THE GENERAL OUTLOOK.--LAND AND PRICES.
From the northern limit of California to the southern is about the same
distance as from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Charleston, South
Carolina. Of these two coast lines, covering nearly ten degrees of
latitude, or over seven hundred miles, the Atlantic has greater extremes
of climate and greater monthly variations, and the Pacific greater
variety of productions. The State of California is, however, so
mountainous, cut by longitudinal and transverse ranges, that any
reasonable person can find in it a temperature to suit him the year
through. But it does not need to be explained that it would be difficult
to hit upon any general characteristic that would apply to the stretch
of the Atlantic coast named, as a guide to a settler looking for a home;
the description of Massachusetts would be wholly misleading for South
Carolina. It is almost as difficult to make any comprehensive statement
about the long line of the California coast.
It is possible, however, limiting the inquiry to the southern third of
the State--an area of about fifty-eight thousand square miles, as large
as Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island--to answer fairly some of the questions oftenest asked about it.
These relate to the price of land, its productiveness, the kind of
products most profitable, the sort of labor required, and its
desirability as a place of residence for the laborer, for the farmer or
horticulturist of small means, and for the man with considerable
capital. Questions on these subjects cannot be answered categorically,
but I hope to be able, by setting down my own observations and using
trustworthy reports, to give others the material on which to exercise
their judgment. In the first place, I think it demonstrable that a
person would profitably exchange 160 acres of farming land east of the
one hundredth parallel for ten acres, with a water right, in Southern
California.
[Illustration: YUCCA-PALM.]
In making this estimate I do not consider the question of health or
merely the agreeability of the climate, but the conditions of labor, the
ease with which one could support a family, and the profits over and
above a fair living. It has been customary in reckoning the value of
land there to look merely to the profit of it beyond its support of a
family, forgetting that agriculture and horticulture the world over,
like almost all other kinds of business, usually do little more than
procure a good comfortable living, with incidental education, to those
who engage in them. That the majority of the inhabitants of Southern
California will become rich by the culture of the orange and the vine is
an illusion; but it is not an illusion that twenty times its present
population can live there in comfort, in what might be called luxury
elsewhere, by the cultivation of the soil, all far removed from poverty
and much above the condition of the majority of the inhabitants of the
foreign wine and fruit-producing countries. This result is assured by
the extraordinary productiveness of the land, uninterrupted the year
through, and by the amazing extension of the market in the United States
for products that can be nowhere else produced with such certainty and
profusion as in California. That State is only just learning how to
supply a demand which is daily increasing, but it already begins to
command the market in certain fruits. This command of the market in the
future will depend upon itself, that is, whether it will send East and
North only sound wine, instead of crude, ill-cured juice of the grape,
only the best and most carefully canned apricots, nectarines, peaches,
and plums, only the raisins and prunes perfectly prepared, only such
oranges, lemons, and grapes and pears as the Californians are willing to
eat themselves. California has yet much to learn about fruit-raising and
fruit-curing, but it already knows that to compete with the rest of the
world in our markets it must beat the rest of the world in quality. It
will take some time yet to remove the unfavorable opinion of California
wines produced in the East by the first products of the vineyards sent
here.
[Illustration: DATE-PALM.]
The difficulty for the settler is that he cannot "take up" ten acres
with water in California as he can 160 acres elsewhere. There is left
little available Government land. There is plenty of government land not
taken up and which may never be occupied, that is, inaccessible mountain
and irreclaimable desert. There are also little nooks and fertile spots
here and there to be discovered which may be pre-empted, and which will
some day have value. But practically all the arable land, or that is
likely to become so, is owned now in large tracts, under grants or by
wholesale purchase. The circumstances of the case compelled associate
effort. Such a desert as that now blooming region known as Pasadena,
Pomona, Riverside, and so on, could not be subdued by individual
exertion. Consequently land and water companies were organized. They
bought large tracts of unimproved land, built dams in the mountain
cañons, sunk wells, drew water from the rivers, made reservoirs, laid
pipes, carried ditches and conduits across the country, and then sold
the land with the inseparable water right in small parcels. Thus the
region became subdivided among small holders, each independent, but all
mutually dependent as to water, which is the _sine qua non_ of
existence. It is only a few years since there was a forlorn and
struggling colony a few miles east of Los Angeles known as the Indiana
settlement. It had scant water, no railway communication, and everything
to learn about horticulture. That spot is now the famous Pasadena.
What has been done in the Santa Ana and San Gabriel valleys will be done
elsewhere in the State. There are places in Kern County, north of the
Sierra Madre, where the land produces grain and alfalfa without
irrigation, where farms can be bought at from five to ten dollars an
acre--land that will undoubtedly increase in value with settlement and
also by irrigation. The great county of San Diego is practically
undeveloped, and contains an immense area, in scattered mesas and
valleys, of land which will produce apples, grain, and grass without
irrigation, and which the settler can get at moderate prices. Nay, more,
any one with a little ready money, who goes to Southern California
expecting to establish himself and willing to work, will be welcomed and
aided, and be pretty certain to find some place where he can steadily
improve his condition. But the regions about which one hears most,
which are already fruit gardens and well sprinkled with rose-clad homes,
command prices per acre which seem extravagant. Land, however, like a
mine, gets its value from what it will produce; and it is to be noted
that while the subsidence of the "boom" knocked the value out of
twenty-feet city lots staked out in the wilderness, and out of insanely
inflated city property, the land upon which crops are raised has
steadily appreciated in value.
So many conditions enter into the price of land that it is impossible to
name an average price for the arable land of the southern counties, but
I have heard good judges place it at $100 an acre. The lands, with
water, are very much alike in their producing power, but some, for
climatic reasons, are better adapted to citrus fruits, others to the
raisin grape, and others to deciduous fruits. The value is also affected
by railway facilities, contiguity to the local commercial centre, and
also by the character of the settlement--that is, by its morality,
public spirit, and facilities for education. Every town and settlement
thinks it has special advantages as to improved irrigation, equability
of temperature, adaptation to this or that product, attractions for
invalids, tempered ocean breezes, protection from "northers," schools,
and varied industries. These things are so much matter of personal
choice that each settler will do well to examine widely for himself, and
not buy until he is suited.
Some figures, which may be depended on, of actual sales and of annual
yields, may be of service. They are of the district east of Pasadena and
Pomona, but fairly represent the whole region down to Los Angeles. The
selling price of raisin grape land unimproved, but with water, at
Riverside is $250 to $300 per acre; at South Riverside, $150 to $200; in
the highland district of San Bernardino, and at Redlands (which is a new
settlement east of the city of San Bernardino), $200 to $250 per acre.
At Banning and at Hesperia, which lie north of the San Bernardino range,
$125 to $150 per acre are the prices asked. Distance from the commercial
centre accounts for the difference in price in the towns named. The crop
varies with the care and skill of the cultivator, but a fair average
from the vines at two years is two tons per acre; three years, three
tons; four years, five tons; five years, seven tons. The price varies
with the season, and also whether its sale is upon the vines, or after
picking, drying, and sweating, or the packed product. On the vines $20
per ton is a fair average price. In exceptional cases vineyards at
Riverside have produced four tons per acre in twenty months from the
setting of the cuttings, and six-year-old vines have produced thirteen
and a half tons per acre. If the grower has a crop of, say, 2000 packed
boxes of raisins of twenty pounds each box, it will pay him to pack his
own crop and establish a "brand" for it. In 1889 three adjoining
vineyards in Riverside, producing about the same average crops, were
sold as follows: The first vineyard, at $17 50 per ton on the vines,
yielded $150 per acre; the second, at six cents a pound, in the sweat
boxes, yielded $276 per acre; the third, at $1 80 per box, packed,
yielded $414 per acre.
Land adapted to the deciduous fruits, such as apricots and peaches, is
worth as much as raisin land, and some years pays better. The pear and
the apple need greater elevation, and are of better quality when grown
on high ground than in the valleys. I have reason to believe that the
mountain regions of San Diego County are specially adapted to the apple.
Good orange land unimproved, but with water, is worth from $300 to $500
an acre. If we add to this price the cost of budded trees, the care of
them for four years, and interest at eight per cent. per annum for four
years, the cost of a good grove will be about $1000 an acre. It must be
understood that the profit of an orange grove depends upon care, skill,
and business ability. The kind of orange grown with reference to the
demand, the judgment about more or less irrigation as affecting the
quality, the cultivation of the soil, and the arrangements for
marketing, are all elements in the problem. There are young groves at
Riverside, five years old, that are paying ten per cent. net upon from
$3000 to $5000 an acre; while there are older groves, which, at the
prices for fruit in the spring of 1890--$1 60 per box for seedlings and
$3 per box for navels delivered at the packing-houses--paid at the rate
of ten per cent. net on $7500 per acre.
In all these estimates water must be reckoned as a prime factor. What,
then, is water worth per inch, generally, in all this fruit region from
Redlands to Los Angeles? It is worth just the amount it will add to the
commercial value of land irrigated by it, and that may be roughly
estimated at from $500 to $1000 an inch of continuous flow. Take an
illustration. A piece of land at Riverside below the flow of water was
worth $300 an acre. Contiguous to it was another piece not irrigated
which would not sell for $50 an acre. By bringing water to it, it would
quickly sell for $300, thus adding $250 to its value. As the estimate
at Riverside is that one inch of water will irrigate five acres of fruit
land, five times $250 would be $1250 per inch, at which price water for
irrigation has actually been sold at Riverside.
The standard of measurement of water in Southern California is the
miner's inch under four inches' pressure, or the amount that will flow
through an inch-square opening under a pressure of four inches measured
from the surface of the water in the conduit to the centre of the
opening through which it flows. This is nine gallons a minute, or, as it
is figured, 1728 cubic feet or 12,960 gallons in twenty-four hours, and
1.50 of a cubic foot a second. This flow would cover ten acres about
eighteen inches deep in a year; that is, it would give the land the
equivalent of eighteen inches of rain, distributed exactly when and
where it was needed, none being wasted, and more serviceable than fifty
inches of rainfall as it generally comes. This, with the natural
rainfall, is sufficient for citrus fruits and for corn and alfalfa, in
soil not too sandy, and it is too much for grapes and all deciduous
fruits.