A year later, on our return from the north, we pursued the "Inland Route" by way of Bakersfield and the Tejon Pass. This route has been finally adopted by the State Highway Commission, but at the time of our trip little had been done to improve the road north of Saugus, thirty miles from Los Angeles. It certainly was in need of improvement, as the notes set down in my "log book" testify. Concerning our run between Fresno and Bakersfield I find the following comment:
"A day on rotten roads—hardly a decent mile between the two towns. We followed the line of the Southern Pacific for the entire day over a neglected, sandy trail, with occasional broken-up oiled stretches. Towns on the way were little, lonely, sandy places, unattractive and poorly improved. No state highway completed, though some work was in progress in Kern and Fresno Counties, making several detours necessary—not a mile free from unmerciful jolting."
And here I might remark that had we taken the longer route from Goshen to Delano by the way of Visalia and Portersville, we might have avoided forty miles of the roughest road. The highway is to make this detour; but there was no immediate prospect of building it at the time of our trip, as Tulare County felt too poor to buy the bonds.
For several miles out of Fresno we ran through vineyards and orchards, passing two or three large wineries not far from the road. A narrow belt of grainfields and meadows succeeded, but the country gradually became poorer until we found ourselves in a sandy desert whose only vegetation was a short red grass with barbed needles which stick to one's clothing in an annoying manner.
Maps of California usually show Lake Tulare as a considerable body of water, twenty to thirty miles in diameter, lying a few miles west of the town. They told us at Tulare that the lake had practically disappeared, a good part of its bed now being occupied by wheatfields. Dry weather and the diversion of water for irrigation have been the chief factors in wiping out the lake, which was never much more than a shallow morass.
Beyond Tulare we again came into a sandy, desert-looking country and were astonished to see billboards in one of the little towns offering "bargains in land at one hundred and thirty-five dollars per acre"—to all appearances the country was as barren and unpromising as the Sahara, but no doubt the price included irrigation rights. Along this road we noticed occasional groves of stunted eucalyptus trees, neglected and dying in many instances. It occurred to us that these groves were planted by the concerns which sold stock to Eastern "investors" on representation that the eucalyptus combined all the merits to be found in all the trees of the forest. The fact is that it is not fit for much and the "fly-by-night" concerns disappeared as soon as they had pocketed the cash, leaving their victims to bemoan "another California swindle."