It has
very wide streets and is laid out on a generous scale. Its fine
Courthouse, its beautiful new schoolhouse, its pretty homes, its
residence streets with their rows of blooming oleanders, pink and white,
make it an attractive town. But it must be confessed that it is very hot
in Bakersfield, as it is in most towns of the San Joaquin and Sacramento
Valleys. The most interesting thing to me in Bakersfield was a leather
shop, where I saw handsome Mexican saddles, very intricately and
ornately stamped. These are made to order and have any amount of
beautiful work upon them. At the same shop I saw handsome stamped belts
and leather coin cases, long leather cuffs which cowboys affect, and
tall riding boots with ornate stitching. When we left Bakersfield we saw
just outside the town a perfect forest of oil derricks towering into the
air, some of the wells being new ones, others having been abandoned.
Bakersfield is the center of a rich oil territory, from which much
wealth has flowed.

In leaving the town we turned by mistake to the right instead of to the
left, and found ourselves traveling toward a Grand Canyon on a miniature
scale. We were driving over lonely country where the water had worn the
hills into fantastic shapes and where the whole country was a series of
terraces. Sometimes small tablelands stood up boldly before us,
sometimes cone-shaped pieces of plateau, like small volcanoes, appeared
in long rows beyond us. Beautiful purple mists and shadows hung over
these carvings of nature as the sun began to decline. The country grew
lonelier and wilder, and we decided that we must retrace our journey
and find out where we were. As we came near to Bakersfield again we saw
the camp of an engineer who was making some borings for oil. He told us
that we had taken the wrong turn and directed us on our way, past the
tall derricks and northeast to Tulare.

So we turned our backs on the browns, yellows, and slate colors, the
pinks and the lavenders of the lonely tableland country and struck north
along a very fair road. We drove for twenty miles through rather level,
brown, desert country, coming then into a grain country. All along there
were pump houses on the ranches, connected with the electric current by
heavy wires which ran from the main lines along the road to the little
houses in the fields. I liked to think that the magic current streamed
down those side wires from the main river of electricity, worked the
pump