William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

To-day, a pretty English town, with banks, hotels, and churches, greets you on the bridge of Sanjon del Alisal. A main street, broad, well-paved and neatly built, runs out for nearly half a mile. Unlike the timber-sheds of Monterey, the stores and banks of this new town are built of brick, striking, as one may say, their roots into the earth. A fine hotel adorns the principal street, every shop in which is stocked with new and useful things, just like a shop in Broadway or the Strand. You buy the latest patterns in hats and coats, in steam-ploughs and grass-rollers, in pump-handles and waterwheels. Salinas has her journals, her lending-libraries, her public schools. A jail has just been opened, for the herdsmen of the district are unruly, and the prison of San Jose is a long way off. Pigeons flutter in the roadways, lending to the town an air of poetry and peace. Some offshoots flow from Main Street into open fields, in which Swiss-like chalets nestle in the midst of peaches, grapes, and figs. One church