Excerpt from American Biography and Genealogy, Vol. 1: California Edition; Illustrated<br><br>And in one year the harvest of her gold mines was a paltry 044, while the golden harvest of her farms and gardens was more than seven times as much as all her gold that year could buy. He taught her how to waste her rivers from their torrent beds, and scatter them over the land in irrigating ditches, so that the shallow river a child could ford became a stream of fertility, an oasis of blossom and fruit and shrub twenty miles wide.<br><br>On every page of her unfolding history and growing greatness. He wrote down paradoxes that her writers of fiction hesitated to use, so that the guileless tenderfoot believed in Colonel Jack Hazard, and Truth ful James, and Bill Nye, in refined and rigidly moral gamblers, in pure-minded harlots and generous stage robbers with university degrees, but shook their heads and said, Oh, California stories! With pitying toleration, such as one uses when speaking of the heathen in his blindness, when told of the Big Trees and the YO Semite, and eight crops of peas or alfalfa in one year from the same field.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.