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Title: Our Italy
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Release Date: April 5, 2009 [EBook #28506]
Language: English
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[Illustration: SANTA BARBARA.]
OUR ITALY
BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
_Author of Their Pilgrimage, Studies in the South and West, A Little
Journey in the World ... With Many Illustrations_
[Illustration]
_NEW YORK_
_HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE_
Copyright, 1891, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. HOW OUR ITALY IS MADE 1
II. OUR CLIMATIC AND COMMERCIAL MEDITERRANEAN 10
III. EARLY VICISSITUDES.--PRODUCTIONS.--SANITARY CLIMATE 24
IV. THE WINTER OF OUR CONTENT 42
V. HEALTH AND LONGEVITY 52
VI. IS RESIDENCE HERE AGREEABLE? 65
VII. THE WINTER ON THE COAST 72
VIII. THE GENERAL OUTLOOK.--LAND AND PRICES 90
IX. THE ADVANTAGES OF IRRIGATION 99
X. THE CHANCE FOR LABORERS AND SMALL FARMERS 107
XI. SOME DETAILS OF THE WONDERFUL DEVELOPMENT 114
XII. HOW THE FRUIT PERILS WERE MET.--FURTHER DETAILS OF LOCALITIES 128
XIII. THE ADVANCE OF CULTIVATION SOUTHWARD 140
XIV. A LAND OF AGREEABLE HOMES 146
XV. SOME WONDERS BY THE WAY.--YOSEMITE.--MARIPOSA TREES.--MONTEREY 148
XVI. FASCINATIONS OF THE DESERT.--THE LAGUNA PUEBLO 163
XVII. THE HEART OF THE DESERT 177
XVIII. ON THE BRINK OF THE GRAND CAÑON.--THE UNIQUE MARVEL OF NATURE 189
APPENDIX 201
INDEX 219
ILLUSTRATIONS.
SANTA BARBARA _Frontispiece_
PAGE
MOJAVE DESERT 3
MOJAVE INDIAN 4
MOJAVE INDIAN 5
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF RIVERSIDE 7
SCENE IN SAN BERNARDINO 11
SCENES IN MONTECITO AND LOS ANGELES 13
FAN-PALM, LOS ANGELES 16
YUCCA-PALM, SANTA BARBARA 17
MAGNOLIA AVENUE, RIVERSIDE 21
AVENUE LOS ANGELES 27
IN THE GARDEN AT SANTA BARBARA MISSION 31
SCENE AT PASADENA 35
LIVE-OAK NEAR LOS ANGELES 39
MIDWINTER, PASADENA 53
A TYPICAL GARDEN, NEAR SANTA ANA 57
OLD ADOBE HOUSE, POMONA 61
FAN-PALM, FERNANDO ST. LOS ANGELES 63
SCARLET PASSION-VINE 68
ROSE-BUSH, SANTA BARBARA 73
AT AVALON, SANTA CATALINA ISLAND 77
HOTEL DEL CORONADO 83
OSTRICH YARD, CORONADO BEACH 86
YUCCA-PALM 92
DATE-PALM 93
RAISIN-CURING 101
IRRIGATION BY ARTESIAN-WELL SYSTEM 104
IRRIGATION BY PIPE SYSTEM 105
GARDEN SCENE, SANTA ANA 110
A GRAPE-VINE, MONTECITO VALLEY, SANTA BARBARA 116
IRRIGATING AN ORCHARD 120
ORANGE CULTURE 121
IN A FIELD OF GOLDEN PUMPKINS 126
PACKING CHERRIES, POMONA 131
OLIVE-TREES SIX YEARS OLD 136
SEXTON NURSERIES, NEAR SANTA BARBARA 141
SWEETWATER DAM 144
THE YOSEMITE DOME 151
COAST OF MONTEREY 155
CYPRESS POINT 156
NEAR SEAL ROCK 157
LAGUNA--FROM THE SOUTH-EAST 159
CHURCH AT LAGUNA 164
TERRACED HOUSES, PUEBLO OF LAGUNA 167
GRAND CAÑON ON THE COLORADO--VIEW FROM POINT SUBLIME 171
INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH AT LAGUNA 174
GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO--VIEW OPPOSITE POINT SUBLIME 179
TOURISTS IN THE COLORADO CAÑON 183
GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO--VIEW FROM THE HANSE TRAIL 191
OUR ITALY.
CHAPTER I.
HOW OUR ITALY IS MADE.
The traveller who descends into Italy by an Alpine pass never forgets
the surprise and delight of the transition. In an hour he is whirled
down the slopes from the region of eternal snow to the verdure of spring
or the ripeness of summer. Suddenly--it may be at a turn in the
road--winter is left behind; the plains of Lombardy are in view; the
Lake of Como or Maggiore gleams below; there is a tree; there is an
orchard; there is a garden; there is a villa overrun with vines; the
singing of birds is heard; the air is gracious; the slopes are terraced,
and covered with vineyards; great sheets of silver sheen in the
landscape mark the growth of the olive; the dark green orchards of
oranges and lemons are starred with gold; the lusty fig, always a
temptation as of old, leans invitingly over the stone wall; everywhere
are bloom and color under the blue sky; there are shrines by the
way-side, chapels on the hill; one hears the melodious bells, the call
of the vine-dressers, the laughter of girls.
The contrast is as great from the Indians of the Mojave Desert, two
types of which are here given, to the vine-dressers of the Santa Ana
Valley.
Italy is the land of the imagination, but the sensation on first
beholding it from the northern heights, aside from its associations of
romance and poetry, can be repeated in our own land by whoever will
cross the burning desert of Colorado, or the savage wastes of the Mojave
wilderness of stone and sage-brush, and come suddenly, as he must come
by train, into the bloom of Southern California. Let us study a little
the physical conditions.
The bay of San Diego is about three hundred miles east of San Francisco.
The coast line runs south-east, but at Point Conception it turns sharply
east, and then curves south-easterly about two hundred and fifty miles
to the Mexican coast boundary, the extreme south-west limits of the
United States, a few miles below San Diego. This coast, defined by these
two limits, has a southern exposure on the sunniest of oceans. Off this
coast, south of Point Conception, lies a chain of islands, curving in
position in conformity with the shore, at a distance of twenty to
seventy miles from the main-land. These islands are San Miguel, Santa
Rosa, Santa Cruz, Anacapa, Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, Santa Catalina,
San Clemente, and Los Coronados, which lie in Mexican waters. Between
this chain of islands and the main-land is Santa Barbara Channel,
flowing northward. The great ocean current from the north flows past
Point Conception like a mill-race, and makes a suction, or a sort of
eddy. It approaches nearer the coast in Lower California, where the
return current, which is much warmer, flows northward and westward
along the curving shore. The Santa Barbara Channel, which may be called
an arm of the Pacific, flows by many a bold point and lovely bay, like
those of San Pedro, Redondo, and Santa Monica; but it has no secure
harbor, except the magnificent and unique bay of San Diego.
[Illustration: MOJAVE DESERT.]
The southern and western boundary of Southern California is this mild
Pacific sea, studded with rocky and picturesque islands. The northern
boundary of this region is ranges of lofty mountains, from five thousand
to eleven thousand feet in height, some of them always snow-clad, which
run eastward from Point Conception nearly to the Colorado Desert. They
are parts of the Sierra Nevada range, but they take various names,
Santa Ynes, San Gabriel, San Bernardino, and they are spoken of all
together as the Sierra Madre. In the San Gabriel group, "Old Baldy"
lifts its snow-peak over nine thousand feet, while the San Bernardino
"Grayback" rises over eleven thousand feet above the sea. Southward of
this, running down into San Diego County, is the San Jacinto range, also
snow-clad; and eastward the land falls rapidly away into the Salt Desert
of the Colorado, in which is a depression about three hundred feet below
the Pacific.
[Illustration]
The Point Arguilles, which is above Point Conception, by the aid of the
outlying islands, deflects the cold current from the north off the coast
of Southern California, and the mountain ranges from Point Conception
east divide the State of California into two climatic regions, the
southern having more warmth, less rain and fog, milder winds, and less
variation of daily temperature than the climate of Central California to
the north.[A] Other striking climatic conditions are produced by the
daily interaction of the Pacific Ocean and the Colorado Desert,
infinitely diversified in minor particulars by the exceedingly broken
character of the region--a jumble of bare mountains, fruitful
foot-hills, and rich valleys. It would be only from a balloon that one
could get an adequate idea of this strange land.
[Footnote A: For these and other observations upon physical and climatic
conditions I am wholly indebted to Dr. P. C. Remondino and Mr. T. S. Van
Dyke, of San Diego, both scientific and competent authorities.]
The United States has here, then, a unique corner of the earth, without
its like in its own vast territory, and unparalleled, so far as I know,
in the world. Shut off from sympathy with external conditions by the
giant mountain ranges and the desert wastes, it has its own climate
unaffected by cosmic changes. Except a tidal wave from Japan, nothing
would seem to be able to affect or disturb it. The whole of Italy feels
more or less the climatic variations of the rest of Europe. All our
Atlantic coast, all our interior basin from Texas to Manitoba, is in
climatic sympathy. Here is a region larger than New England which
manufactures its own weather and refuses to import any other.
[Illustration]
With considerable varieties of temperature according to elevation or
protection from the ocean breeze, its climate is nearly, on the whole,
as agreeable as that of the Hawaiian Islands, though pitched in a lower
key, and with greater variations between day and night. The key to its
peculiarity, aside from its southern exposure, is the Colorado Desert.
That desert, waterless and treeless, is cool at night and intolerably
hot in the daytime, sending up a vast column of hot air, which cannot
escape eastward, for Arizona manufactures a like column. It flows high
above the mountains westward till it strikes the Pacific and parts with
its heat, creating an immense vacuum which is filled by the air from
the coast flowing up the slope and over the range, and plunging down
6000 feet into the desert. "It is easy to understand," says Mr. Van
Dyke, making his observations from the summit of the Cuyamaca, in San
Diego County, 6500 feet above the sea-level, "how land thus rising a
mile or more in fifty or sixty miles, rising away from the coast, and
falling off abruptly a mile deep into the driest and hottest of American
deserts, could have a great variety of climates.... Only ten miles away
on the east the summers are the hottest, and only sixty miles on the
west the coolest known in the United States (except on this coast), and
between them is every combination that mountains and valleys can
produce. And it is easy to see whence comes the sea-breeze, the glory of
the California summer. It is passing us here, a gentle breeze of six or
eight miles an hour. It is flowing over this great ridge directly into
the basin of the Colorado Desert, 6000 feet deep, where the temperature
is probably 120°, and perhaps higher. For many leagues each side of us
this current is thus flowing at the same speed, and is probably half a
mile or more in depth. About sundown, when the air on the desert cools
and descends, the current will change and come the other way, and flood
these western slopes with an air as pure as that of the Sahara and
nearly as dry.
[Illustration: BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF RIVERSIDE.]
"The air, heated on the western slopes by the sea, would by rising
produce considerable suction, which could be filled only from the sea,
but that alone would not make the sea-breeze as dry as it is. The
principal suction is caused by the rising of heated air from the great
desert.... On the top of old Grayback (in San Bernardino) one can feel
it [this breeze] setting westward, while in the cañons, 6000 feet below,
it is blowing eastward.... All over Southern California the conditions
of this breeze are about the same, the great Mojave Desert and the
valley of the San Joaquin above operating in the same way, assisted by
interior plains and slopes. Hence these deserts, that at first seem to
be a disadvantage to the land, are the great conditions of its climate,
and are of far more value than if they were like the prairies of
Illinois. Fortunately they will remain deserts forever. Some parts will
in time be reclaimed by the waters of the Colorado River, but wet spots
of a few hundred thousand acres would be too trifling to affect general
results, for millions of acres of burning desert would forever defy all
attempts at irrigation or settlement."
This desert-born breeze explains a seeming anomaly in regard to the
humidity of this coast. I have noticed on the sea-shore that salt does
not become damp on the table, that the Portuguese fishermen on Point
Loma are drying their fish on the shore, and that while the hydrometer
gives a humidity as high as seventy-four, and higher at times, and fog
may prevail for three or four days continuously, the fog is rather
"dry," and the general impression is that of a dry instead of the damp
and chilling atmosphere such as exists in foggy times on the Atlantic
coast.
"From the study of the origin of this breeze we see," says Mr. Van Dyke,
"why it is that a wind coming from the broad Pacific should be drier
than the dry land-breezes of the Atlantic States, causing no damp walls,
swelling doors, or rusting guns, and even on the coast drying up,
without salt or soda, meat cut in strips an inch thick and fish much
thicker."
At times on the coast the air contains plenty of moisture, but with the
rising of this breeze the moisture decreases instead of increases. It
should be said also that this constantly returning current of air is
always pure, coming in contact nowhere with marshy or malarious
influences nor any agency injurious to health. Its character causes the
whole coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego to be an agreeable place of
residence or resort summer and winter, while its daily inflowing tempers
the heat of the far inland valleys to a delightful atmosphere in the
shade even in midsummer, while cool nights are everywhere the rule. The
greatest surprise of the traveller is that a region which is in
perpetual bloom and fruitage, where semi-tropical fruits mature in
perfection, and the most delicate flowers dazzle the eye with color the
winter through, should have on the whole a low temperature, a climate
never enervating, and one requiring a dress of woollen in every month.
CHAPTER II.
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.
CHAPTER III.
EARLY VICISSITUDES.--PRODUCTIONS.--SANITARY CLIMATE.
Southern California has rapidly passed through varied experiences, and
has not yet had a fair chance to show the world what it is. It had its
period of romance, of pastoral life, of lawless adventure, of crazy
speculation, all within a hundred years, and it is just now entering
upon its period of solid, civilized development. A certain light of
romance is cast upon this coast by the Spanish voyagers of the sixteenth
century, but its history begins with the establishment of the chain of
Franciscan missions, the first of which was founded by the great Father
Junipero Serra at San Diego in 1769. The fathers brought with them the
vine and the olive, reduced the savage Indians to industrial pursuits,
and opened the way for that ranchero and adobe civilization which, down
to the coming of the American, in about 1840, made in this region the
most picturesque life that our continent has ever seen. Following this
is a period of desperado adventure and revolution, of pioneer
State-building; and then the advent of the restless, the cranky, the
invalid, the fanatic, from every other State in the Union. The first
experimenters in making homes seem to have fancied that they had come to
a ready-made elysium--the idle man's heaven. They seem to have brought
with them little knowledge of agriculture or horticulture, were ignorant
of the conditions of success in this soil and climate, and left behind
the good industrial maxims of the East. The result was a period of
chance experiment, one in which extravagant expectation and boasting to
some extent took the place of industry. The imagination was heated by
the novelty of such varied and rapid productiveness. Men's minds were
inflamed by the apparently limitless possibilities. The invalid and the
speculator thronged the transcontinental roads leading thither. In this
condition the frenzy of 1886-87 was inevitable. I saw something of it in
the winter of 1887. The scenes then daily and commonplace now read like
the wildest freaks of the imagination.
The bubble collapsed as suddenly as it expanded. Many were ruined, and
left the country. More were merely ruined in their great expectations.
The speculation was in town lots. When it subsided it left the climate
as it was, the fertility as it was, and the value of arable land not
reduced. Marvellous as the boom was, I think the present recuperation is
still more wonderful. In 1890, to be sure, I miss the bustle of the
cities, and the creation of towns in a week under the hammer of the
auctioneer. But in all the cities, and most of the villages, there has
been growth in substantial buildings, and in the necessities of civic
life--good sewerage, water supply, and general organization; while the
country, as the acreage of vines and oranges, wheat and barley, grain
and corn, and the shipments by rail testify, has improved more than at
any other period, and commerce is beginning to feel the impulse of a
genuine prosperity, based upon the intelligent cultivation of the
ground. School-houses have multiplied; libraries have been founded; many
"boom" hotels, built in order to sell city lots in the sage-brush, have
been turned into schools and colleges.
There is immense rivalry between different sections. Every Californian
thinks that the spot where his house stands enjoys the best climate and
is the most fertile in the world; and while you are with him you think
he is justified in his opinion; for this rivalry is generally a
wholesome one, backed by industry. I do not mean to say that the habit
of tall talk is altogether lost. Whatever one sees he is asked to
believe is the largest and best in the world. The gentleman of the whip
who showed us some of the finest places in Los Angeles--places that in
their wealth of flowers and semi-tropical gardens would rouse the
enthusiasm of the most jaded traveller--was asked whether there were any
finer in the city. "Finer? Hundreds of them;" and then, meditatively and
regretfully, "I should not dare to show you the best." The
semi-ecclesiastical custodian of the old adobe mission of San Gabriel
explained to us the twenty portraits of apostles on the walls, all done
by Murillo. As they had got out of repair, he had them all repainted by
the best artist. "That one," he said, simply, "cost ten dollars. It
often costs more to repaint a picture than to buy an original."
The temporary evils in the train of the "boom" are fast disappearing. I
was told that I should find the country stagnant. Trade, it is true, is
only slowly coming in, real-estate deals are sleeping, but in all
avenues of solid prosperity and productiveness the country is the
reverse of stagnant. Another misapprehension this visit is correcting. I
was told not to visit Southern California at this season on account of
the heat. But I have no experience of a more delightful summer climate
than this, especially on or near the coast.
[Illustration: AVENUE LOS ANGELES.]
In secluded valleys in the interior the thermometer rises in the daytime
to 85°, 90°, and occasionally 100°, but I have found no place in them
where there was not daily a refreshing breeze from the ocean, where the
dryness of the air did not make the heat seem much less than it was, and
where the nights were not agreeably cool. My belief is that the summer
climate of Southern California is as desirable for pleasure-seekers, for
invalids, for workmen, as its winter climate. It seems to me that a
coast temperature 60° to 75°, stimulating, without harshness or
dampness, is about the perfection of summer weather. It should be said,
however, that there are secluded valleys which become very hot in the
daytime in midsummer, and intolerably dusty. The dust is the great
annoyance everywhere. It gives the whole landscape an ashy tint, like
some of our Eastern fields and way-sides in a dry August. The verdure
and the wild flowers of the rainy season disappear entirely. There is,
however, some picturesque compensation for this dust and lack of green.
The mountains and hills and great plains take on wonderful hues of
brown, yellow, and red.
I write this paragraph in a high chamber in the Hotel del Coronado, on
the great and fertile beach in front of San Diego. It is the 2d of June.
Looking southward, I see the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean,
sparkling in the sun as blue as the waters at Amalfi. A low surf beats
along the miles and miles of white sand continually, with the impetus of
far-off seas and trade-winds, as it has beaten for thousands of years,
with one unending roar and swish, and occasional shocks of sound as if
of distant thunder on the shore. Yonder, to the right, Point Loma
stretches its sharp and rocky promontory into the ocean, purple in the
sun, bearing a light-house on its highest elevation. From this signal,
bending in a perfect crescent, with a silver rim, the shore sweeps
around twenty-five miles to another promontory running down beyond Tia
Juana to the Point of Rocks, in Mexican territory. Directly in
front--they say eighteen miles away, I think five sometimes, and
sometimes a hundred--lie the islands of Coronado, named, I suppose, from
the old Spanish adventurer Vasques de Coronado, huge bulks of beautiful
red sandstone, uninhabited and barren, becalmed there in the changing
blue of sky and sea, like enormous mastless galleons, like degraded
icebergs, like Capri and Ischia. They say that they are stationary. I
only know that when I walk along the shore towards Point Loma they seem
to follow, until they lie opposite the harbor entrance, which is close
by the promontory; and that when I return, they recede and go away
towards Mexico, to which they belong. Sometimes, as seen from the beach,
owing to the difference in the humidity of the strata of air over the
ocean, they seem smaller at the bottom than at the top. Occasionally
they come quite near, as do the sea-lions and the gulls, and again they
almost fade out of the horizon in a violet light. This morning they
stand away, and the fleet of white-sailed fishing-boats from the
Portuguese hamlet of La Playa, within the harbor entrance, which is
dancing off Point Loma, will have a long sail if they pursue the
barracuda to those shadowy rocks.
[Illustration: IN THE GARDEN AT SANTA BARBARA MISSION.]
We crossed the bay the other day, and drove up a wild road to the height
of the promontory, and along its narrow ridge to the light-house. This
site commands one of the most remarkable views in the accessible
civilized world, one of the three or four really great prospects which
the traveller can recall, astonishing in its immensity, interesting in
its peculiar details. The general features are the great ocean, blue,
flecked with sparkling, breaking wavelets, and the wide, curving
coast-line, rising into mesas, foot-hills, ranges on ranges of
mountains, the faintly seen snow-peaks of San Bernardino and San Jacinto
to the Cuyamaca and the flat top of Table Mountain in Mexico. Directly
under us on one side are the fields of kelp, where the whales come to
feed in winter; and on the other is a point of sand on Coronado Beach,
where a flock of pelicans have assembled after their day's fishing, in
which occupation they are the rivals of the Portuguese. The perfect
crescent of the ocean beach is seen, the singular formation of North and
South Coronado Beach, the entrance to the harbor along Point Loma, and
the spacious inner bay, on which lie San Diego and National City, with
lowlands and heights outside sprinkled with houses, gardens, orchards,
and vineyards. The near hills about this harbor are varied in form and
poetic in color, one of them, the conical San Miguel, constantly
recalling Vesuvius. Indeed, the near view, in color, vegetation, and
forms of hills and extent of arable land, suggests that of Naples,
though on analysis it does not resemble it. If San Diego had half a
million of people it would be more like it; but the Naples view is
limited, while this stretches away to the great mountains that overlook
the Colorado Desert. It is certainly one of the loveliest prospects in
the world, and worth long travel to see.
Standing upon this point of view, I am reminded again of the striking
contrasts and contiguous different climates on the coast. In the north,
of course not visible from here, is Mount Whitney, on the borders of
Inyo County and of the State of Nevada, 15,086 feet above the sea, the
highest peak in the United States, excluding Alaska. South of it is
Grayback, in the San Bernardino range, 11,000 feet in altitude, the
highest point above its base in the United States. While south of that
is the depression in the Colorado Desert in San Diego County, about
three hundred feet below the level of the Pacific Ocean, the lowest land
in the United States. These three exceptional points can be said to be
almost in sight of each other.
[Illustration: SCENE AT PASADENA.]
I have insisted so much upon the Mediterranean character of this region
that it is necessary to emphasize the contrasts also. Reserving details
and comments on different localities as to the commercial value of
products and climatic conditions, I will make some general observations.
I am convinced that the fig can not only be grown here in sufficient
quantity to supply our markets, but of the best quality. The same may be
said of the English walnut. This clean and handsome tree thrives
wonderfully in large areas, and has no enemies. The olive culture is in
its infancy, but I have never tasted better oil than that produced at
Santa Barbara and on San Diego Bay. Specimens of the pickled olive are
delicious, and when the best varieties are generally grown, and the best
method of curing is adopted, it will be in great demand, not as a mere
relish, but as food. The raisin is produced in all the valleys of
Southern California, and in great quantities in the hot valley of San
Joaquin, beyond the Sierra Madre range. The best Malaga raisins, which
have the reputation of being the best in the world, may never come to
our market, but I have never eaten a better raisin for size, flavor, and
thinness of skin than those raised in the El Cajon Valley, which is
watered by the great flume which taps a reservoir in the Cuyamaca
Mountains, and supplies San Diego. But the quality of the raisin in
California will be improved by experience in cultivation and handling.
The contrast with the Mediterranean region--I refer to the western
basin--is in climate. There is hardly any point along the French and
Italian coast that is not subject to great and sudden changes, caused by
the north wind, which has many names, or in the extreme southern
peninsula and islands by the sirocco. There are few points that are not
reached by malaria, and in many resorts--and some of them most sunny and
agreeable to the invalid--the deadliest fevers always lie in wait. There
is great contrast between summer and winter, and exceeding variability
in the same month. This variability is the parent of many diseases of
the lungs, the bowels, and the liver. It is demonstrated now by
long-continued observations that dampness and cold are not so inimical
to health as variability.
The Southern California climate is an anomaly. It has been the subject
of a good deal of wonder and a good deal of boasting, but it is worthy
of more scientific study than it has yet received. Its distinguishing
feature I take to be its equability. The temperature the year through is
lower than I had supposed, and the contrast is not great between the
summer and the winter months. The same clothing is appropriate, speaking
generally, for the whole year. In all seasons, including the rainy days
of the winter months, sunshine is the rule. The variation of temperature
between day and night is considerable, but if the new-comer exercises a
little care, he will not be unpleasantly affected by it. There are coast
fogs, but these are not chilling and raw. Why it is that with the
hydrometer showing a considerable humidity in the air the general effect
of the climate is that of dryness, scientists must explain. The constant
exchange of desert airs with the ocean air may account for the anomaly,
and the actual dryness of the soil, even on the coast, is put forward as
another explanation. Those who come from heated rooms on the Atlantic
may find the winters cooler than they expect, and those used to the
heated terms of the Mississippi Valley and the East will be surprised at
the cool and salubrious summers. A land without high winds or
thunder-storms may fairly be said to have a unique climate.
[Illustration: LIVE-OAK NEAR LOS ANGELES.]
I suppose it is the equability and not conditions of dampness or dryness
that renders this region so remarkably exempt from epidemics and endemic
diseases. The diseases of children prevalent elsewhere are unknown here;
they cut their teeth without risk, and _cholera infantum_ never visits
them. Diseases of the bowels are practically unknown. There is no
malaria, whatever that may be, and consequently an absence of those
various fevers and other disorders which are attributed to malarial
conditions. Renal diseases are also wanting; disorders of the liver and
kidneys, and Bright's disease, gout, and rheumatism, are not native. The
climate in its effect is stimulating, but at the same time soothing to
the nerves, so that if "nervous prostration" is wanted, it must be
brought here, and cannot be relied on to continue long. These facts are
derived from medical practice with the native Indian and Mexican
population. Dr. Remondino, to whom I have before referred, has made the
subject a study for eighteen years, and later I shall offer some of the
results of his observations upon longevity. It is beyond my province to
venture any suggestion upon the effect of the climate upon deep-seated
diseases, especially of the respiratory organs, of invalids who come
here for health. I only know that we meet daily and constantly so many
persons in fair health who say that it is impossible for them to live
elsewhere that the impression is produced that a considerable proportion
of the immigrant population was invalid. There are, however, two
suggestions that should be made. Care is needed in acclimation to a
climate that differs from any previous experience; and the locality that
will suit any invalid can only be determined by personal experience. If
the coast does not suit him, he may be benefited in a protected valley,
or he may be improved on the foot-hills, or on an elevated mesa, or on a
high mountain elevation.
One thing may be regarded as settled. Whatever the sensibility or the
peculiarity of invalidism, the equable climate is exceedingly favorable
to the smooth working of the great organic functions of respiration,
digestion, and circulation.
It is a pity to give this chapter a medical tone. One need not be an
invalid to come here and appreciate the graciousness of the air; the
color of the landscape, which is wanting in our Northern clime; the
constant procession of flowers the year through; the purple hills
stretching into the sea; the hundreds of hamlets, with picturesque homes
overgrown with roses and geranium and heliotrope, in the midst of orange
orchards and of palms and magnolias, in sight of the snow-peaks of the
giant mountain ranges which shut in this land of marvellous beauty.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WINTER OF OUR CONTENT.
California is the land of the Pine and the Palm. The tree of the
Sierras, native, vigorous, gigantic, and the tree of the Desert, exotic,
supple, poetic, both flourish within the nine degrees of latitude. These
two, the widely separated lovers of Heine's song, symbolize the
capacities of the State, and although the sugar-pine is indigenous, and
the date-palm, which will never be more than an ornament in this
hospitable soil, was planted by the Franciscan Fathers, who established
a chain of missions from San Diego to Monterey over a century ago, they
should both be the distinction of one commonwealth, which, in its seven
hundred miles of indented sea-coast, can boast the climates of all
countries and the products of all zones.
If this State of mountains and valleys were divided by an east and west
line, following the general course of the Sierra Madre range, and
cutting off the eight lower counties, I suppose there would be conceit
enough in either section to maintain that it only is the Paradise of the
earth, but both are necessary to make the unique and contradictory
California which fascinates and bewilders the traveller. He is told that
the inhabitants of San Francisco go away from the draught of the Golden
Gate in the summer to get warm, and yet the earliest luscious cherries
and apricots which he finds in the far south market of San Diego come
from the Northern Santa Clara Valley. The truth would seem to be that in
an hour's ride in any part of the State one can change his climate
totally at any time of the year, and this not merely by changing his
elevation, but by getting in or out of the range of the sea or the
desert currents of air which follow the valleys.
To recommend to any one a winter climate is far from the writer's
thought. No two persons agree on what is desirable for a winter
residence, and the inclination of the same person varies with his state
of health. I can only attempt to give some idea of what is called the
winter months in Southern California, to which my observations mainly
apply. The individual who comes here under the mistaken notion that
climate ever does anything more than give nature a better chance, may
speedily or more tardily need the service of an undertaker; and the
invalid whose powers are responsive to kindly influences may live so
long, being unable to get away, that life will be a burden to him. The
person in ordinary health will find very little that is hostile to the
orderly organic processes. In order to appreciate the winter climate of
Southern California one should stay here the year through, and select
the days that suit his idea of winter from any of the months. From the
fact that the greatest humidity is in the summer and the least in the
winter months, he may wear an overcoat in July in a temperature,
according to the thermometer, which in January would render the overcoat
unnecessary. It is dampness that causes both cold and heat to be most
felt. The lowest temperatures, in Southern California generally, are
caused only by the extreme dryness of the air; in the long nights of
December and January there is a more rapid and longer continued
radiation of heat. It must be a dry and clear night that will send the
temperature down to thirty-four degrees. But the effect of the sun upon
this air is instantaneous, and the cold morning is followed at once by a
warm forenoon; the difference between the average heat of July and the
average cold of January, measured by the thermometer, is not great in
the valleys, foot-hills, and on the coast. Five points give this result
of average for January and July respectively: Santa Barbara, 52°, 66°;
San Bernardino, 51°, 70°; Pomona, 52°, 68°; Los Angeles, 52°, 67°; San
Diego, 53°, 66°. The day in the winter months is warmer in the interior
and the nights are cooler than on the coast, as shown by the following
figures for January: 7 A.M., Los Angeles, 46.5°; San Diego, 47.5°; 3
P.M., Los Angeles, 65.2°; San Diego, 60.9°. In the summer the difference
is greater. In June I saw the thermometer reach 103° in Los Angeles when
it was only 79° in San Diego. But I have seen the weather unendurable in
New York with a temperature of 85°, while this dry heat of 103° was not
oppressive. The extraordinary equanimity of the coast climate (certainly
the driest marine climate in my experience) will be evident from the
average mean for each month, from records of sixteen years, ending in
1877, taken at San Diego, giving each month in order, beginning with
January: 53.5°, 54.7°, 56.0°, 58.2°, 60.2°, 64.6°, 67.1°, 69.0°, 66.7°,
62.9°, 58.1°, 56.0°. In the year 1877 the mean temperature at 3 P.M. at
San Diego was as follows, beginning with January: 60.9°, 57.7°, 62.4°,
63.3°, 66.3°, 68.5°, 69.6°, 69.6°, 69.5°, 69.6°, 64.4°, 60.5°. For the
four months of July, August, September, and October there was hardly a
shade of difference at 3 P.M. The striking fact in all the records I
have seen is that the difference of temperature in the daytime between
summer and winter is very small, the great difference being from
midnight to just before sunrise, and this latter difference is greater
inland than on the coast. There are, of course, frost and ice in the
mountains, but the frost that comes occasionally in the low inland
valleys is of very brief duration in the morning hour, and rarely
continues long enough to have a serious effect upon vegetation.
In considering the matter of temperature, the rule for vegetation and
for invalids will not be the same. A spot in which delicate flowers in
Southern California bloom the year round may be too cool for many
invalids. It must not be forgotten that the general temperature here is
lower than that to which most Eastern people are accustomed. They are
used to living all winter in overheated houses, and to protracted heated
terms rendered worse by humidity in the summer. The dry, low temperature
of the California winter, notwithstanding its perpetual sunshine, may
seem, therefore, wanting to them in direct warmth. It may take a year or
two to acclimate them to this more equable and more refreshing
temperature.
Neither on the coast nor in the foot-hills will the invalid find the
climate of the Riviera or of Tangier--not the tramontane wind of the
former, nor the absolutely genial but somewhat enervating climate of
the latter. But it must be borne in mind that in this, our
Mediterranean, the seeker for health or pleasure can find almost any
climate (except the very cold or the very hot), down to the minutest
subdivision. He may try the dry marine climate of the coast, or the
temperature of the fruit lands and gardens from San Bernardino to Los
Angeles, or he may climb to any altitude that suits him in the Sierra
Madre or the San Jacinto ranges. The difference may be all-important to
him between a valley and a mesa which is not a hundred feet higher; nay,
between a valley and the slope of a foot-hill, with a shifting of not
more than fifty feet elevation, the change may be as marked for him as
it is for the most sensitive young fruit-tree. It is undeniable,
notwithstanding these encouraging "averages," that cold snaps, though
rare, do come occasionally, just as in summer there will occur one or
two or three continued days of intense heat. And in the summer in some
localities--it happened in June, 1890, in the Santiago hills in Orange
County--the desert sirocco, blowing over the Colorado furnace, makes
life just about unendurable for days at a time. Yet with this dry heat
sunstroke is never experienced, and the diseases of the bowels usually
accompanying hot weather elsewhere are unknown. The experienced
traveller who encounters unpleasant weather, heat that he does not
expect, cold that he did not provide for, or dust that deprives him of
his last atom of good-humor, and is told that it is "exceptional," knows
exactly what that word means. He is familiar with the "exceptional" the
world over, and he feels a sort of compassion for the inhabitants who
have not yet learned the adage, "Good wine needs no bush." Even those
who have bought more land than they can pay for can afford to tell the
truth.
The rainy season in Southern California, which may open with a shower or
two in October, but does not set in till late in November, or till
December, and is over in April, is not at all a period of cloudy weather
or continuous rainfall. On the contrary, bright warm days and brilliant
sunshine are the rule. The rain is most likely to fall in the night.
There may be a day of rain, or several days that are overcast with
distributed rain, but the showers are soon over, and the sky clears. Yet
winters vary greatly in this respect, the rainfall being much greater in
some than in others. In 1890 there was rain beyond the average, and even
on the equable beach of Coronada there were some weeks of weather that
from the California point of view were very unpleasant. It was
unpleasant by local comparison, but it was not damp and chilly, like a
protracted period of falling weather on the Atlantic. The rain comes
with a southerly wind, caused by a disturbance far north, and with the
resumption of the prevailing westerly winds it suddenly ceases, the air
clears, and neither before nor after it is the atmosphere "steamy" or
enervating. The average annual rainfall of the Pacific coast diminishes
by regular gradation from point to point all the way from Puget Sound to
the Mexican boundary. At Neah Bay it is 111 inches, and it steadily
lessens down to Santa Cruz, 25.24; Monterey, 11.42; Point Conception,
12.21; San Diego, 11.01. There is fog on the coast in every month, but
this diminishes, like the rainfall, from north to south. I have
encountered it in both February and June. In the south it is apt to be
most persistent in April and May, when for three or four days together
there will be a fine mist, which any one but a Scotchman would call
rain. Usually, however, the fog-bank will roll in during the night, and
disappear by ten o'clock in the morning. There is no wet season properly
so called, and consequently few days in the winter months when it is not
agreeable to be out-of-doors, perhaps no day when one may not walk or
drive during some part of it. Yet as to precipitation or temperature it
is impossible to strike any general average for Southern California. In
1883-84 San Diego had 25.77 inches of rain, and Los Angeles (fifteen
miles inland) had 38.22. The annual average at Los Angeles is 17.64; but
in 1876-77 the total at San Diego was only 3.75, and at Los Angeles only
5.28. Yet elevation and distance from the coast do not always determine
the rainfall. The yearly mean rainfall at Julian, in the San Jacinto
range, at an elevation of 4500 feet, is 37.74; observations at
Riverside, 1050 feet above the sea, give an average of 9.37.
It is probably impossible to give an Eastern man a just idea of the
winter of Southern California. Accustomed to extremes, he may expect too
much. He wants a violent change. If he quits the snow, the slush, the
leaden skies, the alternate sleet and cold rain of New England, he would
like the tropical heat, the languor, the color of Martinique. He will
not find them here. He comes instead into a strictly temperate region;
and even when he arrives, his eyes deceive him. He sees the orange
ripening in its dark foliage, the long lines of the eucalyptus, the
feathery pepper-tree, the magnolia, the English walnut, the black
live-oak, the fan-palm, in all the vigor of June; everywhere beds of
flowers of every hue and of every country blazing in the bright
sunlight--the heliotrope, the geranium, the rare hot-house roses
overrunning the hedges of cypress, and the scarlet passion-vine climbing
to the roof-tree of the cottages; in the vineyard or the orchard the
horticulturist is following the cultivator in his shirt-sleeves; he
hears running water, the song of birds, the scent of flowers is in the
air, and he cannot understand why he needs winter clothing, why he is
always seeking the sun, why he wants a fire at night. It is a fraud, he
says, all this visible display of summer, and of an almost tropical
summer at that; it is really a cold country. It is incongruous that he
should be looking at a date-palm in his overcoat, and he is puzzled that
a thermometrical heat that should enervate him elsewhere, stimulates him
here. The green, brilliant, vigorous vegetation, the perpetual sunshine,
deceive him; he is careless about the difference of shade and sun, he
gets into a draught, and takes cold. Accustomed to extremes of
temperature and artificial heat, I think for most people the first
winter here is a disappointment. I was told by a physician who had
eighteen years' experience of the climate that in his first winter he
thought he had never seen a people so insensitive to cold as the San
Diegans, who seemed not to require warmth. And all this time the trees
are growing like asparagus, the most delicate flowers are in perpetual
bloom, the annual crops are most lusty. I fancy that the soil is always
warm. The temperature is truly moderate. The records for a number of
years show that the mid-day temperature of clear days in winter is from
60° to 70° on the coast, from 65° to 80° in the interior, while that of
rainy days is about 60° by the sea and inland. Mr. Van Dyke says that
the lowest mid-day temperature recorded at the United States signal
station at San Diego during eight years is 51°. This occurred but once.
In those eight years there were but twenty-one days when the mid-day
temperature was not above 55°. In all that time there were but six days
when the mercury fell below 36° at any time in the night; and but two
when it fell to 32°, the lowest point ever reached there. On one of
these two last-named days it went to 51° at noon, and on the other to
56°. This was the great "cold snap" of December, 1879.
It goes without saying that this sort of climate would suit any one in
ordinary health, inviting and stimulating to constant out-of-door
exercise, and that it would be equally favorable to that general
breakdown of the system which has the name of nervous prostration. The
effect upon diseases of the respiratory organs can only be determined by
individual experience. The government has lately been sending soldiers
who have consumption from various stations in the United States to San
Diego for treatment. This experiment will furnish interesting data.
Within a period covering a little over two years, Dr. Huntington, the
post surgeon, has had fifteen cases sent to him. Three of these patients
had tubercular consumption; twelve had consumption induced by attacks of
pneumonia. One of the tubercular patients died within a month after his
arrival; the second lived eight months; the third was discharged cured,
left the army, and contracted malaria elsewhere, of which he died. The
remaining twelve were discharged practically cured of consumption, but
two of them subsequently died. It is exceedingly common to meet persons
of all ages and both sexes in Southern California who came invalided by
disease of the lungs or throat, who have every promise of fair health
here, but who dare not leave this climate. The testimony is convincing
of the good effect of the climate upon all children, upon women
generally, and of its rejuvenating effect upon men and women of advanced
years.
CHAPTER V.
HEALTH AND LONGEVITY.
In regard to the effect of climate upon health and longevity, Dr.
Remondino quotes old Hufeland that "uniformity in the state of the
atmosphere, particularly in regard to heat, cold, gravity, and
lightness, contributes in a very considerable degree to the duration of
life. Countries, therefore, where great and sudden varieties in the
barometer and the thermometer are usual cannot be favorable to
longevity. Such countries may be healthy, and many men may become old in
them, but they will not attain to a great age, for all rapid variations
are so many internal mutations, and these occasion an astonishing
consumption both of the forces and the organs." Hufeland thought a
marine climate most favorable to longevity. He describes, and perhaps we
may say prophesied, a region he had never known, where the conditions
and combinations were most favorable to old age, which is epitomized by
Dr. Remondino: "where the latitude gives warmth and the sea or ocean
tempering winds, where the soil is warm and dry and the sun is also
bright and warm, where uninterrupted bright clear weather and a moderate
temperature are the rule, where extremes neither of heat nor cold are to
be found, where nothing may interfere with the exercise of the aged, and
where the actual results and cases of longevity will bear testimony as
to the efficacy of all its climatic conditions being favorable to a long
and comfortable existence."
[Illustration: MIDWINTER, PASADENA.]
In an unpublished paper Dr. Remondino comments on the extraordinary
endurance of animals and men in the California climate, and cites many
cases of uncommon longevity in natives. In reading the accounts of early
days in California I am struck with the endurance of hardship, exposure,
and wounds by the natives and the adventurers, the rancheros, horsemen,
herdsmen, the descendants of soldiers and the Indians, their
insensibility to fatigue, and their agility and strength. This is
ascribed to the climate; and what is true of man is true of the native
horse. His only rival in strength, endurance, speed, and intelligence is
the Arabian. It was long supposed that this was racial, and that but for
the smallness of the size of the native horse, crossing with it would
improve the breed of the Eastern and Kentucky racers. But there was
reluctance to cross the finely proportioned Eastern horse with his
diminutive Western brother. The importation and breeding of
thoroughbreds on this coast has led to the discovery that the desirable
qualities of the California horse were not racial but climatic. The
Eastern horse has been found to improve in size, compactness of muscle,
in strength of limb, in wind, with a marked increase in power of
endurance. The traveller here notices the fine horses and their
excellent condition, and the power and endurance of those that have
considerable age. The records made on Eastern race-courses by horses
from California breeding farms have already attracted attention. It is
also remarked that the Eastern horse is usually improved greatly by a
sojourn of a season or two on this coast, and the plan of bringing
Eastern race-horses here for the winter is already adopted.
Man, it is asserted by our authority, is as much benefited as the horse
by a change to this climate. The new-comer may have certain unpleasant
sensations in coming here from different altitudes and conditions, but
he will soon be conscious of better being, of increased power in all the
functions of life, more natural and recuperative sleep, and an accession
of vitality and endurance. Dr. Remondino also testifies that it
occasionally happens in this rejuvenation that families which have
seemed to have reached their limit at the East are increased after
residence here.
The early inhabitants of Southern California, according to the statement
of Mr. H. H. Bancroft and other reports, were found to be living in
Spartan conditions as to temperance and training, and in a highly moral
condition, in consequence of which they had uncommon physical endurance
and contempt for luxury. This training in abstinence and hardship, with
temperance in diet, combined with the climate to produce the astonishing
longevity to be found here. Contrary to the customs of most other tribes
of Indians, their aged were the care of the community. Dr. W. A. Winder,
of San Diego, is quoted as saying that in a visit to El Cajon Valley
some thirty years ago he was taken to a house in which the aged persons
were cared for. There were half a dozen who had reached an extreme age.
Some were unable to move, their bony frame being seemingly anchylosed.
They were old, wrinkled, and blear-eyed; their skin was hanging in
leathery folds about their withered limbs; some had hair as white as
snow, and had seen some seven-score of years; others, still able to
crawl, but so aged as to be unable to stand, went slowly about on their
hands and knees, their limbs being attenuated and withered. The organs
of special sense had in many nearly lost all activity some generations
back. Some had lost the use of their limbs for more than a decade or a
generation; but the organs of life and the "great sympathetic" still
kept up their automatic functions, not recognizing the fact, and
surprisingly indifferent to it, that the rest of the body had ceased to
be of any use a generation or more in the past. And it is remarked that
"these thoracic and abdominal organs and their physiological action
being kept alive and active, as it were, against time, and the silent
and unconscious functional activity of the great sympathetic and its
ganglia, show a tenacity of the animal tissues to hold on to life that
is phenomenal."
[Illustration: A TYPICAL GARDEN, NEAR SANTA ANA.]
I have no space to enter upon the nature of the testimony upon which the
age of certain Indians hereafter referred to is based. It is such as to
satisfy Dr. Remondino, Dr. Edward Palmer, long connected with the
Agricultural Department of the Smithsonian Institution, and Father A. D.
Ubach, who has religious charge of the Indians in this region. These
Indians were not migratory; they lived within certain limits, and were
known to each other. The missions established by the Franciscan friars
were built with the assistance of the Indians. The friars have handed
down by word of mouth many details in regard to their early missions;
others are found in the mission records, such as carefully kept records
of family events--births, marriages, and deaths. And there is the
testimony of the Indians regarding each other. Father Ubach has known a
number who were employed at the building of the mission of San Diego
(1769-71), a century before he took charge of this mission. These men
had been engaged in carrying timber from the mountains or in making
brick, and many of them were living within the last twenty years. There
are persons still living at the Indian village of Capitan Grande whose
ages he estimates at over one hundred and thirty years. Since the advent
of civilization the abstemious habits and Spartan virtues of these
Indians have been impaired, and their care for the aged has relaxed.
Dr. Palmer has a photograph (which I have seen) of a squaw whom he
estimates to be 126 years old. When he visited her he saw her put six
watermelons in a blanket, tie it up, and carry it on her back for two
miles. He is familiar with Indian customs and history, and a careful
cross-examination convinced him that her information of old customs was
not obtained by tradition. She was conversant with tribal habits she had
seen practised, such as the cremation of the dead, which the mission
fathers had compelled the Indians to relinquish. She had seen the
Indians punished by the fathers with floggings for persisting in the
practice of cremation.
At the mission of San Tomas, in Lower California, is still living an
Indian (a photograph of whom Dr. Remondino shows), bent and wrinkled,
whose age is computed at 140 years. Although blind and naked, he is
still active, and daily goes down the beach and along the beds of the
creeks in search of drift-wood, making it his daily task to gather and
carry to camp a fagot of wood.
[Illustration: OLD ADOBE HOUSE, POMONA.]
Another instance I give in Dr. Remondino's words: "Philip Crossthwaite,
who has lived here since 1843, has an old man on his ranch who mounts
his horse and rides about daily, who was a grown man breaking horses for
the mission fathers when Don Antonio Serrano was an infant. Don Antonio
I know quite well, having attended him through a serious illness some
sixteen years ago. Although now at the advanced age of ninety-three, he
is as erect as a pine, and he rides his horse with his usual vigor and
grace. He is thin and spare and very tall, and those who knew him fifty
years or more remember him as the most skilful horseman in the
neighborhood of San Diego. And yet, as fabulous as it may seem, the man
who danced this Don Antonio on his knee when he was an infant is not
only still alive, but is active enough to mount his horse and canter
about the country. Some years ago I attended an elderly gentleman, since
dead, who knew this man as a full-grown man when he and Don Serrano were
play-children together. From a conversation with Father Ubach I learned
that the man's age is perfectly authenticated to be beyond one hundred
and eighteen years."
In the many instances given of extreme old age in this region the habits
of these Indians have been those of strict temperance and
abstemiousness, and their long life in an equable climate is due to
extreme simplicity of diet. In many cases of extreme age the diet has
consisted simply of acorns, flour, and water. It is asserted that the
climate itself induces temperance in drink and abstemiousness in diet.
In his estimate of the climate as a factor of longevity, Dr. Remondino
says that it is only necessary to look at the causes of death, and the
ages most subject to attack, to understand that the less of these causes
that are present the greater are the chances of man to reach great age.
"Add to these reflections that you run no gantlet of diseases to
undermine or deteriorate the organism; that in this climate childhood
finds an escape from those diseases which are the terror of mothers, and
against which physicians are helpless, as we have here none of those
affections of the first three years of life so prevalent during the
summer months in the East and the rest of the United States. Then,
again, the chance of gastric or intestinal disease is almost incredibly
small. This immunity extends through every age of life. Hepatic and
kindred diseases are unknown; of lung affections there is no land that
can boast of like exemption. Be it the equability of the temperature or
the aseptic condition of the atmosphere, the free sweep of winds or the
absence of disease germs, or what else it may be ascribed to, one thing
is certain, that there is no pneumonia, bronchitis, or pleurisy lying in
wait for either the infant or the aged."
[Illustration: FAN-PALM, FERNANDO ST. LOS ANGELES.]
The importance of this subject must excuse the space I have given to it.
It is evident from this testimony that here are climatic conditions
novel and worthy of the most patient scientific investigation. Their
effect upon hereditary tendencies and upon persons coming here with
hereditary diseases will be studied. Three years ago there was in some
localities a visitation of small-pox imported from Mexico. At that time
there were cases of pneumonia. Whether these were incident to
carelessness in vaccination, or were caused by local unsanitary
conditions, I do not know. It is not to be expected that unsanitary
conditions will not produce disease here as elsewhere. It cannot be too
strongly insisted that this is a climate that the new-comer must get
used to, and that he cannot safely neglect the ordinary precautions. The
difference between shade and sun is strikingly marked, and he must not
be deceived into imprudence by the prevailing sunshine or the general
equability.
CHAPTER VI.
IS RESIDENCE HERE AGREEABLE?
After all these averages and statistics, and not considering now the
chances of the speculator, the farmer, the fruit-raiser, or the invalid,
is Southern California a particularly agreeable winter residence? The
question deserves a candid answer, for it is of the last importance to
the people of the United States to know the truth--to know whether they
have accessible by rail a region free from winter rigor and
vicissitudes, and yet with few of the disadvantages of most winter
resorts. One would have more pleasure in answering the question if he
were not irritated by the perpetual note of brag and exaggeration in
every locality that each is the paradise of the earth, and absolutely
free from any physical discomfort. I hope that this note of exaggeration
is not the effect of the climate, for if it is, the region will never be
socially agreeable.
There are no sudden changes of season here. Spring comes gradually day
by day, a perceptible hourly waking to life and color; and this glides
into a summer which never ceases, but only becomes tired and fades into
the repose of a short autumn, when the sere and brown and red and yellow
hills and the purple mountains are waiting for the rain clouds. This is
according to the process of nature; but wherever irrigation brings
moisture to the fertile soil, the green and bloom are perpetual the year
round, only the green is powdered with dust, and the cultivated flowers
have their periods of exhaustion.
I should think it well worth while to watch the procession of nature
here from late November or December to April. It is a land of delicate
and brilliant wild flowers, of blooming shrubs, strange in form and
wonderful in color. Before the annual rains the land lies in a sort of
swoon in a golden haze; the slopes and plains are bare, the hills yellow
with ripe wild-oats or ashy gray with sage, the sea-breeze is weak, the
air grows drier, the sun hot, the shade cool. Then one day light clouds
stream up from the south-west, and there is a gentle rain. When the sun
comes out again its rays are milder, the land is refreshed and
brightened, and almost immediately a greenish tinge appears on plain and
hill-side. At intervals the rain continues, daily the landscape is
greener in infinite variety of shades, which seem to sweep over the
hills in waves of color. Upon this carpet of green by February nature
begins to weave an embroidery of wild flowers, white, lavender, golden,
pink, indigo, scarlet, changing day by day and every day more brilliant,
and spreading from patches into great fields until dale and hill and
table-land are overspread with a refinement and glory of color that
would be the despair of the carpet-weavers of Daghestan.
This, with the scent of orange groves and tea-roses, with cool nights,
snow in sight on the high mountains, an occasional day of rain, days of
bright sunshine, when an overcoat is needed in driving, must suffice
the sojourner for winter. He will be humiliated that he is more
sensitive to cold than the heliotrope or the violet, but he must bear
it. If he is looking for malaria, he must go to some other winter
resort. If he wants a "norther" continuing for days, he must move on. If
he is accustomed to various insect pests, he will miss them here. If
there comes a day warmer than usual, it will not be damp or soggy. So
far as nature is concerned there is very little to grumble at, and one
resource of the traveller is therefore taken away.
But is it interesting? What is there to do? It must be confessed that
there is a sort of monotony in the scenery as there is in the climate.
There is, to be sure, great variety in a way between coast and mountain,
as, for instance, between Santa Barbara and Pasadena, and if the tourist
will make a business of exploring the valleys and uplands and cañons
little visited, he will not complain of monotony; but the artist and the
photographer find the same elements repeated in little varying
combinations. There is undeniable repetition in the succession of
flower-gardens, fruit orchards, alleys of palms and peppers, vineyards,
and the cultivation about the villas is repeated in all directions. The
Americans have not the art of making houses or a land picturesque. The
traveller is enthusiastic about the exquisite drives through these
groves of fruit, with the ashy or the snow-covered hills for background
and contrast, and he exclaims at the pretty cottages, vine and rose
clad, in their semi-tropical setting, but if by chance he comes upon an
old adobe or a Mexican ranch house in the country, he has emotions of a
different sort.
[Illustration: SCARLET PASSION-VINE.]
There is little left of the old Spanish occupation, but the remains of
it make the romance of the country, and appeal to our sense of fitness
and beauty. It is to be hoped that all such historical associations will
be preserved, for they give to the traveller that which our country
generally lacks, and which is so largely the attraction of Italy and
Spain. Instead of adapting and modifying the houses and homes that the
climate suggests, the new American comers have brought here from the
East the smartness and prettiness of our modern nondescript
architecture. The low house, with recesses and galleries, built round an
inner court, or _patio_, which, however small, would fill the whole
interior with sunshine and the scent of flowers, is the sort of dwelling
that would suit the climate and the habit of life here. But the present
occupiers have taken no hints from the natives. In village and country
they have done all they can, in spite of the maguey and the cactus and
the palm and the umbrella-tree and the live-oak and the riotous flowers
and the thousand novel forms of vegetation, to give everything a prosaic
look. But why should the tourist find fault with this? The American
likes it, and he would not like the picturesqueness of the Spanish or
the Latin races.
So far as climate and natural beauty go to make one contented in a
winter resort, Southern California has unsurpassed attractions, and both
seem to me to fit very well the American temperament; but the
associations of art and history are wanting, and the tourist knows how
largely his enjoyment of a vacation in Southern Italy or Sicily or
Northern Africa depends upon these--upon these and upon the aspects of
human nature foreign to his experience.
It goes without saying that this is not Europe, either in its human
interest or in a certain refinement of landscape that comes only by long
cultivation and the occupancy of ages. One advantage of foreign travel
to the restless American is that he carries with him no responsibility
for the government or the progress of the country he is in, and that he
leaves business behind him; whereas in this new country, which is his
own, the development of which is so interesting, and in which the
opportunities of fortune seem so inviting, he is constantly tempted "to
take a hand in." If, however, he is superior to this fever, and is
willing simply to rest, to drift along with the equable days, I know of
no other place where he can be more truly contented. Year by year the
country becomes more agreeable for the traveller, in the first place,
through the improvement in the hotels, and in the second, by better
roads. In the large villages and cities there are miles of excellent
drives, well sprinkled, through delightful avenues, in a park-like
country, where the eye is enchanted with color and luxurious vegetation,
and captivated by the remarkable beauty of the hills, the wildness and
picturesqueness of which enhance the charming cultivation of the
orchards and gardens. And no country is more agreeable for riding and
driving, for even at mid-day, in the direct sun rays, there is almost
everywhere a refreshing breeze, and one rides or drives or walks with
little sense of fatigue. The horses are uniformly excellent, either in
the carriage or under the saddle. I am sure they are remarkable in
speed, endurance, and ease of motion. If the visiting season had no
other attraction, the horses would make it distinguished.
A great many people like to spend months in a comfortable hotel,
lounging on the piazzas, playing lawn-tennis, taking a morning ride or
afternoon drive, making an occasional picnic excursion up some mountain
cañon, getting up charades, playing at private theatricals, dancing,
flirting, floating along with more or less sentiment and only the
weariness that comes when there are no duties. There are plenty of
places where all these things can be done, and with no sort of anxiety
about the weather from week to week, and with the added advantage that
the women and children can take care of themselves. But for those who
find such a life monotonous there are other resources. There is very
good fishing in the clear streams in the foot-hills, hunting in the
mountains for large game still worthy of the steadiest nerves, and good
bird-shooting everywhere. There are mountains to climb, cañons to
explore, lovely valleys in the recesses of the hills to be
discovered--in short, one disposed to activity and not afraid of
roughing it could occupy himself most agreeably and healthfully in the
wild parts of San Bernardino and San Diego counties; he may even still
start a grizzly in the Sierra Madre range in Los Angeles County. Hunting
and exploring in the mountains, riding over the mesas, which are green
from the winter rains and gay with a thousand delicate grasses and
flowering plants, is manly occupation to suit the most robust and
adventurous. Those who saunter in the trim gardens, or fly from one
hotel parlor to the other, do not see the best of Southern California in
the winter.
CHAPTER VII.
THE WINTER ON THE COAST.
But the distinction of this coast, and that which will forever make it
attractive at the season when the North Atlantic is forbidding, is that
the ocean-side is as equable, as delightful, in winter as in summer. Its
sea-side places are truly all-the-year-round resorts. In subsequent
chapters I shall speak in detail of different places as to climate and
development and peculiarities of production. I will now only give a
general idea of Southern California as a wintering place. Even as far
north as Monterey, in the central part of the State, the famous Hotel
del Monte, with its magnificent park of pines and live-oaks, and
exquisite flower-gardens underneath the trees, is remarkable for its
steadiness of temperature. I could see little difference between the
temperature of June and of February. The difference is of course
greatest at night. The maximum the year through ranges from about 65° to
about 80°, and the minimum from about 35° to about 58°, though there are
days when the thermometer goes above 90°, and nights when it falls below
30°.
[Illustration: ROSE-BUSH, SANTA BARBARA.]
To those who prefer the immediate ocean air to that air as modified by
such valleys as the San Gabriel and the Santa Ana, the coast offers a
variety of choice in different combinations of sea and mountain climate
all along the southern sunny exposure from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
In Santa Barbara County the Santa Inez range of mountains runs westward
to meet the Pacific at Point Conception. South of this noble range are a
number of little valleys opening to the sea, and in one of these, with a
harbor and sloping upland and cañon of its own, lies Santa Barbara,
looking southward towards the sunny islands of Santa Rosa and Santa
Cruz. Above it is the Mission Cañon, at the entrance of which is the
best-preserved of the old Franciscan missions. There is a superb drive
eastward along the long and curving sea-beach of four miles to the cañon
of Monticito, which is rather a series of nooks and terraces, of lovely
places and gardens, of plantations of oranges and figs, rising up to the
base of the gray mountains. The long line of the Santa Inez suggests the
promontory of Sorrento, and a view from the opposite rocky point, which
encloses the harbor on the west, by the help of cypresses which look
like stone-pines, recalls many an Italian coast scene, and in situation
the Bay of Naples. The whole aspect is foreign, enchanting, and the
semi-tropical fruits and vines and flowers, with a golden atmosphere
poured over all, irresistibly take the mind to scenes of Italian
romance. There is still a little Spanish flavor left in the town, in a
few old houses, in names and families historic, and in the life without
hurry or apprehension. There is a delightful commingling here of sea and
mountain air, and in a hundred fertile nooks in the hills one in the
most delicate health may be sheltered from every harsh wind. I think no
one ever leaves Santa Barbara without a desire to return to it.
Farther down the coast, only eighteen miles from Los Angeles, and a sort
of Coney Island resort of that thriving city, is Santa Monica. Its hotel
stands on a high bluff in a lovely bend of the coast. It is popular in
summer as well as winter, as the number of cottages attest, and it was
chosen by the directors of the National Soldiers' Home as the site of
the Home on the Pacific coast. There the veterans, in a commodious
building, dream away their lives most contentedly, and can fancy that
they hear the distant thunder of guns in the pounding of the surf.
At about the same distance from Los Angeles, southward, above Point
Vincent, is Redondo Beach, a new resort, which, from its natural beauty
and extensive improvements, promises to be a delightful place of sojourn
at any time of the year. The mountainous, embracing arms of the bay are
exquisite in contour and color, and the beach is very fine. The hotel is
perfectly comfortable--indeed, uncommonly attractive--and the extensive
planting of trees, palms, and shrubs, and the cultivation of flowers,
will change the place in a year or two into a scene of green and floral
loveliness; in this region two years, such is the rapid growth, suffices
to transform a desert into a park or garden. On the hills, at a little
distance from the beach and pier, are the buildings of the Chautauqua,
which holds a local summer session here. The Chautauqua people, the
country over, seem to have, in selecting sightly and agreeable sites for
their temples of education and amusement, as good judgment as the old
monks had in planting their monasteries and missions.
[Illustration: AT AVALON, SANTA CATALINA ISLAND.]
If one desires a thoroughly insular climate, he may cross to the
picturesque island of Santa Catalina. All along the coast flowers bloom
in the winter months, and the ornamental semi-tropical plants thrive;
and there are many striking headlands and pretty bays and gentle seaward
slopes which are already occupied by villages, and attract visitors who
would practise economy. The hills frequently come close to the shore,
forming those valleys in which the Californians of the pastoral period
placed their ranch houses. At San Juan Capristrano the fathers had one
of their most flourishing missions, the ruins of which are the most
picturesque the traveller will find. It is altogether a genial,
attractive coast, and if the tourist does not prefer an inland
situation, like the Hotel Raymond (which scarcely has a rival anywhere
in its lovely surroundings), he will keep on down the coast to San
Diego.
The transition from the well-planted counties of Los Angeles and Orange
is not altogether agreeable to the eye. One misses the trees. The
general aspect of the coast about San Diego is bare in comparison. This
simply means that the southern county is behind the others in
development. Nestled among the hills there are live-oaks and sycamores;
and of course at National City and below, in El Cajon and the valley of
the Sweetwater, there are extensive plantations of oranges, lemons,
olives, and vines, but the San Diego region generally lies in the sun
shadeless. I have a personal theory that much vegetation is inconsistent
with the best atmosphere for the human being. The air is nowhere else so
agreeable to me as it is in a barren New Mexican or Arizona desert at
the proper elevation. I do not know whether the San Diego climate would
be injured if the hills were covered with forest and the valleys were
all in the highest and most luxuriant vegetation. The theory is that the
interaction of the desert and ocean winds will always keep it as it is,
whatever man may do. I can only say that, as it is, I doubt if it has
its equal the year round for agreeableness and healthfulness in our
Union; and it is the testimony of those whose experience of the best
Mediterranean climate is more extended and much longer continued than
mine, that it is superior to any on that enclosed sea. About this great
harbor, whose outer beach has an extent of twenty-five miles, whose
inland circuit of mountains must be over fifty miles, there are great
varieties of temperature, of shelter and exposure, minute subdivisions
of climate, whose personal fitness can only be attested by experience.
There is a great difference, for instance, between the quality of the
climate at the elevation of the Florence Hotel, San Diego, and the
University Heights on the mesa above the town, and that on the long
Coronado Beach which protects the inner harbor from the ocean surf. The
latter, practically surrounded by water, has a true marine climate, but
a peculiar and dry marine climate, as tonic in its effect as that of
Capri, and, I believe, with fewer harsh days in the winter season. I
wish to speak with entire frankness about this situation, for I am sure
that what so much pleases me will suit a great number of people, who
will thank me for not being reserved. Doubtless it will not suit
hundreds of people as well as some other localities in Southern
California, but I found no other place where I had the feeling of
absolute content and willingness to stay on indefinitely. There is a
geniality about it for which the thermometer does not account, a charm
which it is difficult to explain. Much of the agreeability is due to
artificial conditions, but the climate man has not made nor marred.
The Coronado Beach is about twelve miles long. A narrow sand promontory,
running northward from the main-land, rises to the Heights, then
broadens into a table-land, which seems to be an island, and measures
about a mile and a half each way; this is called South Beach, and is
connected by another spit of sand with a like area called North Beach,
which forms, with Point Loma, the entrance to the harbor. The North
Beach, covered partly with chaparral and broad fields of barley, is
alive with quail, and is a favorite coursing-ground for rabbits. The
soil, which appears uninviting, is with water uncommonly fertile, being
a mixture of loam, disintegrated granite, and decomposed shells, and
especially adapted to flowers, rare tropical trees, fruits, and
flowering shrubs of all countries.
The development is on the South Beach, which was in January, 1887,
nothing but a waste of sand and chaparral. I doubt if the world can show
a like transformation in so short a time. I saw it in February of that
year, when all the beauty, except that of ocean, sky, and atmosphere,
was still to be imagined. It is now as if the wand of the magician had
touched it. In the first place, abundance of water was brought over by a
submarine conduit, and later from the extraordinary Coronado Springs
(excellent soft water for drinking and bathing, and with a recognized
medicinal value), and with these streams the beach began to bloom like a
tropical garden. Tens of thousands of trees have attained a remarkable
growth in three years. The nursery is one of the most interesting
botanical and flower gardens in the country; palms and hedges of
Monterey cypress and marguerites line the avenues. There are parks and
gardens of rarest flowers and shrubs, whose brilliant color produces the
same excitement in the mind as strains of martial music. A railway
traverses the beach for a mile from the ferry to the hotel. There are
hundreds of cottages with their gardens scattered over the surface;
there is a race-track, a museum, an ostrich farm, a labyrinth, good
roads for driving, and a dozen other attractions for the idle or the
inquisitive.
[Illustration: HOTEL DEL CORONADO.]
The hotel stands upon the south front of the beach and near the sea,
above which it is sufficiently elevated to give a fine prospect. The
sound of the beating surf is perpetual there. At low tide there is a
splendid driving beach miles in extent, and though the slope is abrupt,
the opportunity for bathing is good, with a little care in regard to the
undertow. But there is a safe natatorium on the harbor side close to the
hotel. The stranger, when he first comes upon this novel hotel and this
marvellous scene of natural and created beauty, is apt to exhaust his
superlatives. I hesitate to attempt to describe this hotel--this airy
and picturesque and half-bizarre wooden creation of the architect.
Taking it and its situation together, I know nothing else in the world
with which to compare it, and I have never seen any other which so
surprised at first, that so improved on a two weeks' acquaintance, and
that has left in the mind an impression so entirely agreeable. It covers
about four and a half acres of ground, including an inner court of about
an acre, the rich made soil of which is raised to the level of the main
floor. The house surrounds this, in the Spanish mode of building, with a
series of galleries, so that most of the suites of rooms have a double
outlook--one upon this lovely garden, the other upon the ocean or the
harbor. The effect of this interior court or _patio_ is to give gayety
and an air of friendliness to the place, brilliant as it is with flowers
and climbing vines; and when the royal and date palms that are
vigorously thriving in it attain their growth it will be magnificent.
Big hotels and caravansaries are usually tiresome, unfriendly places;
and if I should lay too much stress upon the vast dining-room (which has
a floor area of ten thousand feet without post or pillar), or the
beautiful breakfast-room, or the circular ballroom (which has an area of
eleven thousand feet, with its timber roof open to the lofty
observatory), or the music-room, billiard-rooms for ladies, the
reading-rooms and parlors, the pretty gallery overlooking the spacious
office rotunda, and then say that the whole is illuminated with electric
lights, and capable of being heated to any temperature desired--I might
convey a false impression as to the actual comfort and home-likeness of
this charming place. On the sea side the broad galleries of each story
are shut in by glass, which can be opened to admit or shut to exclude
the fresh ocean breeze. Whatever the temperature outside, those great
galleries are always agreeable for lounging or promenading. For me, I
never tire of the sea and its changing color and movement. If this great
house were filled with guests, so spacious are its lounging places I
should think it would never appear to be crowded; and if it were nearly
empty, so admirably are the rooms contrived for family life it will not
seem lonesome. I shall add that the management is of the sort that makes
the guest feel at home and at ease. Flowers, brought in from the gardens
and nurseries, are every where in profusion--on the dining-tables, in
the rooms, all about the house. So abundantly are they produced that no
amount of culling seems to make an impression upon their mass.
[Illustration: OSTRICH YARD, CORONADO BEACH.]
But any description would fail to give the secret of the charm of
existence here. Restlessness disappears, for one thing, but there is no
languor or depression. I cannot tell why, when the thermometer is at 60°
or 63°, the air seems genial and has no sense of chilliness, or why it
is not oppressive at 80° or 85°. I am sure the place will not suit those
whose highest idea of winter enjoyment is tobogganing and an ice palace,
nor those who revel in the steam and languor of a tropical island; but
for a person whose desires are moderate, whose tastes are temperate, who
is willing for once to be good-humored and content in equable
conditions, I should commend Coronado Beach and the Hotel del Coronado,
if I had not long ago learned that it is unsafe to commend to any human
being a climate or a doctor.
But you can take your choice. It lies there, our Mediterranean region,
on a blue ocean, protected by barriers of granite from the Northern
influences, an infinite variety of plain, cañon, hills, valleys,
sea-coast; our New Italy without malaria, and with every sort of fruit
which we desire (except the tropical), which will be grown in perfection
when our knowledge equals our ambition; and if you cannot find a winter
home there or pass some contented weeks in the months of Northern
inclemency, you are weighing social advantages against those of the
least objectionable climate within the Union. It is not yet proved that
this equability and the daily out-door life possible there will change
character, but they are likely to improve the disposition and soften the
asperities of common life. At any rate, there is a land where from
November to April one has not to make a continual fight with the
elements to keep alive.
It has been said that this land of the sun and of the equable climate
will have the effect that other lands of a southern aspect have upon
temperament and habits. It is feared that Northern-bred people, who are
guided by the necessity of making hay while the sun shines, will not
make hay at all in a land where the sun always shines. It is thought
that unless people are spurred on incessantly by the exigencies of the
changing seasons they will lose energy, and fall into an idle floating
along with gracious nature. Will not one sink into a comfortable and
easy procrastination if he has a whole year in which to perform the
labor of three months? Will Southern California be an exception to those
lands of equable climate and extraordinary fertility where every effort
is postponed till "to-morrow?"
I wish there might be something solid in this expectation; that this may
be a region where the restless American will lose something of his hurry
and petty, feverish ambition. Partially it may be so. He will take, he
is already taking, something of the tone of the climate and of the old
Spanish occupation. But the race instinct of thrift and of "getting on"
will not wear out in many generations. Besides, the condition of living
at all in Southern California in comfort, and with the social life
indispensable to our people, demands labor, not exhausting and killing,
but still incessant--demands industry. A land that will not yield
satisfactorily without irrigation, and whose best paying produce
requires intelligent as well as careful husbandry, will never be an idle
land. Egypt, with all its _dolce far niente_, was never an idle land for
the laborer.
It may be expected, however, that no more energy will be developed or
encouraged than is needed for the daily tasks, and these tasks being
lighter than elsewhere, and capable of being postponed, that there will
be less stress and strain in the daily life. Although the climate of
Southern California is not enervating, in fact is stimulating to the
new-comer, it is doubtless true that the monotony of good weather, of
the sight of perpetual bloom and color in orchards and gardens, will
take away nervousness and produce a certain placidity, which might be
taken for laziness by a Northern observer. It may be that engagements
will not be kept with desired punctuality, under the impression that the
enjoyment of life does not depend upon exact response to the second-hand
of a watch; and it is not unpleasant to think that there is a corner of
the Union where there will be a little more leisure, a little more of
serene waiting on Providence, an abatement of the restless rush and
haste of our usual life. The waves of population have been rolling
westward for a long time, and now, breaking over the mountains, they
flow over Pacific slopes and along the warm and inviting seas. Is it
altogether an unpleasing thought that the conditions of life will be
somewhat easier there, that there will be some physical repose, the race
having reached the sunset of the continent, comparable to the desirable
placidity of life called the sunset of old age? This may be altogether
fanciful, but I have sometimes felt, in the sunny moderation of nature
there, that this land might offer for thousands at least a winter of
content.
CHAPTER VIII.
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.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ADVANTAGES OF IRRIGATION.
It is necessary to understand this problem of irrigation in order to
comprehend Southern California, the exceptional value of its arable
land, the certainty and great variety of its products, and the part it
is to play in our markets. There are three factors in the expectation of
a crop--soil, sunshine, and water. In a region where we can assume the
first two to be constant, the only uncertainty is water. Southern
California is practically without rain from May to December. Upon this
fact rests the immense value of its soil, and the certainty that it can
supply the rest of the Union with a great variety of products. This
certainty must be purchased by a previous investment of money. Water is
everywhere to be had for money, in some localities by surface wells, in
others by artesian-wells, in others from such streams as the Los Angeles
and the Santa Ana, and from reservoirs secured by dams in the heart of
the high mountains. It is possible to compute the cost of any one of the
systems of irrigation, to determine whether it will pay by calculating
the amount of land it will irrigate. The cost of procuring water varies
greatly with the situation, and it is conceivable that money can be lost
in such an investment, but I have yet to hear of any irrigation that has
not been more or less successful.
Farming and fruit-raising are usually games of hazard. Good crops and
poor crops depend upon enough rain and not too much at just the right
times. A wheat field which has a good start with moderate rain may later
wither in a drought, or be ruined by too much water at the time of
maturity. And, avoiding all serious reverses from either dryness or wet,
every farmer knows that the quality and quantity of the product would be
immensely improved if the growing stalks and roots could have water when
and only when they need it. The difference would be between, say, twenty
and forty bushels of grain or roots to the acre, and that means the
difference between profit and loss. There is probably not a crop of any
kind grown in the great West that would not be immensely benefited if it
could be irrigated once or twice a year; and probably anywhere that
water is attainable the cost of irrigation would be abundantly paid in
the yield from year to year. Farming in the West with even a little
irrigation would not be the game of hazard that it is. And it may
further be assumed that there is not a vegetable patch or a fruit
orchard East or West that would not yield better quality and more
abundantly with irrigation.
[Illustration: RAISIN-CURING.]
But this is not all. Any farmer who attempts to raise grass and potatoes
and strawberries on contiguous fields, subject to the same chance of
drought or rainfall, has a vivid sense of his difficulties. The potatoes
are spoiled by the water that helps the grass, and the coquettish
strawberry will not thrive on the regimen that suits the grosser crops.
In California, which by its climate and soil gives a greater variety of
products than any other region in the Union, the supply of water is
adjusted to the needs of each crop, even on contiguous fields. No two
products need the same amount of water, or need it at the same time. The
orange needs more than the grape, the alfalfa more than the orange, the
peach and apricot less than the orange; the olive, the fig, the almond,
the English walnut, demand each a different supply. Depending entirely
on irrigation six months of the year, the farmer in Southern California
is practically certain of his crop year after year; and if all his
plants and trees are in a healthful condition, as they will be if he is
not too idle to cultivate as well as irrigate, his yield will be about
double what it would be without systematic irrigation. It is this
practical control of the water the year round, in a climate where
sunshine is the rule, that makes the productiveness of California so
large as to be incomprehensible to Eastern people. Even the trees are
not dormant more than three or four months in the year.
But irrigation, in order to be successful, must be intelligently
applied. In unskilful hands it may work more damage than benefit. Mr.
Theodore S. Van Dyke, who may always be quoted with confidence, says
that the ground should never be flooded; that water must not touch the
plant or tree, or come near enough to make the soil bake around it; and
that it should be let in in small streams for two or three days, and not
in large streams for a few hours. It is of the first importance that the
ground shall be stirred as soon as dry enough, the cultivation to be
continued, and water never to be substituted for the cultivator to
prevent baking. The methods of irrigation in use may be reduced to
three. First, the old Mexican way--running a small ditch from tree to
tree, without any basin round the tree. Second, the basin system, where
a large basin is made round the tree, and filled several times. This
should only be used where water is scarce, for it trains the roots like
a brush, instead of sending them out laterally into the soil. Third, the
Riverside method, which is the best in the world, and produces the
largest results with the least water and the least work. It is the
closest imitation of the natural process of wetting by gentle rain. "A
small flume, eight or ten inches square, of common red-wood is laid
along the upper side of a ten-acre tract. At intervals of one to three
feet, according to the nature of the ground and the stuff to be
irrigated, are bored one-inch holes, with a small wooden button over
them to regulate the flow. This flume costs a trifle, is left in
position, lasts for years, and is always ready. Into this flume is
turned from the ditch an irrigating head of 20, 25, or 30 inches of
water, generally about 20 inches. This is divided by the holes and the
buttons into streams of from one-sixth to one-tenth of an inch each,
making from 120 to 200 small streams. From five to seven furrows are
made between two rows of trees, two between rows of grapes, one furrow
between rows of corn, potatoes, etc. It may take from fifteen to twenty
hours for one of the streams to get across the tract. They are allowed
to run from forty-eight to seventy-two hours. The ground is then
thoroughly wet in all directions, and three or four feet deep. As soon
as the ground is dry enough cultivation is begun, and kept up from six
to eight weeks before water is used again." Only when the ground is very
sandy is the basin system necessary. Long experiment has taught that
this system is by far the best; and, says Mr. Van Dyke, "Those whose
ideas are taken from the wasteful systems of flooding or soaking from
big ditches have something to learn in Southern California."
As to the quantity of water needed in the kind of soil most common in
Southern California I will again quote Mr. Van Dyke: "They will tell you
at Riverside that they use an inch of water to five acres, and some say
an inch to three acres. But this is because they charge to the land all
the waste on the main ditch, and because they use thirty per cent. of
the water in July and August, when it is the lowest. But this is no test
of the duty of water; the amount actually delivered on the land should
be taken. What they actually use for ten acres at Riverside, Redlands,
etc., is a twenty-inch stream of three days' run five times a year,
equal to 300 inches for one day, or one inch steady run for 300 days. As
an inch is the equivalent of 365 inches for one day, or one inch for 365
days, 300 inches for one day equals an inch to twelve acres. Many use
even less than this, running the water only two or two and a half days
at a time. Others use more head; but it rarely exceeds 24 inches for
three days and five times a year, which would be 72 multiplied by 5, or
360 inches--a little less than a full inch for a year for ten acres."
[Illustration: IRRIGATION BY ARTESIAN-WELL SYSTEM.]
[Illustration: IRRIGATION BY PIPE SYSTEM.]
I have given room to these details because the Riverside experiment,
which results in such large returns of excellent fruit, is worthy of the
attention of cultivators everywhere. The constant stirring of the soil,
to keep it loose as well as to keep down useless growths, is second in
importance only to irrigation. Some years ago, when it was ascertained
that tracts of land which had been regarded as only fit for herding
cattle and sheep would by good ploughing and constant cultivation
produce fair crops without any artificial watering, there spread abroad
a notion that irrigation could be dispensed with. There are large areas,
dry and cracked on the surface, where the soil is moist three and four
feet below the surface in the dry season. By keeping the surface broken
and well pulverized the moisture rises sufficiently to insure a crop.
Many Western farmers have found out this secret of cultivation, and more
will learn in time the good sense of not spreading themselves over too
large an area; that forty acres planted and cultivated will give a
better return than eighty acres planted and neglected. Crops of various
sorts are raised in Southern California by careful cultivation with
little or no irrigation, but the idea that cultivation alone will bring
sufficiently good production is now practically abandoned, and the
almost universal experience is that judicious irrigation always improves
the crop in quality and in quantity, and that irrigation and cultivation
are both essential to profitable farming or fruit-raising.
CHAPTER X.
THE CHANCE FOR LABORERS AND SMALL FARMERS.
It would seem, then, that capital is necessary for successful
agriculture or horticulture in Southern California. But where is it not
needed? In New England? In Kansas, where land which was given to actual
settlers is covered with mortgages for money absolutely necessary to
develop it? But passing this by, what is the chance in Southern
California for laborers and for mechanics? Let us understand the
situation. In California there is no exception to the rule that
continual labor, thrift, and foresight are essential to the getting of a
good living or the gaining of a competence. No doubt speculation will
spring up again. It is inevitable with the present enormous and yearly
increasing yield of fruits, the better intelligence in vine culture,
wine-making, and raisin-curing, the growth of marketable oranges,
lemons, etc., and the consequent rise in the value of land. Doubtless
fortunes will be made by enterprising companies who secure large areas
of unimproved land at low prices, bring water on them, and then sell in
small lots. But this will come to an end. The tendency is to subdivide
the land into small holdings--into farms and gardens of ten and twenty
acres. The great ranches are sure to be broken up. With the resulting
settlement by industrious people the cities will again experience
"booms;" but these are not peculiar to California. In my mind I see the
time when this region (because it will pay better proportionally to
cultivate a small area) will be one of small farms, of neat cottages, of
industrious homes. The owner is pretty certain to prosper--that is, to
get a good living (which is independence), and lay aside a little
yearly--if the work is done by himself and his family. And the
peculiarity of the situation is that the farm or garden, whichever it is
called, will give agreeable and most healthful occupation to all the
boys and girls in the family all the days in the year that can be spared
from the school. Aside from the ploughing, the labor is light. Pruning,
grafting, budding, the picking of the grapes, the gathering of the fruit
from the trees, the sorting, packing, and canning, are labor for light
and deft hands, and labor distributed through the year. The harvest, of
one sort and another, is almost continuous, so that young girls and boys
can have, in well-settled districts, pretty steady employment--a long
season in establishments packing oranges; at another time, in canning
fruits; at another, in packing raisins.
It goes without saying that in the industries now developed, and in
others as important which are in their infancy (for instance, the
culture of the olive for oil and as an article of food; the growth and
curing of figs; the gathering of almonds, English walnuts, etc.), the
labor of the owners of the land and their families will not suffice.
There must be as large a proportion of day-laborers as there are in
other regions where such products are grown. Chinese labor at certain
seasons has been a necessity. Under the present policy of California
this must diminish, and its place be taken by some other. The pay for
this labor has always been good. It is certain to be more and more in
demand. Whether the pay will ever approach near to the European standard
is a question, but it is a fair presumption that the exceptional profit
of the land, owing to its productiveness, will for a long time keep
wages up.
During the "boom" period all wages were high, those of skilled mechanics
especially, owing to the great amount of building on speculation. The
ordinary laborer on a ranch had $30 a month and board and lodging;
laborers of a higher grade, $2 to $2 50 a day; skilled masons, $6;
carpenters, from $3 50 to $5; plasterers, $4 to $5; house-servants, from
$23 to $33 a month. Since the "boom," wages of skilled mechanics have
declined at least 25 per cent., and there has been less demand for labor
generally, except in connection with fruit raising and harvesting. It
would be unwise for laborers to go to California on an uncertainty, but
it can be said of that country with more confidence than of any other
section that its peculiar industries, now daily increasing, will absorb
an increasing amount of day labor, and later on it will remunerate
skilled artisan labor.
In deciding whether Southern California would be an agreeable place of
residence there are other things to be considered besides the
productiveness of the soil, the variety of products, the ease of
out-door labor distributed through the year, the certainty of returns
for intelligent investment with labor, the equability of summer and
winter, and the adaptation to personal health. There are always
disadvantages attending the development of a new country and the
evolution of a new society. It is not a small thing, and may be one of
daily discontent, the change from a landscape clad with verdure, the
riotous and irrepressible growth of a rainy region, to a land that the
greater part of the year is green only where it is artificially watered,
where all the hills and unwatered plains are brown and sere, where the
foliage is coated with dust, and where driving anywhere outside the
sprinkled avenues of a town is to be enveloped in a cloud of powdered
earth. This discomfort must be weighed against the commercial advantages
of a land of irrigation.
[Illustration: GARDEN SCENE, SANTA ANA.]
What are the chances for a family of very moderate means to obtain a
foothold and thrive by farming in Southern California? I cannot answer
this better than by giving substantially the experience of one family,
and by saying that this has been paralleled, with change of details, by
many others. Of course, in a highly developed settlement, where the land
is mostly cultivated, and its actual yearly produce makes its price very
high, it is not easy to get a foothold. But there are many regions--say
in Orange County, and certainly in San Diego--where land can be had at a
moderate price and on easy terms of payment. Indeed, there are few
places, as I have said, where an industrious family would not find
welcome and cordial help in establishing itself. And it must be
remembered that there are many communities where life is very simple,
and the great expense of keeping up an appearance attending life
elsewhere need not be reckoned.
A few years ago a professional man in a New England city, who was in
delicate health, with his wife and five boys, all under sixteen, and one
too young to be of any service, moved to San Diego. He had in money a
small sum, less than a thousand dollars. He had no experience in farming
or horticulture, and his health would not have permitted him to do much
field work in our climate. Fortunately he found in the fertile El Cajon
Valley, fifteen miles from San Diego, a farmer and fruit-grower, who had
upon his place a small unoccupied house. Into that house he moved,
furnishing it very simply with furniture bought in San Diego, and hired
his services to the landlord. The work required was comparatively easy,
in the orchard and vineyards, and consisted largely in superintending
other laborers. The pay was about enough to support his family without
encroaching on his little capital. Very soon, however, he made an
arrangement to buy the small house and tract of some twenty acres on
which he lived, on time, perhaps making a partial payment. He began at
once to put out an orange orchard and plant a vineyard; this he
accomplished with the assistance of his boys, who did practically most
of the work after the first planting, leaving him a chance to give most
of his days to his employer. The orchard and vineyard work is so light
that a smart, intelligent boy is almost as valuable a worker in the
field as a man. The wife, meantime, kept the house and did its work.
House-keeping was comparatively easy; little fuel was required except
for cooking; the question of clothes was a minor one. In that climate
wants for a fairly comfortable existence are fewer than with us. From
the first, almost, vegetables, raised upon the ground while the vines
and oranges were growing, contributed largely to the support of the
family. The out-door life and freedom from worry insured better health,
and the diet of fruit and vegetables, suitable to the climate, reduced
the cost of living to a minimum. As soon as the orchard and the vineyard
began to produce fruit, the owner was enabled to quit working for his
neighbor, and give all his time to the development of his own place. He
increased his planting; he added to his house; he bought a piece of land
adjoining which had a grove of eucalyptus, which would supply him with
fuel. At first the society circle was small, and there was no school;
but the incoming of families had increased the number of children, so
that an excellent public school was established. When I saw him he was
living in conditions of comfortable industry; his land had trebled in
value; the pair of horses which he drove he had bought cheap, for they
were Eastern horses; but the climate had brought them up, so that the
team was a serviceable one in good condition. The story is not one of
brilliant success, but to me it is much more hopeful for the country
than the other tales I heard of sudden wealth or lucky speculation. It
is the founding in an unambitious way of a comfortable home. The boys of
the family will branch out, get fields, orchards, vineyards of their
own, and add to the solid producing industry of the country. This
orderly, contented industry, increasing its gains day by day, little by
little, is the life and hope of any State.
CHAPTER XI.
SOME DETAILS OF THE WONDERFUL DEVELOPMENT.
It is not the purpose of this volume to describe Southern California.
That has been thoroughly done; and details, with figures and pictures in
regard to every town and settlement, will be forthcoming on application,
which will be helpful guides to persons who can see for themselves, or
make sufficient allowance for local enthusiasm. But before speaking
further of certain industries south of the great mountain ranges, the
region north of the Sierra Madre, which is allied to Southern California
by its productions, should be mentioned. The beautiful antelope plains
and the Kern Valley (where land is still cheap and very productive)
should not be overlooked. The splendid San Joaquin Valley is already
speaking loudly and clearly for itself. The region north of the
mountains of Kern County, shut in by the Sierra Nevada range on the east
and the Coast Range on the west, substantially one valley, fifty to
sixty miles in breadth, watered by the King and the San Joaquin, and
gently sloping to the north, say for two hundred miles, is a land of
marvellous capacity, capable of sustaining a dense population. It is
cooler in winter than Southern California, and the summers average much
warmer. Owing to the greater heat, the fruits mature sooner. It is just
now becoming celebrated for its raisins, which in quality are
unexcelled; and its area, which can be well irrigated from the rivers
and from the mountains on either side, seems capable of producing
raisins enough to supply the world. It is a wonderfully rich valley in a
great variety of products. Fresno County, which occupies the centre of
this valley, has 1,200,000 acres of agricultural and 4,400,000 of
mountain and pasture land. The city of Fresno, which occupies land that
in 1870 was a sheep ranch, is the commercial centre of a beautiful
agricultural and fruit region, and has a population estimated at 12,000.
From this centre were shipped in the season of 1890, 1500 car-loads of
raisins. In 1865 the only exports of Fresno County were a few bales of
wool. The report of 1889 gave a shipment of 700,000 boxes of raisins,
and the whole export of 1890, of all products, was estimated at
$10,000,000. Whether these figures are exact or not, there is no doubt
of the extraordinary success of the raisin industry, nor that this is a
region of great activity and promise.
The traveller has constantly to remind himself that this is a new
country, and to be judged as a new country. It is out of his experience
that trees can grow so fast, and plantations in so short a time put on
an appearance of maturity. When he sees a roomy, pretty cottage overrun
with vines and flowering plants, set in the midst of trees and lawns and
gardens of tropical appearance and luxuriance, he can hardly believe
that three years before this spot was desert land. When he looks over
miles of vineyards, of groves of oranges, olives, walnuts, prunes, the
trees all in vigorous bearing, he cannot believe that five or ten years
before the whole region was a waste. When he enters a handsome village,
with substantial buildings of brick, and perhaps of stone, with fine
school-houses, banks, hotels, an opera-house, large packing-houses, and
warehouses and shops of all sorts, with tasteful dwellings and lovely
ornamented lawns, it is hard to understand that all this is the creation
of two or three years. Yet these surprises meet the traveller at every
turn, and the wonder is that there is not visible more crudeness,
eccentric taste, and evidence of hasty beginnings.
[Illustration: A GRAPE-VINE, MONTECITO VALLEY, SANTA BARBARA.]
San Bernardino is comparatively an old town. It was settled in 1853 by
a colony of Mormons from Salt Lake. The remains of this colony, less
than a hundred, still live here, and have a church like the other sects,
but they call themselves Josephites, and do not practise polygamy. There
is probably not a sect or schism in the United States that has not its
representative in California. Until 1865 San Bernardino was merely a
straggling settlement, and a point of distribution for Arizona. The
discovery that a large part of the county was adapted to the orange and
the vine, and the advent of the Santa Fé railway, changed all that. Land
that then might have been bought for $4 an acre is now sold at from $200
to $300, and the city has become the busy commercial centre of a large
number of growing villages, and of one of the most remarkable orange and
vine districts in the world. It has many fine buildings, a population of
about 6000, and a decided air of vigorous business. The great plain
about it is mainly devoted to agricultural products, which are grown
without irrigation, while in the near foot-hills the orange and the vine
flourish by the aid of irrigation. Artesian-wells abound in the San
Bernardino plain, but the mountains are the great and unfailing source
of water supply. The Bear Valley Dam is a most daring and gigantic
construction. A solid wall of masonry, 300 feet long and 60 feet high,
curving towards the reservoir, creates an inland lake in the mountains
holding water enough to irrigate 20,000 acres of land. This is conveyed
to distributing reservoirs in the east end of the valley. On a terrace
in the foot-hills a few miles to the north, 2000 feet above the sea, are
the Arrow-head Hot Springs (named from the figure of a gigantic
"arrow-head" on the mountain above), already a favorite resort for
health and pleasure. The views from the plain of the picturesque
foot-hills and the snow-peaks of the San Bernardino range are
exceedingly fine. The marvellous beauty of the purple and deep violet of
the giant hills at sunset, with spotless snow, lingers in the memory.
Perhaps the settlement of Redlands, ten miles by rail east of San
Bernardino, is as good an illustration as any of rapid development and
great promise. It is devoted to the orange and the grape. As late as
1875 much of it was Government land, considered valueless. It had a few
settlers, but the town, which counts now about 2000 people, was only
begun in 1887. It has many solid brick edifices and many pretty cottages
on its gentle slopes and rounded hills, overlooked by the great
mountains. The view from any point of vantage of orchards and vineyards
and semi-tropical gardens, with the wide sky-line of noble and snow-clad
hills, is exceedingly attractive. The region is watered by the Santa Ana
River and Mill Creek, but the main irrigating streams, which make every
hill-top to bloom with vegetation, come from the Bear Valley Reservoir.
On a hill to the south of the town the Smiley Brothers, of Catskill
fame, are building fine residences, and planting their 125 acres with
fruit-trees and vines, evergreens, flowers, and semi-tropic shrubbery in
a style of landscape-gardening that in three years at the furthest will
make this spot one of the few great showplaces of the country. Behind
their ridge is the San Mateo Cañon, through which the Southern Pacific
Railway runs, while in front are the splendid sloping plains, valleys,
and orange groves, and the great sweep of mountains from San Jacinto
round to the Sierra Madre range. It is almost a matchless prospect. The
climate is most agreeable, the plantations increase month by month, and
thus far the orange-trees have not been visited by the scale, nor the
vines by any sickness. Although the groves are still young, there were
shipped from Redlands in the season of 1889-90 80 car-loads of oranges,
of 286 boxes to the car, at a price averaging nearly $1000 a car. That
season's planting of oranges was over 1200 acres. It had over 5000 acres
in fruits, of which nearly 3000 were in peaches, apricots, grapes, and
other sorts called deciduous.
Riverside may without prejudice be regarded as the centre of the orange
growth and trade. The railway shipments of oranges from Southern
California in the season of 1890 aggregated about 2400 car-loads, or
about 800,000 boxes, of oranges (in which estimate the lemons are
included), valued at about $1,500,000. Of this shipment more than half
was from Riverside. This has been, of course, greatly stimulated by the
improved railroad facilities, among them the shortening of the time to
Chicago by the Santa Fé route, and the running of special fruit trains.
Southern California responds like magic to this chance to send her
fruits to the East, and the area planted month by month is something
enormous. It is estimated that the crop of oranges alone in 1891 will be
over 4500 car-loads. We are accustomed to discount all California
estimates, but I think that no one yet has comprehended the amount to
which the shipments to Eastern markets of vegetables and fresh and
canned fruits will reach within five years. I base my prediction upon
some observation of the Eastern demand and the reports of
fruit-dealers, upon what I saw of the new planting all over the State in
1890, and upon the statistics of increase. Take Riverside as an example.
In 1872 it was a poor sheep ranch. In 1880-81 it shipped 15 car-loads,
or 4290 boxes, of oranges; the amount yearly increased, until in 1888-89
it was 925 car-loads, or 263,879 boxes. In 1890 it rose to 1253
car-loads, or 358,341 boxes; and an important fact is that the largest
shipment was in April (455 car-loads, or 130,226 boxes), at the time
when the supply from other orange regions for the markets East had
nearly ceased.
[Illustration: IRRIGATING AN ORCHARD.]
It should be said, also, that the quality of the oranges has vastly
improved. This is owing to better cultivation, knowledge of proper
irrigation, and the adoption of the best varieties for the soil. As
different sorts of oranges mature at different seasons, a variety is
needed to give edible fruit in each month from December to May
inclusive. In February, 1887, I could not find an orange of the first
class compared with the best fruit in other regions. It may have been
too early for the varieties I tried; but I believe there has been a
marked improvement in quality. In May, 1890, we found delicious oranges
almost everywhere. The seedless Washington and Australian navels are
favorites, especially for the market, on account of their great size and
fine color. When in perfection they are very fine, but the skin is thick
and the texture coarser than that of some others. The best orange I
happened to taste was a Tahiti seedling at Montecito (Santa Barbara). It
is a small orange, with a thin skin and a compact, sweet pulp that
leaves little fibre. It resembles the famous orange of Malta. But there
are many excellent varieties--the Mediterranean sweet, the paper rind
St. Michael, the Maltese blood, etc. The experiments with seedlings are
profitable, and will give ever new varieties. I noted that the "grape
fruit," which is becoming so much liked in the East, is not appreciated
in California.
[Illustration: ORANGE CULTURE. Packing Oranges--Navel Orange-tree Six
Years Old--Irrigating an Orange Grove.]
The city of Riverside occupies an area of some five miles by three, and
claims to have 6000 inhabitants; the centre is a substantial town with
fine school and other public buildings, but the region is one succession
of orange groves and vineyards, of comfortable houses and broad avenues.
One avenue through which we drove is 125 feet wide and 12 miles long,
planted in three rows with palms, magnolias, the _Grevillea robusta_
(Australian fern), the pepper, and the eucalyptus, and lined all the way
by splendid orange groves, in the midst of which are houses and grounds
with semi-tropical attractions. Nothing could be lovelier than such a
scene of fruits and flowers, with the background of purple hills and
snowy peaks. The mountain views are superb. Frost is a rare visitor. Not
in fifteen years has there been enough to affect the orange. There is
little rain after March, but there are fogs and dew-falls, and the ocean
breeze is felt daily. The grape grown for raisins is the muscat, and
this has had no "sickness." Vigilance and a quarantine have also kept
from the orange the scale which has been so annoying in some other
localities. The orange, when cared for, is a generous bearer; some trees
produce twenty boxes each, and there are areas of twenty acres in good
bearing which have brought to the owner as much as $10,000 a year.
The whole region of the Santa Ana and San Gabriel valleys, from the
desert on the east to Los Angeles, the city of gardens, is a surprise,
and year by year an increasing wonder. In production it exhausts the
catalogue of fruits and flowers; its scenery is varied by ever new
combinations of the picturesque and the luxuriant; every town boasts
some special advantage in climate, soil, water, or society; but these
differences, many of them visible to the eye, cannot appear in any
written description. The traveller may prefer the scenery of Pasadena,
or that of Pomona, or of Riverside, but the same words in regard to
color, fertility, combinations of orchards, avenues, hills, must appear
in the description of each. Ontario, Pomona, Puente, Alhambra--wherever
one goes there is the same wonder of color and production.
Pomona is a pleasant city in the midst of fine orange groves, watered
abundantly by artesian-wells and irrigating ditches from a mountain
reservoir. A specimen of the ancient adobe residence is on the Meserve
plantation, a lovely old place, with its gardens of cherries,
strawberries, olives, and oranges. From the top of San José hill we had
a view of a plain twenty-five miles by fifty in extent, dotted with
cultivation, surrounded by mountains--a wonderful prospect. Pomona, like
its sister cities in this region, has a regard for the intellectual side
of life, exhibited in good school-houses and public libraries. In the
library of Pomona is what may be regarded as the tutelary deity of the
place--the goddess Pomona, a good copy in marble of the famous statue in
the Uffizi Gallery, presented to the city by the Rev. C. F. Loop. This
enterprising citizen is making valuable experiments in olive culture,
raising a dozen varieties in order to ascertain which is best adapted to
this soil, and which will make the best return in oil and in a
marketable product of cured fruit for the table.
The growth of the olive is to be, it seems to me, one of the leading and
most permanent industries of Southern California. It will give us, what
it is nearly impossible to buy now, pure olive oil, in place of the
cotton-seed and lard mixture in general use. It is a most wholesome and
palatable article of food. Those whose chief experience of the olive is
the large, coarse, and not agreeable Spanish variety, used only as an
appetizer, know little of the value of the best varieties as food,
nutritious as meat, and always delicious. Good bread and a dish of
pickled olives make an excellent meal. The sort known as the Mission
olive, planted by the Franciscans a century ago, is generally grown now,
and the best fruit is from the older trees. The most successful attempts
in cultivating the olive and putting it on the market have been made by
Mr. F. A. Kimball, of National City, and Mr. Ellwood Cooper, of Santa
Barbara. The experiments have gone far enough to show that the industry
is very remunerative. The best olive oil I have ever tasted anywhere is
that produced from the Cooper and the Kimball orchards; but not enough
is produced to supply the local demand. Mr. Cooper has written a careful
treatise on olive culture, which will be of great service to all
growers. The art of pickling is not yet mastered, and perhaps some other
variety will be preferred to the old Mission for the table. A mature
olive grove in good bearing is a fortune. I feel sure that within
twenty-five years this will be one of the most profitable industries of
California, and that the demand for pure oil and edible fruit in the
United States will drive out the adulterated and inferior present
commercial products. But California can easily ruin its reputation by
adopting the European systems of adulteration.
[Illustration: IN A FIELD OF GOLDEN PUMPKINS.]
We drove one day from Arcadia Station through the region occupied by
the Baldwin plantations, an area of over fifty thousand acres--a happy
illustration of what industry and capital can do in the way of variety
of productions, especially in what are called the San Anita vineyards
and orchards, extending southward from the foot-hills. About the home
place and in many sections where the irrigating streams flow one might
fancy he was in the tropics, so abundant and brilliant are the flowers
and exotic plants. There are splendid orchards of oranges, almonds,
English walnuts, lemons, peaches, apricots, figs, apples, and olives,
with grain and corn--in short, everything that grows in garden or field.
The ranch is famous for its brandies and wines as well as fruits. We
lunched at the East San Gabriel Hotel, a charming place with a peaceful
view from the wide veranda of live-oaks, orchards, vineyards, and the
noble Sierra Madre range. The Californians may be excused for using the
term paradisiacal about such scenes. Flowers, flowers everywhere, color
on color, and the song of the mocking-bird!
CHAPTER XII.
HOW THE FRUIT PERILS WERE MET.--FURTHER DETAILS OF LOCALITIES.
In the San Gabriel Valley and elsewhere I saw evidence of the perils
that attend the culture of the vine and the fruit-tree in all other
countries, and from which California in the early days thought it was
exempt. Within the past three or four years there has prevailed a
sickness of the vine, the cause of which is unknown, and for which no
remedy has been discovered. No blight was apparent, but the vine
sickened and failed. The disease was called consumption of the vine. I
saw many vineyards subject to it, and hundreds of acres of old vines had
been rooted up as useless. I was told by a fruit-buyer in Los Angeles
that he thought the raisin industry below Fresno was ended unless new
planting recovered the vines, and that the great wine fields were about
"played out." The truth I believe to be that the disease is confined to
the vineyards of Old Mission grapes. Whether these had attained the
limit of their active life, and sickened, I do not know. The trouble for
a time was alarming; but new plantings of other varieties of grapes have
been successful, the vineyards look healthful, and the growers expect no
further difficulty. The planting, which was for a time suspended, has
been more vigorously renewed.
The insect pests attacking the orange were even more serious, and in
1887-88, though little was published about it, there was something like
a panic, in the fear that the orange and lemon culture in Southern
California would be a failure. The enemies were the black, the red, and
the white scale. The latter, the _icerya purchasi_, or cottony cushion
scale, was especially loathsome and destructive; whole orchards were
enfeebled, and no way was discovered of staying its progress, which
threatened also the olive and every other tree, shrub, and flower.
Science was called on to discover its parasite. This was found to be the
Australian lady-bug (_vedolia cardinalis_), and in 1888-89 quantities of
this insect were imported and spread throughout Los Angeles County, and
sent to Santa Barbara and other afflicted districts. The effect was
magical. The _vedolia_ attacked the cottony scale with intense vigor,
and everywhere killed it. The orchards revived as if they had been
recreated, and the danger was over. The enemies of the black and the red
scale have not yet been discovered, but they probably will be. Meantime
the growers have recovered courage, and are fertilizing and fumigating.
In Santa Ana I found that the red scale was fought successfully by
fumigating the trees. The operation is performed at night under a
movable tent, which covers the tree. The cost is about twenty cents a
tree. One lesson of all this is that trees must be fed in order to be
kept vigorous to resist such attacks, and that fruit-raising,
considering the number of enemies that all fruits have in all climates,
is not an idle occupation. The clean, handsome English walnut is about
the only tree in the State that thus far has no enemy.
One cannot take anywhere else a more exhilarating, delightful drive than
about the rolling, highly cultivated, many-villaed Pasadena, and out to
the foot-hills and the Sierra Madre Villa. He is constantly exclaiming
at the varied loveliness of the scene--oranges, palms, formal gardens,
hedges of Monterey cypress. It is very Italy-like. The Sierra Madre
furnishes abundant water for all the valley, and the swift irrigating
stream from Eaton Cañon waters the Sierra Madre Villa. Among the peaks
above it rises Mt. Wilson, a thousand feet above the plain, the site
selected for the Harvard Observatory with its 40-inch glass. The
clearness of the air at this elevation, and the absence of clouds night
and day the greater portion of the year, make this a most advantageous
position, it is said, to use the glass in dissolving nebulæ. The Sierra
Madre Villa, once the most favorite resort in this region, was closed.
In its sheltered situation, its luxuriant and half-neglected gardens,
its wide plantations and irrigating streams, it reminds one of some
secularized monastery on the promontory of Sorrento. It only needs good
management to make the hotel very attractive and especially agreeable in
the months of winter.
[Illustration: PACKING CHERRIES, POMONA.]
Pasadena, which exhibits everywhere evidences of wealth and culture, and
claims a permanent population of 12,000, has the air of a winter resort;
the great Hotel Raymond is closed in May, the boarding-houses want
occupants, the shops and livery-stables customers, and the streets lack
movement. This is easily explained. It is not because Pasadena is not an
agreeable summer residence, but because the visitors are drawn there in
the winter principally to escape the inclement climate of the North and
East, and because special efforts have been made for their entertainment
in the winter. We found the atmosphere delightful in the middle of May.
The mean summer heat is 67°, and the nights are always cool. The hills
near by may be resorted to with the certainty of finding as decided a
change as one desires in the summer season. I must repeat that the
Southern California summer is not at all understood in the East. The
statement of the general equability of the temperature the year through
must be insisted on. We lunched one day in a typical California house,
in the midst of a garden of fruits, flowers, and tropical shrubs; in a
house that might be described as half roses and half tent, for added to
the wooden structure were rooms of canvas, which are used as sleeping
apartments winter and summer.
This attractive region, so lovely in its cultivation, with so many
charming drives, offering good shooting on the plains and in the hills,
and centrally placed for excursions, is only eight miles from the busy
city of Los Angeles. An excellent point of view of the country is from
the graded hill on which stands the Raymond Hotel, a hill isolated but
easy of access, which is in itself a mountain of bloom, color, and
fragrance. From all the broad verandas and from every window the
prospect is charming, whether the eye rests upon cultivated orchards and
gardens and pretty villas, or upon the purple foot-hills and the snowy
ranges. It enjoys a daily ocean breeze, and the air is always
exhilarating. This noble hill is a study in landscape-gardening. It is a
mass of brilliant color, and the hospitality of the region generally to
foreign growths may be estimated by the trees acclimated on these
slopes. They are the pepper, eucalyptus, pine, cypress, sycamore,
red-wood, olive, date and fan palms, banana, pomegranate, guava,
Japanese persimmon, umbrella, maple, elm, locust, English walnut, birch,
ailantus, poplar, willow, and more ornamental shrubs than one can well
name.
I can indulge in few locality details except those which are
illustrative of the general character of the country. In passing into
Orange County, which was recently set off from Los Angeles, we come into
a region of less "fashion," but one that for many reasons is attractive
to people of moderate means who are content with independent simplicity.
The country about the thriving village of Santa Ana is very rich, being
abundantly watered by the Santa Ana River and by artesian-wells. The
town is nine miles from the ocean. On the ocean side the land is mainly
agricultural; on the inland side it is specially adapted to fruit. We
drove about it, and in Tustin City, which has many pleasant residences
and a vacant "boom" hotel, through endless plantations of oranges. On
the road towards Los Angeles we passed large herds of cattle and sheep,
and fine groves of the English walnut, which thrives especially well in
this soil and the neighborhood of the sea. There is comparatively little
waste land in this valley district, as one may see by driving through
the country about Santa Ana, Orange, Anaheim, Tustin City, etc. Anaheim
is a prosperous German colony. It was here that Madame Modjeska and her
husband, Count Bozenta, first settled in California. They own and occupy
now a picturesque ranch in the Santiago Cañon of the Santa Ana range,
twenty-two miles from Santa Ana. This is one of the richest regions in
the State, and with its fair quota of working population, it will be one
of the most productive.
From Newport, on the coast, or from San Pedro, one may visit the island
of Santa Catalina. Want of time prevented our going there. Sportsmen
enjoy there the exciting pastime of hunting the wild goat. From the
photographs I saw, and from all I heard of it, it must be as picturesque
a resort in natural beauty as the British Channel islands.
Los Angeles is the metropolitan centre of all this region. A handsome,
solid, thriving city, environed by gardens, gay everywhere with flowers,
it is too well known to require any description from me. To the
traveller from the East it will always be a surprise. Its growth has
been phenomenal, and although it may not equal the expectations of the
crazy excitement of 1886-87, 50,000 people is a great assemblage for a
new city which numbered only about 11,000 in 1880. It of course felt the
subsidence of the "boom," but while I missed the feverish crowds of
1887, I was struck with its substantial progress in fine, solid
buildings, pavements, sewerage, railways, educational facilities, and
ornamental grounds. It has a secure hold on the commerce of the region.
The assessment roll of the city increased from $7,627,632 in 1881 to
$44,871,073 in 1889. Its bank business, public buildings, school-houses,
and street improvements are in accord with this increase, and show
solid, vigorous growth. It is altogether an attractive city, whether
seen on a drive through its well-planted and bright avenues, or looked
down on from the hills which are climbed by the cable roads. A curious
social note was the effect of the "boom" excitement upon the birth
rate. The report of children under the age of one year was in 1887, 271
boy babies and 264 girl babies; from 1887 to 1888 there were only 176
boy babies and 162 girl babies. The return at the end of 1889 was 465
boy babies, and 500 girl babies.
[Illustration: OLIVE-TREES SIX YEARS OLD.]
Although Los Angeles County still produces a considerable quantity of
wine and brandy, I have an impression that the raising of raisins will
supplant wine-making largely in Southern California, and that the
principal wine producing will be in the northern portions of the State.
It is certain that the best quality is grown in the foot-hills. The
reputation of "California wines" has been much injured by placing upon
the market crude juice that was in no sense wine. Great improvement has
been made in the past three to five years, not only in the vine and
knowledge of the soil adapted to it, but in the handling and the curing
of the wine. One can now find without much difficulty excellent table
wines--sound claret, good white Reisling, and sauterne. None of these
wines are exactly like the foreign wines, and it may be some time before
the taste accustomed to foreign wines is educated to like them. But in
Eastern markets some of the best brands are already much called for, and
I think it only a question of time and a little more experience when the
best California wines will be popular. I found in the San Francisco
market excellent red wines at $3.50 the case, and what was still more
remarkable, at some of the best hotels sound, agreeable claret at from
fifteen to twenty cents the pint bottle.
It is quite unnecessary to emphasize the attractions of Santa Barbara,
or the productiveness of the valleys in the counties of Santa Barbara
and Ventura. There is no more poetic region on the continent than the
bay south of Point Conception, and the pen and the camera have made the
world tolerably familiar with it. There is a graciousness, a softness, a
color in the sea, the cañons, the mountains there that dwell in the
memory. It is capable of inspiring the same love that the Greek
colonists felt for the region between the bays of Salerno and Naples. It
is as fruitful as the Italian shores, and can support as dense a
population. The figures that have been given as to productiveness and
variety of productions apply to it. Having more winter rainfall than
the counties south of it, agriculture is profitable in most years. Since
the railway was made down the valley of the Santa Clara River and along
the coast to Santa Barbara, a great impulse has been given to farming.
Orange and other fruit orchards have increased. Near Buenaventura I saw
hundreds of acres of lima beans. The yield is about one ton to the acre.
With good farming the valleys yield crops of corn, barley, and wheat
much above the average. Still it is a fruit region, and no variety has
yet been tried that does not produce very well there. The rapid growth
of all trees has enabled the region to demonstrate in a short time that
there is scarcely any that it cannot naturalize. The curious growths of
tropical lands, the trees of aromatic and medicinal gums, the trees of
exquisite foliage and wealth of fragrant blossoms, the sturdy forest
natives, and the bearers of edible nuts are all to be found in the
gardens and by the road-side, from New England, from the Southern
States, from Europe, from North and South Africa, Southern Asia, China,
Japan, from Australia and New Zealand and South America. The region is
an arboreal and botanical garden on an immense scale, and full of
surprises. The floriculture is even more astonishing. Every land is
represented. The profusion and vigor are as wonderful as the variety. At
a flower show in Santa Barbara were exhibited 160 varieties of roses all
cut from one garden the same morning. The open garden rivals the Eastern
conservatory. The country is new and many of the conditions of life may
be primitive and rude, but it is impossible that any region shall not be
beautiful, clothed with such a profusion of bloom and color.
I have spoken of the rapid growth. The practical advantage of this as to
fruit-trees is that one begins to have an income from them here sooner
than in the East. No one need be under the delusion that he can live in
California without work, or thrive without incessant and intelligent
industry, but the distinction of the country for the fruit-grower is the
rapidity with which trees and vines mature to the extent of being
profitable. But nothing thrives without care, and kindly as the climate
is to the weak, it cannot be too much insisted on that this is no place
for confirmed invalids who have not money enough to live without work.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ADVANCE OF CULTIVATION SOUTHWARD.
The immense county of San Diego is on the threshold of its development.
It has comparatively only spots of cultivation here and there, in an
area on the western slope of the county only, that Mr. Van Dyke
estimates to contain about one million acres of good arable land for
farming and fruit-raising. This mountainous region is full of charming
valleys, and hidden among the hills are fruitful nooks capable of
sustaining thriving communities. There is no doubt about the salubrity
of the climate, and one can literally suit himself as to temperature by
choosing his elevation. The traveller by rail down the wild Temecula
Cañon will have some idea of the picturesqueness of the country, and, as
he descends in the broadening valley, of the beautiful mountain parks of
live-oak and clear running water, and of the richness both for grazing
and grain of the ranches of the Santa Margarita, Las Flores, and Santa
Rosa. Or if he will see what a few years of vigorous cultivation will
do, he may visit Escondido, on the river of that name, which is at an
elevation of less than a thousand feet, and fourteen miles from the
ocean. This is only one of many settlements that have great natural
beauty and thrifty industrial life. In that region are numerous
attractive villages. I have a report from a little cañon, a few miles
north of Escondido, where a woman with an invalid husband settled in
1883. The ground was thickly covered with brush, and its only product
was rabbits and quails. In 1888 they had 100 acres cleared and fenced,
mostly devoted to orchard fruits and berries. They had in good bearing
over 1200 fruit-trees among them 200 oranges and 283 figs, which yielded
one and a half tons of figs a week during the bearing season, from
August to November. The sprouts of the peach-trees grew twelve feet in
1889. Of course such a little fruit farm as this is the result of
self-denial and hard work, but I am sure that the experiment in this
region need not be exceptional.
[Illustration: SEXTON NURSERIES, NEAR SANTA BARBARA.]
San Diego will be to the southern part of the State what San Francisco
is to the northern. Nature seems to have arranged for this, by providing
a magnificent harbor, when it shut off the southern part by a mountain
range. During the town-lot lunacy it was said that San Diego could not
grow because it had no back country, and the retort was that it needed
no back country, its harbor would command commerce. The fallacy of this
assumption lay in the forgetfulness of the fact that the profitable and
peculiar exports of Southern California must go East by rail, and reach
a market in the shortest possible time, and that the inhabitants look to
the Pacific for comparatively little of the imports they need. If the
Isthmus route were opened by a ship-canal, San Diego would doubtless
have a great share of the Pacific trade, and when the population of that
part of the State is large enough to demand great importations from the
islands and lands of the Pacific, this harbor will not go begging. But
in its present development the entire Pacific trade of Japan, China, and
the islands, gives only a small dividend each to the competing ports.
For these developments this fine harbor must wait, but meantime the
wealth and prosperity of San Diego lie at its doors. A country as large
as the three richest New England States, with enormous wealth of mineral
and stone in its mountains, with one of the finest climates in the
world, with a million acres of arable land, is certainly capable of
building up one great seaport town. These million of acres on the
western slope of the mountain ranges of the country are geographically
tributary to San Diego, and almost every acre by its products is
certain to attain a high value.
The end of the ridiculous speculation in lots of 1887-88 was not so
disastrous in the loss of money invested, or even in the ruin of great
expectations by the collapse of fictitious values, as in the stoppage of
immigration. The country has been ever since adjusting itself to a
normal growth, and the recovery is just in proportion to the arrival of
settlers who come to work and not to speculate. I had heard that the
"boom" had left San Diego and vicinity the "deadest" region to be found
anywhere. A speculator would probably so regard it. But the people have
had a great accession of common-sense. The expectation of attracting
settlers by a fictitious show has subsided, and attention is directed to
the development of the natural riches of the country. Since the boom San
Diego has perfected a splendid system of drainage, paved its streets,
extended its railways, built up the business part of the town solidly
and handsomely, and greatly improved the mesa above the town. In all
essentials of permanent growth it is much better in appearance than in
1887. Business is better organized, and, best of all, there is an
intelligent appreciation of the agricultural resources of the country.
It is discovered that San Diego has a "back country" capable of
producing great wealth. The Chamber of Commerce has organized a
permanent exhibition of products. It is assisted in this work of
stimulation by competition by a "Ladies' Annex," a society numbering
some five hundred ladies, who devote themselves not to æsthetic
pursuits, but to the quickening of all the industries of the farm and
the garden, and all public improvements.
[Illustration: SWEETWATER DAM.]
To the mere traveller who devotes only a couple of weeks to an
examination of this region it is evident that the spirit of industry is
in the ascendant, and the result is a most gratifying increase in
orchards and vineyards, and the storage and distribution of water for
irrigation. The region is unsurpassed for the production of the orange,
the lemon, the raisin-grape, the fig, and the olive. The great reservoir
of the Cuyamaca, which supplies San Diego, sends its flume around the
fertile valley of El Cajon (which has already a great reputation for its
raisins), and this has become a garden, the land rising in value every
year. The region of National City and Chula Vista is supplied by the
reservoir made by the great Sweetwater Dam--a marvel of engineering
skill--and is not only most productive in fruit, but is attractive by
pretty villas and most sightly and agreeable homes. It is an
unanswerable reply to the inquiry if this region was not killed by the
boom that all the arable land, except that staked out for fancy city
prices, has steadily risen in value. This is true of all the bay region
down through Otay (where a promising watch factory is established) to
the border at Tia Juana. The rate of settlement in the county outside of
the cities and towns has been greater since the boom than before--a most
healthful indication for the future. According to the school census of
1889, Mr. Van Dyke estimates a permanent growth of nearly 50,000 people
in the county in four years. Half of these are well distributed in small
settlements which have the advantages of roads, mails, and
school-houses, and which offer to settlers who wish to work adjacent
unimproved land at prices which experience shows are still moderate.
CHAPTER XIV.
A LAND OF AGREEABLE HOMES.
In this imperfect conspectus of a vast territory I should be sorry to
say anything that can raise false expectations. Our country is very big;
and though scarcely any part of it has not some advantages, and
notwithstanding the census figures of our population, it will be a long
time before our vast territory will fill up. California must wait with
the rest; but it seems to me to have a great future. Its position in the
Union with regard to its peculiar productions is unique. It can and will
supply us with much that we now import, and labor and capital sooner or
later will find their profit in meeting the growing demand for
California products.
There are many people in the United States who could prolong life by
moving to Southern California; there are many who would find life easier
there by reason of the climate, and because out-door labor is more
agreeable there the year through; many who have to fight the weather and
a niggardly soil for existence could there have pretty little homes with
less expense of money and labor. It is well that people for whom this is
true should know it. It need not influence those who are already well
placed to try the fortune of a distant country and new associations.
I need not emphasize the disadvantage in regard to beauty of a land
that can for half the year only keep a vernal appearance by irrigation;
but to eyes accustomed to it there is something pleasing in the contrast
of the green valleys with the brown and gold and red of the hills. The
picture in my mind for the future of the Land of the Sun, of the
mountains, of the sea--which is only an enlargement of the picture of
the present--is one of great beauty. The rapid growth of fruit and
ornamental trees and the profusion of flowers render easy the making of
a lovely home, however humble it may be. The nature of the
industries--requiring careful attention to a small piece of
ground--points to small holdings as a rule. The picture I see is of a
land of small farms and gardens, highly cultivated, in all the valleys
and on the foot-hills; a land, therefore, of luxuriance and great
productiveness and agreeable homes. I see everywhere the gardens, the
vineyards, the orchards, with the various greens of the olive, the fig,
and the orange. It is always picturesque, because the country is broken
and even rugged; it is always interesting, because of the contrast with
the mountains and the desert; it has the color that makes Southern Italy
so poetic. It is the fairest field for the experiment of a contented
community, without any poverty and without excessive wealth.
CHAPTER XV.
SOME WONDERS BY THE WAY.--YOSEMITE.--MARIPOSA TREES.--MONTEREY.
I went to it with reluctance. I shrink from attempting to say anything
about it. If you knew that there was one spot on the earth where Nature
kept her secret of secrets, the key to the action of her most gigantic
and patient forces through the long eras, the marvel of constructive and
destructive energy, in features of sublimity made possible to mental
endurance by the most exquisite devices of painting and sculpture, the
wonder which is without parallel or comparison, would you not hesitate
to approach it? Would you not wander and delay with this and that
wonder, and this and that beauty and nobility of scenery, putting off
the day when the imagination, which is our highest gift, must be
extinguished by the reality? The mind has this judicious timidity. Do we
not loiter in the avenue of the temple, dallying with the vista of giant
plane-trees and statues, and noting the carving and the color, mentally
shrinking from the moment when the full glory shall burst upon us? We
turn and look when we are near a summit, we pick a flower, we note the
shape of the clouds, the passing breeze, before we take the last step
that shall reveal to us the vast panorama of mountains and valleys.
I cannot bring myself to any description of the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado by any other route, mental or physical, than that by which we
reached it, by the way of such beauty as Monterey, such a wonder as the
Yosemite, and the infinite and picturesque deserts of New Mexico and
Arizona. I think the mind needs the training in the desert scenery to
enable it to grasp the unique sublimity of the Grand Cañon.
The road to the Yosemite, after leaving the branch of the Southern
Pacific at Raymond, is an unnecessarily fatiguing one. The journey by
stage--sixty-five miles--is accomplished in less than two
days--thirty-nine miles the first day, and twenty-six the second. The
driving is necessarily slow, because two mountain ridges have to be
surmounted, at an elevation each of about 6500 feet. The road is not a
"road" at all as the term is understood in Switzerland, Spain, or in any
highly civilized region--that is, a graded, smooth, hard, and
sufficiently broad track. It is a makeshift highway, generally narrow
(often too narrow for two teams to pass), cast up with loose material,
or excavated on the slopes with frequent short curves and double curves.
Like all mountain roads which skirt precipices, it may seem "pokerish,"
but it is safe enough if the drivers are skilful and careful (all the
drivers on this route are not only excellent, but exceedingly civil as
well), and there is no break in wagon or harness. At the season this
trip is made the weather is apt to be warm, but this would not matter so
much if the road were not intolerably dusty. Over a great part of the
way the dust rises in clouds and is stifling. On a well-engineered road,
with a good road-bed, the time of passage might not be shortened, but
the journey would be made with positive comfort and enjoyment, for
though there is a certain monotony in the scenery, there is the wild
freshness of nature, now and then an extensive prospect, a sight of the
snow-clad Nevadas, and vast stretches of woodland; and a part of the way
the forests are magnificent, especially the stupendous growth of the
sugar-pine. These noble forests are now protected by their
inaccessibility.
From 1855 to 1864, nine years, the Yosemite had 653 visitors; in 1864
there were 147. The number increased steadily till 1869, the year the
overland railroad was completed, when it jumped to 1122. Between 4000
and 5000 persons visit it now each year. The number would be enormously
increased if it could be reached by rail, and doubtless a road will be
built to the valley in the near future, perhaps up the Merced River. I
believe that the pilgrims who used to go to the Yosemite on foot or on
horseback regret the building of the stage road, the enjoyment of the
wonderful valley being somehow cheapened by the comparative ease of
reaching it. It is feared that a railway would still further cheapen, if
it did not vulgarize it, and that passengers by train would miss the
mountain scenery, the splendid forests, the surprises of the way (like
the first view of the valley from Inspiration Point), and that the
Mariposa big trees would be farther off the route than they are now. The
traveller sees them now by driving eight miles from Wawona, the end of
the first day's staging. But the romance for the few there is in staging
will have to give way to the greater comfort of the many by rail.
[Illustration: THE YOSEMITE DOME.]
The railway will do no more injury to the Yosemite than it has done to
Niagara, and, in fact, will be the means of immensely increasing the
comfort of the visitor's stay there, besides enabling tens of thousands
of people to see it who cannot stand the fatigue of the stage ride over
the present road. The Yosemite will remain as it is. The simplicity of
its grand features is unassailable so long as the Government protects
the forests that surround it and the streams that pour into it. The
visitor who goes there by rail will find plenty of adventure for days
and weeks in following the mountain trails, ascending to the great
points of view, exploring the cañons, or climbing so as to command the
vast stretch of the snowy Sierras. Or, if he is not inclined to
adventure, the valley itself will satisfy his highest imaginative
flights of the sublime in rock masses and perpendicular ledges, and his
sense of beauty in the graceful water-falls, rainbow colors, and
exquisite lines of domes and pinnacles. It is in the grouping of objects
of sublimity and beauty that the Yosemite excels. The narrow valley,
with its gigantic walls, which vary in every change of the point of
view, lends itself to the most astonishing scenic effects, and these the
photograph has reproduced, so that the world is familiar with the
striking features of the valley, and has a tolerably correct idea of the
sublimity of some of these features. What the photograph cannot do is to
give an impression of the unique grouping, of the majesty, and at times
crushing weight upon the mind of the forms and masses, of the
atmospheric splendor and illusion, and of the total value of such an
assemblage of wonders. The level surface of the peaceful, park-like
valley has much to do with the impression. The effect of El Capitan,
seen across a meadow and rising from a beautiful park, is much greater
than if it were encountered in a savage mountain gorge. The traveller
may have seen elsewhere greater water-falls, and domes and spires of
rock as surprising, but he has nowhere else seen such a combination as
this. He may be fortified against surprise by the photographs he has
seen and the reports of word painters, but he will not escape (say, at
Inspiration Point, or Artist Point, or other lookouts), a quickening of
the pulse and an elation which is physical as well as mental, in the
sight of such unexpected sublimity and beauty. And familiarity will
scarcely take off the edge of his delight, so varied are the effects in
the passing hours and changing lights. The Rainbow Fall, when water is
abundant, is exceedingly impressive as well as beautiful. Seen from the
carriage road, pouring out of the sky overhead, it gives a sense of
power, and at the proper hour before sunset, when the vast mass of
leaping, foaming water is shot through with the colors of the spectrum,
it is one of the most exquisite sights the world can offer; the
elemental forces are overwhelming, but the loveliness is engaging. One
turns from this to the noble mass of El Capitan with a shock of
surprise, however often it may have been seen. This is the hour also, in
the time of high-water, to see the reflection of the Yosemite Falls. As
a spectacle it is infinitely finer than anything at Mirror Lake, and is
unique in its way. To behold this beautiful series of falls, flowing
down out of the blue sky above, and flowing up out of an equally blue
sky in the depths of the earth, is a sight not to be forgotten. And
when the observer passes from these displays to the sight of the aerial
domes in the upper end of the valley, new wonders opening at every turn
of the forest road, his excitement has little chance of subsiding: he
may be even a little oppressed. The valley, so verdant and friendly with
grass and trees and flowers, is so narrow compared with the height of
its perpendicular guardian walls, and this little secluded spot is so
imprisoned in the gigantic mountains, that man has a feeling of
helplessness in it. This powerlessness in the presence of elemental
forces was heightened by the deluge of water. There had been an immense
fall of snow the winter before, the Merced was a raging torrent,
overflowing its banks, and from every ledge poured a miniature cataract.
[Illustration: COAST OF MONTEREY.]
Noble simplicity is the key-note to the scenery of the Yosemite, and
this is enhanced by the park-like appearance of the floor of the valley.
The stems of the fine trees are in harmony with the perpendicular lines,
and their foliage adds the necessary contrast to the gray rock masses.
In order to preserve these forest-trees, the underbrush, which is
liable to make a conflagration in a dry season, should be removed
generally, and the view of the great features be left unimpeded. The
minor cañons and the trails are, of course, left as much as possible to
the riot of vegetation. The State Commission, which labors under the
disadvantages of getting its supplies from a Legislature that does not
appreciate the value of the Yosemite to California, has developed the
trails judiciously, and established a model trail service. The Yosemite,
it need not be said, is a great attraction to tourists from all parts of
the world; it is the interest of the State, therefore, to increase their
number by improving the facilities for reaching it, and by resolutely
preserving all the surrounding region from ravage.
[Illustration: CYPRESS POINT.]
[Illustration: NEAR SEAL ROCK.]
This is as true of the Mariposa big tree region as of the valley.
Indeed, more care is needed for the trees than for the great chasm, for
man cannot permanently injure the distinctive features of the latter,
while the destruction of the sequoias will be an irreparable loss to the
State and to the world. The _Sequoia gigantea_ differs in leaf, and size
and shape of cone, from the great _Sequoia semper virens_ on the coast
near Santa Cruz; neither can be spared. The Mariposa trees, scattered
along on a mountain ridge 6500 feet above the sea, do not easily obtain
their victory, for they are a part of a magnificent forest of other
growths, among which the noble sugar-pine is conspicuous for its
enormous size and graceful vigor. The sequoias dominate among splendid
rivals only by a magnitude that has no comparison elsewhere in the
world. I think no one can anticipate the effect that one of these
monarchs will have upon him. He has read that a coach and six can drive
through one of the trees that is standing; that another is thirty-three
feet in diameter, and that its vast stem, 350 feet high, is crowned with
a mass of foliage that seems to brush against the sky. He might be
prepared for a tower 100 feet in circumference, and even 400 feet high,
standing upon a level plain; but this living growth is quite another
affair. Each tree is an individual, and has a personal character. No man
can stand in the presence of one of these giants without a new sense of
the age of the world and the insignificant span of one human life; but
he is also overpowered by a sense of some gigantic personality. It does
not relieve him to think of this as the Methuselah of trees, or to call
it by the name of some great poet or captain. The awe the tree inspires
is of itself. As one lies and looks up at the enormous bulk, it seems
not so much the bulk, so lightly is it carried, as the spirit of the
tree--the elastic vigor, the patience, the endurance of storm and
change, the confident might, and the soaring, almost contemptuous pride,
that overwhelm the puny spectator. It is just because man can measure
himself, his littleness, his brevity of existence, with this growth out
of the earth, that he is more personally impressed by it than he might
be by the mere variation in the contour of the globe which is called a
mountain. The imagination makes a plausible effort to comprehend it, and
is foiled. No; clearly it is not mere size that impresses one; it is the
dignity, the character in the tree, the authority and power of
antiquity. Side by side of these venerable forms are young sequoias,
great trees themselves, that have only just begun their millennial
career--trees that will, if spared, perpetuate to remote ages this race
of giants, and in two to four thousand years from now take the place of
their great-grandfathers, who are sinking under the weight of years, and
one by one measuring their length on the earth.
[Illustration: LAGUNA, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.]
The transition from the sublime to the exquisitely lovely in nature can
nowhere else be made with more celerity than from the Sierras to the
coast at Monterey; California abounds in such contrasts and surprises.
After the great stirring of the emotions by the Yosemite and the
Mariposa, the Hotel del Monte Park and vicinity offer repose, and make
an appeal to the sense of beauty and refinement. Yet even here something
unique is again encountered. I do not refer to the extraordinary beauty
of the giant live-oaks and the landscape-gardening about the hotel,
which have made Monterey famous the world over, but to the sea-beach
drive of sixteen miles, which can scarcely be rivalled elsewhere either
for marine loveliness or variety of coast scenery. It has points like
the ocean drive at Newport, but is altogether on a grander scale, and
shows a more poetic union of shore and sea; besides, it offers the
curious and fascinating spectacles of the rocks inhabited by the
sea-lions, and the Cypress Point. These huge, uncouth creatures can be
seen elsewhere, but probably nowhere else on this coast are they massed
in greater numbers. The trees of Cypress Point are unique, this species
of cypress having been found nowhere else. The long, never-ceasing swell
of the Pacific incessantly flows up the many crescent sand beaches,
casting up shells of brilliant hues, sea-weed, and kelp, which seems
instinct with animal life, and flotsam from the far-off islands. But the
rocks that lie off the shore, and the jagged points that project in
fanciful forms, break the even great swell, and send the waters, churned
into spray and foam, into the air with a thousand hues in the sun. The
shock of these sharp collisions mingles with the heavy ocean boom.
Cypress Point is one of the most conspicuous of these projections, and
its strange trees creep out upon the ragged ledges almost to the water's
edge. These cypresses are quite as instinct with individual life and
quite as fantastic as any that Doré drew for his "Inferno." They are as
gnarled and twisted as olive-trees two centuries old, but their
attitudes seem not only to show struggle with the elements, but agony in
that struggle. The agony may be that of torture in the tempest, or of
some fabled creatures fleeing and pursued, stretching out their long
arms in terror, and fixed in that writhing fear. They are creatures of
the sea quite as much as of the land, and they give to this lovely coast
a strange charm and fascination.
CHAPTER, XVI.
FASCINATIONS OF THE DESERT.--THE LAGUNA PUEBLO.
The traveller to California by the Santa Fé route comes into the arid
regions gradually, and finds each day a variety of objects of interest
that upsets his conception of a monotonous desert land. If he chooses to
break the continental journey midway, he can turn aside at Las Vegas to
the Hot Springs. Here, at the head of a picturesque valley, is the
Montezuma Hotel, a luxurious and handsome house, 6767 feet above
sea-level, a great surprise in the midst of the broken and somewhat
savage New Mexican scenery. The low hills covered with pines and piñons,
the romantic glens, and the wide views from the elevations about the
hotel, make it an attractive place; and a great deal has been done, in
the erection of bath-houses, ornamental gardening, and the grading of
roads and walks, to make it a comfortable place. The latitude and the
dryness of the atmosphere insure for the traveller from the North in our
winter an agreeable reception, and the elevation makes the spot in the
summer a desirable resort from Southern heat. It is a sanitarium as well
as a pleasure resort. The Hot Springs have much the same character as
the Töplitz waters in Bohemia, and the saturated earth--the
_Mütterlager_--furnishes the curative "mud baths" which are enjoyed at
Marienbad and Carlsbad. The union of the climate, which is so favorable
in diseases of the respiratory organs, with the waters, which do so much
for rheumatic sufferers, gives a distinction to Las Vegas Hot Springs.
This New Mexican air--there is none purer on the globe--is an enemy to
hay-fever and malarial diseases. It was a wise enterprise to provide
that those who wish to try its efficacy can do so at the Montezuma
without giving up any of the comforts of civilized life.
[Illustration: CHURCH AT LAGUNA.]
It is difficult to explain to one who has not seen it, or will not put
himself in the leisurely frame of mind to enjoy it, the charms of the
desert of the high plateaus of New Mexico and Arizona. Its arid
character is not so impressive as its ancientness; and the part which
interests us is not only the procession of the long geologic eras,
visible in the extinct volcanoes, the _barrancas_, the painted buttes,
the petrified forests, but as well in the evidences of civilizations
gone by, or the remains of them surviving in our day--the cliff
dwellings, the ruins of cities that were thriving when Coronado sent his
lieutenants through the region three centuries ago, and the present
residences of the Pueblo Indians, either villages perched upon an almost
inaccessible rock like Acamo, or clusters of adobe dwellings like Isleta
and Laguna. The Pueblo Indians, of whom the Zuñis are a tribe, have been
dwellers in villages and cultivators of the soil and of the arts of
peace immemorially, a gentle, amiable race. It is indeed such a race as
one would expect to find in the land of the sun and the cactus. Their
manners and their arts attest their antiquity and a long refinement in
fixed dwellings and occupations. The whole region is a most interesting
field for the antiquarian.
We stopped one day at Laguna, which is on the Santa Fé line west of
Isleta, another Indian pueblo at the Atlantic and Pacific junction,
where the road crosses the Rio Grande del Norte west of Albuquerque.
Near Laguna a little stream called the Rio Puerco flows southward and
joins the Rio Grande. There is verdure along these streams, and gardens
and fruit orchards repay the rude irrigation. In spite of these
watercourses the aspect of the landscape is wild and desert-like--low
barren hills and ragged ledges, wide sweeps of sand and dry gray bushes,
with mountains and long lines of horizontal ledges in the distance.
Laguna is built upon a rounded elevation of rock. Its appearance is
exactly that of a Syrian village, the same cluster of little, square,
flat-roofed houses in terraces, the same brown color, and under the same
pale blue sky. And the resemblance was completed by the figures of the
women on the roofs, or moving down the slope, erect and supple, carrying
on the head a water jar, and holding together by one hand the mantle
worn like a Spanish _rebozo_. The village is irregularly built, without
much regard to streets or alleys, and it has no special side of entrance
or approach. Every side presents a blank wall of adobe, and the entrance
seems quite by chance. Yet the way we went over, the smooth slope was
worn here and there in channels three or four inches deep, as if by the
passing feet of many generations. The only semblance of architectural
regularity is in the plaza, not perfectly square, upon which some of the
houses look, and where the annual dances take place. The houses have the
effect of being built in terraces rising one above the other, but it is
hard to say exactly what a house is--whether it is anything more than
one room. You can reach some of the houses only by aid of a ladder. You
enter others from the street. If you will go farther you must climb a
ladder which brings you to the roof that is used as the sitting-room or
door-yard of the next room. From this room you may still ascend to
others, or you may pass through low and small door-ways to other
apartments. It is all haphazard, but exceedingly picturesque. You may
find some of the family in every room, or they may be gathered, women
and babies, on a roof which is protected by a parapet. At the time of
our visit the men were all away at work in their fields. Notwithstanding
the houses are only sun-dried bricks, and the village is without water
or street commissioners, I was struck by the universal cleanliness.
There was no refuse in the corners or alleys, no odors, and many of the
rooms were patterns of neatness. To be sure, an old woman here and there
kept her hens in an adjoining apartment above her own, and there was the
litter of children and of rather careless house-keeping. But, taken
altogether, the town is an example for some more civilized, whose
inhabitants wash oftener and dress better than these Indians.
[Illustration: TERRACED HOUSES, PUEBLO OF LAGUNA.]
We were put on friendly terms with the whole settlement through three or
four young maidens who had been at the Carlisle school, and spoke
English very prettily. They were of the ages of fifteen and sixteen, and
some of them had been five years away. They came back, so far as I could
learn, gladly to their own people and to the old ways. They had resumed
the Indian dress, which is much more becoming to them, as I think they
know, than that which had been imposed upon them. I saw no books. They
do not read any now, and they appear to be perfectly content with the
idle drudgery of their semi-savage condition. In time they will marry in
their tribe, and the school episode will be a thing of the past. But not
altogether. The pretty Josephine, who was our best cicerone about the
place, a girl of lovely eyes and modest mien, showed us with pride her
own room, or "house," as she called it, neat as could be, simply
furnished with an iron bedstead and snow-white cot, a mirror, chair, and
table, and a trunk, and some "advertising" prints on the walls. She said
that she was needed at home to cook for her aged mother, and her present
ambition was to make money enough by the sale of pottery and curios to
buy a cooking stove, so that she could cook more as the whites do. The
house-work of the family had mainly fallen upon her; but it was not
burdensome, I fancied, and she and the other girls of her age had
leisure to go to the station on the arrival of every train, in hope of
selling something to the passengers, and to sit on the rocks in the sun
and dream as maidens do. I fancy it would be better for Josephine and
for all the rest if there were no station and no passing trains. The
elder women were uniformly ugly, but not repulsive like the Mojaves; the
place swarmed with children, and the babies, aged women, and pleasing
young girls grouped most effectively on the roofs.
The whole community were very complaisant and friendly when we came to
know them well, which we did in the course of an hour, and they enjoyed
as much as we did the bargaining for pottery. They have for sale a great
quantity of small pieces, fantastic in form and brilliantly
colored--toys, in fact; but we found in their houses many beautiful jars
of large size and excellent shape, decorated most effectively. The
ordinary utensils for cooking and for cooling water are generally pretty
in design and painted artistically. Like the ancient Peruvians, they
make many vessels in the forms of beasts and birds. Some of the designs
of the decoration are highly conventionalized, and others are just in
the proper artistic line of the natural--a spray with a bird, or a
sunflower on its stalk. The ware is all unglazed, exceedingly light and
thin, and baked so hard that it has a metallic sound when struck. Some
of the large jars are classic in shape, and recall in form and
decoration the ancient Cypriote ware, but the colors are commonly
brilliant and barbaric. The designs seem to be indigenous, and to betray
little Spanish influence. The art displayed in this pottery is indeed
wonderful, and, to my eye, much more effective and lastingly pleasing
than much of our cultivated decoration. A couple of handsome jars that I
bought of an old woman, she assured me she made and decorated herself;
but I saw no ovens there, nor any signs of manufacture, and suppose
that most of the ware is made at Acoma.
It did not seem to be a very religious community, although the town has
a Catholic church, and I understand that Protestant services are
sometimes held in the place. The church is not much frequented, and the
only evidence of devotion I encountered was in a woman who wore a large
and handsome silver cross, made by the Navajos. When I asked its price,
she clasped it to her bosom, with an upward look full of faith and of
refusal to part with her religion at any price. The church, which is
adobe, and at least two centuries old, is one of the most interesting I
have seen anywhere. It is a simple parallelogram, 104 feet long and 21
feet broad, the gable having an opening in which the bells hang. The
interior is exceedingly curious, and its decorations are worth
reproduction. The floor is of earth, and many of the tribe who were
distinguished and died long ago are said to repose under its smooth
surface, with nothing to mark their place of sepulture. It has an open
timber roof, the beams supported upon carved corbels. The ceiling is
made of wooden sticks, about two inches in diameter and some four feet
long, painted in alternated colors--red, blue, orange, and black--and so
twisted or woven together as to produce the effect of plaited straw, a
most novel and agreeable decoration. Over the entrance is a small
gallery, the under roof of which is composed of sticks laid in straw
pattern and colored. All around the wall runs a most striking dado, an
odd, angular pattern, with conventionalized birds at intervals, painted
in strong yet _fade_ colors--red, yellow, black, and white. The north
wall is without windows; all the light, when the door is closed, comes
from two irregular windows, without glass, high up in the south wall.
[Illustration: GRAND CAÑON ON THE COLORADO--VIEW FROM POINT SUBLIME.]
The chancel walls are covered with frescos, and there are several quaint
paintings, some of them not very bad in color and drawing. The altar,
which is supported at the sides by twisted wooden pillars, carved with a
knife, is hung with ancient sheepskins brightly painted. Back of the
altar are some archaic wooden images, colored; and over the altar, on
the ceiling, are the stars of heaven, and the sun and the moon, each
with a face in it. The interior was scrupulously clean and sweet and
restful to one coming in from the glare of the sun on the desert. It was
evidently little used, and the Indians who accompanied us seemed under
no strong impression of its sanctity; but we liked to linger in it, it
was so _bizarre_, so picturesque, and exhibited in its rude decoration
so much taste. Two or three small birds flitting about seemed to enjoy
the coolness and the subdued light, and were undisturbed by our
presence.
These are children of the desert, kin in their condition and the
influences that formed them to the sedentary tribes of upper Egypt and
Arabia, who pitch their villages upon the rocky eminences, and depend
for subsistence upon irrigation and scant pasturage. Their habits are
those of the dwellers in an arid land which has little in common with
the wilderness--the inhospitable northern wilderness of rain and frost
and snow. Rain, to be sure, insures some sort of vegetation in the most
forbidding and intractable country, but that does not save the harsh
landscape from being unattractive. The high plateaus of New Mexico and
Arizona have everything that the rainy wilderness lacks--sunshine,
heaven's own air, immense breadth of horizon, color and infinite beauty
of outline, and a warm soil with unlimited possibilities when moistened.
All that these deserts need is water. A fatal want? No. That is simply
saying that science can do for this region what it cannot do for the
high wilderness of frost--by the transportation of water transform it
into gardens of bloom and fields of fruitfulness. The wilderness shall
be made to feed the desert.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH AT LAGUNA.]
I confess that these deserts in the warm latitudes fascinate me. Perhaps
it is because I perceive in them such a chance for the triumph of the
skill of man, seeing how, here and there, his energy has pushed the
desert out of his path across the continent. But I fear that I am not so
practical. To many the desert in its stony sterility, its desolateness,
its unbroken solitude, its fantastic savageness, is either appalling or
repulsive. To them it is tiresome and monotonous. The vast plains of
Kansas and Nebraska are monotonous even in the agricultural green of
summer. Not so to me the desert. It is as changeable in its lights and
colors as the ocean. It is even in its general features of sameness
never long the same. If you traverse it on foot or on horseback, there
is ever some minor novelty. And on the swift train, if you draw down the
curtain against the glare, or turn to your book, you are sure to miss
something of interest--a deep cañon rift in the plain, a turn that gives
a wide view glowing in a hundred hues in the sun, a savage gorge with
beetling rocks, a solitary butte or red truncated pyramid thrust up into
the blue sky, a horizontal ledge cutting the horizon line as straight as
a ruler for miles, a pointed cliff uplifted sheer from the plain and
laid in regular courses of Cyclopean masonry, the battlements of a fort,
a terraced castle with towers and esplanade, a great trough of a valley,
gray and parched, enclosed by far purple mountains. And then the
unlimited freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to
the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent
atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all
architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and
a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues,
of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage
antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed
again, to the fields of verdure and the forests and the hills of green,
and are limited in view and shut in by that which we love, after all,
better than the arid land, I have a great longing to see again the
desert, to be a part of its vastness, and to feel once more the freedom
and inspiration of its illimitable horizons.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE HEART OF THE DESERT.
There is an arid region lying in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah
which has been called the District of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.
The area, roughly estimated, contains from 13,000 to 16,000 square
miles--about the size of the State of Maryland. This region, fully
described by the explorers and studied by the geologists in the United
States service, but little known to even the travelling public, is
probably the most interesting territory of its size on the globe. At
least it is unique. In attempting to convey an idea of it the writer can
be assisted by no comparison, nor can he appeal in the minds of his
readers to any experience of scenery that can apply here. The so-called
Grand Cañon differs not in degree from all other scenes; it differs in
kind.
The Colorado River flows southward through Utah, and crosses the Arizona
line below the junction with the San Juan. It continues southward,
flowing deep in what is called the Marble Cañon, till it is joined by
the Little Colorado, coming up from the south-east; it then turns
westward in a devious line until it drops straight south, and forms the
western boundary of Arizona. The centre of the district mentioned is the
westwardly flowing part of the Colorado. South of the river is the
Colorado Plateau, at a general elevation of about 7000 feet. North of
it the land is higher, and ascends in a series of plateaus, and then
terraces, a succession of cliffs like a great stair-way, rising to the
high plateaus of Utah. The plateaus, adjoining the river on the north
and well marked by north and south dividing lines, or faults, are,
naming them from east to west, the Paria, the Kaibab, the Kanab, the
Uinkaret, and the Sheavwitz, terminating in a great wall on the west,
the Great Wash fault, where the surface of the country drops at once
from a general elevation of 6000 feet to from 1300 to 3000 feet above
the sea-level--into a desolate and formidable desert.
If the Grand Cañon itself did not dwarf everything else, the scenery of
these plateaus would be superlative in interest. It is not all desert,
nor are the gorges, cañons, cliffs, and terraces, which gradually
prepare the mind for the comprehension of the Grand Cañon, the only
wonders of this land of enchantment. These are contrasted with the
sylvan scenery of the Kaibab Plateau, its giant forests and parks, and
broad meadows decked in the summer with wild flowers in dense masses of
scarlet, white, purple, and yellow. The Vermilion Cliffs, the Pink
Cliffs, the White Cliffs, surpass in fantastic form and brilliant color
anything that the imagination conceives possible in nature, and there
are dreamy landscapes quite beyond the most exquisite fancies of Claude
and of Turner. The region is full of wonders, of beauties, and
sublimities that Shelley's imaginings do not match in the "Prometheus
Unbound," and when it becomes accessible to the tourist it will offer an
endless field for the delight of those whose minds can rise to the
heights of the sublime and the beautiful. In all imaginative writing or
painting the material used is that of human experience, otherwise it
could not be understood; even heaven must be described in the terms of
an earthly paradise. Human experience has no prototype of this region,
and the imagination has never conceived of its forms and colors. It is
impossible to convey an adequate idea of it by pen or pencil or brush.
The reader who is familiar with the glowing descriptions in the official
reports of Major J. W. Powell, Captain C. E. Dutton, Lieutenant Ives,
and others, will not save himself from a shock of surprise when the
reality is before him. This paper deals only with a single view in this
marvellous region.
[Illustration: GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO--VIEW OPPOSITE POINT
SUBLIME.]
The point where we struck the Grand Cañon, approaching it from the
south, is opposite the promontory in the Kaibab Plateau named Point
Sublime by Major Powell, just north of the 36th parallel, and 112° 15'
west longitude. This is only a few miles west of the junction with the
Little Colorado. About three or four miles west of this junction the
river enters the east slope of the east Kaibab monocline, and here the
Grand Cañon begins. Rapidly the chasm deepens to about 6000 feet, or
rather it penetrates a higher country, the slope of the river remaining
about the same. Through this lofty plateau--an elevation of 7000 to 9000
feet--the chasm extends for sixty miles, gradually changing its course
to the north-west, and entering the Kanab Plateau. The Kaibab division
of the Grand Cañon is by far the sublimest of all, being 1000 feet
deeper than any other. It is not grander only on account of its greater
depth, but it is broader and more diversified with magnificent
architectural features.
The Kanab division, only less magnificent than the Kaibab, receives the
Kanab Cañon from the north and the Cataract Cañon from the south, and
ends at the Toroweap Valley.
The section of the Grand Cañon seen by those who take the route from
Peach Springs is between 113° and 114° west longitude, and, though
wonderful, presents few of the great features of either the Kaibab or
the Kanab divisions. The Grand Cañon ends, west longitude 114°, at the
Great Wash, west of the Hurricane Ledge or Fault. Its whole length from
Little Colorado to the Great Wash, measured by the meanderings of the
surface of the river, is 220 miles; by a median line between the crests
of the summits of the walls with two-mile cords, about 195 miles; the
distance in a straight line is 125 miles.
In our journey to the Grand Cañon we left the Santa Fé line at
Flagstaff, a new town with a lively lumber industry, in the midst of a
spruce-pine forest which occupies the broken country through which the
road passes for over fifty miles. The forest is open, the trees of
moderate size are too thickly set with low-growing limbs to make clean
lumber, and the foliage furnishes the minimum of shade; but the change
to these woods is a welcome one from the treeless reaches of the desert
on either side. The cañon is also reached from Williams, the next
station west, the distance being a little shorter, and the point on the
cañon visited being usually a little farther west. But the Flagstaff
route is for many reasons usually preferred. Flagstaff lies just
south-east of the San Francisco Mountain, and on the great Colorado
Plateau, which has a pretty uniform elevation of about 7000 feet above
the sea. The whole region is full of interest. Some of the most
remarkable cliff dwellings are within ten miles of Flagstaff, on the
Walnut Creek Cañon. At Holbrook, 100 miles east, the traveller finds a
road some forty miles long, that leads to the great petrified forest, or
Chalcedony Park. Still farther east are the villages of the Pueblo
Indians, near the line, while to the northward is the great reservation
of the Navajos, a nomadic tribe celebrated for its fine blankets and
pretty work in silver--a tribe that preserves much of its manly
independence by shunning the charity of the United States. No Indians
have come into intimate or dependent relations with the whites without
being deteriorated.
[Illustration: TOURISTS IN THE COLORADO CAÑON.]
Flagstaff is the best present point of departure, because it has a small
hotel, good supply stores, and a large livery-stable, made necessary by
the business of the place and the objects of interest in the
neighborhood, and because one reaches from there by the easiest road the
finest scenery incomparably on the Colorado. The distance is seventy-six
miles through a practically uninhabited country, much of it a desert,
and with water very infrequent. No work has been done on the road; it is
made simply by driving over it. There are a few miles here and there of
fair wheeling, but a good deal of it is intolerably dusty or exceedingly
stony, and progress is slow. In the daytime (it was the last of June)
the heat is apt to be excessive; but this could be borne, the air is so
absolutely dry and delicious, and breezes occasionally spring up, if it
were not for the dust. It is, notwithstanding the novelty of the
adventure and of the scenery by the way, a tiresome journey of two days.
A day of rest is absolutely required at the cañon, so that five days
must be allowed for the trip. This will cost the traveller, according to
the size of the party made up, from forty to fifty dollars. But a much
longer sojourn at the cañon is desirable.
Our party of seven was stowed in and on an old Concord coach drawn by
six horses, and piled with camp equipage, bedding, and provisions. A
four-horse team followed, loaded with other supplies and cooking
utensils. The road lies on the east side of the San Francisco Mountain.
Returning, we passed around its west side, gaining thus a complete view
of this shapely peak. The compact range is a group of extinct volcanoes,
the craters of which are distinctly visible. The cup-like summit of the
highest is 13,000 feet above the sea, and snow always lies on the north
escarpment. Rising about 6000 feet above the point of view of the great
plateau, it is from all sides a noble object, the dark rock,
snow-sprinkled, rising out of the dense growth of pine and cedar. We
drove at first through open pine forests, through park-like intervals,
over the foot-hills of the mountain, through growths of scrub cedar, and
out into the ever-varying rolling country to widely-extended prospects.
Two considerable hills on our right attracted us by their unique beauty.
Upon the summit and side of each was a red glow exactly like the tint of
sunset. We thought surely that it was the effect of reflected light, but
the sky was cloudless and the color remained constant. The color came
from the soil. The first was called Sunset Mountain. One of our party
named the other, and the more beautiful, Peachblow Mountain, a poetic
and perfectly descriptive name.
We lunched at noon beside a swift, clouded, cold stream of snow-water
from the San Francisco, along which grew a few gnarled cedars and some
brilliant wild flowers. The scene was more than picturesque; in the
clear hot air of the desert the distant landscape made a hundred
pictures of beauty. Behind us the dark form of San Francisco rose up
6000 feet to its black crater and fields of spotless snow. Away off to
the north-east, beyond the brown and gray pastures, across a far line
distinct in dull color, lay the Painted Desert, like a mirage, like a
really painted landscape, glowing in red and orange and pink, an immense
city rather than a landscape, with towers and terraces and façades,
melting into indistinctness as in a rosy mist, spectral but constant,
weltering in a tropic glow and heat, walls and columns and shafts, the
wreck of an Oriental capital on a wide violet plain, suffused with
brilliant color softened into exquisite shades. All over this region
nature has such surprises, that laugh at our inadequate conception of
her resources.
Our camp for the night was at the next place where water could be
obtained, a station of the Arizona Cattle Company. Abundant water is
piped down to it from mountain springs. The log-house and stable of the
cow-boys were unoccupied, and we pitched our tent on a knoll by the
corral. The night was absolutely dry, and sparkling with the starlight.
A part of the company spread their blankets on the ground under the sky.
It is apt to be cold in this region towards morning, but lodging in the
open air is no hardship in this delicious climate. The next day the way
part of the distance, with only a road marked by wagon wheels, was
through extensive and barren-looking cattle ranges, through pretty vales
of grass surrounded by stunted cedars, and over stormy ridges and plains
of sand and small bowlders. The water having failed at Red Horse, the
only place where it is usually found in the day's march, our horses went
without, and we had resource to our canteens. The whole country is
essentially arid, but snow falls in the winter-time, and its melting,
with occasional showers in the summer, create what are called surface
wells, made by drainage. Many of them go dry by June. There had been no
rain in the region since the last of March, but clouds were gathering
daily, and showers are always expected in July. The phenomenon of rain
on this baked surface, in this hot air, and with this immense horizon,
is very interesting. Showers in this tentative time are local. In our
journey we saw showers far off, we experienced a dash for ten minutes,
but it was local, covering not more than a mile or two square. We have
in sight a vast canopy of blue sky, of forming and dispersing clouds. It
is difficult for them to drop their moisture in the rising columns of
hot air. The result at times was a very curious spectacle--rain in the
sky that did not reach the earth. Perhaps some cold current high above
us would condense the moisture, which would begin to fall in long
trailing sweeps, blown like fine folds of muslin, or like sheets of
dissolving sugar, and then the hot air of the earth would dissipate it,
and the showers would be absorbed in the upper regions. The heat was
sometimes intense, but at intervals a refreshing wind would blow, the
air being as fickle as the rain; and now and then we would see a slender
column of dust, a thousand or two feet high, marching across the desert,
apparently not more than two feet in diameter, and wavering like the
threads of moisture that tried in vain to reach the earth as rain. Of
life there was not much to be seen in our desert route. In the first day
we encountered no habitation except the ranch-house mentioned, and saw
no human being; and the second day none except the solitary occupant of
the dried well at Red Horse, and two or three Indians on the hunt. A few
squirrels were seen, and a rabbit now and then, and occasionally a bird.
The general impression was that of a deserted land. But antelope abound
in the timber regions, and we saw several of these graceful creatures
quite near us. Excellent antelope steaks, bought of the wandering Indian
hunters, added something to our "canned" supplies. One day as we
lunched, without water, on the cedar slope of a lovely grass interval,
we saw coming towards us over the swells of the prairie a figure of a
man on a horse. It rode to us straight as the crow flies. The Indian
pony stopped not two feet from where our group sat, and the rider, who
was an Oualapai chief, clad in sacking, with the print of the brand of
flour or salt on his back, dismounted with his Winchester rifle, and
stood silently looking at us without a word of salutation. He stood
there, impassive, until we offered him something to eat. Having eaten
all we gave him, he opened his mouth and said, "Smoke 'em?" Having
procured from the other wagon a pipe of tobacco and a pull at the
driver's canteen, he returned to us all smiles. His only baggage was the
skull of an antelope, with the horns, hung at his saddle. Into this he
put the bread and meat which we gave him, mounted the wretched pony, and
without a word rode straight away. At a little distance he halted,
dismounted, and motioned towards the edge of the timber, where he had
spied an antelope. But the game eluded him, and he mounted again and
rode off across the desert--a strange figure. His tribe lives in the
cañon some fifty miles west, and was at present encamped, for the
purpose of hunting, in the pine woods not far from the point we were
aiming at.
CHAPTER XVIII.
ON THE BRINK OF THE GRAND CAÑON.--THE UNIQUE MARVEL OF NATURE.
The way seemed long. With the heat and dust and slow progress, it was
exceedingly wearisome. Our modern nerves are not attuned to the slow
crawling of a prairie-wagon. There had been growing for some time in the
coach a feeling that the journey did not pay; that, in fact, no mere
scenery could compensate for the fatigue of the trip. The imagination
did not rise to it. "It will have to be a very big cañon," said the
duchess.
Late in the afternoon we entered an open pine forest, passed through a
meadow where the Indians had set their camp by a shallow pond, and drove
along a ridge, in the cool shades, for three or four miles. Suddenly, on
the edge of a descent, we who were on the box saw through the tree-tops
a vision that stopped the pulse for a second, and filled us with
excitement. It was only a glimpse, far off and apparently lifted up--red
towers, purple cliffs, wide-spread apart, hints of color and splendor;
on the right distance, mansions, gold and white and carmine (so the
light made them), architectural habitations in the sky it must be, and
suggestions of others far off in the middle distance--a substantial
aerial city, or the ruins of one, such as the prophet saw in a vision.
It was only a glimpse. Our hearts were in our mouths. We had a vague
impression of something wonderful, fearful--some incomparable splendor
that was not earthly. Were we drawing near the "City?" and should we
have yet a more perfect view thereof? Was it Jerusalem or some Hindoo
temples there in the sky? "It was builded of pearls and precious stones,
also the streets were paved with gold; so that by reason of the natural
glory of the city, and the reflection of the sunbeams upon it, Christian
with desire fell sick." It was a momentary vision of a vast amphitheatre
of splendor, mostly hidden by the trees and the edge of the plateau.
We descended into a hollow. There was the well, a log-cabin, a tent or
two under the pine-trees. We dismounted with impatient haste. The sun
was low in the horizon, and had long withdrawn from this grassy dell.
Tired as we were, we could not wait. It was only to ascend the little
steep, stony slope--300 yards--and we should see! Our party were
straggling up the hill: two or three had reached the edge. I looked up.
The duchess threw up her arms and screamed. We were not fifteen paces
behind, but we saw nothing. We took the few steps, and the whole
magnificence broke upon us. No one could be prepared for it. The scene
is one to strike dumb with awe, or to unstring the nerves; one might
stand in silent astonishment, another would burst into tears.
There are some experiences that cannot be repeated--one's first view of
Rome, one's first view of Jerusalem. But these emotions are produced by
association, by the sudden standing face to face with the scenes most
wrought into our whole life and education by tradition and religion.
This was without association, as it was without parallel. It was a shock
so novel that the mind, dazed, quite failed to comprehend it. All that
we could grasp was a vast confusion of amphitheatres and strange
architectural forms resplendent with color. The vastness of the view
amazed us quite as much as its transcendent beauty.
[Illustration: GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO--VIEW FROM THE HANSE TRAIL.]
We had expected a cañon--two lines of perpendicular walls 6000 feet
high, with the ribbon of a river at the bottom; but the reader may
dismiss all his notions of a cañon, indeed of any sort of mountain or
gorge scenery with which he is familiar. We had come into a new world.
What we saw was not a cañon, or a chasm, or a gorge, but a vast area
which is a break in the plateau. From where we stood it was twelve miles
across to the opposite walls--a level line of mesa on the Utah side. We
looked up and down for twenty to thirty miles. This great space is
filled with gigantic architectural constructions, with amphitheatres,
gorges, precipices, walls of masonry, fortresses terraced up to the
level of the eye, temples mountain size, all brilliant with horizontal
lines of color--streaks of solid hues a few feet in width, streaks a
thousand feet in width--yellows, mingled white and gray, orange, dull
red, brown, blue, carmine, green, all blending in the sunlight into one
transcendent suffusion of splendor. Afar off we saw the river in two
places, a mere thread, as motionless and smooth as a strip of mirror,
only we knew it was a turbid, boiling torrent, 6000 feet below us.
Directly opposite the overhanging ledge on which we stood was a
mountain, the sloping base of which was ashy gray and bluish; it rose in
a series of terraces to a thousand-feet wall of dark red sandstone,
receding upward, with ranges of columns and many fantastic sculptures,
to a finial row of gigantic opera-glasses 6000 feet above the river. The
great San Francisco Mountain, with its snowy crater, which we had passed
on the way, might have been set down in the place of this one, and it
would have been only one in a multitude of such forms that met the eye
whichever way we looked. Indeed, all the vast mountains in this region
might be hidden in this cañon.
Wandering a little away from the group and out of sight, and turning
suddenly to the scene from another point of view, I experienced for a
moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to
be alone in such a presence. With all this grotesqueness and majesty of
form and radiance of color, creation seemed in a whirl. With our
education in scenery of a totally different kind, I suppose it would
need long acquaintance with this to familiarize one with it to the
extent of perfect mental comprehension.
The vast abyss has an atmosphere of its own, one always changing and
producing new effects, an atmosphere and shadows and tones of its
own--golden, rosy, gray, brilliant, and sombre, and playing a thousand
fantastic tricks to the vision. The rich and wonderful color effects,
says Captain Dutton, "are due to the inherent colors of the rocks,
modified by the atmosphere. Like any other great series of strata in the
plateau province, the carboniferous has its own range of colors, which
might serve to distinguish it, even if we had no other criterion. The
summit strata are pale gray, with a faint yellowish cast. Beneath them
the cross-bedded sandstone appears, showing a mottled surface of pale
pinkish hue. Underneath this member are nearly 1000 feet of the lower
Aubrey sandstones, displaying an intensely brilliant red, which is
somewhat marked by the talus shot down from the gray cherty limestone at
the summit. Beneath the lower Aubrey is the face of the Red Wall
limestone, from 2000 to 3000 feet high. It has a strong red tone, but a
very peculiar one. Most of the red strata of the West have the brownish
or vermilion tones, but these are rather purplish red, as if the pigment
had been treated to a dash of blue. It is not quite certain that this
may not arise in part from the intervention of the blue haze, and
probably it is rendered more conspicuous by this cause; but, on the
whole, the purplish cast seems to be inherent. This is the dominant
color of the cañon, for the expanse of the rock surface displayed is
more than half in the Red Wall group."
I was continually likening this to a vast city rather than a landscape,
but it was a city of no man's creation nor of any man's conception. In
the visions which inspired or crazy painters have had of the New
Jerusalem, of Babylon the Great, of a heaven in the atmosphere, with
endless perspective of towers and steeps that hang in the twilight sky,
the imagination has tried to reach this reality. But here are effects
beyond the artist, forms the architect has not hinted at; and yet
everything reminds us of man's work. And the explorers have tried by the
use of Oriental nomenclature to bring it within our comprehension, the
East being the land of the imagination. There is the Hindoo
Amphitheatre, the Bright Angel Amphitheatre, the Ottoman Amphitheatre,
Shiva's Temple, Vishnu's Temple, Vulcan's Throne. And here, indeed, is
the idea of the pagoda architecture, of the terrace architecture, of the
bizarre constructions which rise with projecting buttresses, rows of
pillars, recesses, battlements, esplanades, and low walls, hanging
gardens, and truncated pinnacles. It is a city, but a city of the
imagination. In many pages I could tell what I saw in one day's lounging
for a mile or so along the edge of the precipice. The view changed at
every step, and was never half an hour the same in one place. Nor did it
need much fancy to create illusions or pictures of unearthly beauty.
There was a castle, terraced up with columns, plain enough, and below it
a parade-ground; at any moment the knights in armor and with banners
might emerge from the red gates and deploy there, while the ladies
looked down from the balconies. But there were many castles and
fortresses and barracks and noble mansions. And the rich sculpture in
this brilliant color! In time I began to see queer details: a Richardson
house, with low portals and round arches, surmounted by a Nuremberg
gable; perfect panels, 600 feet high, for the setting of pictures; a
train of cars partly derailed at the door of a long, low warehouse, with
a garden in front of it. There was no end to such devices.
It was long before I could comprehend the vastness of the view, see the
enormous chasms and rents and seams, and the many architectural ranges
separated by great gulfs, between me and the wall of the mesa twelve
miles distant. Away to the north-east was the blue Navajo Mountain, the
lone peak in the horizon; but on the southern side of it lay a desert
level, which in the afternoon light took on the exact appearance of a
blue lake; its edge this side was a wall thousands of feet high, many
miles in length, and straightly horizontal; over this seemed to fall
water. I could see the foam of it at the foot of the cliff; and below
that was a lake of shimmering silver, in which the giant precipice and
the fall and their color were mirrored. Of course there was no silver
lake, and the reflection that simulated it was only the sun on the lower
part of the immense wall.
Some one said that all that was needed to perfect this scene was a
Niagara Falls. I thought what figure a fall 150 feet high and 3000 long
would make in this arena. It would need a spy-glass to discover it. An
adequate Niagara here should be at least three miles in breadth, and
fall 2000 feet over one of these walls. And the Yosemite--ah! the lovely
Yosemite! Dumped down into this wilderness of gorges and mountains, it
would take a guide who knew of its existence a long time to find it.
The process of creation is here laid bare through the geologic periods.
The strata of rock, deposited or upheaved, preserve their horizontal and
parallel courses. If we imagine a river flowing on a plain, it would
wear for itself a deeper and deeper channel. The walls of this channel
would recede irregularly by weathering and by the coming in of other
streams. The channel would go on deepening, and the outer walls would
again recede. If the rocks were of different material and degrees of
hardness, the forms would be carved in the fantastic and architectural
manner we find them here. The Colorado flows through the tortuous inner
chasm, and where we see it, it is 6000 feet below the surface where we
stand, and below the towers of the terraced forms nearer it. The
splendid views of the cañon at this point given in Captain Dutton's
report are from Point Sublime, on the north side. There seems to have
been no way of reaching the river from that point. From the south side
the descent, though wearisome, is feasible. It reverses mountaineering
to descend 6000 feet for a view, and there is a certain pleasure in
standing on a mountain summit without the trouble of climbing it. Hance,
the guide, who has charge of the well, has made a path to the bottom.
The route is seven miles long. Half-way down he has a house by a spring.
At the bottom, somewhere in those depths, is a sort of farm, grass
capable of sustaining horses and cattle, and ground where fruit-trees
can grow. Horses are actually living there, and parties descend there
with tents, and camp for days at a time. It is a world of its own. Some
of the photographic views presented here, all inadequate, are taken from
points on Hance's trail. But no camera or pen can convey an adequate
conception of what Captain Dutton happily calls a great innovation in
the modern ideas of scenery. To the eye educated to any other, it may be
shocking, grotesque, incomprehensible; but "those who have long and
carefully studied the Grand Cañon of the Colorado do not hesitate for a
moment to pronounce it by far the most sublime of all earthly
spectacles."
I have space only to refer to the geologic history in Captain Dutton's
report of 1882, of which there should be a popular edition. The waters
of the Atlantic once overflowed this region, and were separated from the
Pacific, if at all, only by a ridge. The story is of long eras of
deposits, of removal, of upheaval, and of volcanic action. It is
estimated that in one period the thickness of strata removed and
transported away was 10,000 feet. Long after the Colorado began its work
of corrosion there was a mighty upheaval. The reader will find the story
of the making of the Grand Cañon more fascinating than any romance.
Without knowing this story the impression that one has in looking on
this scene is that of immense antiquity, hardly anywhere else on earth
so overwhelming as here. It has been here in all its lonely grandeur and
transcendent beauty, exactly as it is, for what to us is an eternity,
unknown, unseen by human eye. To the recent Indian, who roved along its
brink or descended to its recesses, it was not strange, because he had
known no other than the plateau scenery. It is only within a quarter of
a century that the Grand Cañon has been known to the civilized world. It
is scarcely known now. It is a world largely unexplored. Those who best
know it are most sensitive to its awe and splendor. It is never twice
the same, for, as I said, it has an atmosphere of its own. I was told by
Hance that he once saw a thunder-storm in it. He described the chaos of
clouds in the pit, the roar of the tempest, the reverberations of
thunder, the inconceivable splendor of the rainbows mingled with the
colors of the towers and terraces. It was as if the world were breaking
up. He fled away to his hut in terror.
The day is near when this scenery must be made accessible. A railway can
easily be built from Flagstaff. The projected road from Utah, crossing
the Colorado at Lee's Ferry, would come within twenty miles of the
Grand Cañon, and a branch to it could be built. The region is arid, and
in the "sight-seeing" part of the year the few surface wells and springs
are likely to go dry. The greatest difficulty would be in procuring
water for railway service or for such houses of entertainment as are
necessary. It could, no doubt, be piped from the San Francisco Mountain.
At any rate, ingenuity will overcome the difficulties, and travellers
from the wide world will flock thither, for there is revealed the
long-kept secret, the unique achievement of nature.
APPENDIX.
A CLIMATE FOR INVALIDS.
The following notes on the climate of Southern California, written by
Dr. H. A. Johnson, of Chicago, at the solicitation of the writer of this
volume and for his information, I print with his permission, because the
testimony of a physician who has made a special study of climatology in
Europe and America, and is a recognized authority, belongs of right to
the public:
The choice of a climate for invalids or semi-invalids involves
the consideration of: First, the invalid, his physical
condition (that is, disease), his peculiarities (mental and
emotional), his social habits, and his natural and artificial
needs. Second, the elements of climate, such as temperature,
moisture, direction and force of winds, the averages of the
elements, the extremes of variation, and the rapidity of
change.
The climates of the western and south-western portions of the
United States are well suited to a variety of morbid
conditions, especially those pertaining to the pulmonary organs
and the nervous system. Very few localities, however, are
equally well adapted to diseases of innervation of circulation
and respiration. For the first and second, as a rule, high
altitudes are not advisable; for the third, altitudes of from
two thousand to six thousand feet are not only admissible but
by many thought to be desirable. It seems, however, probable
that it is to the dryness of the air and the general
antagonisms to vegetable growths, rather than to altitude
alone, that the benefits derived in these regions by persons
suffering from consumption and kindred diseases should be
credited.
Proximity to large bodies of water, river valleys, and damp
plateaus are undesirable as places of residence for invalids
with lung troubles. There are exceptions to this rule.
Localities near the sea with a climate subject to slight
variations in temperature, a dry atmosphere, little rainfall,
much sunshine, not so cold in winter as to prevent much
out-door life and not so hot in summer as to make out-door
exercise exhausting, are well adapted not only to troubles of
the nervous and circulatory systems, but also to those of the
respiratory organs.
Such a climate is found in the extreme southern portions of
California. At San Diego the rainfall is much less, the air is
drier, and the number of sunshiny days very much larger than on
our Atlantic seaboard, or in Central and Northern California.
The winters are not cold; flowers bloom in the open air all the
year round; the summers are not hot. The mountains and sea
combine to give to this region a climate with few sudden
changes, and with a comfortable range of all essential
elements.
A residence during a part of the winter of 1889-90 at Coronado
Beach, and a somewhat careful study of the comparative
climatology of the south-western portions of the United States,
leads me to think that we have few localities where the
comforts of life can be secured, and which at the same time are
so well adapted to the needs of a variety of invalids, as San
Diego and its surroundings. In saying this I do not wish to be
understood as preferring it to all others for some one
condition or disease, but only that for weak hearts, disabled
lungs, and worn-out nerves it seems to me to be unsurpassed.
CHICAGO, _July 12, 1890_.
THE COMING OF WINTER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
From Mr. Theodore S. Van Dyke's altogether admirable book on _Southern
California_ I have permission to quote the following exquisite
description of the floral procession from December to March, when the
Land of the Sun is awakened by the first winter rain:
Sometimes this season commences with a fair rain in November,
after a light shower or two in October, but some of the very
best seasons begin about the time that all begin to lose hope.
November adds its full tribute to the stream of sunshine that
for months has poured along the land; and, perhaps, December
closes the long file of cloudless days with banners of blue and
gold. The plains and slopes lie bare and brown; the low hills
that break away from them are yellow with dead foxtail or wild
oats, gray with mustard-stalks, or ashy green with chemisal or
sage. Even the chaparral, that robes the higher hills in living
green, has a tired air, and the long timber-line that marks
the cañon winding up the mountain-slopes is decidedly paler.
The sea-breeze has fallen off to a faint breath of air; the
land lies silent and dreamy with golden haze; the air grows
drier, the sun hotter, and the shade cooler; the smoke of
brush-fires hangs at times along the sky; the water has risen
in the springs and sloughs as if to meet the coming rain, but
it has never looked less like rain than it now does.
Suddenly a new wind arises from the vast watery plains upon the
south-west; long, fleecy streams of cloud reach out along the
sky; the distant mountain-tops seem swimming in a film of haze,
and the great California weather prophet--a creature upon whom
the storms of adverse experience have beaten for years without
making even a weather crack in the smooth cheek of his
conceit--lavishes his wisdom as confidently as if he had never
made a false prediction. After a large amount of fuss, and
enough preliminary skirmishing over the sky for a dozen storms
in any Eastern State, the clouds at last get ready, and a soft
pattering is heard upon the roof--the sweetest music that ever
cheers a Californian ear, and one which the author of "The Rain
upon the Roof" should have heard before writing his poem.
When the sun again appears it is with a softer, milder beam
than before. The land looks bright and refreshed, like a tired
and dirty boy who has had a good bath and a nap, and already
the lately bare plains and hill-sides show a greenish tinge.
Fine little leaves of various kinds are springing from the
ground, but nearly all are lost in a general profusion of dark
green ones, of such shape and delicacy of texture that a
careless eye might readily take them for ferns. This is the
alfileria, the prevailing flower of the land. The rain may
continue at intervals. Daily the land grows greener, while the
shades of green, varied by the play of sunlight on the slopes
and rolling hills, increase in number and intensity. Here the
color is soft, and there bright; yonder it rolls in wavy
alternations, and yonder it reaches in an unbroken shade where
the plain sweeps broad and free. For many weeks green is the
only color, though cold nights may perhaps tinge it with a
rusty red. About the first of February a little starlike flower
of bluish pink begins to shine along the ground. This is the
bloom of the alfileria, and swiftly it spreads from the
southern slopes, where it begins, and runs from meadow to
hill-top. Soon after a cream-colored bell-flower begins to nod
from a tall, slender stalk; another of sky-blue soon opens
beside it; beneath these a little five-petaled flower of deep
pink tries to outshine the blossoms of the alfileria; and above
them soon stands the radiant shooting-star, with reflexed
petals of white, yellow, and pink shining behind its purplish
ovaries. On every side violets, here of the purest golden hue
and overpowering fragrance, appear in numbers beyond all
conception. And soon six or seven varieties of clover, all with
fine, delicate leaves, unfold flowers of yellow, red, and pink.
Delicate little crucifers of white and yellow shine modestly
below all these; little cream-colored flowers on slender scapes
look skyward on every side; while others of purer white, with
every variety of petal, crowd up among them. Standing now upon
some hill-side that commands miles of landscape, one is dazzled
with a blaze of color, from acres and acres of pink, great
fields of violets, vast reaches of blue, endless sweeps of
white.
Upon this--merely the warp of the carpet about to cover the
land--the sun fast weaves a woof of splendor. Along the
southern slopes of the lower hills soon beams the orange light
of the poppy, which swiftly kindles the adjacent slopes, then
flames along the meadow, and blazes upon the northern
hill-sides. Spires of green, mounting on every side, soon open
upon the top into lilies of deep lavender, and the scarlet
bracts of the painted-cup glow side by side with the crimson of
the cardinal-flower. And soon comes the iris, with its broad
golden eye fringed with rays of lavender blue; and five
varieties of phacelia overwhelm some places with waves of
purple, blue, indigo, and whitish pink. The evening primrose
covers the lower slopes with long sheets of brightest yellow,
and from the hills above the rock-rose adds its golden bloom to
that of the sorrel and the wild alfalfa, until the hills almost
outshine the bright light from the slopes and plains. And
through all this nods a tulip of most delicate lavender;
vetches, lupins, and all the members of the wild-pea family are
pushing and winding their way everywhere in every shade of
crimson, purple, and white; along the ground crowfoot weaves a
mantle of white, through which, amid a thousand comrades, the
orthocarpus rears its tufted head of pink. Among all these are
mixed a thousand other flowers, plenty enough as plenty would
be accounted in other countries, but here mere pin-points on a
great map of colors.
As the stranger gazes upon this carpet that now covers hill and
dale, undulates over the table-lands, and robes even the
mountain with a brilliancy and breadth of color that strikes
the eye from miles away, he exhausts his vocabulary of
superlatives, and goes away imagining he has seen it all. Yet
he has seen only the background of an embroidery more varied,
more curious and splendid, than the carpet upon which it is
wrought. Asters bright with centre of gold and lavender rays
soon shine high above the iris, and a new and larger tulip of
deepest yellow nods where its lavender cousin is drooping its
lately proud head. New bell-flowers of white and blue and
indigo rise above the first, which served merely as ushers to
the display, and whole acres ablaze with the orange of the
poppy are fast turning with the indigo of the larkspur. Where
the ground was lately aglow with the marigold and the
four-o'clock the tall penstemon now reaches out a hundred arms
full-hung with trumpets of purple and pink. Here the silene
rears high its head with fringed corolla of scarlet; and there
the wild gooseberry dazzles the eye with a perfect shower of
tubular flowers of the same bright color. The mimulus alone is
almost enough to color the hills. Half a dozen varieties, some
with long, narrow, trumpet-shaped flowers, others with broad
flaring mouths; some of them tall herbs, and others large
shrubs, with varying shades of dark red, light red, orange,
cream-color, and yellow, spangle hill-side, rock-pile, and
ravine. Among them the morning-glory twines with flowers of
purest white, new lupins climb over the old ones, and the
trailing vetch festoons rock and shrub and tree with long
garlands of crimson, purple, and pink. Over the scarlet of the
gooseberry or the gold of the high-bush mimulus along the
hills, the honeysuckle hangs its tubes of richest cream-color,
and the wild cucumber pours a shower of white over the green
leaves of the sumach or sage. Snap-dragons of blue and white,
dandelions that you must look at three or four times to be
certain what they are, thistles that are soft and tender with
flowers too pretty for the thistle family, orchids that you may
try in vain to classify, and sages and mints of which you can
barely recognize the genera, with cruciferæ, compositæ, and
what-not, add to the glare and confusion.
Meanwhile, the chaparral, which during the long dry season has
robed the hills in sombre green, begins to brighten with new
life; new leaves adorn the ragged red arms of the manzanita,
and among them blow thousands of little urn-shaped flowers of
rose-color and white. The bright green of one lilac is almost
lost in a luxuriance of sky-blue blossoms, and the white lilac
looks at a distance as if drifted over with snow. The
cercocarpus almost rivals the lilac in its display of white and
blue, and the dark, forbidding adenostoma now showers forth
dense panicles of little white flowers. Here, too, a new
mimulus pours floods of yellow light, and high above them all
the yucca rears its great plume of purple and white.
Thus marches on for weeks the floral procession, new turns
bringing new banners into view, or casting on old ones a
brighter light, but ever showing a riotous profusion of
splendor until member after member drops gradually out of the
ranks, and only a band of stragglers is left marching away into
the summer. But myriads of ferns, twenty-one varieties of which
are quite common, and of a fineness and delicacy rarely seen
elsewhere, still stand green in the shade of the rocks and
trees along the hills, and many a flower lingers in the timber
or cañons long after its friends on the open hills or plains
have faded away. In the cañons and timber are also many flowers
that are not found in the open ground, and as late as the
middle of September, only twenty miles from the sea, and at an
elevation of but fifteen hundred feet, I have gathered bouquets
that would attract immediate attention anywhere. The whole land
abounds with flowers both curious and lovely; but those only
have been mentioned which force themselves upon one's
attention. Where the sheep have not ruined all beauty, and the
rains have been sufficient, they take as full possession of the
land as the daisy and wild carrot do of some Eastern meadows.
There are thousands of others, which it would be a hopeless
task to enumerate, which are even more numerous than most of
the favorite wild flowers are in the East, yet they are not
abundant enough to give character to the country. For instance,
there is a great larkspur, six feet high, with a score of
branching arms, all studded with spurred flowers of such
brilliant red that it looks like a fountain of strontium fire;
but you will not see it every time you turn around. A tall lily
grows in the same way, with a hundred golden flowers shining on
its many arms, but it must be sought in certain places. So the
tiger-lily and the columbine must be sought in the mountains,
the rose and sweetbrier on low ground, the night-shades and the
helianthus in the timbered cañons and gulches.
Delicacy and brilliancy characterize nearly all the California
flowers, and nearly all are so strange, so different from the
other members of their families, that they would be an ornament
to any greenhouse. The alfileria, for instance, is the richest
and strongest fodder in the world. It is the main-stay of the
stock-grower, and when raked up after drying makes excellent
hay; yet it is a geranium, delicate and pretty, when not too
rank.
But suddenly the full blaze of color is gone, and the summer is
at hand. Brown tints begin to creep over the plains; the wild
oats no longer ripple in silvery waves beneath the sun and
wind; and the foxtail, that shone so brightly green along the
hill-side, takes on a golden hue. The light lavender tint of
the chorizanthe now spreads along the hills where the poppy so
lately flamed, and over the dead morning-glory the dodder
weaves its orange floss. A vast army of cruciferæ and compositæ
soon overruns the land with bright yellow, and numerous
varieties of mint tinge it with blue or purple; but the greater
portion of the annual vegetation is dead or dying. The distant
peaks of granite now begin to glow at evening with a soft
purple hue; the light poured into the deep ravines towards
sundown floods them with a crimson mist; on the shady
hill-sides the chaparral looks bluer, and on the sunny
hill-sides is a brighter green than before.
COMPARATIVE TEMPERATURE AROUND THE WORLD.
The following table, published by the Pasadena Board of Trade, shows the
comparative temperature of well-known places in various parts of the
world, arranged according to the difference between their average winter
and average summer:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Place. | Winter.| Spring.| Summer.| Autumn.| Difference
| | | | | Summer,
| | | | | Winter.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Funchal, Madeira | 62.88 | 64.55 | 70.89 | 70.19 | 8.01
St. Michael, Azores | 57.83 | 61.17 | 68.33 | 62.33 | 10.50
PASADENA | 56.00 | 61.07 | 67.61 | 62.31 | 11.61
Santa Cruz, Canaries | 64.65 | 68.87 | 76.68 | 74.17 | 12.03
Santa Barbara | 54.29 | 59.45 | 67.71 | 63.11 | 13.42
Nassau, Bahama Islands | 70.67 | 77.67 | 86.00 | 80.33 | 15.33
San Diego, California | 54.09 | 60.14 | 69.67 | 64.63 | 15.58
Cadiz, Spain | 52.90 | 59.93 | 70.43 | 65.35 | 17.53
Lisbon, Portugal | 53.00 | 60.00 | 71.00 | 62.00 | 18.00
Malta | 57.46 | 62.76 | 78.20 | 71.03 | 20.74
Algiers | 55.00 | 66.00 | 77.00 | 60.00 | 22.00
St Augustine, Florida | 58.25 | 68.69 | 80.36 | 71.90 | 22.11
Rome, Italy | 48.90 | 57.65 | 72.16 | 63.96 | 23.26
Sacramento, California | 47.92 | 59.17 | 71.19 | 61.72 | 23.27
Mentone | 49.50 | 60.00 | 73.00 | 56.60 | 23.50
Nice, Italy | 47.88 | 56.23 | 72.26 | 61.63 | 24.44
New Orleans, Louisiana | 56.00 | 69.37 | 81.08 | 69.80 | 25.08
Cairo, Egypt | 58.52 | 73.58 | 85.10 | 71.48 | 26.58
Jacksonville, Florida | 55.02 | 68.88 | 81.93 | 62.54 | 96.91
Pau, France | 41.86 | 54.06 | 70.72 | 57.39 | 28.86
Florence, Italy | 44.30 | 56.00 | 74.00 | 60.70 | 29.70
San Antonio, Texas | 52.74 | 70.48 | 83.73 | 71.56 | 30.99
Aiken, South Carolina | 45.82 | 61.32 | 77.36 | 61.96 | 31.54
Fort Yuma, California | 57.96 | 73.40 | 92.07 | 75.66 | 34.11
Visalia, California | 45.38 | 59.40 | 80.78 | 60.34 | 35.40
Santa Fé, New Mexico | 30.28 | 50.06 | 70.50 | 51.34 | 40.22
Boston, Mass | 28.08 | 45.61 | 68.68 | 51.04 | 40.60
New York, N. Y. | 31.93 | 48.26 | 72.62 | 48.50 | 40.69
Albuquerque, New Mexico| 34.78 | 56.36 | 76.27 | 56.33 | 41.40
Denver, Colorado, | 27.66 | 46.33 | 71.66 | 47.16 | 44.00
St. Paul, Minnesota | 15.09 | 41.29 | 68.03 | 44.98 | 52.94
Minneapolis, Minnesota | 12.87 | 40.12 | 68.34 | 45.33 | 55.47
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CALIFORNIA AND ITALY.
The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, in its pamphlet describing that
city and county, gives a letter from the Signal Service Observer at
Sacramento, comparing the temperature of places in California and Italy.
He writes:
To prove to your many and intelligent readers the equability
and uniformity Of the climate of Santa Barbara, San Diego, and
Los Angeles, as compared with Mentone and San Remo, of the
Riviera of Italy and of Corfu, I append the monthly temperature
for each place. Please notice a much warmer temperature in
winter at the California stations, and also a much cooler
summer temperature at the same places than at any of the
foreign places, except Corfu. The table speaks with more
emphasis and certainty than I can, and is as follows:
+-----------+---------+-----------+----------+----------+---------+---------+
| | San | Santa | Los | | San | |
| Month. | Diego's | Barbara's | Angeles' | Mentone's| Remo's | Corfu's |
| | mean temperature. |
+-----------+---------+-----------+----------+----------+---------+---------+
|January | 53.7 | 54.4 | 52.8 | 48.2 | 47.2 | 53.6 |
|February | 54.2 | 55.6 | 54.2 | 48.5 | 50.2 | 51.8 |
|March | 55.6 | 56.4 | 56.0 | 52.0 | 52.0 | 53.6 |
|April | 57.8 | 58.8 | 57.9 | 57.2 | 57.0 | 58.3 |
|May | 61.1 | 60.2 | 61.0 | 63.0 | 62.9 | 66.7 |
|June | 64.4 | 62.6 | 65.5 | 70.0 | 69.2 | 72.3 |
|July | 67.3 | 65.7 | 68.3 | 75.0 | 74.3 | 67.7 |
|August | 68.7 | 67.0 | 69.5 | 75.0 | 73.8 | 81.3 |
|September | 66.6 | 65.6 | 67.5 | 69.0 | 70.6 | 78.8 |
|October | 62.5 | 62.1 | 62.7 | 74.4 | 61.8 | 70.8 |
|November | 58.2 | 58.0 | 58.8 | 54.0 | 58.3 | 63.8 |
|December | 55.5 | 55.3 | 54.8 | 49.0 | 49.3 | 68.4 |
| | | | | | | |
| Averages | 60.6 | 60.2 | 60.4 | 60.4 | 60.1 | 65.6 |
+-----------+---------+-----------+----------+----------+---------+---------+
The table on pages 210 and 211, "Extremes of Heat and Cold," is
published by the San Diego Land and Farm Company, whose pamphlet says:
The United States records at San Diego Signal Station show that
in ten years there were but 120 days on which the mercury
passed 80°. Of these 120 there were but 41 on which it passed
85°, but 22 when it passed 90°, but four over 95°, and only one
over 100°; to wit, 101°, the highest ever recorded here. During
all this time there was not a day on which the mercury did not
fall to at least 70° during the night, and there were but five
days on which it did not fall even lower. During the same ten
years there were but six days on which the mercury fell below
35°. This low temperature comes only in extremely dry weather
in winter, and lasts but a few minutes, happening just before
sunrise. On two of these six days it fell to 32° at daylight,
the lowest point ever registered here. The lowest mid-day
temperature is 52°, occurring only four times in these ten
years. From 65° to 70° is the average temperature of noonday
throughout the greater part of the year.
FIVE YEARS IN SANTA BARBARA.
[Transcriber's note: Table has been turned from original to fit, along
with using abbreviations for the months and a legend.]
The following table, from the self-registering thermometer in the
observatory of Mr. Hugh D. Vail, shows the mean temperature of each
month in the years 1885 to 1889 at Santa Barbara, and also the mean
temperature of the warmest and coldest days in each month:
A = Mean Temperature of each Month.
B = Mean Temperature of Warmest Day.
C = Mean Temperature of Coldest Day.
D = Monthly Rainfall, Inches.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MONTH.
Jan.| Feb.| Mar. | Apr.| May | June| July| Aug.| Sep.| Oct.| Nov.| Dec.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1885.
A|53.2 | 56.7 |59.1 |60.9 |60.0 |62.0 | 66.1| 68.0| 66.9| 63.0|58.9 | 57.2
B|57.0 | 65.5 |62,5 |70.5 |64.6 |68.0 | 73.0| 78.8| 78.8| 72.0|64.8 | 65.7
C|49.5 | 51,5 |56.0 |54.0 |54.0 |58.5 | 62.2| 62.5| 72.0| 58.5|50.0 | 52.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1886.
A|55.0 | 59.6 |53.1 |55.7 |60.5 |62.0 | 66.3| 68.2| 63.8| 58.3|56.3 | 55.8
B|73.5 | 70.0 |59.5 |61.5 |65.5 |67.5 | 72.0| 72.0| 68.3| 62.5|66.2 | 65.8
C|47.5 | 45.0 |46.2 |50.5 |54.0 |58.5 | 63.3| 63.2| 57.0| 51.7|49.8 | 49.5
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1887.
A|54.67| 50.4 |57.0 |58.43|60.0 |63.7 | 64.6| 64.8| 66.0| 65.0|58.9 | 52.8
B|63.5 | 61.1 |64.8 |66.8 |67.0 |79.0 | 71.3| 69.7| 70.5| 74.0|65.3 | 59.6
C|49.0 | 45.3 |52.0 |51.0 |53.3 |59.0 | 60.9| 62.0| 61.5| 59.3|47.5 | 49.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1888.
A|49.0 | 53.8 |53.0 |59.9 |57.6 |64.4 | 67.0| 66.3| 67.9| 63.5|59 8 |.56.5
B|58.7 | 57.5 |60.5 |75.0 |64.5 |69.0 | 72.0| 72.0| 76.2| 76.9|61.3 | 63.0
C|41.0 | 49.0 |46.0 |53.0 |51.7 |59.5 | 63.0| 63.5| 63.2| 59.0|54.5 | 52.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1889.
A|53.0 | 55.4 |58.0 |59.9 |60.0 |62.5 | 64.2| 67.3| 68.8| 63.9|59.6 | 54.4
B|58.0 | 65.0 |67.0 |72.7 |68.5 |65.7 | 84.0| 77.0| 78.0| 70.3|65.7 | 60.7
C|48.8 | 45.5 |52.5 |52.7 |54.5 |58.5 | 61.0| 63.0| 62.0| 60.0|54.5 | 50.0
D| 0.29| 1.29| 7.31| 0.49| 0.76| 0.13| ...| ... | ... | 8.69| 3.21| 10.64
Observations made at San Diego City, compiled from Report Of the Chief
Signal Officer of the U. S. Army.
[Transcriber's note: Table has been modified from original to fit, using
abbreviations for the months and a legend.]
Column headers:
a = Average number of cloudy days for each month and year.
b = Average number of fair days for each month and year.
c = Average number of clear days for each month and year.
d = Average cloudiness, scale 0 to 10, for each month and year.
e = Average hourly velocity of wind for each month and year.
f = Average precipitation for each month and year.
g = Minimum temperature for each month and year.
h = Maximum temperature for each month and year.
i = Mean temperature for each month and year.
j = Mean normal barometer of San Diego for each month and year for four years.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| OBSERVATIONS EXTENDING OVER A PERIOD OF TWELVE YEARS.
MONTH. | a | b | c | d | e f | g | h | i | j
---------+------------------------------------------------------------+-------
January | 8.5 | 11.2 | 11.3 | 4.1 | 5.1 | 1.85 | 32.0 | 78.0 | 53.6 | 30.027
February | 7.9 | 11.3 | 9.0 | 4.4 | 6.0 | 2.07 | 35.0 | 82.6 | 54.3 | 30.058
March | 9.6.| 12.7 | 8.7 | 4.8 | 6.4 | 0.97 | 38.0 | 99.0 | 55.7 | 30.004
April | 7.9 | 11.9 | 10.2 | 4.4 | 6.6 | 0.68 | 39.0 | 87.0 | 57.7 | 29.965
May |10.9 | 12.1 | 8.0 | 5.2 | 6.7 | 0.26 | 45.4 | 94.0 | 61.0 | 29.893
June | 8.1.| 15.2 | 6.7 | 5.0 | 6.3 | 0.05 | 51.0 | 94.0 | 64.4 | 29.864
July | 6.7 | 16.1 | 8.2 | 4.7 | 6.3 | 0.02 | 54.0 | 86.0 | 67.1 | 29.849
August | 4.7 | 16.9 | 9.4 | 4.1 | 6.0 | 0.23 | 54.0 | 86.0 | 68.7 | 29.894
September| 4.4 | 13.9 | 11.7 | 3.7 | 5.9 | 0.05 | 49.5 |101.0 | 66.8 | 29.840
October | 5.6 | 12.6 | 12.8 | 3.9 | 5.4 | 0.49 | 44.0 | 92.0 | 62.9 | 29.905
November | 6.5 | 10.0 | 13.5 | 3.6 | 5.1 | 0.70 | 38.0 | 85.0 | 58.3 | 29.991
December | 6.6 | 11.2 | 13.2 | 3.7 | 5.1 | 2.12 | 32.0 | 82.0 | 55.6 | 30.009
Mean | | | | | | | | | |
annual |87.4 |155.1 |122.7 | 4.3 | 5.9.| 9.49 | 42.6 | 88.8 | 60.5 | 29.942
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EXTREMES OF HEAT AND COLD.
The following table, taken from the Report of the Chief Signal Officer,
shows the highest and lowest temperatures recorded since the opening of
stations of the Signal Service at the points named, for the number of
years indicated. An asterisk (*) denotes below zero:
a = Maximum
b = Minimum
c = Number of Years of Observation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| | Jan. | Feb. | March.| April.| May. | June.|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Locality of Station | c | a | b | a | b | a | b | a | b | a | b | a | b |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charleston, S. C. | 12| 80| 23| 78| 26| 85| 28| 87| 32| 94| 47| 94| 65|
Denver, Col. | 12| 67|*29| 72|*22| 81|*10| 83| 4| 92| 27| 89| 50|
Jacksonville, Fla. | 12| 80| 24| 83| 32| 88| 31| 91| 37| 99| 48|101| 62|
L'S ANG'LES, CAL. | 6| 82| 30| 86| 28| 99| 34| 94| 39|100| 40|104| 47|
New Orleans, La. | 13| 78| 20| 80| 33| 84| 37| 86| 38| 92| 56| 97| 65|
Newport, R. I. | 2| 48| 2| 50| 4| 60| 4| 62| 26| 75| 33| 91| 41|
New York | 13| 64| *6| 69| *4| 72| *3| 81| 20| 94| 34| 95| 47|
Pensacola, Fla. | 4| 74| 29| 78| 31| 79| 36| 87| 34| 93| 47| 97| 64|
SAN DIEGO, CAL. | 12| 78| 32| 83| 35| 99| 38| 87| 39| 94| 45| 94| 51|
San Francisco, Cal. | 12| 69| 36| 71| 35| 77| 39| 81| 40| 86| 45| 95| 48|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
EXTREMES OF HEAT AND COLD.--_Continued._
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| | July.| Aug. | Sept. | Oct. | Nov. | Dec. |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Locality of Station | c | a | b | a | b | a | b | a | b | a | b | a | b |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charleston, S. C. | 12| 94| 69| 96| 69| 94| 64| 89| 49| 81| 33| 78| 22|
Denver, Col. | 12| 91| 59| 93| 60| 93| 51| 84| 38| 73| 23| 69| 1|
Jacksonville, Fla. | 12|104| 68|100| 66| 98| 56| 92| 40| 84| 30| 81| 19|
L'S ANG'LES, CAL. | 6| 98| 51|100| 50|104| 44| 97| 43| 86| 34| 88| 30|
New Orleans, La. | 13| 96| 70| 97| 69| 92| 58| 89| 40| 82| 32| 78| 20|
Newport, R. I. | 9| 87| 56| 85| 45| 77| 39| 75| 29| 62| 17| 56| *9|
New York | 13| 99| 57| 96| 53|100| 36| 83| 31| 74| 7| 66| *6|
Pensacola, Fla. | 4| 97| 64| 93| 69| 93| 57| 89| 45| 81| 28| 76| 17|
SAN DIEGO, CAL. | 12| 86| 54| 86| 54|101| 50| 92| 44| 85| 38| 82| 32|
San Francisco, Cal. | 12| 83| 49| 89| 50| 92| 50| 84| 45| 78| 41| 68| 34|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
STATEMENTS OF SMALL CROPS.
The following statements of crops on small pieces of ground, mostly in
Los Angeles County, in 1890, were furnished to the Chamber of Commerce
in Los Angeles, and are entirely trustworthy. Nearly all of them bear
date August 1st. This is a fair sample from all Southern California:
PEACHES.
Ernest Dewey, Pomona--Golden Cling Peaches, 10 acres, 7 years
old, produced 47 tons green; sold dried for $4800; cost of
production, $243.70; net profit, $4556.30. Soil, sandy loam;
not irrigated. Amount of rain, 28 inches, winter of 1889-90.
H. H. Rose, Santa Anita Township (3/4 of a mile from Lamanda
Park)--2-6/7 acres; produced 47,543 pounds; sold for $863.46;
cost of production, $104; net profit, $759.46. Soil, light
sandy loam; not irrigated. Produced in 1889 12,000 pounds,
which sold at $1.70 per 100 pounds.
E. R. Thompson, Azusa (2 miles south of depot)--2-1/6 acres,
233 trees, produced 57,655 pounds; sold for $864.82-1/2; cost
of production, $140; net profit, $724.82-1/2. Soil, sandy loam;
irrigated three times in summer, 1 inch to 7 acres. Trees 7
years old, not more than two-thirds grown.
P. O'Connor, Downey--20 trees produced 4000 pounds; sold for
$60; cost of production $5; net profit, $55. Soil, sandy loam;
not irrigated. Crop sold on the ground.
H. Hood, Downey City (1/4 of a mile from depot)--1/4 of an acre
produced 7-1/2 tons; sold for $150; cost of production, $10;
net profit, $140. Damp sandy soil; not irrigated.
F. D. Smith (between Azusa and Glendora, 1-1/4 miles from
depot)--1 acre produced 14,361 pounds; sold for $252.51; cost
of production, $20; net profit, $232.51. Dark sandy loam;
irrigated once. Trees 5 and 6 years old.
P. O. Johnson, Ranchito--17 trees, 10 years old, produced 4-3/4
tons; sold 4-1/4 tons for $120; cost of production, $10; net
profit, $110; very little irrigation. Sales were 1/2c. per
pound under market rate.
PRUNES.
E. P. Naylor (3 miles from Pomona)--15 acres produced 149 tons;
sold for $7450; cost of production, $527; net profit, $6923.
Soil, loam, with some sand; irrigated, 1 inch per 10 acres.
W. H. Baker, Downey (1/2 a mile from depot)--1-1/2 acres
produced 12,529 pounds; sold for $551.90; cost of production,
$50; net profit, $501.90. Soil, sandy loam; not irrigated.
Howe Bros. (2 miles from Lordsburg)--800 trees, which had
received no care for 2 years, produced 28 tons; sold for $1400;
cost of production, $200; net profit, $1200. Soil, gravelly
loam, red; partially irrigated. Messrs. Howe state that they
came into possession of this place in March, 1890. The weeds
were as high as the trees and the ground was very hard. Only
about 500 of the trees had a fair crop on them.
W. A. Spalding, Azusa--1/3 of an acre produced 10,404 pounds;
sold for $156.06; cost of production, $10; net profit, $146.06.
Soil, sandy loam.
E. A. Hubbard, Pomona (1-1/2 miles from depot)--4-1/2 acres
produced 24 tons; sold green for $1080; cost of production,
$280; net profit, $800. Soil, dark sandy loam; irrigated. This
entire ranch of 9 acres was bought in 1884 for $1575.
F. M. Smith (1-1/4 miles east of Azusa)--3/5 of an acre
produced 17,174 pounds; sold for $315.84; cost of production,
$25; net profit, $290. Soil, deep, dark sandy loam; irrigated
once in the spring. Trees 5 years old.
George Rhorer (1/2 of a mile east of North Pomona)--13 acres
produced 88 tons; sold for $4400 on the trees; cost of
production, $260; net profit, $4140. Soil, gravelly loam;
irrigated, 1 inch to 8 acres. Trees planted 5 years ago last
spring.
J. S. Flory (between the Big and Little Tejunga rivers)--1-1/3
acres or 135 trees 20 feet apart each way; 100 of the trees 4
years old, the balance of the trees 5 years old; produced 5230
pounds dried; sold for $523; cost of production, $18; net
profit, $505. Soil, light loam, with some sand; not irrigated.
W. Caruthers (2 miles north of Downey)--3/4 of an acre produced
5 tons; sold for $222; cost of production, $7.50; net profit,
$215. Soil, sandy loam; not irrigated. Trees 4 years old.
James Loney, Pomona--2 acres; product sold for $1150; cost of
production, $50; net profit, $1100. Soil, sandy loam.
I. W. Lord, Eswena--5 acres produced 40 tons; sold for $2000;
cost of production, $300; net profit, $1700. Soil, sandy loam.
M. B. Moulton, Pomona--3 acres; sold for $1873; cost of
production, $215; net profit, $1658. Soil, deep sandy loam.
Trees 9 years old.
Ernest Dewey, Pomona--6 acres produced 38 tons green; dried, at
10 cents a pound, $3147; cost of production, $403; profit,
$2734. Soil, sandy loam; irrigated one inch to 10 acres. Sixty
per cent. increase over former year.
C. S. Ambrose, Pomona--12 acres produced 77 tons; $50 per ton
gross, $3850; labor of one hand one year, $150; profit, $3700.
Soil, gravelly; very little irrigation. Prunes sold on trees.
ORANGES.
Joachim F. Jarchow, San Gabriel--2-1/2 acres; 10-year trees;
product sold for $1650; cost of production $100, including
cultivation of 7-1/2 acres, not bearing; net profit, $1550.
F. D. Smith, Azusa--6-1/2 acres produced 600 boxes; sold for
$1200; cost of production, $130; net profit, $1070. Soil, dark
sandy loam; irrigated three times. Trees 4 years old.
George Lightfoot, South Pasadena--5-1/2 acres produced 700
boxes; sold for $1100; cost of production, $50; net profit,
$1050. Soil, rich, sandy loam; irrigated once a year.
H. Hood, Downey--1/2 of an acre produced 275 boxes; sold for
$275; cost of production, $25; net profit, $250. Soil, damp,
sandy; not irrigated.
W. G. Earle, Azusa--1 acre produced 210 boxes; sold for $262;
cost of production, $15; net profit, $247. Soil, sandy loam;
irrigated four times.
Nathaniel Hayden, Vernon--4 acres; 986 boxes at $1.20 per box;
sales, $1182; cost of production, $50; net profit, $1132. Loam;
irrigated. Other products on the 4 acres.
H. O. Fosdick, Santa Ana--1 acre; 6 years old; 350 boxes;
sales, $700; cost of production and packing, $50; net profit,
$650. Loam; irrigated.
J. H. Isbell, Rivera--1 acre, 82 trees; 16 years old; sales,
$600; cost of production, $25; profit, $575. Irrigated. $1.10
per box for early delivery, $1.65 for later.
GRAPES.
William Bernhard, Monte Vista--10 acres produced 25 tons; sold
for $750; cost of production, $70; net profit, $680. Soil,
heavy loam; not irrigated. Vines 5 years old.
Dillon, Kennealy & McClure, Burbank (1 mile from Roscoe
Station)--200 acres produced 90,000 gallons of wine; cost of
production, $5000; net profit, about $30,000. Soil, sandy loam;
not irrigated; vineyard in very healthy condition.
P. O'Connor (2-1/2 miles south of Downey)--12 acres produced
100 tons; sold for $1500; cost of production, $360; net profit,
$1140. Soil, sandy loam; not irrigated. Vines planted in 1884,
when the land would not sell for $100 per acre.
J. K. Banks (1-3/4 miles from Downey)--40 acres produced 250
tons; sold for $3900; cost of production, $1300; net profit,
$2600. Soil, sandy loam.
BERRIES.
W. Y. Earle (2-1/2 miles from Azusa)--Strawberries, 2-1/2 acres
produced 15,000 boxes; sold for $750; cost of production, $225;
net profit, $525. Soil, sandy loam; irrigated. Shipped 3000
boxes to Ogden, Utah, and 6000 boxes to Albuquerque and El
Paso.
Benjamin Norris, Pomona--Blackberries, 1/4 of an acre produced
2500 pounds; sold for $100; cost of production, $5; net profit,
$95. Soil, light sandy; irrigated.
S. H. Eye, Covina--Raspberries, 5/9 of an acre produced 1800
pounds; sold for $195; cost of production, $85; net profit,
$110. Soil, sandy loam; irrigated.
J. O. Houser, Covina--Blackberries, 1/4 of an acre produced 648
pounds; sold for $71.28; cost of production, $18; net profit,
$53.28. Soil, sandy loam; irrigated. First year's crop.
APRICOTS.
T. D. Leslie (1 mile from Pomona)--1 acre produced 10 tons;
sold for $250; cost of production, $60; net profit, $190. Soil,
loose, gravelly; irrigated; 1 inch to 10 acres. First crop.
George Lightfoot, South Pasadena--2 acres produced 11 tons;
sold for $260; cost of production, $20; net profit, $240. Soil,
sandy loam; not irrigated.
T. D. Smith, Azusa--1 acre produced 13,555 pounds; sold for
$169.44; cost of production, $25; net profit, $144.44. Soil,
sandy loam; irrigated once. Trees 5 years old.
W. Y. Earle (2-1/2 miles from Azusa)--6 acres produced 6 tons;
sold for $350; cost of production, $25; net profit, $325. Soil,
sandy loam; not irrigated. Trees 3 years old.
W. A. Spalding, Azusa--335 trees produced 15,478 pounds; sold
for $647.43; cost of production, $50; net profit, $597.43.
Soil, sandy loam.
Mrs. Winkler, Pomona--3/4 of an acre, 90 trees; product sold
for $381; cost of production, $28.40; net profit, $352.60.
Soil, sandy loam; not irrigated. Only help, small boys and
girls.
MISCELLANEOUS FRUITS.
E. A. Bonine, Lamanda Park--Apricots, nectarines, prunes,
peaches, and lemons, 30 acres produced 160 tons; sold for
$8000; cost of production, $1500; net profit, $6500. No
irrigation.
J. P. Fleming (1-1/2 miles from Rivera)--Walnuts, 40 acres
produced 12-1/2 tons; sold for $2120; cost of production, $120;
net profit, $2000. Soil, sandy loam; not irrigated.
George Lightfoot, South Pasadena--Lemons, 2 acres produced 500
boxes; sold for $720; cost of production, $20; net profit,
$700. Soil, rich sandy loam; not irrigated. Trees 10 years old.
W. A. Spalding, Azusa--Nectarines, 96 trees produced 19,378
pounds; sold for $242.22; cost of production, $35; net profit,
$207.22. Soil, sandy loam.
F. D. Smith, Azusa--Nectarines, 1-2/5 acres produced 36,350
pounds; sold for $363.50; cost of production, $35; net profit,
$318.50. Soil, deep dark sandy loam; irrigated once in spring.
Trees 5 and 6 years old.
C. D. Ambrose (4 miles north of Pomona)--Pears, 3 acres
produced 33,422 pounds; sold green for $1092.66; cost of
production, $57; net profit, $1035.66. Soil, foot-hill loam;
partly irrigated.
N. Hayden--Statement of amount of fruit taken from 4 acres for
one season at Vernon District: 985 boxes oranges, 15 boxes
lemons, 8000 pounds apricots, 2200 pounds peaches, 200 pounds
loquats, 2500 pounds nectarines, 4000 pounds apples, 1000
pounds plums, 1000 pounds prunes, 1000 pounds figs, 150 pounds
walnuts, 500 pounds pears. Proceeds, $1650. A family of five
were supplied with all the fruit they wanted besides the above.
POTATOES.
O. Bullis, Compton--28-3/4 acres produced 3000 sacks; sold for
$3000; cost of production, $500; net profit, $2500. Soil, peat;
not irrigated. This land has been in potatoes 3 years, and will
be sown to cabbages, thus producing two crops this year.
P. F. Cogswell, El Monte--25 acres produced 150 tons; sold for
$3400; cost of production, $450; net profit, $2950. Soil,
sediment; not irrigated.
M. Metcalf, El Monte--8 acres produced 64 tons; sold for $900;
cost of production, $50; net profit, $850. Soil, sandy loam;
not irrigated.
Jacob Vernon (1-1/2 miles from Covina)--3 acres produced 400
sacks; sold for $405.88; cost of production, $5; net profit,
$400.88. Soil, sandy loam; irrigated one acre. Two-thirds of
crop was volunteer.
H. Hood, Downey--Sweet potatoes, 1 acre produced 300 sacks;
sold for $300; cost of production, $30; net profit, $270. Soil,
sandy loam; not irrigated.
C. C. Stub, Savannah (1 mile from depot)--10 acres produced
1000 sacks; sold for $2000; cost of production, $100; net
profit, $1900. Soil, sandy loam; not irrigated. A grain crop
was raised on the same land this year.
ONIONS.
F. A. Atwater and C. P. Eldridge, Clearwater--1 acre produced
211 sacks; sold for $211; cost of production, $100; net profit,
$111. Soil, sandy loam; no irrigation. At present prices the
onions would have brought $633.
Charles Lauber, Downey--1 acre produced 113 sacks; sold for
$642; cost of production, $50; net profit, $592. No attention
was paid to the cultivation of this crop. Soil, sandy loam; not
irrigated. At present prices the same onions would have brought
$803.
MISCELLANEOUS VEGETABLES.
Eugene Lassene, University--Pumpkins, 5 acres produced 150
loads; sold for $4 per load; cost of production, $3 per acre;
net profit, $585. Soil, sandy loam. A crop of barley was raised
from the same land this year.
P. K. Wood, Clearwater--Pea-nuts, 3 acres produced 5000 pounds;
sold for $250; cost of production, $40; net profit, $210. Soil,
light sandy; not irrigated. Planted too deep, and got about
one-third crop.
Oliver E. Roberts (Terrace Farm, Cahuenga Valley)--3 acres
tomatoes; sold product for $461.75. Soil, foot-hill; not
irrigated; second crop, watermelons. One-half acre green
peppers; sold product for $54.30. 1-1/2 acres of green peas;
sold product for $220. 17 fig-trees; first crop sold for $40.
Total product of 54 acres, $776.05.
Jacob Miller, Cahuenga--Green peas, 10 acres; 43,615 pounds;
sales, $3052; cost of production and marketing, $500; profit,
$2552. Soil, foot-hill; not irrigated. Second crop, melons.
W. W. Bliss, Duarte--Honey, 215 stands; 15,000 pounds; sales,
$785. Mountain district. Bees worth $1 to $3 per stand.
James Stewart, Downey--Figs, 3 acres; 20 tons, at $50, $1000.
Not irrigated; 26 inches rain; 1 acre of trees 16 years old, 2
acres 5 years. Figs sold on trees.
The mineral wealth of Southern California is not yet
appreciated. Among the rare minerals which promise much is a
very large deposit of tin in the Temescal Cañon, below South
Riverside. It is in the hands of an English company. It is
estimated that there are 23 square miles rich in tin ore, and
it is said that the average yield of tin is 20-1/4 per cent.
INDEX.
Acamo, 165, 170.
Adenostoma, 205.
Africa, 18.
Aiken, South Carolina, Temperature of, 207.
Ailantus, 134.
Alaska, 34.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 165.
---- temperature of, 207.
Alfalfa, 23, 98, 101, 204.
Alfileria, 203, 206.
Algiers, Temperature of, 207.
Alhambra, 124.
Almond, 18, 19, 101.
Alpine pass, 1.
Amalfi, 30.
Ambrose, C. D., 215.
Ambrose, Ernest, 213.
Anacapa, 2.
Anaheim, 134.
Antelope, 114, 188.
Apples, 19, 96, 97, 127.
---- prices and profits, 215.
---- San Diego, 97.
Apricots, 18, 19, 43, 92.
---- prices and profits, 214, 215.
Arcadian Station, 126.
Arizona, 5, 149, 164, 173, 177.
---- Cattle Company, 186.
---- desert, 79.
Arrow-head Hot Springs, 117.
Artist Point, 154.
Atlantic, 5, 18, 47, 165, 198.
Atwater, F. A., 216.
Aubrey sandstones, 195.
Australian lady-bug, 129.
---- navels, 120.
Azusa, 211-215.
Baker, W. H., 212.
Baldwin plantation, 127.
Banana, 19, 134.
Bancroft, H. H., 56.
Banks, J. K., 214.
Banning, 96.
Barley, 8, 14, 25, 138.
---- prices and profits, 216.
Beans, 138.
Bear Valley Dam, 117, 118.
Bees, 217.
Bell-flower, 204.
Bernhard, William, 214.
Berries, 141.
Big Tejunga River, 212.
Big Trees (Mariposa), 150, 156-161.
Birch, 134.
Blackberries--prices and profits, 214.
Bliss, W. W., 217.
Bohemia Töplitz waters, 163.
Bonine, E. A., 215.
Boston, Massachusetts, Temperature of, 207.
Bozenta (Count), 134.
Brandy, 136.
Breezes, 70, 123, 184, 203. (See Winds.)
Bright Angel Amphitheatre, 195.
Buenaventura, 138.
Bullis, O., 215
Burbank, 214.
Cactus, 69, 165.
Cadiz, Spain. Temperature of, 207.
Cahuenga Valley, 216.
Cairo, Egypt, Temperature of, 207.
Capri, 30, 80.
Carlisle school, 168.
Carlsbad, 163.
Carrot (wild), 206.
Caruthers, W., 213.
Cataract Cañon, 182.
Cedars, 185, 186.
Cereals, 12. (See Grains.)
Chalcedony Park, 183.
Chamber of Commerce, Los Angeles, 211.
---- ---- San Diego, 143.
Chaparral, 81, 202, 205, 206.
Charleston, South Carolina, Temperature of, 210, 211.
Chautauqua, The, 76.
Chemisal, 202.
Cherries, 43.
Chief Signal Officer, U. S. A., Report of, 210.
China trade, 142.
Chorizanthe, 206.
Chula Vista, 144.
Clearwater, 216.
Climate, 4-6, 9, 29, 43, 45, 48, 130, 140, 142, 146.
---- adapted to health, 29, 37, 38, 45, 46.
---- adapted to recreation, 70.
---- compared to European, 5;
to Italian, 18;
to Mediterranean, 18;
to Tangierian, 46.
---- discussed and described, 10, 38, 44, 45.
---- affected by ocean and deserts, 4, 8, 29, 45.
---- effect on character, 88.
---- effect on disease, 50.
---- effect on fruits, 10.
---- effect on horses, 55.
---- effect on longevity, 56, 59, 62.
---- effect on seasons, 10, 43, 65, 66.
---- Hufeland on, 52.
---- insular, 76.
---- in various altitudes, 46.
---- Johnson (Dr.) on, 201.
---- of Coronado Beach, 47, 81, 87.
---- of New Mexico, 164.
---- of Pasadena, 130.
---- of San Diego, 49.
---- of winter, 43, 48.
---- Van Dyke on, 6, 78.
Climatic regions, 4.
Clover, 204.
Cogswell, P. F., 216.
Colorado desert, 2-5, 6, 33, 34, 46.
---- Grand Cañon, 149. (See Grand Cañon.)
---- Plateau, 182.
---- ---- description of, 177.
---- River, 8, 197, 199.
---- ---- course described, 177.
Columbine, 206.
Como, 1.
Compton, 215.
Concord coach, 184.
Cooper, Ellwood, 125.
Corfu, Temperature of, 208.
Corn, 9, 12, 14, 25, 98.
Coronado Beach, 29, 33, 47, 87, 202.
---- ---- climate, 47, 81, 87.
---- ---- Description of, 80-87.
---- Islands, 30.
---- Vasques de, 32, 165.
Covina, 214, 216.
Cremation among Indians, 60.
Crossthwaite, Philip, Longevity of, 61.
Crowfoot, 204.
Crucifers, 204.
Cucumbers, 205.
Cuyamaca (mountain) 6, 18, 33, 37.
----(reservoir), 144.
Cypress (Monterey), 49, 82, 130.
---- Point (tree), 161.
---- ---- description of, 162.
Cypriote ware, 169.
Cyprus, 82, 134.
Daisy, 206.
Dandelion, 205.
Date (palms), 19, 42, 49, 85, 134.
Denver, Colorado, Temperature of, 207, 210, 211.
Deserts, 2-7, 84, 79.
---- affecting climate, 4, 8, 29, 45.
---- describing beauty of, 175.
Dewey, Ernest, 211, 213.
Dew-falls, 123.
Dillon, Kennealy & McClure, 214.
District of the Grand Cañon--area described, 177.
Downey, 211-214, 216, 217.
---- City, 211.
Duarte, 217.
Dutton, Captain C. E., 181, 194, 198.
Earle, W. G., 213.
Earle, W. Y., 214, 215.
East San Gabriel Hotel, 127.
Eaton Cañon, 130.
Egypt, 178.
El Cajon, 37, 56, 79, 111, 144.
El Capitan, 154.
Eldridge, C. P., 216.
Elm, 134.
El Monte, 216.
English Walnut, 18, 19, 34, 48, 101, 129, 134.
Escondido, 140, 141.
Eswena, 213.
Eucalyptus, 23, 48, 112, 123, 134.
Eye, S. H., 214.
Fan-palm, 49, 134.
Fern (Australian), 123, 205.
Fig, 18, 19, 34, 101, 141, 144, 147.
---- cultivation discussed, 34.
---- prices and profits, 215-217.
Flagstaff, 182, 183, 199.
Fleming, J. P., 215.
Florence Hotel, 80.
Florence, Italy, Temperature of, 207.
Flory, J. S., 212.
Fogs, 4, 8, 38, 47, 123.
Fort Yuma, California, Temperature of, 207.
Fosdick, H. O., 213.
Foxtail, 206.
Franciscan Fathers, 42.
Franciscan missions, 24.
Fresno, 115, 128.
Frosts, 10, 19, 123.
Fruits, 9, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 37, 43, 46, 47, 96, 141, 144, 198.
Fruits compared to European, 18.
---- cultivation and speculation discussed, 20, 93, 107, 140.
---- great region for, 97.
---- grouped, 18, 19, 92, 94-96, 101, 115, 127, 211-217.
---- lands adapted to, 37, 46, 96.
---- orchards, 67, 165.
---- rapid growth of, 115.
---- Riverside method for, 104.
---- winter, 48.
Fumigation, Cost of, 124, 129.
Funchal, Madeira, Temperature of, 207.
Gardens, 46, 67, 147, 165.
Geraniums, 49.
Glendora, 212.
Golden Gate, 42.
Gooseberry, 205.
Government land, 93.
Grain, 12, 14, 15, 19, 23, 25, 140.
Grand Cañon, 149, 178, 181.
---- ---- area of district of, 177.
---- ---- description of, 181, 182, 190-200.
---- ---- journey to the, 182-190.
Grapes, 15, 18, 19, 92, 93, 98, 101.
---- diseases of, 128.
---- Old Mission, 128.
---- prices and profits of, 96.
---- raisin. (See Raisins.)
Grape-vines, 79, 91, 123.
---- ---- on small farms, 107.
---- ---- prices and profits of, 96.
---- ---- Santa Anita, 127.
Grayback (mountain), 34, 46.
Great Wash fault, 178, 182.
_Grevillea robusta_, 123.
Guava, 19, 134.
Gums, 138.
Hance (guide), 198, 199.
Harvard Observatory, 130.
Hawaii Islands, 5.
Hayden, Nathaniel, 213, 215.
Helianthus, 206.
Heliotrope, 10, 41, 49.
Hesperia, 96.
Hindoo Amphitheatre, 195.
Holbrook, 183.
Honey--prices and profits of, 217.
Honeysuckle, 205.
Hood, H., 211, 213, 216.
Horses, 55, 70.
Hotel del Coronado, 29, 87.
---- del Monte Park, 161.
---- Raymond, 79, 130, 133.
Hot Springs (Las Vegas), 163, 164.
Houser, J. O., 214.
Houses, Suggestions on, 68.
Howe Bros., 212.
Hubbard, E. A., 212.
Hufeland, on climate and health, 52.
Humidity, 38, 43.
Huntington, Dr., 50.
Hurricane Ledge or Fault, 182.
_Icerya purchasi_, 129.
Indiana settlement, 94.
Indians, 55, 187, 188
---- affected by climate, 55.
---- converted by missionaries, 24.
---- longevity of, 59.
---- Mojave, 2, 169.
---- Navajos, 170, 183.
---- Oualapai, 188.
---- Pueblo, 165.
---- ---- at Acamo, 165.
---- ---- at Isleta, 165.
---- ---- at Laguna, 165-173.
Ingo County, 34.
Inspiration Point, 150, 154.
Iris, 204.
Irrigation, 97, 117, 147, 165.
---- at Pasadena, 130.
---- at Pomona, 15, 94, 124, 211, 215.
---- at Redlands, 102, 104, 118.
---- at San Diego, 144.
---- at Santa Ana, 134.
---- by companies, 94.
---- by natural means, 11, 14, 37.
---- cost of, 98.
---- for apricots, berries, grapes, onions, oranges, peaches,
potatoes, prunes, vegetables, 211-217.
---- for orchards, 120.
---- for wheat, 100.
---- in relation to fruits and crops, 19, 99, 100, 101.
---- necessity of, 15, 19, 88.
---- results of, discussed, 12, 14, 15.
---- Riverside method of, 102, 104.
---- three methods of, 102.
---- Van Dyke on, 102, 103.
Isbell, J. H., 213.
Ischia, 30.
Isleta, 165.
Isthmus route, 142.
Italy, 1, 2, 4, 18, 68, 69, 75, 87. (See Our Italy.)
Ives, Lieutenant, 181.
Jacksonville, Florida, Temperature of, 207, 210, 211.
Japanese persimmon, 134.
Japan trade, 142.
Jarchom, Joachim F., 213.
Johnson, Dr. H. A., on climate, 201.
Johnson, P. O., 212.
Josephites, 117.
Julian (rainfall), 48.
Kaibab Plateau, 178, 181, 182.
Kanab Cañon, 178, 182.
Kanab Plateau, 178, 181, 182.
Kelp, 38, 161.
Kentucky racers, 55.
Kern County, 16, 94, 114.
Kimball, F. A., 125.
King River, 114.
Labor, "boom" prices of, 109.
---- necessity of, 108.
Ladies' Annex, 143.
Laguna--climate of, 174.
---- description of, 165-168.
---- Indians at, 165-173.
Lamanda Park, 215.
Land, 12, 14, 23, 147.
---- adapted to apricots, berries, grapes, onions, oranges,
peaches, potatoes, prunes, vegetables, 211-217.
---- adapted to fruits, 97, 141.
---- arable, 93, 140, 142, 145.
---- capabilities of, 17, 91-95, 114.
---- converted from deserts, 94.
---- crops adapted to, 108.
---- elements constituting value of, 95.
---- experiments of settlers on, 111.
---- for farms and gardens, 107.
---- Government, 93.
---- of the Sun, 147, 202.
---- profits and prices of, 20, 23, 95-98, 117.
---- raisin, 114.
---- speculations in, 24, 107, 143.
La Playa, 33.
Larkspur, 205, 206.
Las Flores, 140.
Lassene, Eugene, 216.
Las Vegas Hot Springs, 163, 164.
Lauber, Charles, 216.
Lee's Ferry, 199.
Lemons, 1, 18, 19, 79, 93, 107, 129, 137, 144.
Leslie, T. D., 214.
Lightfoot, George, 213, 214.
Lilac, 205.
Lilies, 204, 206.
Limes, 18.
Lisbon, Portugal, Temperature of, 207.
Little Colorado River, 177, 181, 182.
Little Tejunga River, 212.
Live-oaks, 49, 69, 72, 79, 127, 134, 140, 161.
Locust, 134.
Lombardy, 1.
Loney, James, 213.
Longevity at El Cajon, 56.
---- at San Diego, 59, 60.
---- climatic influence on, 56, 59, 62.
---- Dr. Bancroft on, 56.
---- Dr. Palmer on, 59, 60.
---- Dr. Remondino on, 52.
---- Dr. Winder on, 56.
---- Father Ubach on, 59, 62.
---- Hufeland on, 52.
Longevity, Philip Crossthwaite, Story of, 61.
Loquats, 21.
---- prices and profits of, 215.
Lord, I. W., 213.
Lordsburg, 212.
Los Angeles, 12, 15, 16, 26, 46, 71, 76, 79, 94, 95, 97, 124, 128, 129,
133-135.
---- ---- assessment roll and birth rate of, 136.
---- ---- climate of, 12, 15, 26, 76, 79, 95, 124, 129, 133.
---- ---- County, 211.
---- ---- description of, 135, 136.
---- ---- report of Chamber of Commerce of, 207, 211.
---- ---- River, 11, 99.
---- ---- temperature of, 44, 207, 210, 211.
---- ---- wines, 136.
Los Coronados, 2.
Lupins, 205.
Maggiore, 1.
Magnolia, 41, 48, 123.
Maguey, 69.
Malta, Temperature of, 207.
Manitoba, 5.
Manzanita, 205.
Maple, 134.
Marble Cañon, 177.
Marguerites, 82.
Marienbad, 163.
Marigold, 205.
Mariposa (big trees), 150, 156-161.
Martinique, 48.
Mediterranean--climate of the, 37, 46, 80.
---- fruits and products of the, 18.
---- Our, 18, 46.
Mentone, 6.
---- temperature of, 207, 208.
Merced River, 150, 155.
Meserve plantation, 124.
Metcalf, M., 216.
Methusaleh of trees, 158.
Mexican Gulf, 18.
---- ranch house, 67.
Mexico, 2, 11, 30, 33, 40, 47.
---- small-pox from, 64.
Miller, Jacob, 216.
Mimulus, 205.
Minerals, 142.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, Temperature of, 207.
Mint, 205, 206.
Mirror Lake, 154.
Mission Cañon, 75.
---- of San Diego, 60.
---- of San Tomas, 60.
Mississippi Valley, 38.
Modjeska, Madame, 134.
Moisture in relation to health, 201.
Mojave Desert, 2, 7.
---- Indians, 7, 169.
Montecito (Santa Barbara), 123.
Monterey, 42, 47, 49, 72, 149.
---- cypress, 82, 130.
---- description of, 161, 162.
Monte Vista, 214.
Montezuma, 164.
---- Hotel, 163.
Monticello, 75.
Mormons, 117.
Morning-glory, 205.
Moulton, M. B., 213.
Mount Whitney, 34.
---- Wilson, 130.
Murillo--pictures by, 26.
Mustard stalks, 202.
Mütterlager, 163.
Naples, 34.
Nassau, Bahama Islands, Temperature of, 207.
National City, 33, 79, 125, 144.
---- Soldiers' Home, 76.
Navajo Indians, 170, 183.
---- Mountains, 196.
Naylor, E. P., 212.
Neah Bay, 47, 76.
Nebraska, 175.
Nectarines, 19, 92.
---- prices and profits of, 215.
Nevadas, 34, 150.
New Mexico, 79, 164, 173.
---- ---- climate of, 164.
---- ---- desert of, 149.
---- ---- scenery of, 163-165.
New Orleans, Louisiana, Temperature of, 207, 210, 211.
Newport, Rhode Island, Temperature of, 210, 211.
New York, N. Y., Temperature of, 207, 210, 211.
Niagara Falls, 153, 197.
Nice, 207.
Nightshade, 206.
Norris, Benjamin, 214.
Northern Africa, 69.
---- Arizona, 177.
---- Pomona, 212.
Nuts, 18, 138.
Oats, 206.
O'Connor, P., 211, 214.
Old Baldy Mountain, 4.
Olives, 1, 18, 19, 24, 37, 115, 129, 134, 147, 162.
---- at Pomona, 125.
---- at Santa Barbara, 37.
---- Cooper on, 125.
---- cultivation of, discussed, 19, 37, 125.
---- future of, 125, 126.
---- Mission, 125, 126.
---- prices and profits of, 126.
Onions--prices and profits of, 216.
Ontario, 15, 124.
Orange City, 46.
---- ---- description of, 134.
---- County, 16, 46, 79, 111, 134.
Oranges, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 66, 79, 93, 101, 107,
108, 115, 123, 129, 138, 144.
---- as resource, 91.
---- at Redlands, 119.
---- cost of land for, 97.
---- diseases and care of, 101, 129, 137.
---- groves, 20, 118, 123, 127.
---- irrigation for, 213.
---- prices and profits of, 97, 107, 119, 120, 124, 213, 215.
---- Riverside as centre, 119.
---- varieties of, 120, 123.
Orchards, 20, 24, 41, 144, 147.
Orchids, 205.
Orthocarpus, 204.
Otay, 145.
Ottoman Amphitheatre, 195.
Oualapai Indians, 188.
Our Italy, Description of, 18.
Pacific, 2-5, 8, 16, 29, 58, 75, 142, 165, 198.
---- trade, 142.
Painted Desert, 185, 186.
Palmer, Dr. Edward, 59, 60.
Palms, 41, 42, 67, 69, 85, 123, 130, 134.
---- date, 42, 49, 69, 85.
---- fan, 49.
---- royal, 55, 85.
Paria Plateau, 178.
Pasadena, 15, 67, 94, 95, 124, 130.
---- Board of Trade, 207.
---- climate, 130.
---- description of, 130-134.
---- temperature of, 133, 207.
---- trees of, 134.
Passion-vine, 49.
Pau, France, Temperature of, 207.
Peach, 92, 101, 182, 211.
---- prices and profits of, 211, 212, 215.
Peachblow Mountain, 185.
Pea-nuts--prices and profits of, 216.
Pears--prices and profits of, 215.
Pensacola, Florida, Temperature of, 210, 211.
Penstemon, 205.
Pepper, 48, 67, 123, 134.
---- prices and profits of, 216.
Peruvians, 169.
Pineapple, 19.
Pines, 42, 72, 134, 185, 188-190.
---- spruce, 182.
---- sugar, 42, 150, 157.
Pink Cliffs, 178.
Plums, 92.
---- prices and profits of, 215.
Point Arguilles, 1.
---- Conception, 2-4, 47, 72, 137.
Point Loma, 8, 30, 33, 81.
---- Sublime, 181, 198.
---- Vincent, 76.
Pomegranate, 19, 134.
Pomona, 15, 94, 95, 124, 211-215.
---- description of, 124.
---- irrigation at, 15, 94, 95, 124, 211-215.
---- land at, 94.
---- olives at, 125.
---- temperature of, 7, 44.
Poplar, 134.
Poppy, 204-206.
Portuguese hamlet, 33.
Potatoes, 14.
---- prices and profits of, 215.
Powell, Major J. W., 181.
Profitable products discussed, 19.
Prometheus Unbound, 178.
Prunes, 18, 93, 96, 115.
---- prices and profits of, 212, 213, 215.
Pueblo Indians, 165-183.
Puenta, 124.
Puget Sound, 47.
Pumpkins--prices and profits of, 216.
Quail, 8, 140.
Rabbits, 140.
Rain, 12, 38, 47, 48, 49, 123, 138, 202, 203, 206.
---- at Julian, Los Angeles, Monterey, Neah Bay, Point Conception, Riverside,
Santa Cruz, San Diego, San Jacinto, 47, 202.
---- in relation to health, 202.
---- on deserts described, 187.
---- season for, 47.
Rainbow Fall, 154.
Raisin grape, 144.
Raisins, 18, 19, 93, 108, 136.
---- at Los Angeles, 136.
---- at Redlands, 119.
---- curing, 107.
---- Malaga, 37.
---- prices and profits of, 96, 114, 115.
Ranchito, 212.
Raspberries--prices and profits of, 214.
Raymond Hotel, 133, 149.
Red Horse Well, 186, 187.
Redlands, 15, 95-97, 124.
---- centre for oranges, 119.
---- description of, 118, 121-123.
---- history of growth of, 118.
---- irrigation of, 102-104, 118.
---- resources of, 120.
---- return on fruits, 97, 98, 124.
Redondo, 3.
---- Beach, 12.
---- description of, 76.
Red Wall limestone, 195.
Redwood, 134.
Remondino, Dr., 40, 52, 56, 59, 60.
Remondino, Dr., on health, 62.
---- on horses, 55, 61.
---- on longevity, 40, 61.
Rhorer, George, 212.
Rio Grande del Norte, 165.
Rio Puerco, 165.
Rivera, 213, 215.
Riverside, 15, 95, 124.
---- centre of orange growth, 119.
---- description of, 123-127.
---- growth in resources, 120.
---- irrigation at, 102-104.
---- price of land, 95-98.
---- return on fruits, 97, 98, 124.
Riviera, Italy, Temperature of, 7, 45, 208.
Roberts, Oliver E., 216.
Rock-rose, 204.
Rome, Italy, Temperature of, 207.
Roscoe Station, 214.
Rose, H. H., 211.
Roses, 41, 49, 66, 138, 206.
Royal palms, 85.
Sacramento, California, Temperature of, 207.
Sages, 202, 205.
Sahara, 6.
San Antonio, Texas, Temperature of, 207.
San Bernardino, 4, 15-17, 33, 34, 118.
---- ---- description of, 116, 117.
---- ---- land, prices of, 96, 117.
---- ---- Mountain, 4, 7.
---- ---- River, 11.
---- ---- temperature at, 6, 33, 44, 46, 210, 211.
San Diego, 2, 9, 15, 24, 26, 34, 42, 43, 47, 62, 72, 79, 80, 94.
---- ---- as a health resort, 50.
---- ---- Chamber of Commerce, 143.
---- ---- climate of, 49, 50.
---- ---- commercial possibilities of, 142.
---- ---- converted lands, 94.
---- ---- description of, 29-34, 79-81, 142-145.
---- ---- fruits, 37, 97.
---- ---- Land and Farm Company, 208.
---- ---- longevity at, 60.
---- ---- markets, 43.
---- ---- mission, 24, 60.
---- ---- rainfall at, 47, 202.
---- ---- recreations at, 41, 71.
---- ---- temperature of, 30, 44, 49, 50, 207, 210, 211.
---- ---- Bay, 2, 3.
---- ---- County, 4, 6, 16, 34.
---- ---- ---- description of, 140-145.
---- ---- River, 4, 6, 11, 16, 34.
San Francisco, 2, 42, 142.
---- ---- Mountain, 182, 185, 194, 200.
---- ---- River, 185.
---- ---- temperature at, 210, 211.
San Gabriel, 4, 15, 26, 72, 94, 213.
San Gabriel, description of, 124-128.
---- ---- mission, 26.
---- ---- Mountain, 4, 5.
---- ---- River, 11.
---- ---- Valley, 72, 94.
San Jacinto Range, 4, 17, 33, 46, 118.
---- ---- rain at, 48.
San Joaquin, 7, 37, 114.
San Juan, 177.
---- ---- Capristrano, 79.
---- ---- San José, 124.
San Luis Obispo, 16.
---- ---- River, 11.
San Mateo Cañon, 118.
San Miguel, 33.
San Nicolas, 2.
San Pedro, 3, 135.
San Remo, Temperature of, 208.
Santa Ana, 2, 13, 72, 94, 99, 118.
---- ---- description of, 124.
---- ---- Mountain, 134.
---- ---- River, 11, 79, 134.
---- ---- Township, 15, 127, 211.
---- ---- Valley, 2, 72, 213.
Santa Barbara, 2, 3, 9, 37, 67.
---- ---- at Montecito, 123.
---- ---- Channel, 2, 3.
---- ---- County, 16.
---- ---- description of, 72, 137, 138.
---- ---- fruits, 37, 129.
---- ---- Island, 2, 3.
---- ---- Mountain, 17.
---- ---- olives, 37, 125.
---- ---- temperature of, 29, 44, 207.
Santa Catalina, 2, 134.
Santa Clara, 43, 138.
---- ---- River, 11.
Santa Clemente, 2.
Santa Cruz, 2, 47, 157.
---- ---- Canaries, Temperature of, 207.
Santa Fé line, 117, 119, 163, 165, 182.
---- ---- New Mexico, Temperature of, 207.
Santa Margarita River, 11.
Santa Miguel, 2.
Santa Monica, 3.
---- ---- description of, 76.
---- ---- irrigation at, 134.
Santa Rosa, 2, 140.
Santa Ynes, 4, 72.
Santiago, 46.
---- ---- Cañon, 134.
San Tomas mission, 60.
Savannah, 216.
Sea-lions, 30, 161.
Seasons, 6, 10, 37, 38, 43, 65, 66, 81.
---- description of the, 65, 66.
---- Van Dyke on the, 202-206.
_Sequoia semper virens_, 157.
_Sequoias gigantea_, 157, 158.
Serra, Father Junipero, 24.
Serrano, Don Antonio, 61, 62.
Sheavwitz Plateau, 178.
Sheep, 12, 206.
Shiva's Temple, 195.
Shooting-star, 203.
Sicily, 18, 69.
Sierra Madre, 4, 15, 37, 42, 46, 71, 94, 114, 118.
---- ---- Villa, 130.
Sierra Nevada, 2, 3.
Sierras, 153, 161.
Signal Service Observer, 207.
Silene, 204.
Smith, F. D., 212-215.
---- F. M., 212.
---- T. D., 214.
Smithsonian Institution, 59.
Snap-dragon, 205.
Sorrel, 204.
Sorrento, 132.
Southern California, 2-4, 16.
---- ---- climate of, 29, 38, 45, 55, 56, 59, 62, 130.
---- ---- commerce of, 18.
---- ---- compared to Italy, 46.
---- ---- counties of, 16.
---- ---- history of, 24, 25.
---- ---- "Our Italy," 18, 46.
---- ---- pride of nations, the, 26.
---- ---- rainy seasons in. (See Rain.)
---- ---- rapid growth of fruits in, 115.
---- ---- recreations of, 69-71.
---- ---- temperature of, 43, 133. (See Temperature.)
---- Italy, 69, 147.
---- Pacific Railroad, 149.
---- Utah, 177.
South Pasadena, 213, 214.
---- Riverside, 217.
Spain, 149.
Spalding, W. A., 212, 215.
Spanish adventurers, 24, 30.
Spruce-pine, 182.
St. Augustine, Florida, Temperature of, 207.
St. Michael, Azores, Temperature of, 207.
St. Paul, Minnesota, Temperature of, 207.
State Commission, 156.
Stewart, James, 217.
Stone, 142.
Strawberries, 10.
---- prices and profits of, 214.
Stub, C. C., 216.
Sugar-pine, 150, 157.
Sumach, 205.
Sunset Mountain, 185.
Sweetbrier, 206.
Sweetwater Dam, 144.
Switzerland, 149.
Sycamore, 79, 134.
Table Mountain, 33.
Tangier, 45.
Temperature, 4, 5, 29, 37, 38.
Temperature compared to European, 45.
---- discussed, 43, 45.
---- of Coronado Beach, 87.
---- of Los Angeles, 44, 207, 210, 211.
---- of Monterey, 72.
---- of Pasadena, 13, 207.
---- of Pomona, 44.
---- of San Bernardino, 6, 33, 44, 46, 210, 211.
---- of San Diego, 30, 44, 49, 50, 210, 211.
---- of Santa Barbara, 29, 44, 207.
---- relation of, to health, 201.
---- statistics, 44, 45, 72.
---- statistics compared, 207, 208, 210, 211.
---- Van Dyke on, 50.
Temecula Cañon, 140.
Temescal Cañon, 217.
The Rockies, 10.
Thistle, 205.
Thompson, E. R., 211.
Tia Juana River, 11, 30, 145.
Tiger-lily, 206.
Tin, 217.
Tomatoes--prices and profits of, 216.
Töplitz waters, 163.
Toroweap Valley, 182.
Trees, 48, 69, 130, 134, 138, 147, 156, 198.
---- description of, 150, 156-161.
---- region of Mariposa big, 156.
Tulip, 204.
Tustin City, 134.
Ubach, Father A. D., 59, 60, 62.
Uinkaret Plateau, 178.
Umbrella-tree, 69, 184.
University Heights, 80, 81.
Utah, 177, 178, 199.
Vail, Hugh D., 209.
Van Dyke, Theodore S., 4, 140, 202.
---- on climate, 6, 78.
---- on floral procession and seasons, 202-206.
---- on growth in population, 145.
---- on irrigation, 102, 103.
---- on temperature, 50.
Van Dyke, Theodore S., on winds, 8, 203.
Vedolia cardinalis (Australian lady-bug), 129.
Vegetables, 112, 216.
Ventura, 16, 137.
Vermilion Cliffs, 178.
Vernon, 213, 215.
---- Jacob, 216.
Vesuvius, 33.
Vetch, 203.
Vines, 20, 23-25, 67, 79, 91, 107, 123, 128, 144, 147.
Violets, 203.
Visalia, California, Temperature of, 207.
Vishnu's Temple, 196.
Vulcan's Throne, 196.
Wages, "Boom," 109.
Walnut Creek Cañon, 183.
Walnuts, 14, 19, 115.
---- prices and profits of, 215.
Water, 186.
---- how measured, 98.
---- price of, 97, 98.
Watermelons--prices and profits of, 216.
Wawona, 150.
Wells, 186.
Wheat, 2, 5, 14, 25, 138.
---- affected by irrigation, 100.
White Cliffs, 178.
Wild Oats, 202.
Williams, 182.
Willow, 134.
Winder, Dr. W. A., on longevity, 56.
Winds, 4, 6, 8, 29, 30, 38, 47, 70, 78, 123, 184, 203.
---- relation of, to health, 201.
---- Van Dyke on, 8, 203.
Wine, 20, 92, 93, 107, 136, 137.
Winkler, Mrs., 215.
Wood, P. K., 216.
Yosemite, 150, 153, 154, 161, 197.
---- description of, 149-156.
Yucca, 205.
Zuñis, 165.
THE END.
BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
As We Were Saying.
With Portrait, and Illustrated by H. W. MACVICKAR and others.
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