The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-12-24
CALIFORNIA; DESERT.
ITS FAST AREA, AND WHAT TITS
 REALLY LIKE,

sparsely Settied Basin of the Coast
 Range.
 In spite of much that has been writ ten about the arid section of California, both as to certain sections and as to the desert as q whole, by people who knew and by people who guessed. there are very few who have any idea of the real size or character of that sparsely settled basin of the coast range until it is lost in the immensities Of the Nevada and Arizona deserts, writes a special contributor to the Los Angeles Times. It is land fraught with promise; a land amply able to care for population (which it will one day have) greater than that of the whole state of California at the pres ent time, and a land which needs but the one word, water to unlock a storehouse, not of gold, but of that more enduring than gold agricultural wealth.
 The great basin which lies between the peaks of Shasta and Tehachelll on the north and south, and which is bounded on te east by the Sierra Neva. das, and on the west by the coast ranges, contains the fertile and well watered valleys of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento, but in it as well, and occupying gy far the greater part of it. are the barren desert counties of Mari posa, Merced, Madeira, Fresno. Tulare, Kings and Kern. The great Tulare plain is probably the most unfertile piece of land that lies beneath the sun, and it's improvement has not been rap i'd in those few instances where man has brought water to it's rescue. Yet it is not of this north-central section of which would speak, but rather of that art of the state most generally accept ed as "the desert, and which, because it lies nearest home, is of most interest. From the northernmost tip of Mono county, beyond eVenN the famed lands that lie about Mono Lake, to old Fort Yuma, down on the Colorado in San Diego county, is we1l-nigh five hundred miles, and this is the length of the Cal- ifornia desert; from where the railroad breaks through the San Gabriel Noun tains by way of the Soledad straight across the. desert to the Kingston range and the Nevada line, the distance is about one hundred and seventy-five miles, and this is its greatest width. Tn shape, this great basin, some of which is considerably below sea level, is a rough leg of mutton, bounded on the east by the Nevada line and the Colo rado river. an the north and west by. the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast range, and on the south by Lower Cali fornia, though in reality this latter is no boundary at all, as Lower California is but a continuation of the Alta Calf- fornia desert. At Mono Lake the width of the desert os about forty miles,, it's central and greatest width has already been given, and this latter width persists uniformly from Tehe- |chepl to the San Diego county end, SO you can very easily figure for yourself that it's area must be immense Few maps give anything like a correct esti- mate of the amount of land contained in any of the western deserts, and, in many cases, so- little is known of the more interior sections that the map makers have little to base their lines on save hearsay. South of the Tehachepl the desert is kept from the coastwise counties by the various ranges that fol- low down the coast, but north of that the Sierra Nevada runs through seve- ral desert counties, with vast stretches of arid land on either side. The most notable of these is Kern county, while just east of it lies Inyo, an entirely tses- ert section, though having some valua ble mining properties hidden away in it's depths The real part of the Great Basin known as the California Desert covers as with a blanket the counties of Mono, Inyo, portions of Kern and Los Angeles, most of San Bernardino. about half of Riverside and nearly all of San Diego. It is penetrated by three lines of railroad, two of which cross it, so that so far as transportation is con cerned parties going into the desert need have no fears of not being suffi- ciently we'll prepared.
 But most people have very peculiar ideas of what the desert is like Many think it great sandy plain where the horses sink ankle deep in fine dust, where there is absolutely no lwatr, and, most silly of all, where every man bristles with an arsenal limited only by his capacity to use 1t. Nothing could be further from the truth; some of the. finest natural roads, untouched by the hand of man, are to be found on the desert, and over these roads you may ride for miles without seeing a patch of sand as large as city lot. Mile upon mile of the desert is baked clay, as level as floor and almost as hard, swept by desert winds until there is not a particle of dust upon it, and it shames many fine city boulevard in it's clean bed. Then, again, there will be vast sand flats, thousands of acres in extent, covered with a sand so fine that flour seems like unground wheat beside it. And when a wind comes bowling along over the floor of one of these sand flats, gathering up a hand ful of the loose stuff here and there it is time for the travelr to get out of its. way. These breezes travel at a uni form gait of several hundred miles an hour, and the sand they carry cuts like a two-edged sword. For many miles the desert is as open and level as land