The main street of the town consists mainly of bar-rooms, livery-stables, barber-shops, and hotels, with an occasional store of merchandise sandwiched between; and, if you saw only this main street, you would conceive but a poor opinion of the people.

But other streets contain a number of pleasant, shady cottages; and, as I drove out into the country, the driver pointed with pride to the school-house, a large and fine building, which had just been completed at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, and seemed to me worth the money.

The town has also water-works; and the people propose to bridge the Sacramento at a cost of forty thousand dollars, and to build a new jail, to cost fifteen thousand dollars.

Such enterprises show the wealth of the people in this State, and astonish the traveler, who imagines, in driving over the great plain, that it is almost uninhabited, but sees, in a thirty-thousand dollar school-house in a little town like Red Bluff, that not only are there people, but that they have the courage to bear taxation for good objects, and the means to pay.
From Red Bluff two of the great mountain peaks of Northern California are magnificently seen--Lassen's Peaks and Shasta.

The latter, still one hundred and twenty miles off to the north, rears his great, craggy, snow-covered summit high in the air, and seems not more than twenty miles away.