was

in a deafening bombardment. At times the log house trembled like a pine tree in a gale, and the rain came down in torrents. By and bye the rage of the storm spent, the sun peeked out through the golden rifts in the gray blanket overhead, tinging the remarkable peaks and "ruined castles" in a deep orange-red glory. Now the whole face of nature was changed. The multitude of spires, peaks, side canyons and walls, all blended into one harmonious whole-a deep, unfathomable gorge of purple gloom, and only the most elevated peaks-the leading actors in the calcium light of this marvelous amphitheatre, caught the blood-red tints of the after-glow.

Finally even these sun-fires died away, leaving the whole scene a monochrome of sombre violet. Just as the scene was dissolving from twilight to moonlight, several great, white, balloon-like, cumulus clouds floated up from the river, until they overflowed the rim. Slowly, majestically in spectacular grandeur they moved! The stars and the moon came out, and another phase of the canyon's moods lay spread before us, as the daylight scene in part revived in silver light, and a thousand spectral forms projected from the impenetrable gloom-"dreams of mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eter

nal."

Long might I have gazed and never tired of the scene, but there was a crisp, frosty tang in the September air, and I tore myself away from this enchanting scene to snuggle around the blazing fireplace at the inn where, in the cheery atmosphere of indoors, fellow tourists drawn hither from all quarters of the globe to witness this, the greatest of all scenic wonders, exchanged tales of travel that were both interesting and thrilling.

There was the middle-aged couple from a farm in Nebraska, a prominent New York educator, tourists from Phoenix, Denver, St. Louis, Chicago and the East, Presidents of railroads, bankers, and last, but not least, many ladies and a few children.

All who had been down to the river were enthusiastic about the trip, although none of them were unmindful of being sore from the saddle. The few new arrivals who contemplated taking the trail on the morrow, listened eagerly to the various experiences, but to not one of them did my method of "hitting the trail" appeal. It was "too strenuous," they all declared, even the sore ones, and yet on the following morning I could have made the trip again without the slightest feeling of soreness or fatigue.

N THE LOS ANGELES road, near the point where it divides like the letter Y into two highways, one leading to San Pedro, the other to Long Beach, is a group of adobe ruins and the skeleton of an old windmill. The vigorous ocean breeze has sown wild seed, the soil has brought them forth, and the sun has warmed them into lush growth until now a clamoring tangle of juicy stalked, broad-leafed weeds has woven a living screen about the ruins. Venerable pepper trees cast pendent streamers and a cooling shadow over the deserted houses long since left to the occupancy of spinning spiders and nesting birds. It is a fair spot. On all sides the ground ripples away in a sea of green, tufted eucalyptus trees with with slender scythe-like leaves stand silhouetted against the sky, and far, far away through opalescent scarfs of smoke soar the mountains, quivering into altitudes that seem one with the silver mist.

was

The thrall of silence, broken now and again by the exultant lilt of the meadowlark, the elfin chuckle of the grass-hopper, and the fantastic song of some lone mocking bird, is upon the ancient adobes. Yet once upon a time in the good old days of the dons, the mellow note of the guitar thrummed to the time of a serenade, and who knows what once lovely face framed in the windows that now hold the empty image of ruin and decay. The hoary walls, bearded with tufts of grass, have seen many a change, endured through many a stirring passage in the making of our national history. The bullets of opposing forces have fallen about them, and they have trembled at the shock of musketry and the thud of charging hoofs when native Californians and Americans met to contest the right to the land. Indeed, this is no less than Dominguez, the romantic, the historical, the forgotten!

Almost reverently I waded through the entangling woof and mesh of green, all spangled over with dew and patterned with darting dragon-flies and crimson spotted blackbirds, into the chill shadow that fell upon me with the strange depression which seems to be the common heritage of abandoned places, as though the ghosts of departed masters and mistresses live and mourn through the silence and solitude. As I moved hither and thither, now lingering beneath a naked threshold or by a gaping window curtained only by the lacy foliage of pepper leaves, bits of adobe kept crumbling, crumbling with slight, stealthy rattling noises and dropped on the grass-grown floor. Some patches of plaster still showed yellow-white upon the walls; the old, dismantled windmill bared its stripped wheel impotently to the wind and the whole strange assembly of disintegrating walls and shielding trees seemed to be rather the phantoms of a dream, the half-forgotten memory of another century. Such is the Dominguez of to-day, and now for the story.

It is hard to dispel the living image of the California of the present and recreate in imagination the California of more than a hundred years ago, yet that is what we must do if we would go threading our way through the romance of Dominguez. We must try to picture to ourselves a time in the infancy of this western land when it was so remote from the rest of the world that only once a month the mail was brought from Mexico over El Camino Real, the King's Highway, a distance of 3,000 miles. It was an age of monkish and militant rule, enlivened by daring vaqueros and gaudy dons and forever and ever by petty insurrections which varied the monotony of bull fights and amours.

Fages was Governor, and the little pueblo of Los Angeles was was struggling through its beginnings. A number of

families had gathered together there in a small community, and one citizen, perhaps possessed of more thrift than his indolent neighbors, applied to Fages for a grant of land upon which to raise cattle and such things besides as the soil would produce. The question was without precedent. Fages appealed to the Commandant General for guidance, and that mighty official augustly declared that a worthy subject might be given lands "not to exceed three leagues square, so located as not to interfere with the rights of any existing mission or pueblo." Upon this authority in 1884 Fages bestowed upon Juan Jose Dominguez the country "along

houses of adobe, planted his pepper trees, let us assume, drowsing in their pleasant shade while his vaqueros rode the wavelike hills in pursuit of his growing herds. And when Don Juan was gathered to his fathers, his lands passed on through his brother sergeant, Cristobal Dominguez, unto his descendants even to the present day.

The old buildings dreamed on through uneventful years until 1846, when the United States and Mexico were on the eve of war. To understand the story, which is, after all, more of a tableau than a narrative, we must stop a bit and glance back at some history.

the ocean, at San Pedro," and up the estuary half way to Los Angeles. Generous as this giving of vast tracts would seem at first sight, it was, nevertheless, a precarious blessing, depending solely upon the caprice or whim of the all-powerful Governor. There is record of the fact that the Encina rancho, granted to Francisco Reyes (and of these Reyes we shall hear more by and bye), was confiscated to endow the newly founded Mission of San Fernando.

The acres of Dominguez knew no such unjust fate. Upon his goodly estate, Don Juan Jose lived and flourished, built his

Just about this time, Captain John C. Fremont, then a young officer of the topographical engineers, marched into California with a detail of sixty one men skilled in mountaineering and hardened by adventure on the plains. They made their camp in the Sacramento Valley, and Fremont proceeded to the capital at Monterey to see General Castro, the military Commandant of Alta California. Precisely what happened between Fremont and Castro will never be known, but Fremont announced that his mission was a peaceable one, undertaken in the interests of science. Nevertheless, the astute young