OUR CLIMATIC AND COMMERCIAL MEDITERRANEAN.
Winter as we understand it east of the Rockies does not exist. I
scarcely know how to divide the seasons. There are at most but three.
Spring may be said to begin with December and end in April; summer, with
May (whose days, however, are often cooler than those of January), and
end with September; while October and November are a mild autumn, when
nature takes a partial rest, and the leaves of the deciduous trees are
gone. But how shall we classify a climate in which the strawberry (none
yet in my experience equal to the Eastern berry) may be eaten in every
month of the year, and ripe figs may be picked from July to March? What
shall I say of a frost (an affair of only an hour just before sunrise)
which is hardly anywhere severe enough to disturb the delicate
heliotrope, and even in the deepest valleys where it may chill the
orange, will respect the bloom of that fruit on contiguous ground fifty
or a hundred feet higher? We boast about many things in the United
States, about our blizzards and our cyclones, our inundations and our
areas of low pressure, our hottest and our coldest places in the world,
but what can we say for this little corner which is practically
frostless, and yet never had a sunstroke, knows nothing of
thunder-storms and lightning, never experienced a cyclone, which is so
warm that the year round one is tempted to live out-of-doors, and so
cold that woollen garments are never uncomfortable? Nature here, in this
protected and petted area, has the knack of being genial without being
enervating, of being stimulating without "bracing" a person into the
tomb. I think it conducive to equanimity of spirit and to longevity to
sit in an orange grove and eat the fruit and inhale the fragrance of it
while gazing upon a snow-mountain.
[Illustration: SCENE IN SAN BERNARDINO.]
This southward-facing portion of California is irrigated by many streams
of pure water rapidly falling from the mountains to the sea. The more
important are the Santa Clara, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel, the
Santa Ana, the Santa Margarita, the San Luis Rey, the San Bernardo, the
San Diego, and, on the Mexican border, the Tia Juana. Many of them go
dry or flow underground in the summer months (or, as the Californians
say, the bed of the river gets on top), but most of them can be used for
artificial irrigation. In the lowlands water is sufficiently near the
surface to moisten the soil, which is broken and cultivated; in most
regions good wells are reached at a small depth, in others
artesian-wells spout up abundance of water, and considerable portions of
the regions best known for fruit are watered by irrigating ditches and
pipes supplied by ample reservoirs in the mountains. From natural
rainfall and the sea moisture the mesas and hills, which look arid
before ploughing, produce large crops of grain when cultivated after the
annual rains, without artificial watering.
Southern California has been slowly understood even by its occupants,
who have wearied the world with boasting of its productiveness.
Originally it was a vast cattle and sheep ranch. It was supposed that
the land was worthless except for grazing. Held in princely ranches of
twenty, fifty, one hundred thousand acres, in some cases areas larger
than German principalities, tens of thousands of cattle roamed along the
watercourses and over the mesas, vast flocks of sheep cropped close the
grass and trod the soil into hard-pan. The owners exchanged cattle and
sheep for corn, grain, and garden vegetables; they had no faith that
they could grow cereals, and it was too much trouble to procure water
for a garden or a fruit orchard. It was the firm belief that most of the
rolling mesa land was unfit for cultivation, and that neither forest nor
fruit trees would grow without irrigation. Between Los Angeles and
Redondo Beach is a ranch of 35,000 acres. Seventeen years ago it was
owned by a Scotchman, who used the whole of it as a sheep ranch. In
selling it to the present owner he warned him not to waste time by
attempting to farm it; he himself raised no fruit or vegetables, planted
no trees, and bought all his corn, wheat, and barley. The purchaser,
however, began to experiment. He planted trees and set out orchards
which grew, and in a couple of years he wrote to the former owner that
he had 8000 acres in fine wheat. To say it in a word, there is scarcely
an acre of the tract which is not highly productive in barley, wheat,
corn, potatoes, while considerable parts of it are especially adapted to
the English walnut and to the citrus fruits.
[Illustration: SCENES IN MONTECITO AND LOS ANGELES.]
On this route to the sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could
be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed
and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We
passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an
acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre;
and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has sold in one
season $750 worth of cabbages.
The truth is that almost all the land is wonderfully productive if
intelligently handled. The low ground has water so near the surface that
the pulverized soil will draw up sufficient moisture for the crops; the
mesa, if sown and cultivated after the annual rains, matures grain and
corn, and sustains vines and fruit-trees. It is singular that the first
settlers should never have discovered this productiveness. When it
became apparent--that is, productiveness without artificial
watering--there spread abroad a notion that irrigation generally was not
needed. We shall have occasion to speak of this more in detail, and I
will now only say, on good authority, that while cultivation, not to
keep down the weeds only, but to keep the soil stirred and prevent its
baking, is the prime necessity for almost all land in Southern
California, there are portions where irrigation is always necessary, and
there is no spot where the yield of fruit or grain will not be
quadrupled by judicious irrigation. There are places where irrigation is
excessive and harmful both to the quality and quantity of oranges and
grapes.
The history of the extension of cultivation in the last twenty and
especially in the past ten years from the foot-hills of the Sierra Madre
in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties southward to San Diego is
very curious. Experiments were timidly tried. Every acre of sand and
sage-bush reclaimed southward was supposed to be the last capable of
profitable farming or fruit-growing. It is unsafe now to say of any land
that has not been tried that it is not good. In every valley and on
every hill-side, on the mesas and in the sunny nooks in the mountains,
nearly anything will grow, and the application of water produces
marvellous results. From San Bernardino and Redlands, Riverside, Pomona,
Ontario, Santa Anita, San Gabriel, Pasadena, all the way to Los Angeles,
is almost a continuous fruit garden, the green areas only emphasized by
wastes yet unreclaimed; a land of charming cottages, thriving towns,
hospitable to the fruit of every clime; a land of perpetual sun and
ever-flowing breeze, looked down on by purple mountain ranges tipped
here and there with enduring snow. And what is in progress here will be
seen before long in almost every part of this wonderful land, for
conditions of soil and climate are essentially everywhere the same, and
capital is finding out how to store in and bring from the fastnesses of
the mountains rivers of clear water taken at such elevations that the
whole arable surface can be irrigated. The development of the country
has only just begun.
[Illustration: FAN-PALM, LOS ANGELES.]
[Illustration: YUCCA-PALM, SANTA BARBARA.]
If the reader will look upon the map of California he will see that the
eight counties that form Southern California--San Luis Obispo, Santa
Barbara, Ventura, Kern, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange, and San
Diego--appear very mountainous. He will also notice that the eastern
slopes of San Bernardino and San Diego are deserts. But this is an
immense area. San Diego County alone is as large as Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined, and the amount of arable land in
the valleys, on the foot-hills, on the rolling mesas, is enormous, and
capable of sustaining a dense population, for its fertility and its
yield to the acre under cultivation are incomparable. The reader will
also notice another thing. With the railroads now built and certain to
be built through all this diversified region, round from the Santa
Barbara Mountains to the San Bernardino, the San Jacinto, and down to
Cuyamaca, a ride of an hour or two hours brings one to some point on the
250 miles of sea-coast--a sea-coast genial, inviting in winter and
summer, never harsh, and rarely tempestuous like the Atlantic shore.
Here is our Mediterranean! Here is our Italy! It is a Mediterranean
without marshes and without malaria, and it does not at all resemble the
Mexican Gulf, which we have sometimes tried to fancy was like the
classic sea that laves Africa and Europe. Nor is this region Italian in
appearance, though now and then some bay with its purple hills running
to the blue sea, its surrounding mesas and cañons blooming in
semi-tropical luxuriance, some conjunction of shore and mountain, some
golden color, some white light and sharply defined shadows, some
refinement of lines, some poetic tints in violet and ashy ranges, some
ultramarine in the sea, or delicate blue in the sky, will remind the
traveller of more than one place of beauty in Southern Italy and Sicily.
It is a Mediterranean with a more equable climate, warmer winters and
cooler summers, than the North Mediterranean shore can offer; it is an
Italy whose mountains and valleys give almost every variety of elevation
and temperature.
But it is our commercial Mediterranean. The time is not distant when
this corner of the United States will produce in abundance, and year
after year without failure, all the fruits and nuts which for a thousand
years the civilized world of Europe has looked to the Mediterranean to
supply. We shall not need any more to send over the Atlantic for
raisins, English walnuts, almonds, figs, olives, prunes, oranges,
lemons, limes, and a variety of other things which we know commercially
as Mediterranean products. We have all this luxury and wealth at our
doors, within our limits. The orange and the lemon we shall still bring
from many places; the date and the pineapple and the banana will never
grow here except as illustrations of the climate, but it is difficult to
name any fruit of the temperate and semi-tropic zones that Southern
California cannot be relied on to produce, from the guava to the peach.
It will need further experiment to determine what are the more
profitable products of this soil, and it will take longer experience to
cultivate them and send them to market in perfection. The pomegranate
and the apple thrive side by side, but the apple is not good here unless
it is grown at an elevation where frost is certain and occasional snow
may be expected. There is no longer any doubt about the peach, the
nectarine, the pear, the grape, the orange, the lemon, the apricot, and
so on; but I believe that the greatest profit will be in the products
that cannot be grown elsewhere in the United States--the products to
which we have long given the name of Mediterranean--the olive, the fig,
the raisin, the hard and soft shell almond, and the walnut. The orange
will of course be a staple, and constantly improve its reputation as
better varieties are raised, and the right amount of irrigation to
produce the finest and sweetest is ascertained.
It is still a wonder that a land in which there was no indigenous
product of value, or to which cultivation could give value, should be so
hospitable to every sort of tree, shrub, root, grain, and flower that
can be brought here from any zone and temperature, and that many of
these foreigners to the soil grow here with a vigor and productiveness
surpassing those in their native land. This bewildering adaptability has
misled many into unprofitable experiments, and the very rapidity of
growth has been a disadvantage. The land has been advertised by its
monstrous vegetable productions, which are not fit to eat, and but
testify to the fertility of the soil; and the reputation of its fruits,
both deciduous and citrus, has suffered by specimens sent to Eastern
markets whose sole recommendation was size. Even in the vineyards and
orange orchards quality has been sacrificed to quantity. Nature here
responds generously to every encouragement, but it cannot be forced
without taking its revenge in the return of inferior quality. It is just
as true of Southern California as of any other land, that hard work and
sagacity and experience are necessary to successful horticulture and
agriculture, but it is undeniably true that the same amount of
well-directed industry upon a much smaller area of land will produce
more return than in almost any other section of the United States.
Sensible people do not any longer pay much attention to those tempting
little arithmetical sums by which it is demonstrated that paying so much
for ten acres of barren land, and so much for planting it with vines or
oranges, the income in three years will be a competence to the investor
and his family. People do not spend much time now in gaping over
abnormal vegetables, or trying to convince themselves that wines of
every known variety and flavor can be produced within the limits of one
flat and well-watered field. Few now expect to make a fortune by cutting
arid land up into twenty-feet lots, but notwithstanding the extravagance
of recent speculation, the value of arable land has steadily
appreciated, and is not likely to recede, for the return from it, either
in fruits, vegetables, or grain, is demonstrated to be beyond the
experience of farming elsewhere.
[Illustration: MAGNOLIA AVENUE, RIVERSIDE.]
Land cannot be called dear at one hundred or one thousand dollars an
acre if the annual return from it is fifty or five hundred dollars. The
climate is most agreeable the year through. There are no unpleasant
months, and few unpleasant days. The eucalyptus grows so fast that the
trimmings from the trees of a small grove or highway avenue will in four
or five years furnish a family with its firewood. The strong, fattening
alfalfa gives three, four, five, and even six harvests a year. Nature
needs little rest, and, with the encouragement of water and fertilizers,
apparently none. But all this prodigality and easiness of life detracts
a little from ambition. The lesson has been slowly learned, but it is
now pretty well conned, that hard work is as necessary here as elsewhere
to thrift and independence. The difference between this and many other
parts of our land is that nature seems to work with a man, and not
against him.