[Cal. Star’s Sonoma Correspondence.]
SONOMA, January 1, 1848.
DEAR EDITOR,— I greet you with a happy New Year, and wish you health and prosperity so long as you live, and a host of young editors to prop your tottering old age to the tomb, with talent sufficient to wear the shoes of their dad, and write eulogies, appropriate, on his fair fame after death. This morning, though frosty, and the pools skimmed with ice, opened bright, balmy, and beautiful—old Sol seeming to smile with unwonted benignity on our lovely valley. About ten, a party of us mounted for a pasea, and such sports as we might pick up by the way. Across the branch one mile from town. we entered, in rare glee, a large caral, lassoing wild mares and colts, a menado of several hundred, belonging to General V. being penned up, principally for our amusement. ‘Twas seldom that such of us as were novices in the art, noosed an animal, but when successful, our burnt and blistered palms, paid well for the fun. Leaving the balance to continue their California national pastimes, I rode with a companion to the summit of the hills separating the vales of Sonoma and Petaluma . These hills are quite barren and denuded of timber. In the hollows and ravines, there is considerable oak and a few other trees generally fit only for firewood, and dotted along the tops a species of stunted live-oak, and another of evergreen—a kind of laurel—which gives a pleasing and picturesque view to their appearance. Higher up the valley are scattered at intervals some tall specimens of the pinus genus, contiguous to which is a saw mill from whence our town gets lumber. The view obtained from our elevated position to day, was varied, beautiful, and grand—the best point of observation for a painter and lover of nature, I hesitate not to say, in all California.
Mountain scenery was the principal object in the landscape—but little else to be seen in the north. To the east, and immediately beneath us, lay the valley of Sonoma with its level plains and handsome oak groves clustered over it, a richly fringed and embowered little crystal stream meandering through its centre, till it arrives near the rival embacadaro cities, that are to be, between which it flows, when, meeting the tide waters of the bay, it loses its rivulet character as well as foliaged banks, and assumes the name of creek—which last puzzles some navigators to thread its mazy labyrinthian windings and avoid its numerous deceptive bayous, as much as learning Greek. Near the base of the hills on the eastern side, lies embosomed its mud-built capitol, from whose centre, rises in isolated feudal grandeur, a dilapidated and unfinished adobie sort of castle, under the frowning and giant armed battlements of which, your correspondent does his scribblings, Lifting our gaze from this to the somewhat sterile hills in the rear, which gradually lessen in altitude as they run south to the bay, and increase proportionally in fertility, we look to the range that skirts the eastern edge of Napa, which slopes away towards the famous and immortalized city of Californian printing press notoriety. Here as the vision sweeps to the south, is presented a view of unsurpassed loveliness. The Strait of Carquiuez shuts out the sight from Suisun Bay and farther water scenery east, but is amply satisfied with beholding nearly the whole of San Pablo with its in-running points and in-pouring creeks— thence through the opening, by the island rocks and point San Pablo, into Yerba Buena Bay and in a long watery vista as far as the eye can see up the Bay of Santa Clara. Across this latter, in dark blue relief, stretches, till lost in the horizon, the highlands leading from San Francisco towards the Pueblo of San Jose. Turning westward, we behold spread out before us the valley and creek of Petaluma; beyond several ranges of hills, which terminate in high and bold promontories, where they meet the bay. Ranging the eye along the north, it rests upon a dense forest of towering cedar and fir, about thirty miles distant, crowning the summits just back of Bodega, where are growing the materials of some grand future houses, to be put up in your destined great western emporium, as it is here our enterprising Captain S. of Bodega, gets logs for his fine steam saw mill. Across the intervening space where the naked grassy hills sink low, looms up in dim distance, the dark waters of the great ocean, over whose wide extended water and waves, the vision of imagination can wing its westward flight, till it halts to revel in the gorgeous, poetical, and romantic scenes and incidents of Oriental climes, which flight of fancy allow me to leave you to pursue. And now we are jogging downhill homeward. Saw numbers of coyotes and deer, in the hills, and geese and ducks by millions in the bottom, which you know swarm in myriads all parts of the country at this season. Passing through a flock of sheep at the foot of the hills, I inquired of my military companion, as he was from the guessing land, what number he supposed there were. Three or four hundred, was his reply. Not far from the number of figures denoting the correct enumeration, said I, as you have only missed by one nought. There were just so many thousands.
Yours, &c., P.