During the summer of 1875 Mr. Lick sent Mr. Fraser, his trusted agent, to report on Mount St. Helena, Monte Diablo, Mount Hamilton, and others. In many respects the latter, in sight of his old mill at San José, seemed the best situated of all the mountain peaks. "Yet the possibility that a complete astronomical establishment might one day be planted on its summit seemed more like a fairy-tale than like sober fact," says Professor Edward S. Holden, Director of the Lick Observatory. "It was at that time a wilderness. A few cattle-ranches occupied the valleys around it. Its slopes were covered with chaparral or thickets of scrub oak. Not even a trail led over it. The nearest house was eleven miles away." It was and is the home of many rattlesnakes. They live upon squirrels, and small birds and their eggs, and come up to the top of the mountain in quest of water. Sir Edwin Arnold, who visited Mount Hamilton, tells this incident of the "road-runner," the bird sometimes called "chaparral cock," as it was told to him. "The rattlesnake is the deadly enemy of its species, always hunting about in the thickets for eggs and young birds, since the 'road-runner' builds its nest on the ground. When, therefore, the 'chaparral cocks' find a 'rattler' basking in the sun, they gather, I was assured, leaves of the prickly cactus, and lay them in a circle all around the serpent, which cannot draw its belly over the sharp needles of these leaves. Thus imprisoned, the reptile is set upon by the birds, and pecked or spurred to death." Mount Hamilton, fifty miles southeast of San Francisco, is near San José, twenty-six miles eastward, and thus easy of access, save the difficulty of reaching its summit, 4,300 feet above the sea. This was overcome by the willingness of Santa Clara County to construct a road to its top; which road was completed in December, 1876, at a cost of about $78,000. The road rises 4,000 feet in twenty-two miles; and the grade nowhere exceeds six and one-half feet in one hundred, or 343 feet to the mile. Towards the top it winds round and round the flanks of the mountain itself. The view from the top of the mountain is most inspiring. "The lovely valley of Santa Clara and the Santa Cruz mountains to the west, a bit of the Pacific and the Bay of Monterey to the southwest, the Sierra Nevada (13,000-14,000 feet) with countless ranges between to the southeast, the San Joaquin valley with the Sierras beyond to the east, while to the north lie many lower ranges of hills, and on the horizon Mount Shasta, or Lassens' Butte (14,400 feet), 175 miles away. The Bay of San Francisco lies flat before you, and beyond it is Mount Tamalpais at the entrance to the Golden Gate."