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The county of San
Bernardino (Saint Bernard) is the largest in California, embracing an area of
23,476 square miles, or 15,024,640 acres. It has no coastage, being thirty miles
from the Pacific Ocean. It is 215 miles wide by 150 miles from north to south.
In all this immense area there is embraced a vast deal of diversified scenery,
mountains, and rich plains and valleys, with running streams of sparkling
mountain water; a belt of timber three miles long by forty miles wide; the
highest mountain peak in Southern California, Grey Back, 11,600 feet high, with
his perpetual snow-cap; an enormously large and rich mineral region, and an
immense territory of the richest agricultural lands in the universe.
Comparatively speaking, the natural resources and advantages of this county have
as yet hardly begun to be developed. The original inhabitants of San Bernardino County were Indians, mostly the Cahuilla and Serrano. In 1819 the gentiles of the rancheria Guachama, also called, by the Spaniards, San Bernardino, voluntarily asked for the introduction of agriculture and stock raising upon their fertile territories, and some beginning was made. But it would appear from the reports on the missions that no station was established here, nor any buildings erected prior to 1822, although the padres regarded these advances of the Indians as an important step in the direction of subduing the tribes of the Colorado River. Read more... Additional San Bernardino Resources An Illustrated History of Southern California: embracing the counties of San Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Orange, and the peninsula of lower California. |
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