San Francisco, August 24: After spending a few days in Seattle we started southward, with Los Angeles as the end of our journeying in that direction. Tacoma has been out-distanced by Seattle, but it is itself a great and growing city. Portland, in Oregon, is a city of older appearances than Seattle. It has more leisure and more culture and, perhaps, more realized riches. It has a great river, mountains around it and the ocean only a few miles away. Portland is building for the future and the growth of Pacific Ocean commerce is in the dreams of all the business men. On the way to San Francisco we rode up the Rogue River valley, which we found not equal to its fame, and around Mount Shasta, grand and glorious in the sunshine that fell around its snow-covered peak. The next morning we were in the wheat belt of California, the wonderful Sacramento Valley. In August it is barren enough, nothing green in it except the fields of alfalfa, an occasional plum orchard and the wonderful live oaks scattered over the landscapes, always with the range of mountains in the perspective. Wheat growing in these valleys has about reached its limit. The continual cropping has left the soil impoverished and there is talk of cutting up the big ranches into individual small farms, watered artificially. What there may come out of this form of development is problematical. Some persons who had lived in the valley assured us that the heat is often so intense that it scalds the fruit on the trees. On the western slope of the coast range the climate is much better for fruit and also for gardening. Incidentally, it may be remarked that the American is hardly the race that will develop this form of intensive farming. They want to do things on a bigger scale and they shun the manual labor that is necessary to make it successful. Portuguese colonies are said to be prospering in the culture of fruit and the Japanese also are making headway. They are willing to do such work and to do it for wages that are not considered adequate by Americans. Under present conditions nothing seems to me more hopeless than the establishment of fruit farms, by American farmers from the Mississippi Valley, in the valley of the Sacramento, the Rogue River or even the Yakima and the Yellowstone. San Francisco has recovered marvelously from the earthquake and the fire. It is a city in the process of rebuilding and the rebuilding is all along greater and better lines. Old Chinatown is no longer a city of rookeries, but of substantial brick and steel, with shops that would do credit to any city. The haunts of vice are fewer and the old devotees of oriental vices complain bitterly that the “town” has lost its “atmosphere.” If it has, it is so much for the better. San Francisco has been hampered and handicapped, but its business men are striving to retain the commerce of the Pacific for which so many other cities are now striving and for which Seattle has made so much headway. VII