Peninsular California Author:Charles Nordhoff Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. NATURAL WEALTH, CLIMATE, SOIL, TIMBER, WATER, ETC. E grant of the International Company begins a little south of the northern limit of the ext... more »inct Lower California Company, and extends north to the United States boundary line. It covers a region almost the whole of which possesses a totally different character from that farther south. While more mountainous than our Upper California, or than the part of the Peninsula to the south, and therefore containing a less proportion of arable lands, it has numerous valleys, mesas, and hill-slopes as rich as the best of Upper California, with, as will be found by settlers, as large an average rainfall as San Diego or San Bernardino County, and as large a number, in proportion, of streams available for irrigation. I do not believe that irrigation will be more necessary in these valleys than it is in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Bernardino counties. Grain crops are grown as successfully without irrigation in the valleys of northern Lower California, wherever men have tried, as in the counties I have named. This change in the character of the northern part of Tables of temperature, rainfall, etc., will be found in an appendix. - m the Peninsula has struck every traveller. It is due mainly to the fact that the high mountain ranges in the north affect the climate favorably, and also gather and store waters for the streams. In his " Historical Summary of Lower California, from its Discovery in 1532 to 1867," Alexander S. Taylor, a well-known Californian, says on this point: " As the vicinities of the bay of Viscaino are reached, and after passing the parallel of 28, the mountain system begins to rapidly rise from four thousand feet to the elevation of perpetual snow, which it appears to attain opposite the mis...« less