, trim trunks, also appear in abundance, forming in most places an almost solid shade. The extreme top is a pile of rocks, the highest point but one in the whole county and sixty-five hundred feet above the sea. From here on a clear day one can see with a glass the greater part of the southern half of the county, and can learn better than in any other way the conditions of its peculiar climate. But a few miles from us on the east, the land falls off five thousand feet into the Colorado Desert, a sea of fiery sand broiling beneath an almost eternal sun, apparently as vast and level as the great shimmering plain of water fifty miles to the west. A hundred miles away the snowy scalp of Grayback of the San Bernardino range lies like a cloud two miles in the northern sky with San Jacinto, but a trifle lower beside it; while between them and us runs the long, lofty chain of blue and gray mountains that separate the western part of San Diego County from the great desert. Away on the south the range continues dark with pine, green with oak, or bluish with chaparral until lost in the hazy outlines of the highlands of Mexico. From here you can look down on hundreds of rolling slopes, golden with dry grass, wild oats, or stubble, or covered with scattered oaks like some old Eastern apple orchard; on hundreds of little valleys and parks, with little farms nestled in them; on larger plains, yellow with grass or stubble; on deep canons-filled with eternal shade, but having plenty of good land; and on broad rolling table-lands covered with chaparral, but as good land as any. High mountains rise in all directions; some broad-backed, like Volcan, just beyond Julian, or Palomar still farther northwest, both almost level with our feet, and crowned with forests, breaking away in long ridges clad with grass along the backs and sides, with dark, timbered gulches between. Others are lower and clad only in chaparral, or scattered trees, like the great granite dome El Cajon, or Lyons Peak. And both north and south, the whole land is tumbling and tumbling in long-alternations of valley, slope, and hill, away to the distant sea. And now it is easy to see how so little is known of the county. Unapproachable on the east because of the desert, from the south because no American travel comes that way, only the coast line and a line of the northern edge can be seen by the ordinary traveler. These beautiful timbered mountains, and the long, rich slopes that lead away from them, and the fine valleys hidden among them, show nothing but barrenness from the desert side; while from the coast they look by distance even more dreary than the bare, rocky hills of the coast rain belt. The desert is, of course, uninhabitable, as is that of San Bernardino County, but we shall hereafter see it is worth more for its effect on climate than if its millions of acres of burning sand were Illinois prairie; while the inhabitable part of the county is a long slope fifty to sixty miles wide, rising eastward to a general level of five thousand feet, forming a rim of the great basin of the desert five thousand feet deep. Additional Comments: From: THE CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN DIEGO. ILLUSTRATED, AND CONTAINING BI0GRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF PROMINENT MEN AND PIONEERS. SAN DIEGO, CAL. LEBERTHON & TAYLOR 1888 File at: http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ca/sandiego/history/1888/cityandc/interior297nms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/cafiles/ File size: 14.8 Kb