USA > California > Napa County > History of Napa and Lake Counties, California : comprising their geography, geology, topography, climatography, springs and timber, together with a full and particular record of the Mexican Grants, also separate histories of all the townships and biographical sketches > Part 4
USA > California > Lake County > History of Napa and Lake Counties, California : comprising their geography, geology, topography, climatography, springs and timber, together with a full and particular record of the Mexican Grants, also separate histories of all the townships and biographical sketches > Part 4
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through this soft sandstone by the waters of ages. It is possible that gigantic water-falls have worked themselves along this valley in those early days of floods and softer stone. Truly here is a wonderful field for the student of nature.
Crossing over to Berryessa Valley we find that the eastern slope of the mountains to the west of it, have been more or less overrun with lava, and that the underlying rock is a body of sandstone, deposited probably much earlier than the Tertiary, or else in a different epoch in that age, for it is of a different nature from the other Tertiary sandstone in this vicinity, in that it is very compact and rather fine-grained. Just north-west of Mr. Abraham Clark's place there is some adobe, but not a great deal of it, showing that there was once a limestone body there, but it was quite limited in its area. Following this slope to the north as far as Knoxville, which is very near the line of Lake County, we find the same general characteristics present.
Passing to the east side of the valley we come to the true Tertiary sand- stone, and the great bluffs of it overlooking this valley from the east present a grand appearance. The traveler along the highway comes to flat stones or boulders of sandstone in the streams which put down from the eastern range. Presently, as he advances to the northward they become more abundant, and he says to himself that there must be a ledge of this not far distant. Finally he comes upon the ledge, at least small sections of it, which he is surprised to find standing on its edge in a nearly vertical position. A good view of it in this position may be had on the creek just north of Mr. Ward's house, on the road leading from Monticello to Knoxville. There are hosts of other places all along this road where it is exposed in almost all conceivable angles of dip. There is at this place a great amount of deposit upon the sandstone, which thus stands on edge, but it is all of a very recent period, there being no lava in it as a body. Far away from here to the eastward rises the bold front of the Blue Ridge range, the bald bluffs of which are formed of this sandstone. The deposit was of course made in regular layers, and the whole body has been raised up perpendicularly from the bottom of the sea, where it was made, to the summit of a very high range of mountains, and the original conformation of these strata have been but very slightly disturbed, and the lines of strati- fication may be easily traced from the valley below, showing a slight dip to the northward. It is evident that this body of stone started up right from the bed of the Tertian sea, and probably before that period had passed into the Post Tertiary, the mountains stood as high islands above that ancient sea.
Passing on northward, until we come to the vicinity of Knoxville, we find a limestone body, which is well filled with fossil shells, afford- ing a fine field for the study of paleontology. A careful examination and
I Baldridge
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classification of these fossils would reveal the age in which they were de- posited in the bottom of the sea and subsequently became a part of the solid rock. It is stated that mollusks imbedded in this body of limestone are of the same species as those of to-day. Such, however, is not the truth. They evidently belong to the Tertiary age, which it will be remem- bered embraced many molluski of the former ages, and also that the genera of the present mollusks were in existence. In a boulder of limestone picked up in Putah Creek, the writer discovered a spirifer, which genus had its dawn away back in the Devonian period. This body of limestone can be traced in a north-westerly course as far as Middletown, Lake County, near which it is being successfully burned into lime, and is used for all economical purposes to good advantage, it proving to be a good quality of lime. Gypsum occurs in the southern end of Berryessa Valley, but we have not seen the ledges, hence we do not know how extensive they may be.
In the foregoing we have only given an outline of the geological fea- tures of Napa County. A full and complete dissertation upon the subject would require very much time and call for more space than we can devote to the subject, and we think would not prove of any more interest to the general reader than the cursory glance we have given them. As we have referred in the foregoing to fire and water as the two great factors in the upbuilding of worlds and the modification of the earth's surface, we will append a few very notable examples of their workings in other parts of the world, that the reader may get a just idea of the wonderful agencies that have been at work on all these hills, and in all the broad and beautiful valleys.
Taking the agency of fire first, we notice first that it operates through volcanoes chiefly, and we find that these great fire mountains are distributed throughout the world as follows : Twenty-four in Europe, eleven in Africa, forty-six in Asia, one hundred and fourteen in America, and one hundred and eight in Oceanica, two-thirds of the latter being situated on islands. It will thus be seen that in America there are over one-third of all the vol- canoes in the world. We will now notice the results of the activity of some of the most prominent of these in different parts of the earth. Previous to A. D. 63, Vesuvius was regarded only as an ordinary mountain, just as we now regard St. Helena or Diablo. None but students of nature ever dreamed of the grand old monarch as a slumbering volcano that might burst forth with such wonderful and devastating effect, or that in days gone by and long since forgotten it had sent forth immense floods of molten lava and showers of ashes and stones.
Its sides were adorned with fertile fields, and date trees grew in rank luxuriance upon the very rim of the crater. Large cities flourished at its
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History of Napa and Lake Counties-NAPA.
base, whose people followed the avocations of life with never a single thought of the doom that awaited them. In the year 63 the inhabitants were startled by an earthquake, and they followed from time to time till the fatal day. In the year A. D. 79, the great drama culminated in one grand act which swept out of existence three large cities, with quite a per- centage of their inhabitants, devastated beautiful fields, and blasted the bright hopes of a whole nation at one fell swoop. The sun came up out of the east that fatal morning with as smiling a face as he ever deigned to show to any land. Presently dark columns of smoke and ash-laden vapor began to burst from the crater, in the midst of which the lightnings flashed their forked tongues in a revelry of grim delight. The air was ominously quiet and oppressive, and seemed burdened with the awful solemnity of the great event that was about to occur. Finally, the first shower of ashes de- scended upon the ill-fated cities, light and feathery as the gentle falling snow. This was followed by stones, scoria, and the accumulated debris of the crater ; and ere the people could escape even with their lives, the cities were buried deep beneath the accumulated mass of volcanic matter. Thus perished in a day the beautiful cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiæ.
Strange as it may seem, the very legends of the land failed to retain a trace of the fact that these cities had ever existed. An idea of how little diffused was the general knowledge of history in those days, may be had from the fact that the younger Pliny, who was present at this time, and escaped, wrote an epistle in which a very minute description of the event was recorded ; still, it was not read enough to keep in remembrance the cir- cumstance by the people who followed as residents of the land. It is read now more generally in the Latin, a dead language, that it was then when the tongue was still common in the land. For seventeen long centuries, almost the duration of the Christian Era, these cities remained undisturbed in the silence of death, and forgotten. Other people had become possessed of the land. Again the fields bloomed with cultivation, and the fruits of industry were to be seen on every hand. Cities thrived and were blotted out again upon the site of the first. Resina was constructed upon the very site of Herculaneum, and in 1631, an eruption destroyed it as completely as did the former one destroy the former cities. In 1713, workmen who were sinking a well, came upon the theatre of Herculaneum, at a depth of about one hundred feet. Pompeii was not discovered till 1750, when a farmer ran his ploughshare against some of the walls of the highest buildings. It was covered as a whole, less than twenty feet deep. Extensive excavations have since been made, and much of the city restored to its former condition.
From that time to this, this volcano has been in more or less activity. In 1794, the lava from it overflowed Torre del Greco, filling the streets and destroying four hundred people. It is estimated that twenty-two
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million cubic yards of lava were thrown out at this time. In 1822, the crater was cleared of all accumulated material and a gulf was found more than one thousand feet deep, and three-fourths of a mile in diameter ; and eight hundred feet of the top of the mountain was carried away.
Ætna, in the island of Sicily, is eleven thousand feet high and ninety miles in circumference. In 1669 the lava from this volcano overrun fourteen towns and villages before it reached Catania, whose walls had been raised to a height of sixty feet as a protection to the molten floods from this moun- tain. Here the lava collected till it rose above the height of the wall and poured in a fiery flood upon the city. The traveler may now see the solid lava curling over the top of the rampart as if still in the act of falling. It then proceeded in a stream forty feet deep and eighteen hundred feet wide, until it entered the sea. During this eruption a fissure six feet wide and of unknown depth, opened in the mountain to the distance of twelve miles.
In 1750-60 Jorullo, in Mexico, experienced a violent eruption, and six volcanic cones were formed in the district of country where before had been flelds of sugar cane and indigo. Forty years later Humboldt, the renowned traveler and naturalist, found this lava to be so hot that it would char a stick thrust into it; some adequate idea of the great heat of this matter can thus be attained.
In 1783 Skapter Jokul, in Iceland, sent forth two streams of lava which flowed in opposite directions. One of these streams was fifty miles long and twelve broad, while the other was forty miles long and seven broad, each averaging one hundred feet in depth. The eruption continued for two years and destroyed twenty villages and nine thousand people.
In 1815 a violent eruption occurred on the island of Sumbawa, at which time the explosions were heard nearly one thousand miles away, and the falling ashes crushed houses forty miles distant. The ashes filled the air so densely in Java, that it was totally dark at midday, and floating cinders covered the sea west of Sumatra, so that vessels were retarded seriously in their course. The lava flowed over the land and entered the sea ; whirl- winds swept over the island tearing up trees and bearing off men, horses and cattle. Of twelve thousand inhabitants, only twenty-six persons sur- vived the awful catastrophe.
The most remarkable eruptions of the present century have occurred upon the island of Hawaii, in the Pacific Ocean, from Mauna Loa, and the craters upon its sides. This volcano is thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty feet high. Kilauea, nine thousand seven hundred and ninety feet below its summit, is a crater sixteen thousand feet long, seven thousand five hundred feet wide, and one thousand feet deep. In 1823 a stream of lava issued from this crater, between four and five miles wide, and it is estimated that twenty-seven million cubic feet was ejected at this time.
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History of Napa and Lake Counties-NAPA
In 1840 there was another grand eruption from this crater. The lava had gradually raised some four hundred or five hundred feet above its wonted level, and its bosom was raging like an ocean lashed into a fury by a tempest. At length, on the first day of June of that year, the lava made its way through subterranean fissures several miles below the true crater. Then it started on its relentless march down to the sea, sweeping forest, ham- let, plantation and everything before it with resistless energy. When it reached the ocean it leaped over a precipice forty or fifty feet high, and poured in one vast cataract of fire into the deep below, falling with loud detonations, fearful hissings and a thousand unearthly and indescribable sounds. Imagine for a moment to yourself a river of fused minerals, of the breadth and depth of Niagara, and of gory red, falling in one emblazoned sheet, one raging torrent, into the ocean !
The atmosphere in all directions was filled with ashes, spray and gases, while the burning lava, as it fell into the water, was shivered into millions of minute particles. The coast was extended into the sea a quarter of a mile at this time. For three weeks this terrific river disgorged itself into the sea, heating the water for twenty miles along the coast, and destroying multitudes of fishes. The breadth of the stream, where it fell into the sea, was about half a mile, but inland it varied from one to four miles, conform- ing, like a river of water, to the face of the country over which it passed. It varied in depth from ten to two hundred feet, according to the inequali- ties of the surface, and the whole length of the stream was forty miles. During the flow night was converted into day, the light being seen over one hundred miles at sea, and the finest of print could be read forty miles away at midnight. According to Prof. J. D. Dana, 15,400,000,000 cubic feet of matter flowed from Kilauea at this eruption-a mass equal to a triangular ridge eight hundred feet high, two miles long, and one mile wide at its base.
And so we might go on and enumerate thousands of recorded instances of volcanic action, but enough have been given to show the reader the grand and wonderful power that lies hidden somewhere in the boweis of the earth, and which from time to time exerts itself in this manner. The reader will also get some idea of what may be done by volcanic action, and when he looks upon the lava-covered hills and mountains of Napa County he can see that, while this action has been great here, it has been as nothing compared with many other places in the world. It is recorded that one single eruption of Skapter Jokul, mentioned above, would cover an area thirty miles square to a depth of one hundred feet. Napa County is not much larger than that.
The other grand agent in changing and modifying the surface of the earth is water, and we will give the reader some idea of the importance
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and activity of this factor. Improbable as it may seem, the falling of rain upon the rocks of the mountain sides continually wears them away, until eventually they are changed much in appearance and size. As the rain-drop descends through the atmosphere it becomes impreg- nated with carbonic acid, which is able to decompose many kinds of rock, especially those of a calcareous nature. Frost is a powerful modifying agent. Water finds its way into the fissures of the rocks, where it freezes and rends them asunder, often sending the loosened fragments headlong into the valley below, where they are taken up by the torrents of mountain streams, and eventually find their way to the river bed as smooth and nicely rounded boulders. On the top of St. Helena there is a great pile of broken fragments of stone, which very much resembles a dump pile of a mine, which has been formed by this agency alone. The rock was origi- nally deposited in strata, and projected as a great peak on the summit of the mountain. The water permeated between the strata, and the cold tem- perature of the summit did the balance of the work. The rock was forced off in fragments just as deep as the water had gone.
Springs produce rapid and remarkable changes by depositing the sub- stances held in solution by them, such as lime, iron, soda, silica and magnesia, thus forming beds of calcareous tufea, bog iron ore, and serpen- tine. Every one is familiar with the sediment that is deposited by the mineral springs in Napa and Lake Counties. The heaviest deposit made by any springs in these two counties is to be seen at the soda springs on the ranch of Messrs. Priest. There a plateau of over an acre has been formed, varying in depth from a few feet to fifty, and the formation extends down the stream in which the water flows, for a distance of over a mile. In So- lano County, at Tolenas Springs, a few miles north of Suisun, a fine body of white onyx has been deposited.
Rivers cut channels in the superficial accumulations, and through the solid rocks, and transport loose material to the valleys below, and into the water basins, and what is true of rivers may be said of all streams of water, no matter how small they may be. Every mountain brook, during flood seasons, bears with it much of the substance along its banks down into the streams of the valleys, and they in turn take it up and bear it to the rivers, and they to the bays. An estimate of the greatness of this action may be had when we state that a large portion of Louisiana has been brought down the Mississippi River, and the land is still advancing into the Gulf of Mexico, it being estimated that 28,000,000,000 cubic feet is annually carried down by this river and deposited at its mouth.
The Amazon is so charged with sediment that its waters can be de- tected by their discoloration three hundred miles from its mouth. The Nile has formed vast deltas at its mouth, and there is good evidence that
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History of Napa and Lake Counties-NAPA.
nearly all of Egypt has been formed in this manner by that river. The Ganges carries such vast quantities of sediment and detritus to the sea during the four months of its flood season, that it would require a fleet of eighty vessels, each freighted with one thousand four hundred tons of mud, to sail by a given point every hour of the day and night, to carry an amount equal to it, and during the entire year there is an amount equal to 20,000,- 000,000 cubic feet deposited at its mouth. Can the human mind grasp even an idea of such vast sums? Indeed, it cannot; and yet, this is only really a fraction of the amount that is being transported from the mountains, hills and dales of the whole earth, to the mighty and capacious maws of old Mother Ocean. Would we see near at home this action and its result, we have only to look at the Sacramento River and its tributaries. There was a time when the American River de- bouched into the bay ; but now the mouth of the Sacramento River is forty or fifty miles to the south of it. The San Joaquin River once had its mouth far up, near the site of Stockton, or even above that. All that sec- tion of country now designated as " tule lands," embraced in Sherman, Union, Andrus, Staten, Grand, Schoolcraft and Brannan Islands, was once covered with a deep body of water, and it has only been raised to its present altitude by long and continued depositions of sediment by the streams which empty into it. Of these Cache and Putah Creeks have played no small part, and much of the matter that is now lying in the substratums of Schoolcraft Island were once a portion of the mountains of Napa and Lake Counties.
Tule and other vegetable matter have been found at a depth of eighty and one hundred feet in the locality of Georgetown, Sacramento County, and on Dr. Ziele's place, at the lower end of Brannan Island. This action was comparatively slow and it must have consumed a vast age of time to accomplish it. But since the advent of the white man, especially the Americans, the work has gone on very rapidly. The hardy miner has aided in the matter very materially, and almost in the third of a century the streams have been all filled up, and the Bay is having great encroachments made upon it. In 1850 quite large steamers plied with ease as high up the Feather River as Marysville, while now only light draught steamers are able to reach it during the flood season. Then steamers went up the Sacramento to Red Bluff, and now when a small launch reaches the place it is a matter of rejoicing and cannon are fired, and the citizens turn out en masse to see it. As late as 1852 the water was over fifty feet deep in the Sacramento River for some distance below the State Capital, and such ocean steamers as the " Senator," made the trip from there to San Francisco with ease, while at the present time only very light draught stern-wheel steamers are able to keep above the sand bars.
Coming nearer home, we find an excellent example in the Napa River.
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All the tule land that lies between the city and the bay was formed by this agency. It is not improbable that the Bay of Napa was once a handsome sheet of water, reaching from the present line of the railroad on the east to the foothills on the west, and extending north to the present site of Napa City, or even further. Since the advent of agricultural pursuits in Napa County, this action has progressed very rapidly. Who that has seen the Napa River in a time of flood can doubt as to the amount of sediment borne by it to the bay below. The streets of Napa City attest to that fact after every overflow.
Waves produce geological changes, and the fact can be seen on any of the mountain sides of Napa, where the traces of their action have not been obliterated by subsequent action. The shore line spoken of above, which is to be seen in the western slope of the range to the east of Napa Valley attests this fact. In many places small caves have been hollowed out, and at one place, near the Crystal Springs Hotel, north-east of the town of St. Helena a few miles, there is a cave over eighty feet in length, in a strataum of clay and shale. Along the present shore line of the Pacific many such places can be found, and are designated by the term " blow-holes." Near Mendocino City there is one so large that a schooner once went into it with one man on board, and neither man or vessel were ever seen or heard from afterwards. How extensive these cavities are is unknown, but they have been explored for the distance of a mile. Near Cahto, in Mendocino County, over forty miles distant from the ocean, and over a high range of mountains, there are some mud springs which ebb and flow with the tide, and it is thought that there is a possibility of these springs being connected with the Pacific by means of one of these "blow-holes." Thus it will be seen that the great agencies of the world have been busily at work in Napa County as elsewhere.
Passing from the general to the special geological features of Napa County, we will name and describe the various metals and minerals to be found within its borders.
METALS .- Metals are found either native or in the state of ores, the former being pure or simply mixed, but not chemically combined, with some other substance, while the latter is chemically combined with foreign matter. Metals occur in layers or beds, in veins intersecting the rocks, or disseminated through them in grains and crystals. They are only found in the two last forms in Napa County.
Iron .- This metal is found native only in meteorites-those wonderful bodies which occasionally fall to our earth-hence we need not expect to find it in any quantities here. Iron, as an ore, does not occur in any great
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History of Napa and Lake Counties-NAPA.
bodies in the county, but in its several forms is very generally dissemi- nated over the surface of the country. It is the oxyd of iron which gives to the rocks, lava, and soils their reddish color, and the protoxyd which gives to all mineral substances their yellowish color. Chromate of iron is an ore of a dark brown color, and is usually found in serpentine. Persons familiar with this latter substance will remember that it bears a large percentage of chromate in this county. Iron pyrites, or sulphuret of iron, is the most common of all the ores, except the oxyds, and is diffused throughout all the minerals and rocks of the county. It is better known as " Fool's Gold," from its yellow color and close resemblance to free gold.
Manganese .- This metal occurs in small quantities in certain sections of Napa County. Its presence is detected by the color of the water that has flowed over it after a rain, rather than by its appearance in bodies.
Tin .- Tin ore, or the oxyd of tin, is said to exist in small quantities at the lower end of Chiles Valley, and' a man has a large amount of work done on a tin ledge in that locality; but he has not yet developed the fact to the satisfaction of his neighbors that the metal exists in quantities sufficient to pay for working. That some tin is in the ledge, they all believe.
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