In fact, this
vast stretch of country is one continuous pine forest. From the shore,
where the trees dip into the sea, back to the verge of the distant
horizon, over hills, down valleys, across ravines, and on and around the
sides and tops of mountains, it is one great waving panorama of forest
scenery. Timber--enough to supply the wants of the world for ages, one
would think. Yet the broken character of the country relieves the scene
from monotony, and it fully realises the idea of the grand and the
beautiful combined. One spot in particular made an impression upon me
which I wish I had the power to convey by words. Between Cape Mendocina
and Humboldt Bay, on the northern limits of California, a grand
collection of hills and mountains of every variety of size, shape, and
form occurs. This grand group recedes in a gentle sweep from the coast
far inland, where it terminates in a high conical mountain, overtopping
the entire mass of pinnacles which cluster around it. The whole is well
clothed with trees of that feathery and graceful foliage peculiar to the
spruce and larch, and interspersed with huge round clumps of evergreens,
with alternations of long glades and great open patches of lawn covered
with rich grass of that bright emerald green peculiar to California.
This woodland scene, viewed of an early morning, sparkling with
dew-drops under the rising sun which slowly lifted the veil of mist
hanging over it, surpassed in beauty anything I have seen on this
continent. Here everything in nature is on a grand scale. All her
works are magnificent to a degree unknown in Europe. A trip to these
regions will pay the migratory Englishman in search of novelty to his
heart's content, and I will bear the blame if he is not well pleased
with his journey. California alone should satisfy a traveller of
moderate desires. Here he will find combined the beauty and loveliness
of English landscape with the bolder and grander features of the scenery
of the Western continent--a combination, perhaps, unequalled in any
other country. On this, the northern coast, the bold and the
picturesque predominate over the tamer park-like scenery of the interior
valleys, which so nearly resemble the `fine old places' of England."

Another route, which it is proposed to open on the other side of the
country, from Minnesota to the Fraser River gold mines, would appear to
be very feasible. From Saint Anthony the Mississippi is navigable for