It ’s hard to imagine contemporary Los Angeles, city of freeway sprawl, was once a small agrarian community with open vistas. But in 1860 that’s exactly what William Brewer found. A Yale graduate picked by Josiah Whitney for the Geological Survey of California, Brewer’s December 7 letter to his brother tells just how lovely a place Los Angeles—“a city of some three and a half or four thousand”—could be. His description still resonates with today’s southern Californians lucky enough to see the L.A. basin on clear winter days.

Here is a great plain, or rather a gentle slope, from the Pacific to the mountains. We are on this plain about twenty miles from the sea and fiteen from the mountains, a most lovely locality; all that is wanted naturally to make it a paradise is water, more water...

As we stand on a hill over the town, which lies at our feet, one of the loveliest views I ever saw is spread out. Over the level plain to the south-west lies the Pacific, blue in the distance; to the north are the mountains of the Sierra Santa Monica; to the south, beneath us, lies the picturesque town with its flat roofs, the fertile plain and vineyards stretching away to a great distance, are some mountains without name, their sides abrupt and broken, while still above them stand the snow-covered peaks of San Bernardino. The effect of the pepper, fig, olive, and palm trees in the foreground, with the snow in the distance, is very unusual.

Brewer returned to Yale in 1864, but his letters—collected and edited by Francis P. Farquhar—provide one of our most vivid resources for rediscovering the California of the nineteenth century.

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