[Illustration: TAHOE TAVERN—MOST MODERN OF HOSTELRIES IN EQUIPMENT, IS DESIGNED IN HARMONY WITH ITS SURROUNDINGS OF PINEY WOODS AND WILD FLOWER GARDENS]
All down this slope of the Sierra, past beautiful Auburn, a modern town, and yet with a touch of ancient days, half hidden in foliage and flowers, with orange and peach blossoms, are natural sanitariums where people suffering from asthma and other throat and lung troubles are surprising their home doctors continually by getting well. From Auburn, Newcastle (center of the great Placer County fruit belt) Penryn and neighboring stations, are shipped each year thousands of cars of green fruit, principally peaches, to the Eastern markets. No other section of the west ships so many cars of fresh peaches to market and its fame as an orange growing section is growing rapidly.
[Illustration: THE PAVILION AT TALLAC, ANOTHER POPULAR LAKE RESORT]
The Overland Route joins the Road of a Thousand Wonders (between Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles) at Roseville, a great railway center to be, with fifty-seven miles of yards, round-houses of sixty-four stalls, machine and car shops, club house, icing plant and hospital. From Roseville to Sacramento the nineteen mile journey is made past horse ranches (a notable one at Ben Ali), and great dairy farms.
Sacramento, the capital city of California, is a manufacturing and wholesale center, with an ever increasing and diversified trade extending up to central Oregon on the North, and to central Nevada on the East. Its post office receipts, school attendance, and directory returns, indicate the city has a population of practically 50,000. The railway shops of the Southern Pacific cover twenty acres, and employ 3,000 people. The rich tributary country about Sacramento amounts to 600,000 acres in area. Its bank capital and resources are greater than in many cities of over a hundred thousand people.
[Illustration: THE STEAMER “TAHOE” DAILY CIRCLES THE SAPPHIRE WATERS OF THE LAKE]
Here was born the Central Pacific Railroad. Theodore D. Judah had been employed by a California company to build a road from Sacramento to Folsom (forty miles), but his eyes were ever turning Sierraward. At last he gained the attention of Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and the Crockers, and succeeded in interesting them in the stupendous project of building a railroad, which, in a hundred miles was to rise from about sea-level to almost half a mile; then to drop 3300 feet and then crossing ten ranges of mountains, was to find a way to meet the western end of a road from the Missouri, by the waters of Great Salt Lake.