The Pioneer has left other material legacies to the nation. The great American Deserts you knew will soon be blotted from our maps. By the science of civilization large tracts of these have been made to “blossom like the rose,” rivers that ran to waste now work the mine, turn the wheel, and then with the artesian flow irrigate the desert wastes, until fruitful gardens have grown like sweet dreams along the trail where comrades of ours died of damning thirst. We all love the sweet flowery land we knew as territory, then as the new, and now the dear old State. We remember with becoming pride our first votes. California came into the Union a Free State. How controlling this action was none knew, nor when viewed in the light of the history of the Rebellion can it be measured. California became a gem in the Federal coronet. The pen of Bishop Berkley must have pointed toward it when he wrote his epigrammatic expression, “Ho! westward Empire takes its way.” It is a sunny land, and merits the sobriquet, “Italy of America,” with its clear skies, charms of climate, wonderful soils, wealth of mines, fabulous products and enchantments of scenery, crowned with the Yosemite Falls, the highest in the world, descending in three leaps 2,500 feet, or one-half a mile, from the glaciers and eternal snows of the Sierras to the valley below, a very Eden of sublimity and loveliness, perhaps the most wondrously grand and beautiful spot on the earth. To stand for an hour upon a summit crest of the Sierras, the grandest of America’s Alpine ranges; to live a day amid their icy homes; to descend their western slopes; to trace their long summit lines of snow-clad peaks that link Oregon to Aztec Mexico; to walk where a single step takes you from the glacier ice to Spring’s resurrection, where the violets greet you with sweetest smiles through dewy tears of joy, born on the spot where the snows of yesterday were melted by the morning’s sun; the great pines and sequoia gigantea, those wonders of the world’s forests, in whose branches the birds chorused their matin songs centuries before the Christian era, towering below you; the silvery lines of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers mirroring hundreds of miles of the great central valley, reaching far North and South from the Bay of San Francisco; the Coast Range alone curtaining the Pacific Sea, with stern old Mount Diablo standing as the sole sentinel guarding the Golden gate--these are alone worth crossing a continent to see--and recall the words of Tom Moore, who, after visiting the mountains of New England, the rivers and lakes of New York, the St. Lawrence and grand old Niagara, wrote to Lady Charlotte Rowdon, saying: “Oh, Lady, these are miracles which man, Caged in the bonds of Europe’s pigmy plan, Can scarce dream of, and which the eye must see To know how beautiful this world can be.”