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Show 396. He reported on the fur trade in less than romantic terms; its "hairy harvests" were the skins of our "poor earth-born companions and fellow-mortals." He found the residents of Washington "hacking, burning, b l a s t i n g t h e i r way deeper into the wilderness, beneath the sky, and beneath the ground." The homesteaders of western Washington seemed equally abhorrent, "gnawing like beavers, and scratching for a l i v i n g among the blackened stumps and logs, regarding the trees as t h e i r greatest enemies - a sort of l a r g e r pernicious weed immensely d i f f i c u lt to get rid of." He l e f t the defense of culture to the other writers whom he commissioned for Picturesque California. Jeanne Carr, in her essay, spoke of the "love of the freeholder for his home." He wouldn't. In s p i t e of his best intentions to restrain himself, he was once again grumbling about the destruction of the West. Such was not the stuff out of which volumes called Picturesque California were made. In almost a l l ways, the whole book was out of his control. Even when he helped his friend and a l l y , Charles Howard Shinn, write an essay on "The Land of the Redwood," things went wrong, shinn took, f i r s t of a l l , a p r a c t i c a l view of the cutting of coast Redwoods, and spoke of s c i e n t i f i c forestry and the timber crop. But worse were his opinions, that the Redwood was "a s t r i k i n g but not altogether a picturesque tree," that the Sequoia forest had a "monotony of coloring in reds and browns of the s o i l and bark," and contained a "scarcity of animal and b i r d l i f e . " Shinn made factual errors as well, not recognizing the difference between the cones of |