Across the Coast Range of mountains, eastward from San José, is the extensive San Joaquin Valley, noted as the "granary of California," two hundred miles long and thirty to seventy miles wide between the mountain ranges. It produces almost limitless crops of grain, fruits and wines. Through this great valley the San Joaquin River flows northward, and the Sacramento River southward in another valley as spacious, and uniting, they go out westward to San Francisco Bay. We are told that in the days when the earth was forming, the sea waves beat against the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, but ultimately the waters receded, leaving the floor of this vast valley of central California stretching nearly five hundred miles between the mountain ranges. The first comers among the white men dug gold out of its soils, but now they also get an enormous revenue from the prolific crops. Railways traverse it in all directions. The chief city is Stockton, at the head of navigation on the San Joaquin, a town of twenty thousand people, having numerous factories. Here in the slopes and gulches of the Sierras, stretching far away, were the first gold-mines of California, when the discoveries of the "Forty-niners" set the world agog. Here, at Jackson, was tapped the famous "Mother Lode," the most continuous and richest of the three gold belts extending along the slope of the Sierras, and so-called by the early miners because they regarded it as the parent source of all the gold found in the placers. This lode is in some parts a mile wide, and extends a hundred miles, being here a series of parallel fissures filled with gold-bearing quartz-veins, while farther south they unite in a single enormous fissure. The mineral belts paralleling it on both sides are rich in copper and gold. The country all about is a mining region with prolific "diggings" everywhere, and smokes arising from the stamp-mills at work reducing the ores. Here are Tuttletown and Jackass Hill, the home of "Truthful James," and the localities made familiar by Bret Harte and Mark Twain. Here is Carson Hill, there having been picked up on its summit the largest gold-nugget ever found in California, worth $47,000. What this gold-mining has meant is shown by the results, aggregating since California first produced the metal a total of nearly $1,350,000,000 gold given the world. As the San Joaquin Valley is ascended, it develops its wealth of grain-fields, orchards and vineyards, and displays the grand systems of irrigation which have contributed to produce so much fertility.