File:California; an intimate history (1914) (14761559476).jpg

Identifier: californiaintima00athe (find matches)
Title: California; an intimate history
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn, 1857-1948
Subjects: California -- History
Publisher: New York and London, Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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ur-vivors of the extrusive eon, during which life made itsfirst negligible appearance on the globe. As the rangerose higher and higher during vast succeeding reaches ofgeological time the Sierra witnessed the gradual unfold-ing of the California drama; destined itself to undergomany and terrific changes, it was the solitary spectator ofthe heroic and often thwarted struggle for existence of ayounger range of mountains, born of the sea. At first the Sierra looked west over an illimitableexpanse of gray water that washed its very base. What-ever folding and crumpling might be going on under thatstormy surface, it was many million years before a longlow chain of rocks lifted its heads and tarried long enoughto be so eroded that man—when, some forty million yearslater, he developed the scientific brain—should read thestory as the old Sierra saw it. They were smothered foreons again, not only by the sea, but by sediments manythousands of feet deep, to be known later as the Franciscan 6
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THE GEOLOGICAL DRAMA or Golden Gate series. The boldest of the peninsulasheadlands, Telegraph Hill, and the present islands in thebay are of sandstone interspersed with shales and rocksof peculiar interest to the geologist, not only for their ageand record, but for their coats of many colors. In late Jurassic or early Cretaceous times, some twentymillion years after its first baffled attempt to live, the coast,including what are now its bay shores and islands, thenbut a part of the range, was bom again. Folded andfaulted on the seas uneasy floor, the mass was pushed upinto the light at last and permitted to grow and breathe,and harden and erode, and signal across a gray cold sea tothe stately first-born of the west—for nearly a millionyears. Then down she went once more, and the Pacificstood on end and rushed with tidal ferocity at the in-vincible Sierra. But the Coast Range, if her ambitions were curtailed,did not waste her time. During that long period of sub-mergence she accumula

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