Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Footnote 2 has an anchor but no footnote text.
GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS.
BY
HELEN JACKSON (H. H.),
AUTHOR OF "RAMONA," "A CENTURY OF DISHONOR," "VERSES," "SONNETS
AND LYRICS," "HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY," "BITS OF TRAVEL,"
"BITS OF TRAVEL AT HOME," "ZEPH," "MERCY PHILBRICK'S
CHOICE," "BETWEEN WHILES," "BITS OF TALK
ABOUT HOME MATTERS," "BITS OF TALK FOR
YOUNG FOLKS," "NELLY'S SILVER
MINE," "CAT STORIES."
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1886.
_Copyright, 1886_,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
I.
CALIFORNIA AND OREGON.
PAGE
OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 3
FATHER JUNIPERO AND HIS WORK. I. II. 30
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE MISSION INDIANS IN
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 78
ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS 103
CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON 129
II.
SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND.
A BURNS PILGRIMAGE 153
GLINTS IN AULD REEKIE 175
CHESTER STREETS 196
III.
NORWAY, DENMARK, AND GERMANY.
BERGEN DAYS 221
FOUR DAYS WITH SANNA 245
THE KATRINA SAGA. I. II. 277
ENCYCLICALS OF A TRAVELLER. I. II. III. 322
THE VILLAGE OF OBERAMMERGAU 384
THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU 402
CALIFORNIA AND OREGON.
GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS.
I.
CALIFORNIA AND OREGON.
OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
Climate is to a country what temperament is to a man,--Fate. The
figure is not so fanciful as it seems; for temperament, broadly
defined, may be said to be that which determines the point of view of
a man's mental and spiritual vision,--in other words, the light in
which he sees things. And the word "climate" is, primarily, simply a
statement of bounds defined according to the obliquity of the sun's
course relative to the horizon,--in other words, the slant of the sun.
The tropics are tropic because the sun shines down too straight.
Vegetation leaps into luxuriance under the nearly vertical ray: but
human activities languish; intellect is supine; only the passions,
human nature's rank weed-growths, thrive. In the temperate zone,
again, the sun strikes the earth too much aslant. Human activities
develop; intellect is keen; the balance of passion and reason is
normally adjusted: but vegetation is slow and restricted. As compared
with the productiveness of the tropics, the best that the temperate
zone can do is scanty.
There are a few spots on the globe where the conditions of the country
override these laws, and do away with these lines of discrimination in
favors. Florida, Italy, the South of France and of Spain, a few
islands, and South California complete the list.
These places are doubly dowered. They have the wealths of the two
zones, without the drawbacks of either. In South California this
results from two causes: first, the presence of a temperate current in
the ocean, near the coast; second, the configuration of the mountain
ranges which intercept and reflect the sun's rays, and shut South
California off from the rest of the continent. It is, as it were,
climatically insulated,--a sort of island on land. It has just enough
of sea to make its atmosphere temperate. Its continental position and
affinities give it a dryness no island could have; and its
climatically insulated position gives it an evenness of temperature
much beyond the continental average.
It has thus a cool summer and a temperate winter,--conditions which
secure the broadest and highest agricultural and horticultural
possibilities. It is the only country in the world where dairies and
orange orchards will thrive together.
It has its own zones of climate; not at all following lines parallel
to the equator, but following the trend of its mountains. The
California mountains are a big and interesting family of geological
children, with great gaps in point of age, the Sierra Nevada being
oldest of all. Time was when the Sierra Nevada fronted directly on the
Pacific, and its rivers dashed down straight into the sea. But that is
ages ago. Since then have been born out of the waters the numerous
coast ranges, all following more or less closely the shore line. These
are supplemented at Point Conception by east and west ranges, which
complete the insulating walls of South, or semi-tropic, California.
The coast ranges are the youngest of the children born; but the ocean
is still pregnant of others. Range after range, far out to sea, they
lie, with their attendant valleys, biding their time, popping their
heads out here and there in the shape of islands.
This colossal furrow system of mountains must have its correlative
system of valleys; hence the great valley divisions of the country.
There may be said to be four groups or kinds of these: the low and
broad valleys, so broad that they are plains; the high mountain
valleys; the rounded plateaus of the Great Basin, as it is called, of
which the Bernardino Mountains are the southern rim; and the river
valleys or cañons,--these last running at angles to the mountain and
shore lines.
When the air in these valleys becomes heated by the sun, it rushes up
the slopes of the Sierra Nevada as up a mighty chimney. To fill the
vacuum thus created, the sea air is drawn in through every break in
the coast ranges as by a blower. In the upper part of the California
coast it sucks in with fury, as through the Golden Gate, piling up and
demolishing high hills of sand every year, and cutting grooves on the
granite fronts of mountains.
The country may be said to have three distinct industrial belts: the
first, along the coast, a narrow one, from one to fifteen miles wide.
In this grow some of the deciduous fruits, corn, pumpkins, and grain.
Dairy and stock interests flourish. The nearness of the sea makes the
air cool, with fogs at night. There are many _ciénagas_, or marshy
regions, where grass is green all the year round, and water is near
the surface everywhere. Citrus fruits do not flourish in this belt,
except in sheltered spots at the higher levels.
The second industrial belt comprises the shorter valleys opening
toward the sea; a belt of country averaging perhaps forty miles in
width. In this belt all grains will grow without irrigation; all
deciduous fruits, including the grape, flourish well without
irrigation; the citrus fruits thrive, but need irrigation.
The third belt lies back of this, farther from the sea; and the land,
without irrigation, is worthless for all purposes except pasturage.
That, in years of average rain-fall, is good.
The soils of South California are chiefly of the cretaceous and
tertiary epochs. The most remarkable thing about them is their great
depth. It is not uncommon, in making wells, to find the soil the same
to a depth of one hundred feet; the same thing is to be observed in
cañons, cuts, and exposed bluffs on the sea-shore. This accounts for
the great fertility of much of the land. Crops are raised year after
year, sometimes for twenty successive years, on the same fields,
without the soil's showing exhaustion; and what are called volunteer
crops, sowing themselves, give good yields for the first, second, and
even third year after the original planting.
To provide for a wholesome variety and succession of seasons, in a
country where both winter and summer were debarred full reign, was a
meteorological problem that might well have puzzled even Nature's
ingenuity. But next to a vacuum, she abhors monotony; and to avoid it,
she has, in California, resorted even to the water-cure,--getting her
requisite alternation of seasons by making one wet and the other dry.
To define the respective limits of these seasons becomes more and more
difficult the longer one stays in California, and the more one studies
rain-fall statistics. Generally speaking, the wet season may be said
to be from the middle of October to the middle of April, corresponding
nearly with the outside limits of the north temperate zone season of
snows. A good description of the two seasons would be--and it is not
so purely humorous and unscientific as it sounds--that the wet season
is the season in which it can rain, but may not; and the dry season is
the season in which it cannot rain, but occasionally does.
Sometimes the rains expected and hoped for in October do not begin
until March, and the whole country is in anxiety; a drought in the wet
season meaning drought for a year, and great losses. There have been
such years in California, and the dread of them is well founded. But
often the rains, coming later than their wont, are so full and steady
that the requisite number of inches fall, and the year's supply is
made good. The average rain-fall in San Diego County is ten inches; in
Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, fifteen; in Santa
Barbara, twenty. These five counties are all that properly come under
the name of South California, resting the division on natural and
climatic grounds. The political division, if ever made, will be based
on other than natural or climatic reasons, and will include two,
possibly three, more counties.
The pricelessness of water in a land where no rain falls during six
months of the year cannot be appreciated by one who has not lived in
such a country. There is a saying in South California that if a man
buys water he can get his land thrown in. This is only an epigrammatic
putting of the literal fact that the value of much of the land
depends solely upon the water which it holds or controls.
Four systems of irrigation are practised: First, flooding the land.
This is possible only in flat districts, where there are large heads
of water. It is a wasteful method, and is less and less used each
year. The second system is by furrows. By this system a large head of
water is brought upon the land and distributed in small streams in
many narrow furrows. The streams are made as small as will run across
the ground, and are allowed to run only twenty-four hours at a time.
The third system is by basins dug around tree roots. To these basins
water is brought by pipes or ditches; or, in mountain lands, by
flumes. The fourth system is by sub-irrigation. This is the most
expensive system of all, but is thought to economize water. The water
is carried in pipes laid from two to three feet under ground. By
opening valves in these pipes the water is let out and up, but never
comes above the surface.
The appliances of one sort and another belonging to these irrigation
systems add much to the picturesqueness of South California
landscapes. Even the huge, tower-like, round-fanned windmills by which
the water is pumped up are sometimes, spite of their clumsiness, made
effective by gay colors and by vines growing on them. If they had
broad, stretching arms, like the Holland windmills, the whole country
would seem a-flutter.
The history of the industries of South California since the American
occupation is interesting in its record of successions,--successions,
not the result of human interventions and decisions so much as of
climatic fate, which, in epoch after epoch, created different
situations.
The history begins with the cattle interest; hardly an industry,
perhaps, or at any rate an unindustrious one, but belonging in point
of time at the head of the list of the ways and means by which money
has been made in the country. It dates back to the old mission days;
to the two hundred head of cattle which the wise Galvez brought, in
1769, for stocking the three missions projected in Upper California.
From these had grown, in the sixty years of the friars' unhindered
rule, herds, of which it is no exaggeration to say that they covered
thousands of hills and were beyond counting. It is probable that even
the outside estimates of their numbers were short of the truth. The
cattle wealth, the reckless ruin of the secularization period,
survived, and was the leading wealth of the country at the time of its
surrender to the United States. It was most wastefully handled. The
cattle were killed, as they had been in the mission days, simply for
their hides and tallow. Kingdoms full of people might have been fed on
the beef which rotted on the ground every year, and the California
cattle ranch in which either milk or butter could be found was an
exception to the rule.
Into the calm of this half-barbaric life broke the fierce excitement
of the gold discovery in 1849. The swarming hordes of ravenous miners
must be fed; beef meant gold. The cattlemen suddenly found in their
herds a new source of undreamed-of riches. Cattle had been sold as low
as two dollars and a half a head. When the gold fever was at its
highest, there were days and places in which they sold for three
hundred. It is not strange that the rancheros lost their heads, grew
careless and profligate.
Then came the drought of 1864, which killed off cattle by thousands of
thousands. By thousands they were driven over steep places into the
sea to save pasturage, and to save the country from the stench and the
poison of their dying of hunger. In April of that year, fifty thousand
head were sold in Santa Barbara for thirty-seven and a half cents a
head. Many of the rancheros were ruined; they had to mortgage their
lands to live; their stock was gone; they could not farm; values so
sank, that splendid estates were not worth over ten cents an acre.
Then came in a new set of owners. From the north and from the interior
poured in the thriftier sheep men, with big flocks; and for a few
years the wide belt of good pasturage land along the coast was chiefly
a sheep country.
Slowly farmers followed; settling, in the beginning, around town
centres such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Ventura. Grains and
vegetables were grown for a resource when cattle and sheep should
fail. Cows needed water all the year round; corn only a few months. A
wheat-field might get time to ripen in a year when by reason of a
drought a herd of cattle would die.
Thus the destiny of the country steadily went on toward its
fulfilling, because the inexorable logic of the situation forced
itself into the minds of the population. From grains and vegetables to
fruits was a short and natural step, in the balmy air, under the sunny
sky, and with the traditions and relics of the old friars' opulent
fruit growths lingering all through the land. Each palm, orange-tree,
and vineyard left on the old mission sites was a way-signal to the new
peoples; mute, yet so eloquent, the wonder is that so many years
should have elapsed before the road began to be thronged.
Such, in brief, is the chronicle of the development of South
California's outdoor industries down to the present time; of the
successions through which the country has been making ready to become
what it will surely be, the Garden of the world,--a garden with which
no other country can vie; a garden in which will grow, side by side,
the grape and the pumpkin, the pear and the orange, the olive and the
apple, the strawberry and the lemon, Indian corn and the banana, wheat
and the guava.
The leading position which the fruit interest will ultimately take has
been reached only in Los Angeles County. There the four chief
industries, ranged according to their relative importance, stand as
follows: Fruit, grain, wool, stock, and dairy. This county may be said
to be pre-eminently the garden of the Garden. No other of the five
counties can compete with it. Its fruit harvest is nearly
unintermitted all the year round. The main orange crop ripens from
January to May, though oranges hang on the trees all the year. The
lemon, lime, and citron ripen and hang, like the orange. Apricots,
pears, peaches, nectarines, strawberries, currants, and figs are
plentiful in June; apples, pears, peaches, during July and August.
Late in July grapes begin, and last till January. September is the
best month of all, having grapes, peaches, pomegranates, walnuts,
almonds, and a second crop of figs. From late in August till
Christmas, the vintage does not cease.
The county has a sea-coast line of one hundred miles, and contains
three millions of acres; two thirds mountain and desert, the remaining
million good pasturage and tillable land. What is known as the great
Los Angeles valley has an area of about sixty miles in length by
thirty in width, and contains the three rivers of the county,--the
Los Angeles, the Santa Ana, and the San Gabriel. Every drop of the
water of these rivers and of the numberless little springs and streams
ministering to their system is owned, rated, utilized, and, one might
almost add, wrangled over. The chapters of these water litigations are
many and full; and it behooves every new settler in the county to
inform himself on that question first of all, and thoroughly.
In the Los Angeles valley lie several lesser valleys, fertile and
beautiful; most notable of these, the San Gabriel valley, where was
the site of the old San Gabriel Mission, twelve miles east of the town
of Los Angeles. This valley is now taken up in large ranches, or in
colonies of settlers banded together for mutual help and security in
matter of water rights. This colony feature is daily becoming more and
more an important one in the development of the whole country. Small
individual proprietors cannot usually afford the purchase of
sufficient water to make horticultural enterprises successful or safe.
The incorporated colony, therefore, offers advantages to large numbers
of settlers of a class that could not otherwise get foothold in the
country,--the men of comparatively small means, who expect to work
with their hands and await patiently the slow growth of moderate
fortunes,--a most useful and abiding class, making a solid basis for
prosperity. Some of the best results in South California have already
been attained in colonies of this sort, such as Anaheim, Riverside,
and Pasadena. The method is regarded with increasing favor. It is a
rule of give and take, which works equally well for both country and
settlers.
The South California statistics of fruits, grain, wool, honey, etc.,
read more like fancy than like fact, and are not readily believed by
one unacquainted with the country. The only way to get a real
comprehension and intelligent acceptance of them is to study them on
the ground. By a single visit to a great ranch one is more enlightened
than he would be by committing to memory scores of Equalization Board
Reports. One of the very best, if not the best, for this purpose is
Baldwin's ranch, in the San Gabriel valley. It includes a large part
of the old lands of the San Gabriel Mission, and is a principality in
itself.
There are over a hundred men on its pay-roll, which averages $4,000 a
month. Another $4,000 does not more than meet its running expenses. It
has $6,000 worth of machinery for its grain harvests alone. It has a
dairy of forty cows, Jersey and Durham; one hundred and twenty
work-horses and mules, and fifty thoroughbreds.
It is divided into four distinct estates: the Santa Anita, of 16,000
acres; Puente, 18,000; Merced, 20,000; and the Potrero, 25,000. The
Puente and Merced are sheep ranches, and have 20,000 sheep on them.
The Potrero is rented out to small farmers. The Santa Anita is the
home estate. On it are the homes of the family and of the laborers. It
has fifteen hundred acres of oak grove, four thousand acres in grain,
five hundred in grass for hay, one hundred and fifty in orange
orchards, fifty of almond trees, sixty of walnuts, twenty-five of
pears, fifty of peaches, twenty of lemons, and five hundred in vines;
also small orchards of chestnuts, hazel-nuts, and apricots; and
thousands of acres of good pasturage.
From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in May, he will drive
through a wild garden,--asters, yellow and white; scarlet pentstemons,
blue larkspur, monk's-hood; lupines, white and blue; gorgeous golden
eschscholtzia, alder, wild lilac, white sage,--all in riotous
flowering.
Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he will look southward
down gentle slopes of orchards and vineyards far across the valley,
the tints growing softer and softer, and blending more and more with
each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze. Driving from
orchard to orchard, down half-mile avenues through orchards skirting
seemingly endless stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what
comes of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of hundreds of
acres, and the Equalization Board Statistics no longer appear to him
even large. It does not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should
be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in vines, when here on
one man's ranch are five hundred acres. The last Equalization Board
Report said the county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees. It
would hardly have surprised him to be told that there were as many as
that in the Santa Anita groves alone. The effect on the eye of such
huge tracts, planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase
enormously the apparent size of the tract; the mind stumbles on the
very threshold of the attempt to reckon its distances and numbers, and
they become vaster and vaster as they grow vague.
The orange orchard is not the unqualifiedly beautiful spectacle one
dreams it will be; nor, in fact, is it so beautiful as it ought to be,
with its evergreen shining foliage, snowy blossoms, and golden fruit
hanging together and lavishly all the year round. I fancy that if
travellers told truth, ninety-nine out of a hundred would confess to a
grievous disappointment at their first sight of the orange at home. In
South California the trees labor under the great disadvantage of being
surrounded by bare brown earth. How much this dulls their effect one
realizes on finding now and then a neglected grove where grass has
been allowed to grow under the trees, to their ruin as fruit-bearers,
but incomparably heightening their beauty. Another fatal defect in the
orange-tree is its contour. It is too round, too stout for its height;
almost as bad a thing in a tree as in a human being. The uniformity of
this contour of the trees, combined with the regularity of their
setting in evenly spaced rows, gives large orange groves a certain
tiresome quality, which one recognizes with a guilty sense of being
shamefully ungrateful for so much splendor of sheen and color. The
exact spherical shape of the fruit possibly helps on this
tiresomeness. One wonders if oblong bunches of long-pointed and
curving fruit, banana-like, set irregularly among the glossy green
leaves, would not look better; which wonder adds to ingratitude an
impertinence, of which one suddenly repents on seeing such a tree as I
saw in a Los Angeles garden in the winter of 1882,--a tree not over
thirty feet high, with twenty-five hundred golden oranges hanging on
it, among leaves so glossy they glittered in the sun with the glitter
of burnished metal. Never the Hesperides saw a more resplendent sight.
But the orange looks its best plucked and massed; it lends itself then
to every sort and extent of decoration. At a citrus fair in the
Riverside colony in March, 1882, in a building one hundred and fifty
feet long by sixty wide, built of redwood planks, were five long
tables loaded with oranges and lemons; rows, plates, pyramids,
baskets; the bright redwood walls hung with great boughs, full as
when broken from the tree; and each plate and pyramid decorated with
the shining green leaves. The whole place was fairly ablaze, and made
one think of the Arabian Nights' Tales. The acme of success in orange
culture in California is said to have been attained in this Riverside
colony, though it is only six years old, and does not yet number two
thousand souls. There are in its orchards 209,000 orange-trees, of
which 28,000 are in bearing, 20,000 lemon trees, and 8,000 limes.
The profits of orange culture are slow to begin, but, having once
begun, mount up fast. Orange orchards at San Gabriel have in many
instances netted $500 an acre annually. The following estimate, the
result of sixteen years' experience, is probably a fair one of the
outlay and income of a small orange grove:--
10 acres of land, at $75 per acre $750.00
1000 trees, at $75 per hundred 750.00
Ploughing and harrowing, $2.50 per acre 25.00
Digging holes, planting, 10 cents each 100.00
Irrigating and planting 10.00
Cultivation after irrigation 4.50
3 subsequent irrigations during the year 30.00
3 subsequent cultivations the first year 13.50
---------
Total cost, first year $1,683.00
This estimate of cost of land is based on the price of the best
lands in the San Gabriel valley. Fair lands can be bought in
other sections at lower prices.
Second year.--An annual ploughing in January $25.00
Four irrigations during year 40.00
Six cultivations during year 27.00
Third year 125.00
Fourth year 150.00
Fifth year 200.00
Interest on investment 1,000.00
---------
Total $3,250.00
If first-class, healthy, thrifty budded trees are planted, they
will begin to fruit the second year. The third year, a few
boxes may be marketed. The fourth year, there will be an
average yield of at least 75 oranges to the tree, which will
equal:
75,000, at $10 per thousand net $750.00
The fifth year, 250 per tree, 250,000, at $10 per
thousand 2,500.00
---------
Total $3,250.00
The orchard is now clear gain, allowing $1,000 as interest on
the investment. The increase in the volume of production will
continue, until at the end of the tenth year an average of
1,000 oranges to a tree would not be an extraordinary yield.
To all these formulas of reckoning should be added one with the
algebraic _x_ representing the unknown quantity, and standing for
insect enemies at large. Each kind of fruit has its own, which must be
fought with eternal vigilance. No port, in any country, has more rigid
laws of quarantine than are now enforced in California against these
insect enemies. Grafts, cuttings, fruit, if even suspected, are seized
and compelled to go through as severe disinfecting processes as if
they were Cuban passengers fresh from a yellow fever epidemic.
The orange's worst enemy is a curious insect, the scale-bug. It looks
more like a mildew than like anything alive; is usually black,
sometimes red. Nothing but violent treatment with tobacco will
eradicate it. Worse than the scale-bug, in that he works out of sight
underground, is the gopher. He has gnawed every root of a tree bare
before a tooth-mark on the trunk suggests his presence, and then it is
too late to save the tree. The rabbit also is a pernicious ally in the
barking business; he, however, being shy, soon disappears from settled
localities; but the gopher stands not in fear of man or men. Only
persistent strychnine, on his door-sills and thrust down his winding
stairs, will save the orchard in which he has founded a community.
The almond and the walnut orchards are beautiful features in the
landscape all the year round, no less in the winter, when their
branches are naked, than in the season of their full leaf and bearing.
In fact, the broad spaces of filmy gray made by their acres when
leafless are delicious values in contrast with the solid green of the
orange orchards. The exquisite revelation of tree systems which
stripped boughs give is seen to more perfect advantage against a warm
sky than a cold one, and is heightened in effect standing side by side
with the flowing green pepper-trees and purple eucalyptus.
In the time of blossoms, an almond orchard, seen from a distance, is
like nothing so much as a rosy-white cloud, floated off a sunset and
spread on the earth. Seen nearer, it is a pink snow-storm, arrested
and set on stalks, with an orchestra buzz of bees filling the air.
It is a pity that the almond-tree should not be more repaying; for it
will be a sore loss to the beauty of the country when the orchards are
gone, and this is only a question of time. They are being uprooted and
cast out. The crop is a disappointing one, of uncertain yield, and
troublesome to prepare. The nuts must be five times handled: first
picked, then shucked, then dried, then bleached, and then again dried.
After the first drying, they are dipped by basketfuls into hot water,
then poured into the bleachers,--boxes with perforated bottoms.
Underneath these is a sulphur fire to which the nuts must be exposed
for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they are again spread in a
drying-house. The final gathering them up to send to market makes
really a sixth handling; and after all is said and done, the nuts are
not very good, being flavorless in comparison with those grown in
Europe.
The walnut orchard is a better investment, and no less a delight to
the eye. While young, the walnut-tree is graceful; when old, it is
stately. It is a sturdy bearer, and if it did not bear at all, would
be worth honorable place and room on large estates, simply for its
avenues of generous shade. It is planted in the seed, and transplanted
at two or three years old, with only twenty-seven trees to an acre.
They begin to bear at ten years, reach full bearing at fifteen, and do
not give sign of failing at fifty.
Most interesting of all South California's outdoor industries is the
grape culture. To speak of grape culture is to enter upon a subject
which needs a volume. Its history, its riches, past and prospective,
its methods, its beautiful panorama of pictures, each by itself is
worth study and exhaustive treatment. Since the days of Eschol, the
vine and the vineyard have been honored in the thoughts and the
imaginations of men; they furnished shapes and designs for the
earliest sacred decorations in the old dispensation, and suggestions
and symbols for divine parables in the new. No age has been without
them, and no country whose sun was warm enough to make them thrive. It
is safe to predict that so long as the visible frame of the earth
endures, "wine to make glad the heart of man" will be made, loved,
celebrated, and sung.
To form some idea of California's future wealth from the grape
culture, it is only necessary to reflect on the extent of her
grape-growing country as compared with that of France. In France,
before the days of the phylloxera, 5,000,000 of people were supported
entirely by the grape industry, and the annual average of the wine
crop was 2,000,000,000 gallons, with a value of $400,000,000. The
annual wine-yield of California is already estimated at about
10,000,000 gallons. Nearly one third of this is made in South
California, chiefly in Los Angeles County, where the grape culture is
steadily on the increase, five millions of new vines having been set
out in the spring of 1882.
The vineyards offer more variety to the eye than the orange orchards.
In winter, when leafless, they are grotesque; their stocky, twisted,
hunchback stems looking like Hindoo idols or deformed imps, no two
alike in a square mile, all weird, fantastic, uncanny. Their first
leafing out does not do away with this; the imps seem simply to have
put up green umbrellas; but presently the leaves widen and lap, hiding
the uncouth trunks, and spreading over all the vineyard a beautiful,
tender green, with lights and shades breaking exquisitely in the
hollows and curves of the great leaves. From this on, through all the
stages of blossoms and seed-setting, till the clusters are so big and
purple that they gleam out everywhere between the leaves,--sometimes
forty-five pounds on a single vine, if the vine is irrigated, twelve
if it is left to itself. Eight tons of grapes off one acre have been
taken in the Baldwin ranch. There were made there, in 1881, 100,000
gallons of wine and 50,000 of brandy. The vintage begins late in
August, and lasts many weeks, some varieties of grapes ripening later
than others. The vineyards are thronged with Mexican and Indian
pickers. The Indians come in bands, and pitch their tents just outside
the vineyard. They are good workers. The wine-cellars and the great
crushing-vats tell the vineyards' story more emphatically even than
the statistical figures. A vat that will hold 1,000 gallons piled full
of grapes, huge wire wheels driving round and round in the spurting,
foaming mass, the juice flying off through trough-like shoots on each
side into seventy great vats; below, breathless men working the
wheels, loads of grapes coming up momently and being poured into the
swirling vat, the whole air reeking with winy flavor. The scene makes
earth seem young again, old mythologies real; and one would not wonder
to see Bacchus and his leopards come bowling up, with shouting Pan
behind.
The cellars are still, dark, and fragrant. Forty-eight great
oval-shaped butts, ten feet in diameter, holding 2,100 gallons each, I
counted in one cellar. The butts are made of Michigan oak, and have a
fine yellow color, which contrasts well with the red stream of the
wine when it is drawn.
Notwithstanding the increase of the grape culture, the price of grapes
is advancing, some estimates making it forty per cent higher than it
was five years ago. It is a quicker and probably a more repaying
industry than orange-growing. It is reckoned that a vineyard in its
fourth year will produce two tons to the acre; in the seventh year,
four; the fourth year it will be profitable, reckoning the cost of the
vineyard at sixty dollars an acre, exclusive of the first cost of the
land. The annual expense of cultivation, picking, and handling is
about twenty-five dollars. The rapid increase of this culture has been
marvellous. In 1848 there were only 200,000 vines in all California;
in 1862 there were 9,500,000; in 1881, 64,000,000, of which at least
34,000,000 are in full bearing.
Such facts and figures are distressing to the advocates of total
abstinence; but they may take heart in the thought that a by no means
insignificant proportion of these grapes will be made into raisins,
canned, or eaten fresh.
The raisin crop was estimated at 160,000 boxes for 1881. Many
grape-growers believe that in raisin-making will ultimately be found
the greatest profit. The Americans are a raisin-eating people. From
Malaga alone are imported annually into the United States about ten
tons of raisins, one half the entire crop of the Malaga raisin
district. This district has an area of only about four hundred square
miles. In California an area of at least twenty thousand square miles
is adapted to the raisin.
A moderate estimate of the entire annual grape crop of California is
119,000 tons. "Allowing 60,000 tons to be used in making wines, 2,000
tons to be sent fresh to the Eastern States, and 5,000 tons to be made
into raisins, there would still remain 52,000 tons to be eaten fresh
or wasted,--more than one hundred pounds for each resident of
California, including children."[1]
The California wines are as yet of inferior quality. A variety of
still wines and three champagnes are made; but even the best are
looked on with distrust and disfavor by connoisseurs, and until they
greatly improve they will not command a ready market in America. At
present it is to be feared that a large proportion of them are sold
under foreign labels.
* * * * *
Prominent among the minor industries is honey-making. From the great
variety of flowers and their spicy flavor, especially from the
aromatic sages, the honey is said to have a unique and delicious
taste, resembling that of the famous honey of Hymettus.
The crop for 1881, in the four southern counties, was estimated at
three millions of pounds; a statistic that must seem surprising to
General Fremont, who, in his report to Congress of explorations on the
Pacific coast in 1844, stated that the honey-bee could not exist west
of the Sierra Nevadas.
The bee ranches are always picturesque; they are usually in cañons or
on wooded foot-hills, and their villages of tiny bright-colored hives
look like gay Lilliputian encampments. It has appeared to me that men
becoming guardians of bees acquire a peculiar calm philosophy, and are
superior to other farmers and outdoor workers. It would not seem
unnatural that the profound respect they are forced to entertain for
insects so small and so wholly at their mercy should give them
enlarged standards in many things; above all, should breed in them a
fine and just humility toward all creatures.
A striking instance of this is to be seen in one of the most beautiful
cañons of the San Gabriel valley, where, living in a three-roomed,
redwood log cabin, with a vine-covered booth in front, is an old man
kings might envy.
He had a soldier's warranty deed for one hundred and sixty acres of
land, and he elected to take his estate at the head of a brook-swept
gorge, four fifths precipice and rock. In the two miles between his
cabin and the mouth of the gorge, the trail and the brook change sides
sixteen times. When the brook is at its best, the trail goes under
altogether, and there is no getting up or down the cañon. Here, with a
village of bees for companions, the old man has lived for a dozen
years. While the bees are off at work, he sits at home and weaves, out
of the gnarled stems and roots of manzanita and laurels, curious
baskets, chairs, and brackets, for which he finds ready market in Los
Angeles. He knows every tree and shrub in the cañon, and has a fancy
for collecting specimens of all the native woods of the region. These
he shapes into paper-cutters, and polishes them till they are like
satin. He came from Ohio forty years ago, and has lived in a score of
States. The only spot he likes as well as this gorge is Don Yana, on
the Rio Grande River, in Mexico. Sometimes he hankers to go there and
sit under the shadow of big oaks, where the land slopes down to the
river; but "the bee business," he says, "is a good business only for a
man who has the gift of continuance;" and "it's no use to try to put
bees with farms: farms want valleys, bees want mountains."
"There are great back-draws to the bee business, the irregularities of
the flowers being chief; some years there's no honey in the flowers at
all. Some explain it on one hypothesis and some on another, and it
lasts them to quarrel over."
His phrases astonish you; also the quiet courtesy of his manner, so at
odds with his backwoodsman's garb. But presently you learn that he
began life as a lawyer, has been a judge in his time; and when, to
show his assortment of paper-cutters, he lifts down the big book they
are kept in, and you see that it is Voltaire's "Philosophical
Dictionary," you understand how his speech has been fashioned. He
keeps a diary of every hive, the genealogy of every swarm.
"No matter what they do,--the least thing,--we note it right down in
the book. That's the only way to learn bees," he says.
On the outside wall of the cabin is fastened an observation hive, with
glass sides. Here he sits, watch in hand, observing and noting; he
times the bees, in and out, and in each one of their operations. He
watches the queen on her bridal tour in the air; once the drone
bridegroom fell dead on his note-book. "I declare I couldn't help
feeling sort of sorry for him," said the old man.
In a shanty behind the house is the great honey-strainer, a marvellous
invention, which would drive bees mad with despair if they could
understand it. Into a wheel, with perforated spokes, is slipped the
comb full of honey, the cells being first opened with a hot knife. By
the swift turning of this wheel, the honey flies out of the comb, and
pours through a cylinder into a can underneath, leaving the comb whole
and uninjured, ready to be put back into the hive for the patient
robbed bees to fill again. The receiving-can will hold fifteen hundred
pounds; two men can fill it in a day; a single comb is so quickly
drained that a bee might leave his hive on his foraging expedition,
and before he could get his little load of honey and return, the comb
could be emptied and put back. It would be vastly interesting to know
what is thought and said in bee-hives about these mysterious emptyings
of combs.
A still more tyrannical circumvention has been devised, to get extra
rations of honey from bees: false combs, wonderful imitations of the
real ones, are made of wax. Apparently the bees know no difference; at
any rate, they fill the counterfeit full of real honey. These
artificial combs, carefully handled, will last ten or twelve years in
continual use.
The highest yield his hives had ever given him was one hundred and
eighty pounds a hive.
"That's a good yield; at that rate, with three or four hundred hives,
I'd do very well," said the old man. "But you're at the mercy of
speculators in honey as well as everything else. I never count on
getting more than four or five cents a pound. They make more than I
do."
The bee has a full year's work in South California: from March to
August inexhaustible forage, and in all the other months plenty to
do,--no month without some blossoms to be found. His time of danger is
when apricots are ripe and lady-bugs fly.
Of apricots, bees will eat till they are either drunk or stuffed to
death; no one knows which. They do not live to get home. Oddly enough,
they cannot pierce the skins themselves, but have to wait till the
lady-bug has made a hole for them. It must have been an accidental
thing in the outset, the first bee's joining a lady-bug at her feast
of apricot. The bee, in his turn, is an irresistible treat to the
bee-bird and lizard, who pounce upon him when he is on the flower; and
to a stealthy moth, who creeps by night into hives and kills hundreds.
"Nobody need think the bee business is all play," was our old
philosopher's last word. "It's just like everything else in life, and
harder than some things."
* * * * *
The sheep industry is, on the whole, decreasing in California. In
1876, the wool crop of the entire State was 28,000 tons; in 1881, only
21,500. This is the result, in part, of fluctuations in the price of
wool, but more of the growing sense of the greater certainty of
increase from agriculture and horticulture.
The cost of keeping a sheep averages only $1.25 a year. Its wool sells
for $1.50, and for each hundred there will be forty-five lambs, worth
seventy-five cents each. But there have been droughts in California
which have killed over one million sheep in a year; there is always,
therefore, the risk of losing in one year the profits of many.
The sheep ranches are usually desolate places: a great stretch of
seemingly bare lands, with a few fenced corrals, blackened and
foul-smelling; the home and out-buildings clustered together in a
hollow or on a hill-side where there is water; the less human the
neighborhood the better.
The loneliness of the life is, of itself, a salient objection to the
industry. Of this the great owners need know nothing; they can live
where they like. But for the small sheepmen, the shepherds, and, above
all, the herders, it is a terrible life,--how terrible is shown by the
frequency of insanity among herders. Sometimes, after only a few
months of the life, a herder goes suddenly mad. After learning this
fact, it is no longer possible to see the picturesque side of the
effective groups one so often comes on suddenly in the wildernesses:
sheep peacefully grazing, and the shepherd lying on the ground
watching them, or the whole flock racing in a solid, fleecy, billowy
scamper up or down a steep hill-side, with the dogs leaping and
barking on all sides at once. One scans the shepherd's face alone,
with pitying fear lest he may be losing his wits.
A shearing at a large sheep ranch is a grand sight. We had the good
fortune to see one at Baldwin's, at La Puente. Three thousand sheep
had been sheared the day before, and they would shear twenty-five
hundred on this day.
A shed sixty feet long by twenty-five wide, sides open; small pens
full of sheep surrounding it on three sides; eighty men bent over at
every possible angle, eighty sheep being tightly held in every
possible position, eighty shears flashing, glancing, clipping; bright
Mexican eyes shining, laughing Mexican voices jesting. At first it
seemed only a confused scene of phantasmagoria. As our eyes became
familiarized, the confusion disentangled itself, and we could note the
splendid forms of the men and their marvellous dexterity in using the
shears. Less than five minutes it took from the time a sheep was
grasped, dragged in, thrown down, seized by the shearer's knees, till
it was set free, clean shorn, and its three-pound fleece tossed on a
table outside. A good shearer shears seventy or eighty sheep in a day;
men of extra dexterity shear a hundred. The Indians are famous for
skill at shearing, and in all their large villages are organized
shearing-bands, with captains, that go from ranch to ranch in the
shearing-season. There were a half-dozen Indians lying on the ground
outside this shearing-shed at Puente, looking on wistfully. The
Mexicans had crowded them out for that day, and they could get no
chance to work.
A pay clerk stood in the centre of the shed with a leathern wallet
full of five-cent pieces. As soon as a man had sheared his sheep, he
ran to the clerk, fleece in hand, threw down the fleece, and received
his five-cent piece. In one corner of the shed was a barrel of beer,
which was retailed at five cents a glass; and far too many of the
five-cent pieces changed hands again the next minute at the beer
barrel. As fast as the fleeces were tossed out from the shed, they
were thrown up to a man standing on the top of the roof. This man
flung them into an enormous bale-sack, swinging wide-mouthed from a
derrick; in the sack stood another man, who jumped on the wool to pack
it down tight.
As soon as the shearers perceived that their pictures were being drawn
by the artist in our party, they were all agog; by twos and threes
they left their work and crowded around the carriage, peering,
commenting, asking to have their portraits taken, quizzing those whose
features they recognized; it was like Italy rather than America. One
tattered fellow, whose shoeless feet were tied up in bits of
gunny-bags, was distressed because his trousers were too short. "Would
the gentleman kindly make them in the drawing a little farther down
his legs? It was an accident they were so short." All were ready to
pose and stand, even in the most difficult attitudes, as long as was
required. Those who had done so asked, like children, if their names
could not be put in the book; so I wrote them all down: "Juan Canero,
Juan Rivera, Felipe Ybara, José Jesus Lopez, and Domingo Garcia." The
space they will fill is a little thing to give; and there is a
satisfaction in the good faith of printing them, though the shearers
will most assuredly never know it.
The faces of the sheep being shorn were piteous; not a struggle, not a
bleat, the whole of their unwillingness and terror being written in
their upturned eyes. "As a sheep before her shearers is dumb" will
always have for me a new significance.
The shepherd in charge of the Puente ranch is an Italian named
Gaetano. The porch of his shanty was wreathed with vines and blossoms,
and opened on a characteristic little garden, half garlic, the other
half pinks and geraniums. As I sat there looking out on the scene, he
told me of a young man who had come from Italy to be herder for him,
and who had gone mad and shot himself.
"Three go crazy last year," he said. "Dey come home, not know noting.
You see, never got company for speak at all."
This young boy grew melancholy almost at once, was filled with
abnormal fears of the coyotes, and begged for a pistol to shoot them
with. "He want my pistol. I not want give. I say, You little sick; you
stay home in house; I send oder man. My wife she go town buy clothes
for baptism one baby got. He get pistol in drawer while she gone."
They found him lying dead with his catechism in one hand and the
pistol in the other. As Gaetano finished the story, a great flock of
two thousand shorn sheep were suddenly let out from one of the
corrals. With a great burst of bleating they dashed off, the colly
running after them. Gaetano seized his whistle and blew a sharp call
on it. The dog halted, looked back, uncertain for a second; one more
whistle, and he bounded on.
"He know," said Gaetano. "He take dem two tousand all right. I like
better dat dog as ten men."
* * * * *
On the list of South California's outdoor industries, grain stands
high, and will always continue to do so. Wheat takes the lead; but
oats, barley, and corn are of importance. Barley is always a staple,
and averages twenty bushels to the acre.