"Chaparral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rode, the 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 distance, and again the tules, the marsh, the patches of orange. He rode through ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... in all stages of advancement; here two elk heads and a buffalo; there a gaunt coyote crouching in the chaparral; a cluster of giant oaks; far off, a waving line of mountain peaks; a canon with vultures sailing high above it; cow boys, and a shoreless sea of prairie, with no shadows except those cast by filmy clouds drifting against ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... examine the wide circle of the horizon with eyes that were trained to 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
... in the 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 ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... our economy. This may apply 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 in by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... 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. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... ridden the river trail, and for ten hours his ears had been burdened with the dull beat of his pony's hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of his wooden stirrups against the chaparral growth. And for ten hours his mind had been confused with a multitude of perplexities ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... channel, a score or more of feet in depth, at the bottom of which was a dense chaparral thicket. The little valley thus nestled in the earth was about forty rods in width, and one would never have dreamed it existed, unless they chanced to ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... of bushes beside which the colonel was standing; then, as every sword was drawn and a row of muskets held ready, a tall man bounded into the space, laid his finger on his lip to enforce silence, and, beckoning all to follow, crept on stealthily through the chaparral. He was a man advanced in years, a long white beard flowed over his chest, yet he was lithe and quick, and his look and manner were those of one who lives in the open and in frequent danger. He spoke not a word, but after a time drew himself erect and pointed ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... Song had suddenly taken America by storm. Sung first in the 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 it, every ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... the saddle again headed for the river. Half an hour of riding brought him to the dense chaparral and willow thickets. These he threaded to come at length to the ford. It was a gravel bottom, and therefore an easy crossing. Once upon the opposite shore he reined in his horse and looked darkly back. This action marked his acknowledgment of his situation: he had voluntarily sought ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... valley, following the same hilly trail he had taken two days before with Miss Rutherford. It took him past the aspen grove at the mouth of the gulch which led to the Meldrum place. Beyond this a few hundred yards he left the main road and went through the chaparral toward a small ranch that nestled close to the timber. Beulah had told him that it belonged to an old German named Rothgerber who had lived there with his wife ever since ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 shame to ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... arroyo when hunting for 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 factor ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... 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, and the ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... saw a 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 ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 |
