and picturesque white oaks, which relieve the
solitude of the plain, and make it resemble a well-planted park. Wherever
the valley is settled, you will see neat board fences, roomy barns, and
farm-houses nestling among trees, and flanked by young orchards. You will
not find a great variety of crops, for wheat and barley are the staple
products of this valley; and though the farms here are in general of 640
acres or less, there are not wanting some of those immense estates for
which California is famous; and a single farmer in this valley is said to
have raised on his own land last year one-twentieth of the entire wheat
crop of the State.

Northwest of Marysville the plain is broken by a singularly lovely range
of mountains, the Buttes. They rise abruptly from the plain, and their
peaks reach from two to three thousand feet high. It is an extremely
pretty miniature mountain range, having its peaks, passes, and canons--all
the features of the Sierra--and it is well worth a visit. Butte is a word
applied to such isolated mountains, which do not form part of a chain, and
which are not uncommon west of the Mississippi. Shasta is called a butte;
Lassen's Peaks are buttes; and the traveler across the continent hears the
word frequently applied to mountain. It is pronounced with the _u_ long.

Along the banks of the Sacramento there are large quantities of land which
is annually overflowed by the river, and much of which is still only used
for pasturage during the dry season, when its grasses support large herds
of cattle and sheep, which are driven to the uplands when the rains begin
to fall. But much of this swamp and tule land has been drained and diked,
and is now used for farm land. It produces heavy crops of wheat, and
its reclamation has been, and continues to be, one of the successful
speculations in land in this State. It will not be long before the shores
of the Sacramento and its tributaries will be for many miles so diked that
these rivers will never break their bounds, and thus a very considerable
area will be added to the fertile farming lands of the State.

Already, however, the Yuba, the Feather, and the American rivers,
tributaries of the Sacramento, have been leveed at different points for
quite another reason. These rivers, once clear and rapidly flowing within
deep banks, are now turbid, in many places shallow, and their bottoms have
been raised from twenty to thirty feet by the accumulation of the washings