Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin. Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange, sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs." Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes. Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself. He bought--it is more exact to say he acquired--vast acreage of Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil. The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the sheep-herder. [Illustration: AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS] Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the message aright.