Jack London wrote The Valley of the Moon in 1913 at his Beauty Ranch above Glen Ellen — the land is now Jack London State Historic Park. Each week the Wag lifts a passage from the valley’s most famous resident.
“We'll soon enter the valley. You bet I saw. First thing, in Japan, the terraced hillsides. Take a hill so steep you couldn't drive a horse up it. No bother to them. They terraced it–a stone wall, and good masonry, six feet high, a level terrace six feet wide; up and up, walls and terraces, the same thing all the way, straight into the air, walls upon walls, terraces upon terraces, until I've seen ten-foot walls built to make three-foot terraces, and twenty-foot walls for four or five feet of soil they could grow things on. And that soil, packed up the mountainsides in baskets on their backs!
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (1913)
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