The California Ranch

THERE is a story related of one of those nomads of the far West whom Blumenbach might classify as belonging to the genus emigrantes, species remigrantes, who was met returning from California with his family and all his worldly possessions in an ox-wagon.

“ Why are you leaving California? ” he was asked.

“I’ll never live in a country,” said he, “ whar straw is called hay, and men do the cookin’.”

This remark illustrates two of the points wherein the Eastern farmer will find his ideas upset on becoming a California ranchman. What a curious farm-world it is! More than three hundred clear working days in a year, with all the rainy weather collected in one balmy and liquid season, and all the long, cloudless days in another. Never a white dart of lightning, never a blare of the great trumpets of the thunder through all the monotonous year, so that the spirit of man wearies of this strange, eternal silence, and longs for only one thunder-storm of his native East, with all its soul - stirring pomp, until, some sullen, murky day of this treacherous stillness, the Sierra itself cracks, and the lightnings leap out of the summit instead of falling down upon it! For five, six, seven weary months the sun comes up with a pale orange, burns all day across an unwinking and pitiless heaven, and goes down as he came up. If there were so much as one little capful of fog, one square foot of green grass! The whole face of the earth is seamed with cracks; the coarse grass-stems crumble even to dust beneath one’s tread; there is no sod; at least a half-dozen species of small burrs spread everywhere, and woe betide the lounger who reclines on his back beneath a tree! for he will acquire a thousand burrs, and the ants will insinuate themselves into every crevice of his garments. A thin film of almost impalpable dust gilds everything, and rises like a magic exhalation when touched. But the halo of the earth amid the violet hills — that certain something of desert lands which Solomon, after mentioning all the sources of light, calls “ the light,” — atones for all. There is a subdued warmth and softness in the earth’s reflection— for the sun itself is phenomenally white and pitiless — which breathes through the soul of man a languor and a great content. The old Californian feels this delicious quality, even if unable to analyze it, and it holds him like the charms of a mistress. How he sighs for it beneath your cold, sour sky! The dryest day of your Eastern heavens has a washed and wet - blue color which is chilling even to remember ; but here the sky is ever pale and warm. The singular purity of the atmosphere causes the new-comer to have a strange feeling as of nakedness, and in late autumn Nature certainly seems to be en deshabillü.

These huge and treeless hills of the Coast Mountains, seen far off, seem clad in deerskin, smooth and soft as velvet; or a rich, cold brown; or, when they stand beneath the sun, they take on a damson-purple, all frosted with a soft and sunny flush of haze. Look over, now, across yon distant slope, where each humble house or splendid villa seems to sleep as light as a thought, on its broad, tawny - velvet floor, as if scarcely touching. Often as one may execrate these California autumn landscapes, one cannot elude their secret power. There is that strange desert glory, that wild and wizard transparency, breath, halo, which has for me an inexpressible fascination. Nowhere else on earth, and I have been a wanderer in many lands, have I seen the light of the sun rest on this beautiful world so tenderly as it streams down through this white-lilac autumn haze of California; such a light alone as could have inspired the passionate laments which Euripides puts into the mouths of Alcestis and Iphigenia as they close their dying eyes. Hard was it for the ancient Greek to leave his beloved light; and to go down from this witching breath of California into the grim, black grave — that were the saddest death which earth could give!

Then comes, from Christmas to the end of May, the revival of earth, the one long-drawn spring, with its “ vivid, incessant green.” Here autumn and winter are omitted from the roll of the seasons. Grass and grain are up by Thanksgiving, and grow slowly until the robins come out of the mountains; then, like magic. Plowing goes on all winter, except in an excess of rain. The overland cars, after climbing the lofty Sierra, descend into Sacramento with their backs covered with snow, like an apparition from another planet; and the California boys stare at it.

Of pointing out many contrasts there is no end. In summer the earth bakes so hard that plowing is impossible (I have seen ten horses hitched to a farm-plow in July); in winter a horse will bog down in almost any ravine in the forest.

Rain comes from the south, and simooms from the north, sometimes even burning off a small circle of bark from young fruit trees, close to the ground. Robins winter in the mountains, and appear in the valleys in spring. Many birds which migrate in the Atlantic States here remain throughout the year. Away in the dryest of the dry October days, in the wooded coast valleys, early in the morning I have heard a most sweet jangle of many tunes — the lark, the magpie, the California quail, the red-winged blackbird, the oriole, the bluebird, the paysano, and the grossbeak, if not others : such a concert as is possible in the East only in spring. California has the reputation of producing songless birds, an erroneous impression which arose from the fact that the journeys of most early pioneers lay across the naked and arid central plains, where no birds lived. Cronise, in The Natural Wealth of California, asserts that her flowers are notably scentless; but they are certainly gorgeous, to suit that “ tropical Spanish taste” of which she is accused by her poets, and the copses of the Coast Range are remarkably aromatic. Mint, rosemary, sweet-scented shrub, honeysuckle, sage, fennel, — all these in several varieties you may find in the space of a single square rod, in Los Angeles County.

The average ranchman plants no Indian corn, no vegetables. In the East the country supplies the town; here the town supplies the country. The town is furnished by San Francisco, the latter by the vegetable-growing counties of the bay and coast. In one way or another Indian corn gives the Eastern farmer employment three hundred and sixtyfive days in a year; but the wheat ranchman does no work of any consequence save twice a year, in harvest and seedtime. The all-year-round Ohio corn is a nourisher of industry and virtue; the wheat of California greatly promotes idleness, gambling, and horse-racing between seasons. There is a traditional and timehonored interval of a few days between corn planting and the first plowing in Ohio, when “ all hands go a-fishing,” the one, solitary play-day of the year; but the rancher works with amazing energy in the two busy seasons, then takes many a play-day, idling away his time in the village.

The California boys have no corn to plow and hoe and cut and husk and crib and shell, for months; no garden to hoe after school; no hopeful, spotted steers to break; perhaps no chickens to feed; no old cow to milk; no briers and bushes to mow out of the fence-corners. There is very little firewood to be cut. Whatever is burned is generally picked up dry beneath the trees, or if that supply is exhausted, a superfluous limb or two is lopped from an oak, after the excellent economical fashion of the old padres. (To their credit be it recorded, the Californians do not slash down their all too sparse valley forests, but the wheat flourishes amid the whiteoak parks.) Under these conditions the boys gravitate to mischief and a shotgun, as the sparks fly upward. A pair of huge Mexican bell-spurs and a buckskin bronco are the least objectionable forms in which this disease of juvenile idleness breaks out. The boy rides to school on a vicious beast, by an exceedingly devious and uncertain route, and hitches him to a tree, where he meditates the livelong day on the bunchgrass pastures which once he was cognizant of. It is a pity to see these fine lads going in troops to the bad for lack of those old-fashioned, homely, Yankee chores to do. Pity California does not produce more weeds, more hoe-handles, and more birch!

The great majority of farm laborers dwell in the towns, except about four months in the year. In this dry climate wheat, instead of sprouting, lies sacked in the field for months, and is transported to market on open platform cars. It is so flinty that the millers have to moisten it at the rate of twelve or fifteen pounds of water to a hundred pounds of wheat, before it can be ground. Instead of shrinking, as in the East, it gains, the increase in bulk going far toward paying the transportation to Liverpool. Wood is so hard and knaggy that it often has to be burst asunder with powder before it can be converted into firewood. That grubbing which the Eastern farmer so dreads is often performed here, during the softest winter weather, with a long rope and a yoke of oxen.

All through the State, until you penetrate to the remote and lonely cattle-ranches and the habitations of the Pikes, there is a suggestion of city life, of city atmosphere, about a California ranch, which renders it thoroughly unlike an Eastern farm. There is little rusticity in the dress, for the rurals are so often in the village that they keep abreast of the fashions. I do not remember ever to have seen a patched garment on a farmer, and the “old clo’ ” man is only found occasionally in the vicinity of the largest cities. Daily or semi-weekly the butcher wagon, the fruit and wine wagon, and the vegetable wagon make their appearance, far out from the village; and they will execute small commissions on the grocery ten miles distant. Daily papers from San Francisco travel hundreds of miles by

rail, then are carried twelve or fifteen farther by the rancher, arriving out forty-eight hours old. Four hundred miles from the metropolis I have stopped the mail-carrier, riding on a mule in a bridlepath, and bought the daily journals. On that same bridle-path you shall see scores of letter-boxes nailed to trees, though the ranchers’ houses are not in sight. The young men drive spanking teams to spick-and-span new sulkies or buggies, with elegant cashmere or wolfskin afghans. Their talk is the talk of the town: it has gold in it, and stocks, and horse-races. A ranch has two or three great, high-seated California wagons, with a splendid four-in-hand to each; the corral (speak, correl) is so full of trig and painted gimeracks that it looks like a magazine of agricultural machinery. There are few cozy, comfortable, middle-class homes. The house is either a magnificent country residence, or a mean, unpainted redwood shanty, though either may be occupied by a man immensely wealthy. Everything seems put there, adventitious; nothing grew out of the soil. There are no ancient trees, no shrubberies, no grass. Instead of homely farmer-messes, you eat urban fare of beefsteak and hot biscuit made with Boston yeast-powder. You hope for pumpkin pie, and get a can of Baltimore oysters. There are Oregon apples, Cincinnati hams, and stewed prunes from Germany. A man may be worth one hundred thousand dollars and have no milk to whiten his colfee. The cow runs on the range and comes home when she lists. A boy may be dispatched for her on his tough little shaggy cow-horse, and a man must be sent to bring the bov home. The yard-fences all look imported, as they are; all things have a contractor-like look, a little tawdry, a little cheap. Everything is so naked and so new, that no one can hang a tradition on it. There is no moss on the fences; the newly sawed boards and posts and the houses stand out painfully ugly and prominent beneath the lovely sky. Yet you never hear the wind whistle or malignantly yell around them, as in the East in winter; it always gurgles softly around those hideous corners. Fortunate it is so. Nowhere else could the flimsiness and cheapness of our American material civilization stand revealed with more appalling ugliness. It would require the finest and subtlest art to bear the searching test of this pellucid atmosphere. In the East the fog and humidity conceal something; they lend garments of moss; they blind your eyes to deformities. When one goes abroad in California, he shudders and shrugs his shoulders and wishes to draw a mantle around him. Especially does he wish to draw a mantle around those stark and rigid fences and naked houses.

Let us recur to the disgusted Pike’s complaint. It is necessary to admit that nowhere else has the “ tyrant man,” white, black, or yellow, so completely intruded himself into the scullery, so audaciously peeped into the mysteries of the Bona Dea. It is safe to assert that there are few men who have been on the coast long enough to entitle them to admission into the society of California pioneers, who cannot prepare a beefsteak and decoct a cup of Mocha as well as their spouses, if not better. And that is nothing especially creditable to them, for the time once was when to a majority of them cooking was a grim necessity. In the days when the watchers on Telegraph Hill signaled to the incoming steamer, as the first question, “ Have you any women aboard? ” and when reputable merchants of San Francisco robed beardless boys in feminine apparel and placed them behind the counter, as a legitimate means of attracting customers, it was not strange that men acquired the science of Francatelli per force. There were only two alternatives, of which the one was painful to contemplate, while the other was death. And often it was a dilemma of only one horn, for death was in the pot anyhow. Many a hapless ranchman came to an untimely end before the great truth became generally disseminated, that the beans must be boiled two hours before the pork is introduced into the pot. Dried apples have slain their thousands, heavy bread its tens of thousands. While California has probably the healthiest climate in the Union, it supports to-day over twenty mineral spring resorts, some of them with scores of patients apiece. These consist principally of two great classes: the rheumatics, victims of mining; and the dyspeptics, victims of ranch cooking.

Probably the wheat-ranch is the best present representative of the coast. With a crop of this cereal reaching in 1872 the great figure of twenty - nine million bushels, California outranks all other wheat-growing States. It is, fortunately, no longer preeminently the Golden State, but the agricultural as well, or, as Starr King happily described it, “ The beloved Benjamin of American States, whose autumn sack is filled with grain, while the mouth of it contains a cup of gold.” The first thing that impresses one in this department is the multifarious and almost humanly conscious machinery, which gives one man dominion over so many acres, and has elevated California in twelve years from an arid waste to the first wheat-producing State. Down in the San Joaquin Valley there is a ranch so vast that the men start in the morning with their gang-plows, travel on until noon, take dinner at a midway station, then drive on until the going down of the sun, and return the day following. So immensely is one man’s profitable ownership broadened by machines. True, the plowing is only skindeep, and the average yield per acre has already fallen off over five bushels in the State; but who takes thought for the morrow? Then in harvest, the field actually swarms with machinery. As the cumbrous header moves on, with its long guillotine reaching far out into the wheat to be decapitated, a wagon is driven dexterously alongside to receive the heads. Every header thus employs five men, three wagons, and twelve horses. Sometimes three or four headers are going at once, each with its little army, and simultaneously in the middle of the field a steam thresher, with its greater army of men, dark as mulattoes with tan and dust, working with an amazing energy, even running at their several tasks, while the header wagons come and return on a trot. Perhaps a spark from the thresher ignites the standing grain: the farmer leaps on a reaper and whips his horses to a gallop to cut a swath around and arrest the progress of the conflagration. The wind sweeps the billowy flames upon him; he dismounts, slashes off the traces, bestrides a horse, and gallops for life, leaving the reaper to its fate. It might as well be burned as lie outdoors all winter. It makes one’s head dizzy to see how they do things in California in harvest.

The more careful farmer harvests his grain with a reaper, and binds it into sheaves. In the hot and dry interior the straw is too brittle to be bound by day, so you shall sometimes see John Chinaman binding wheat all night long by the light of the moon and the stars, and sleeping by day in a dirty tent or underneath a spreading oak, perfectly secure from rain. The ranchman’s house is generally too small for this sudden host of laborers, quite small enough for himself and his family, and the workmen sleep outdoors, like Boaz, at the end of the heap of corn, wrapped in their gray California blankets.

Usually the grain is sacked and left in the open field for months together, without fear of rain or thieves. By and by it accumulates around the little country depots, corded up in quarter-acres and half-acres. For month after month immense trains of platform-cars are rolling down to the bay with this gorge and plethora of wheat, and frequently the rainy season begins before it is all removed.

As soon as the first rain comes, in October or November, the torch is applied to the straw piles. I have stood in Sacramento in the evening and seen the whole circle of the horizon one red, angry glare of flaming ricks. Wasteful California! For lack of that straw next winter hundreds of cattle may go to the crows. This straw is not fired before a considerable rain has fallen, because sooner there would be a good likelihood of consuming the whole surface of the earth. The one constant, deadly peril of the farmer in summer is fire. He plows fresh strips of earth parallel with the railroad to keep the locomotive from burning up his ranch. Standing near the railroad track after a train passes, you may presently see a hand-car propelled by two burly, red-jowled Irishmen, running in a mad chase after the great thunderer, to discover and extinguish the sparks he may have left in his flight. Nothing is so terrible as the snaky swiftness with which the fire will flash along an old brushwood fence in the mountains. The Indians used to fire the woods on these red, dusty foothills, that they might devour the roasted grasshoppers, and they kept the forests swept clean as a park; but nothing will rally out a neighborhood so quick as a column of smoke, and now there is increase of undergrowth. Those evil and miserable vagabonds who migrate to Oregon one year and return the next frequently fire the ranges from their bivouac fires. Farmers seeing a “ blanket man ” crossing their fields with a lighted cigar follow him until he disappears over the outside fence.

The most common fashion of ranchhouse is the pioneer redwood shanty, which has neither posts, joists, nor braces, neither lath, plaster, nor paper; the merest shell of savory, cedar-smelling boards, with a ceiling of cotton drilling, if any. Unfenced, unshaded, unplaned, unpainted, it looms stark and rigid across the tawny plains, where broods a dead, grim silence, like a desert spectre. Ten thousand acres of splendid, golden wheat may wave around it, but not one tree within eye-shot. A cabin of this description is frequently seen in the San Joaquin Valley, tenanted by two or more bachelors. They rent land at a cash rental of two, three, or even five dollars an acre, go in debt with Californian recklessness, establish a rude cuisine, and sow five hundred, perhaps one thousand acres of wheat. Last year the windows of heaven were opened without stint, and men reaped seven hundred bushels for every man, woman, and child in the county (that has been done); but this year comes a drought, a killing drought, and dries up the bud of all their prospects. Those vast plains, so fertile in themselves, become as naked as the back of a man’s hand. The sheriff attaches everything for the merchants, but they finally relent and restore one horse, whereon our two bachelors, riding and walking by turns, set out for Oregon, execrating California, but as certain to return to it as curses come home to roost. Fortunate they were bachelors, else they would have been too poor to get away, and ever-generous San Francisco would have been obliged to send them provisions and seed for a fresh start. Perhaps they escape from the wreck with a wagon and horses, and turn teamsters until they accumulate enough to repeat the foolhardy venture. Thus they will vibrate to and fro, and five out of a hundred may make a fortune in a single year, while the ninety and five have their noses on the grindstone all the while. There are immense bodies of land owned by San Franciscans which are seldom wrought by other than tenants. They do as above described, perhaps putting one thousand dollars’ worth of improvements on the portion rented by them, then abandon them totally, and they go to the owls and the bats before another tenant comes along. And yet, notwithstanding all this waste and this recklessness, all this miserable shillyshally and vagabondage, the prodigal soil of California, in a good year, pours forth its millions upon millions, until the outgoing wheat-ships whiten the seas.

You see everywhere deserted cabins like that above described. I suppose I have seen one for every five miles I have traveled in the State, though it is often a shell made by a preemption or homestead claimant to hold his claim, and visited by him perhaps once in six months, perhaps never.

A second style of ranch-house is the great, barnlike affair, something in the Southern plantation manner, with outhouses leaning in various directions with entire indifference, and perhaps a few giant cottonwoods about; a broad veranda stretches all across the front, reached by a flight of steps of equal length. The veranda floor and steps are cumbered with saddles, bridles, huge Mexican bellspurs, cougars’ and coyotes’ skins, oxhides, whips, etc. There is no carpet in any room, and the chair-legs are worn off up to the first round. All the doors are open the year long in this delicious climate. In the yard is one of those Connecticut pumps which when sent to far California never yield any water until they are irrigated. There is also one of those Indiana wagons whose tires never stay on in this climate, unless they are watered as often as the horses. California and Texas are the ultimate receptacles of all the wooden nutmegs, sanded sugar, and split-leather boots manufactured in the Union. Eastern-made garments, when purchased in either of those two commonwealths, commence shedding their buttons the first day. In a land of bachelors the latter insult would almost justify the secession of the State.

In the interior the ordinary fence is constructed of boards, running along the top of a slight embankment to economize lumber. Owing to the extraordinary shrinkage of lumber in summer and the corresponding swellage in winter, farmers are more and more planting the posts independently and fastening on the boards with wire. Nothing is done thoroughly on the ranch, hence the fence soon sags over, and the above circumstance added makes an affair which would be a grievous eye-sore to a wellregulated farmer in the East. This variable quality of lumber is a source of infinite annoyance. In winter you can kindle a fire several mornings off the edge of your door; then in summer, if you are as small and humble a person as little Dr. Chillip, you can slip in sideways between the door and the post. In the coast valleys, near the great redwood forests, the common fence is made of espaliers driven into the ground and capped with a board, which is rather pretty than otherwise in a landscape of golden, lilac-tinted wheat-fields islanded with live-oaks. In the mountains the hideous brushwood fence largely prevails. In Southern California cottonwood logs are set on end in a ditch, suggesting the earlier company-drills of the war, wherein a six-footer would stand alongside of a boy, and a slim man beside a Jack Falstaff.

Throughout the more populous hay counties, in Sacramento, San Joaquin, Los Angeles, etc., there is nearly as great a proportion of tasteful farm-houses as in Ohio, for instance. A white farmhouse with green shutters is seen less frequently than East, yet too often, for it looks painfully stark and staring in the pellucid air and straw-colored landscape of summer. A new-comer will weary of the houses sicklied over with yellowish, brownish, drabbish, or leaden paints, but this is inevitable, for unless one lives far from the main road and remote from the prodigious and execrable clouds of dust, white is the last color that should be put upon a dwelling. Probably the windmill is the most distinguishing feature of the farm picture. Above all others it is the one thing that California has contributed to American agriculture and American landscape. It is not the unwieldy Dutchman, swinging his four huge arms around as if fuddled with schnapps, but a genuine, moneymaking American, working right lustily. It is neatly painted white, smirk and smug, and looks very pleasant and chipper on a summer day, amid the still, dead landscape, running so fast that it seems a solid wheel. It stands astride the well with a huge tank hoisted high on its shoulder, and it is its constant business to keep this filled and overrunning into the garden and orchard through a rubber hose, which the ranchman has only to change now and then, to set the water running in a new direction.

Representative of Southern California is the stock-ranch. Far down in the San Joaquin Valley, where the cars (a bit of the nineteenth century injected into the eighteenth) bowl over the infinite dead wastes, singing with a clear, dry whir through the desert air — there is the land where yet the Lethe of Spanish life rolls its lazy waves. Across this seeming desert sluggishly creeps a stream, coming out of somewhere and ending nowhere, for its ends are concealed in the all-enveloping murk. A few willows and cottonwoods fringe its banks, and beneath them ruminate the Spanish cattle, with their long, shining horns; sleek-looking but leggy and highheaded brutes, with a disposition to inspect closely a pedestrian’s heels. On the mighty plains around there is not a spear of green herbage, nothing but the coarse burr - clover stems and leafage, now reduced even to powder. But the cattle thrust out their long tongues and gather up the farinaceous seeds, thriving thereon. On the river-bank stands the ranch-house, a structure of the meanest description, perhaps a “ dobie,” long and windowless. It has been there sixteen years, yet there is not a panel of fence nor a single green leaf to shelter the inmates against the fervid heat. Hard by is a little inclosure, just spacious enough to contain three graves and a poor, struggling tree-of-paradise. It is little wonder that the son pistoled his stepfather and graduated from this accursed spot to San Quentin. Living in sueh a house at sueh a temperature, a man might even take the life of his motherin-law. A little farther away there is a rick of alfiteria hay, the natural product of some moister river meadow, and harvested for the supply of the vaqueros’ horses. Such “ hay ” were best handled with a shovel, as it consists largely of vegetable powder, though exceedingly nutritious. The surroundings are completed by the spacious circular corral of poles.

Early in the morning, while it is cool, the Mexican and Indian vaqueros saddle their wiry little broncos, gather their riatas and cow-whips, leap into the saddle, and scour away over the plains, disappearing from sight. Toward meridian the Chinese cook emerges from the cabin, his shaven pate shining in the sun and his pigtail gayly flapping, and with his telescope sweeps the horizon. If the black specks far in the distance are moving homeward, he goes in and hastens on the dinner. In half an hour the vaqueros gallop up, with their ponies' flanks smoking and bleeding from the cruel laceration of the spurs, loosen the sinches a little, and make their toilet with a comb which is kept hanging in the switch of an ox-tail. The casual stranger riding up is saluted with a quiet “buenas dias,” after which he draws up to the table, as expected to do, without ceremony. Everything eaten, to the gammoned pork and the cabbages, was brought down from San Francisco. After the meal the cigaritos are rolled and puffed a while, then the herdsmen sinch and are off again like a shot, while John, sly dog, brings out a lickerish morsel and discusses it alone. He is not eligible to sit at table with Greasers and Diggers, but he has his little revenge.

Meantime, what are the vaqueros doing afar off? Perhaps amusing themselves by lassoing up the survey stakes, to keep “ the-farmers ” from set-

tling in the vicinity, or to annoy the railroad surveyors. Perhaps they are purposely herding their enormous droves so as to trample down some poor man’s little grain patch, his solitary hope of the year for the maintenance of his wife and children. The cattle-lords do things that way in the “ cow counties.” Lumber is too costly to be thought of for fencing by any person not owning a fortune. The farmer watches his hardearned crop as long as human nature can endure, but there comes a night when he must sleep. In the morning it is a field of dust. And so at last, bullied, badgered, “ pastured out,” trampled out, run over, insulted, he appeals, perhaps, to the first and last law-maker of California, the six - shooter, and blood is spilled. Yet this infamous system is upheld year after year by State legislation! And for what purpose? Simply that these brutal bullies, these domineering “ox-born souls,” may monopolize the shambles of San Francisco with their mustang beef and cow-heel.

If these bull-baiters reared valuable animals, their infamous tyranny and stamping out of small farmers would be more tolerable. But, like everything acclimated in California, the Digger, the mustang, the mission grape, the club wheat (will it be so with the American ?), the cattle are “runts.” In a good year they are eatable, but in droughty times, after the horns and hide are subtracted there is little remaining, and that were best fed to a menagerie. Day after day they have to travel out farther from the water to procure grass, day after day they grow weaker, until at length they are mere skeletons, and their instinct tells them infallibly they cannot accomplish the journey again and return. Then they may be seen staggering, feebly thrusting and fighting about the pools, and mournfully rolling their hollow eyes around, until they go down in some untoward lurch, and yield themselves up to the ravens, if indeed those foul birds have not plucked out their eyes before they ceased to struggle.

Kindred with this is the great sheepranch. It is on all hands agreed that the occupation of a sheep-herder (the word “ shepherd,” so haloed round about with memories of the poetic Orient, is not heard here) is the most degraded in the whole category. A man who has fallen from society and passed down through all the menial and despised avocations outside of San Quentin, ends at last by herding sheep. Suicide in Sati Francisco Bay comes next. The Greaser and the Digger have contributed something to make this employment what it is; decrees of social outlawry and prison service in the East have contributed more. The great sheep-runs of California, like those of Australia, are a mollified form of Botany Bay for their respective mother countries, and not in any vocation known to civilization, outside of prison walls, are there so many sad and melancholy human shipwrecks or downright caitiffs. A large woolgrower in Salinas Valley once told me that he had in his employment during one year (according to my recollection) a bishop’s son, an editor, a civil engineer, a poet, a book-keeper, etc., all college graduates.

Of itself it is rather a romantic pursuit. Far in among the broken hills of the Coast Range, beneath a live-oak grove and hard by a living spring or pool, is the brushwood corral and the shepherd’s hut of shakes (long shingles). He cooks his own provisions, — the inevitable mutton, beans, and tea, — wraps himself in his blankets, and is lulled into a delicious condition of semi - sleep by the puppy-like chorus of the coyotes, or starts up in terror at the lumbering crunch of the grizzly over his corral. Once a week or once a fortnight he hears from the great outside world, when there is brought to him a donkey-load of supplies. Through the long-drawn summer of California he loafs with his gadding flock over the hills yellow with the gold of the ripened wild oats and aromatic with mint and rosemary, or through the live-oak parks of the valleys, where the long, pea-green streamers of moss sweep and sway in the breeze. But there comes also the winter of his discontent, when he must wrap himself closely in his waterproof or seek the friendly shelter of a tree.

The life of the great southern woolgrower is almost the stupidest possible to be conceived. Living far from neighbors, with all his shepherds away in the mountains, his wife perhaps a native lady and compelling him to speak Spanish to her, no improvements around his house to occupy his attention, but all about a sheep-trodden waste, he is oppressed with intolerable ennui. Early in the morning he saddles his horse and gallops away to the old Mission to meet his compotators. Deep within the cool, dark, earth-walled recesses of its widestretching wings he gambles the livelong day, only now and then casting a glance out through the massive arches upon the crisped plain beyond, where the beatwaves wimple and quiver like a wounded serpent.

Time has been when fortunes were reaped in sheep-farming with only less suddenness than in the most successful mining ventures. With his flock frequently increasing at the rate of one hundred and fifty per cent., and self-supporting the year long, with only a little nucleus owned in fee-simple, but rimmed with a boundless margin of government land, at a trifling outlay for tendance, clipping and hauling of fleece, etc., he saw himself grow rich without effort. Many colossal fortunes of the South have been thus made, and impregnably intrenched by the owners “pasturing out” all poor neighbors, until the Land Office wearied of offering land for preemption and let it drift off in vast masses at private entry. Nearly all the native grasses of California are annuals, depending for their continuance on seeds, and these the sheep ruthlessly consume, so foreshortening the pasturage year by year; and as the government ranges have been pared down continually, and one flock after another wedged into a given region, the wings of the wool-grower have been seriously clipped, though this is still one of the best paying industries on the coast.

Here it will be in place to say a few words concerning that beautiful and interesting animal, the Cashmere goat, with its fleece like a summer cloud, wavy and long and shining after a rain, like white-gold satin. William M. Landrum says in his pamphlet on the subject that there are already seventy thousand animals in the State with more or less of this noble blood in their veins. Always hardy and healthy in this climate, clean as a cat, inodorous, never deserting its young like the base Spanish goat, contentedly browsing on chaparral, pine, poison oak, and a hundred things where even the little Merino would die, never so happy as when picking moss off a rock or a decaying log, never getting lost like the stupid sheep, but always cleaving to its fellows and always coming to the corral at night of its own accord, yielding the purest milk of all animals, whieh is never bitter, no matter what the goat eats, with flesh sweeter than mutton and mohair twice as valuable as wool — this little animal is one of Nature’s priceless boons to the poor man. It thrives wonderfully on the thinnest, rockiest farms of the foot-hills, where the miners have peeled off the top-soil, and in my opinion it is destined to be the regenerator of those very regions, otherwise beyond hope. In addition to its beauty and its value, it is an affectionate animal, and if indulged by its master with a casual handful of grain or salt, it will become greatly attached to him, and distressed when he is out of sight, running and bleating in quest of him. How any man with a knowledge of these facts can still cleave to the filthy, accursed, abominable hog — which may I live many years to kick! — passes my comprehension. Dry wines, fruits, nuts, and mohair are destined to be the great staples of the Sierra foot-hills.

Of the vineyard, the orchard, the mountain bee-ranch of Los Angeles, the strawberry garden, the mulberry grove, and many other forms of the ranch with which I am personally less familiar, it is not needful here to speak. But there is one other deserving brief mention, because it is so characteristically Californian, and that is the turkey-ranch. Along the base of the Sierra for hundreds of miles, between the foot-hills and the plains proper, there is a strip of rolling land, arid, gravelly, and uninhabitable. Certainly no human being can gain a livelihood here. But a Californian would extract blood from a turnip. What have we? First, grasshoppers; second, a little, harsh, miserable plant, called by the Americans mullein, by the Spaniards poleo. Its prickly capsules are as full of farinaceous seeds as they can hold. Just the place for turkeys, but it required a genius to think of that. It is very curious to see a man on these desolate and burning wastes, afoot or on horseback, herding five hundred, one thousand, sometimes two thousand or three thousand turkeys in a flock, and perhaps assisted by a shepherd dog, who gently admonishes the stragglers. But, in Californian parlance, “it pays.” I know an old man and his son who are said to clear three thousand dollars a year in the business. A man is considered to be getting pretty well down in the social scale who will circle turkeys; but when he comes to town at Christmas with his cribs of fat gobblers at sixteen cents a pound, no true Californian will refuse him respect. He is the more entitled to that tribute because he has gained an honest living where Nature seems to have displayed her ingenuity in making it impossible. Even heathen John is entirely respectable when he turns his turkeys into “ Christian ducats.”

There are many nuisances encountered by the farmer in this part of the world which do something to countervail the surpassing loveliness of the climate. Of these, ants are one. Frequently food can he preserved only by being suspended in sacks, or placed in cupboards with their legs standing in vessels of water. The native Californians scrape all the grass out of their yards and tramp the ground down hard to keep the ants away. Choppers are sometimes driven from a tree by the amazing multitude and the stench of them. They collect great quantities of grass-seed into their holes, leaving the chaff on the surface, and these chaff heaps become quite a resource for stock in the winter. The fleas have given rise to a fashionable folly known as the “ California wriggle,” which even young ladies practice in the presence of their lovers. In the high mountain regions, strange, to say, and around the salty lagoons of the bay, mosquitoes are so intolerably bad that men often wear mosquito-bars on their heads. On the portion of the plains overflowed in the wet season, gnats are so thick that many people live for weeks in a smoke, with their hands and faces lacerated by themselves to a bloody blotch. In the coast valleys and the interior basin, ground-squirrels swarm in countless hordes, honey-combing all the surface of the earth, and devouring every green thing, unless the farmers make banded war on them with strychnine pot, shotgun, trap, sulphur smoke, water, and all other conceivable devices. Summer brings a plague of impalpable dust which penetrates even into a watch; winter, a plague of fathomless mud and of miring down.

Though making more pretensions to a lofty generosity, ranchmen treat laborers more shabbily and niggardly than their Eastern brethren do. They keenly contract with them for one dollar a day, or thirty dollars “ for twenty-six dry days.” No shelter is provided where they may labor on a rainy day, but they are meanly compelled to lose that time. The amount is not great, but the principle is pitiful. At night they are relegated to the horse-stable. A story is related of an Irishman who came to breakfast in the morning, snatching the while at the barn straw in his hair, and was greeted by the proprietor, “ Good morning, sir. ” Whereto Pat made reply, “ And is it ’sur ’ ye says to the likes of me? Shure and I’d like to trade that same for a bed, bedad.”

There is a favorite hit of blarney which calls this “ the workingman’s paradise.” If a poor man can acquire a piece of land without borrowing, or is a skilled artisan, then it is indeed good for him to be here — as the forty-eight million dollars in the savings-banks of the State attest. Put a hireling, as such, for the most part leads a precarious and miserable existence. Finding steady employment only about four months a year, he is eternally in quest of " a job,” eternally impecunious, eternally a vagabond and a wanderer on the face of the earth. On the other hand, farmers have had their tempers infinitely tried by the thieveries, the barn-burnings, and the infamous wastages of property done by these tramps. It is a melancholy spectacle to see them wearily approach with their rolls of blankets a-shoulder, and timidly or with reckless bravado — one or other, because they have been so often rudely repulsed — “ ask a brother of the earth to give them leave to toil.” Time has been when, for half the year, there were probably ten thousand men to whom their good gray blankets were at once house, bed, pillow, trunk, chair, and cushion. Happily, thrice happily for California, the great “blanket brigade” is fast being mustered out. As good men as ever knapped ginger have trudged in the dusty road, carrying their blankets — and as infamous. The former have received one kind of discharge-papers; the latter, another. It has taken California many years to absorb all the men who drifted down out of the placers, and all the riffraff of the East; and there were plenty of them that required to be absorbed seven feet deep.

An unfavorable symptom appearing to the traveler is the number of ranches over which is posted in conspicuous lettering that melancholy legend FOR SALE. There is little hazard in asserting that there is not a ranchman of them all who would not sell “ if he could get his price.” Everybody wants to “realize.” Nobody is content to sow the long seed of the future. Who plants olives for his son ? or a grove of hard-wood trees for his son’s son ? Interest is reckoned by the month, laborers are hired by the day. People know not how “ to labor and to wait.” The one baneful error of thousands is that they think they are making nothing unless they are working for a wage. They want to see and finger every night what they have accumulated during the day. The old, ineradicable virus of the mining days is in their blood, and it can never be gotten out of them unless it is stamped out or burnt out. When a generation of men grow up who have irever seen a “ chispa” or handled a sluice-fork, then and not till then will farming affairs be managed with some steadfastness and good discretion. No farmer now, or farmer’s wife, drops a tear of sentiment or of regret over the rough and uncanny dwelling which the hammer of the roaring auctioneer knocks off amid a ribald throng. No long-drawn chain of sweet and tender recollections grapples the old homestead back into the storied past, or binds it to scenes rendered forever sacred by participation of beloved hearts which now lie low in the church-yard graves, turning to silent dust. There is no spreading tree which Benny planted long ago, when a boy, or rose-bush which Mary’s tender hands placed in the ground, watered, and taught to twine itself across the casement. All these matters are the growth of time alone, and they will come to California at last, when the wild and reckless wanderers who planted the foundations hap-hazard are sleeping in the ground.

Let us hope also that the California farmer may not always preëminently deserve the epithet given by Virgil to the universal class, avarus agricola. It makes one’s blood bitter to be compelled always, when about to do a matter of business, to be braced in every direction like an Olympic wrestler. The pitiless and eternal hunting down of “ a bargain; ” the backing and filling and hedging; the higgling and chaffering; the bated breath with which one party ventures an offer at last, and the other listens; the sickening of heart and bitter chagrin with which one or other or both contemplate the dawning suspicion that they have been overreached — these things are pitiful. This accursed, insatiable rapacity of California is the one “ damned spot ” on its character.

Agriculture has had to make a hard and bitter fight to secure even the poor modicum of recognition which it has. For nearly fourteen years no man came here to get any good out of the soil itself. The vaquero and the “forty-niner,” the old Spanish rëgime and the mining system, have been the serpents to throttle the young Hercules, but are themselves gasping instead. The former still holds the legislature to the nefarious fence-law in its home counties, against the farmer’s behoof; the latter still cracks the whip in Sacramento which it has swung ever since the " legislature of a thousand drinks,” forcing on the agricultural counties certain wrongs in regard of taxes and representation; though the seat of wealth and population long ago migrated to the plains, leaving the prematurely old, bankrupt, skinny mining counties in the mountains like a haggard young debauchee.¹ Farmers as a class arc still highly contemned and disparaged by miners, both in the legislature and outside of it. Truthful James has no admiration for dull John Hodge. In the agricultural fairs the most pitiful premiums are awarded to stock and field products, which are huddled in a corner, while thousands are lavished on the races. A farmer on the soundest basis cannot borrow of the San Francisco money-jugglers as easily as a stockgambler can. Addressing a farmers’ club, Ross Browne bitterly but too truly said, “ Even now I believe he could raise money more readily on diamond lands than on swamp or agricultural enterprises.” Ranchmen are scattered and powerless; the men of the cities are united and strong; hence the former are outrageously fleeced by them. Wheat is often sold at one hundred per cent, over what the farmers received ; wine at one dollar and a half a bottle, while it was sold at Los Angeles for forty cents a gallon, or eight cents a bottle; grapes at eight or ten cents a pound, when the grower was glad to get seventy-five cents a hundred; and tons of fruit are cast into San Francisco Bay every summer because the petty hucksters cannot work it off at five cents a pound, though the farmer was obliged to accept twenty dollars a ton. Thousands of tons rot under the trees yearly, while the poor of the cities go without, because the infamous extortions of the middle-men place it above their reach.

Despite all these drawbacks, the outlook for agriculture in this great commonwealth is hopeful. The skinning and shiftless methods of the present are passing away. There are two great and cardinal ideas slowly permeating the rural mind. One is the absolute necessity of getting the seed into the earth in time to receive the earliest autumn rains, comprehended in one word, summer-fallowing. The other is the economy and the greater security of planting several crops on every ranch, so that if one is a failure another may succeed, comprehended in two words, diversified agriculture. Another equally important matter is the breaking up small of the colossal ranches owned under Mexican grants or got together through the enormous rapacity of speculators. Cronise says in his preface,² “ It will be a grand day for California when the word ' ranch,’ like the idea and system it represents, has only a historical meaning, and when small farms, well tilled, dot the lovely plains now abandoned to herds of cattle.” Only consider the vast area of cultivable land, of which men have as yet tilled merely the tithe! In the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys there are twelve million eight hundred thousand acres of arable land in an unbroken body! True, this will yield only about four years in seven, while in the remaining three drought brings the harvest to nothing. But Nature has provided an exhaustless resource in the mountains, of which men have only to avail themselves in order to regulate the machinery of the heavens and bring water upon the thirsty earth at pleasure. The immense area of condensation and catchment afforded by the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range creates vast reservoirs in the form of snow and mountain tarns, which at present all run to waste, flowing down in swift and ice - cold rivers across the sweltering plains. It is not that Nature scatters rain upon California with a niggard hand, but that it is mostly precipitated upon the summits, whence it runs down two or three months too early. It is necessary to create artificial reservoirs in the elevated valleys, and retain there this magnificent supply of waters until later in the season. Otherwise expressed, it is necessary to construct eaves-troughs for the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range, which can he plugged and tapped at pleasure.

Already a chartered company have quietly expended over five hundred thousand dollars in surveys and initiatory works toward the setting on of this vast undertaking, the irrigation of an empire. There is a loose and large swing of phrasing in their certificate of incorporation— “ the construction of irrigating canals in the State of California, . . . the supplying of cities and towns with pure, fresh water,” etc. — which is peculiar to the lordly Western speech. But when great deeds unostentatiously follow hard on the heels of these large, unconscious utterances, the case is hopeful. The time may come when this arid basin will be netted with irrigating canals, making possible a dense population.

Stephen Powers.