The Pacific Coast scenic tour

"The Pacific Coast scenic tour" by Henry T. Finck is a travelogue written in the late 19th century. It presents a grand journey from Southern California to Alaska—with diversions to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon—mixing vivid landscape description with practical counsel on routes, seasons, and sights, and a strong advocacy for the West’s climate, scenery, and emerging industries. It reads as both an invitation to tourists and a persuasive guide for health-seekers and settlers. The opening of this travelogue sets its scope and approach: a broad, affectionate survey of the entire Pacific Coast, with clear advice on timing each stop to its best season and a promise to capture “local color.” Finck begins with the cross-country rail approach, a dramatic desert rainstorm, and first impressions of Los Angeles—its rapid growth, electric streetcars, real-estate boom and bust—and then turns to the region’s lifeblood: irrigation via windmills, artesian wells, ditches, and remarkable tunnels beneath riverbeds, with reservoirs envisioned as the key to limitless growth. He praises Southern California’s winter-spring—sunny, dry, breezy, flower-rich—and sells it as a superior health resort to Florida and Mediterranean Europe, while imagining future “rural cities” of shaded avenues, orchards, and electric rails; yet he notes drawbacks like gophers, pests, the Santa Ana winds, dust, and occasional frost.

The Pacific Coast scenic tour, by Henry T. Finck. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #77884.