This town is on the San Joaquin, the
most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada
water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State,--a series,
indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the
Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region,
that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying
the northern portion of the State,--resembling in its physical features,
much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated
trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is
almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which
debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,--and that rises east of
the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is
one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach
the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good
United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to
the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or
would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You
will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving
the San Joaquin at Stockton _en route_ for Mariposa,--the Stanislaus,
the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced.
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