a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this
Indian summer weather and that survives them all, the men who scratched
its surface and passed.

Who was this James King of William, so curiously named? The oldest
surviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not. Yet only
sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Vallejo eighteen thousand dollars on
security of certain lands including the vineyard yet to be and to be
called Tokay. Whence came Peter O'Connor, and whither vanished, after
writing his little name of a day on the woodland that was to become a
vineyard? Appears Louis Csomortanyi, a name to conjure with. He lasts
through several pages of this record of the enduring soil.

Comes old American stock, thirsting across the Great American Desert,
mule-backing across the Isthmus, wind-jamming around the Horn, to write
brief and forgotten names where ten thousand generations of wild Indians
are equally forgotten--names like Halleck, Hastings, Swett, Tait, Denman,
Tracy, Grimwood, Carlton, Temple. There are no names like those to-day
in the Valley of the Moon.

The names begin to appear fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to
legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil
remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names of men of
whom I have vaguely heard but whom I have never known. Kohler and
Frohling--who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Tokay,
but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul
their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of
1906 threw down the winery; and I now live in its ruins.

La Motte--he broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted
commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned in its day, was
defeated by the soil, and passed. And my name of a day appears. On the
site of his orchards and vine-yards, of his proud mansion, of his very
fish ponds, I have scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand
eucalyptus trees.

Cooper and Greenlaw--on what is called the Hill Ranch they left two of
their dead, "Little Lillie" and "Little David," who rest to-day inside a
tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Gooper and Greenlaw in their
time cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres. To-day
I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they
shall be ploughed under for green manure.

Haska--a dim legendary figure of a ge