"Chaparral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... biennial, triennial; exotic. timber, forest; wood, woodlands; timberland; hurst[obs3], frith[obs3], holt, weald[obs3], park, chase, greenwood, brake, grove, copse, coppice, bocage[obs3], tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk[obs3], ceja[Sp], chaparral, motte [obs3][U.S.].; arboretum &c. 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary[obs3]; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva[obs3], mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... range is so closely restricted to special localities. It is usually found apart, standing deep in chaparral on sunny hill-and canon-sides where there is but little depth of soil, and, where found at all, it is quite plentiful; but the ordinary traveler, following carriage-roads and trails, may ascend the range many times without ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... skill. Nothing but fire could have dislodged the enemy. They had fled under cover of night. Vallejo set off in pursuit, and when, two days later, he surrounded them, they declared they would die rather than surrender. A road was cut through chaparral with axes, along which the field-piece and muskets were pressed forward and discharged. The Indians retreated slowly, wounding eight soldiers. When the cannon was close to the enemies' intrenchments the ammunition gave ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... 9th of March, the steamers "Spitfire" and "Vixen" and several gunboats ran close inshore and shelled the sand-hills and chaparral in which the enemy might be concealed. Only a few horsemen were made to scamper away. The Government for this very landing had sent out a number of surf-boats, flat on the bottom and sharp at both ends. Each of these carried one hundred ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Several species of oak are found upon the hillsides and in the valleys, while mingled with them in many places appear such shrubs as the California lilac, chamiso, and manzanita. Where the soil is too poor or the slopes too steep for the trees, these shrubs, commonly called "chaparral," are massed ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... terminating in the gleaming waters of the Pacific Ocean. Could he do this, he would behold, for the first seventy-five or eighty miles, a vast, billowy sea of foot-hills, clothed with forests of sombre pine and bright, evergreen oaks; and, lower down, dense patches of white-blossomed chaparral, looking in the enchanted distance like irregular banks of snow. Then the world-renowned valley of the Sacramento River, with its level plains of dark, rich soil, its matchless fields of ripening grain, traversed here and there by streams that, emerging from the shadowy depths ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... was on the first upward roll of the hills. Farther back, along more distant slopes, the chaparral spread like a dark cloth but here there was little verdure. The rainless California summer had scorched the country; mounded summit swelled beyond mounded summit all dried to a uniform ochre. But if you had ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Wu did not work for the people of Whiskeytown, he was not, therefore, idle. Many a sunrise found him wandering through the chaparral thickets back of his house, digging here and there in the red soil for roots and herbs. These he took home, washed, tasted, and, perhaps, dried. His mornings were mainly spent in cooking for his abundantly supplied table, in tending his fowls and house, and in making spotless and ironing ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... on the northern brow, and in the gray light we dropped down through chaparral into redwood canyons deep and warm with the breath of passing summer. It was old country to me that I knew and loved, and soon I became the guide. The hiding-place was mine. I had selected it. We let down the bars and crossed an upland meadow. Next, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... heart of the gold-ribbed mountains. The canyon, a mere shapeless gash in the side of the great hills, was deep, long, undulating, ever twisting about like some immense serpent, its sides darkened by clinging cedars and bunches of chaparral, and rising in irregular terraces of partially exposed rock toward a narrow strip of blue sky. It was a fragment of primitive nature, as wild, gloomy, desolate, and silent as though never yet ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... He went on a ranch in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, and was a keen hunter, especially fond of the chase of cougar, bear, and elk. One day while riding a stony mountain trail he saw a grisly cub watching him from the chaparral above, and he dismounted to try to capture it; his rifle was a 40-90 Sharp's. Just as he neared the cub, he heard a growl and caught a glimpse of the old she, and he at once turned up-hill, and stood under some tall, quaking ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... established by the six-shooter, and honest men were forced to the wall. In 1876 the property-holding classes went to the Legislature, got it to appropriate a hundred thousand dollars a year for two years, and the Ranger force was reorganized to carry the law into the chaparral. At this time many judges were in league with bandits; sheriffs were elected by the outlaws, ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... is woven a woof of green, spreading in irregular patches in all directions. It is made by the chaparral, which is composed of a variety of desert plants that are native to the soil and can live on very little water. It consists of live oak, pinion, mesquite, desert willow, greasewood, sage brush, palmilla, maguey, yucca and cacti and ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... fog receded slowly. He left the chaparral and rode by green marshes cut with sloughs and stained with vivid patches of orange. The frogs in the tules chanted their hoarse matins. Through brush-covered plains once more, with sparsely wooded hills in ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... the Illyrian lived alone improving his lands and selling vegetables to the Yankee traders who came up the river in their little schooners; he was always busy ploughing and dressing the gardens or clearing away the chaparral. ...
— A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters • Charles A. Gunnison
... handful of Coulter pines, and on the northern slope a few scattered spruce. The western slope of the foothills of the San Jacinto, San Bernardino, San Gabriel, Zaca Lake and Pine Mountain, and Santa Ynez reserves, are clad only in chaparral, yet the preservation of these hillsides from fire is of vital importance to the people, since the mantle of vegetation protects, to a certain degree, the sources of the streams from which the supply of water is derived. In this country ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... note every aspect of the wilderness. On his right the plains melted away in gentle swell after swell, until they met the horizon. Their brown surface was broken only by the spiked and thorny cactus and stray bits of chaparral. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... stopped the car beside a well at the edge of the chaparral and there in the shade the passengers alighted, while Carlitos filled his radiator and tinkered with parts of the machine ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... Mesa del Mogollon, in the darkling Coconino Forest she interviewed the cowboy, that valiant belted knight of modern western chivalry, and in the chaparral she ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... trail, out through a patch of chaparral into a rocky gorge, Hampton turned east again toward the higher plateau. Taking the roundabout way which led from the far side of the lake and along the flank of the mountain to the table-land, he came to a scattering band ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... porch, the hillside, covered with scrub-oak and chaparral and madrono trees, and the stumps where redwoods had been, dropped sharply to the little river, which came tumbling down from the wooded mountains to plunge roaring into one end of the big power-house, and which foamed out at the other side to continue ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... chaparral point, they came in full view of an Indian rancherie. The uncivilized savages were amazed. Never had they seen such forlorn, wretched, pitiable human beings, as the tattered, disheveled, skeleton creatures who stood stretching out their arms for assistance. At first, they all ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... light, and, forsaking what they believed in hopeful moments to be the road, they made for it across country. Across open spaces of sand, into gullies and out of gullies, through stinging patches of yucca and prickly pear, through breast-high chaparral, meshed, knotted, and matted, like a clumsy weaving together of very tough ropes, some with thorns, and all with ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... hopper nor cat. They were the Sierra dawn and the summer east wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... out West where the antelope roam, And the coyote howls 'round the cowboy's home, Where the mountains are covered with chaparral frail, And the valleys are checkered with the cattle trail, Where the miner digs for the golden veins, And the cowboy rides ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... those of its pages which it is clear he wrote most en amateur. Soldier and student, he is above all a sportsman. It is delightful to follow him over the plain and (in spirit and untearable trousers) into the chaparral. Anywhere between the Rio Grande, the Missouri and Bridger's Pass he seems to be as much at home as on his own farm. All its live-stock is familiar to him. His sheep are of the big-horn breed; his black cattle, the two varieties of buffalo, mountain and lowland; and his poultry, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... to society. We are all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom and color. But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out? It is not contrast altogether. For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the Homesteaders showed along the line of the great canal, keen and blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... course for several hundred yards, when, striking a new trail, our course was laid in a westerly direction. The character of the country underwent a complete change; instead of the sandy desert, we were now passing over a prairie clothed with verdure. At intervals we would enter dense thickets of chaparral, and then emerge into glades, that were veritable flower gardens. At evening a halt was called, but only long enough to water the horses, and partake of a hasty meal; and continuing the march we forged ahead with increased speed. I judged by the animated ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... hour or so he read to her from "The Seven Seas," while the afternoon passed, the wind stirring the chaparral and blackberry bushes in the hollows of the huge, bare hills, the surf rolling and grumbling on the beach below, the sea-birds wheeling overhead. Blix listened intently, but Condy could not have told of what he was reading. Living was better than reading, life was better ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... mist nets stretched over water. Those from Coahuila were snared over a concrete water tank situated near the base of low hills in mixed mesquite and chaparral. In Nuevo Leon, one bat was netted over a small pond around which grew some low trees in an intermontane valley in the Sierra Madre Oriental. In Tamaulipas two bats were caught in a mist net stretched across a narrow, brush-bordered arroyo ...
— A New Long-eared Myotis (Myotis Evotis) From Northeastern Mexico • Rollin H. Baker
... mile when he was rewarded for his alertness by a glimpse of a large animal in the chaparral thicket before him. He drew rein to test the wind in approved book hunter fashion. There was not a breath of air stirring. The mesa lay basking in the dry, hot stillness of the July afternoon. He set the safety catch of his rifle, ready for ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... road and sunny, and the fairest in the world— There are peaks that rise above it in their snowy mantles curled, And it leads from the mountains through a hedge of chaparral, Down to the waters ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... as far as Cape San Antonio, where Cuba ends. There were many encounters between the pirates and the squadron, sometimes afloat, sometimes ashore, in several of which our officer served, forcing his way with his party through marsh and chaparral and cactus—a service often perilous, always painful and exhausting. His health fortunately held out through it; nor did he take the yellow fever, which, as the summer wore on, made sad havoc among both officers and men. Toward the end of his time he obtained the command of one of the Mosquito ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... a warm night. The cool breeze which usually sprang up with the going down of the sun behind the chaparral-crested mountain was that evening withheld from Sandy Bar. The little canon was stifling with heated resinous odors, and the decaying driftwood on the Bar sent forth faint sickening exhalations. The feverishness ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Empire Theatre on the Broadway by Abe Gideon, the bark-blocks comedian, ten days after the mare's victory and defeat, it had raged through the land like a prairie fire. Cattle-men on the Mexican Border sung it in the chaparral, and the lumber-camps by the Great Lakes echoed it at night. Gramophones carried it up and down the Continent from Oyster Bay to Vancouver, and from Frisco to New Orleans. Every street-boy whistled ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... Johnny, for whom he had orders. This trail was very irregular, as if the horse had wandered at will. Suddenly they came upon five tracks, all pointing one way, and four of these turned abruptly and disappeared in the northwest. Half a mile beyond the point of separation was a chaparral, which was an important ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... underlife. Many have known the breath of the pampas beyond the Amazon; the soft pungency of the wattle blown across the salt-bush plains of Australia; the friendly exhilaration of the prairie or the chaparral; the living, loving loneliness of the desert; but yonder on the veld is a life of the night which possesses all the others have, and something of its own besides; something which gets into the bones and makes for forgetfulness of the world. It lifts a man away from the fret of life, and sets ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in safety at Brownsville, on the American shore. Here Paul wrote letters home and requested his father to send him a remittance to Galveston. With the little money they bad, mustangs and provisions were purchased and they started on a long ride to Corpus Christi. It was a wild journey through the chaparral, over the burnt and dried grass of the prairie, across swamps and rivers; but they made the two hundred miles in eight days. Here they separated. While his companions sought employment with the ranchers, Paul for consideration of his mustang, rifle and revolver, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... be disappointed. She had not proceeded a hundred yards before she noticed the moving figure of a man beyond her in the hillside chaparral above the trail. He seemed to be going in the same direction as herself, and, as she fancied, endeavoring to avoid her. This excited her curiosity to the point of urging her horse forward until the trail broadened into the ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... prairie owl (Athene cunicularis), which inhabits deserted dog burrows and is the same bird as occupies the Biscacha burrows in Argentina. Rattlesnakes, so common around dog-towns, enter the burrows to secure the young marmots. Another animal frequently seen was the chaparral-cock or road-runner, really the earth cuckoo (Geococcyx Mexicanus), called paisano or pheasant, or Correcamino, by the Mexicans. It is a curious creature, with a very long tail, and runs at a tremendous rate, seldom taking to flight. Report says that ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... impact of the bullet made Shandon crumple and reel and clutch at his saddle horn, he went dizzy, almost blind with the shock. In that moment Little Saxon feeling the reins drop upon his neck, turned out to the left, striking for an open clearing. He should have turned to the right as a thicket of chaparral lay in front now, and there was no turning back. So, when Shandon's right hand shut down tight upon the reins, gathering them up, there was but one thing to do, turn still further to the left, skirt the thicket, try to turn to the right again upon the further side. He was ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... and then no more until the contest," Jack announced placatingly, when he spied a lone bull standing just before a thicket of chaparral and staring at them with stupid resentment that his siesta had been disturbed. "A kiss for luck, ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... The river directly before us was hidden by a narrow belt of chaparral and the drift that had lodged along the banks, but the smoke stacks of three or four transports were visible above the weed stalks and bushes, and the course of one or two more could be traced by a distant, trailing line of smoke as they steamed down ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... States from Oregon, Colorado and Kansas, southward; most abundant on the Mexican border, and wintering in central Mexico. This curious species is known as the "Chaparral Cock", "Ground Cuckoo," "Snake-killer," etc. Its upper parts are a glossy greenish brown, each feather being edged or fringed with whitish; the tail is very long, broad and graduated, the feathers being broadly tipped with ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... bullets were flying like hailstones, so it didn't much matter where a fellow went—he was sure to get peppered. Of course the captain couldn't be left up there—we wanted him for morning parades. Then I happened to see the little field-piece stranded among the chaparral. It was a cursed nice little cannon. It would have been a blighting ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... outlined bulk, in the gathering darkness, showed here and there in vague but incessant motion; it could be nothing but an animal whose utterance was at once so incoherent, monotonous, and unremitting. Yet, when the sound came nearer, and the chaparral was parted, it seemed to be a man, and that ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
