I. LOS ANGELES COUNTY.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT—A STORM IN THE DESERT—A CONTEMPTUOUS CITY—PROGRESS AND PROSPECTS—THE LAND BOOM—CLIMATE AND CROPS—OSTRICH-FARMING—A VINEYARD TERROR—THE NATIVE WINES—QUAIL-HUNTING.

Twenty-three years ago, when the first transcontinental railway was commenced, the possibility of not only its success, but of its very construction, was almost universally doubted, and the San Francisco bankers who advanced money for the enterprise had to do so secretly, in order not to create a panic among their depositors. To-day there are five transcontinental lines, or six, if we count the Oregon Short Line separately, and the tourist or invalid can pay his money and take his choice, according to the season,—the Canadian Pacific, Northern Pacific, or Union Pacific in summer; the Atlantic and Pacific or Southern Pacific in winter. The last-named is less interesting scenically than some of the Northern routes, but to invalids leaving the East in winter it presents the advantage of plunging at once in medias res, so far as semi-tropical climate is concerned.

Of the southern United States, this side of the Mississippi, one gets a rather unfavorable impression from the railway window, as the greater part of the distance from Washington to New Orleans, and some hundred miles beyond, seems little else than one boundless swamp, with moss-covered trees, an occasional low mountain range, corn and cotton fields, and beggarly huts, as the only scenic features. Montgomery seems a sleepy country village; and although New Orleans has sights worth seeing, it requires courage and a taste for roughing it in order to get at them; for the streets (naturally inclined to be muddy, because the city lies below the level of the Mississippi) are so horribly paved that even a New Yorker must lift up his hands and thank Heaven that he does not live in such a city. Without any exaggeration, a Swiss stage-road in the midst of the mountains is not so rough and jolting an affair as the street-car tracks in New Orleans; and what the roads are beyond the paved streets may be inferred from the fact that in January I found it absolutely impossible to reach the City Park (where the Exposition was held some years ago) on foot, from the terminus of the street-cars. Some of the gardens on the way were ornamented with orange-trees laden with ripe fruit, but both trees and fruit presented a sad contrast to the luxuriance I beheld in Los Angeles three days later; and equally great was the contrast between the moist, warm, enervating atmosphere of the Louisiana marshes, and the dry, cool, mountain and ocean breezes of Southern California.

If you leave New Orleans, say, on Wednesday noon, you will be at Los Angeles on Saturday evening before ten. A good supply of reading-matter is desirable, as there is little to see for a day or two, except cactus bushes, a few painted Indians, and bleak mountains, some of them across the Mexican border. At El Paso, which calls itself “the Paris of the Southwest,” and claims twelve thousand inhabitants, the train stops long enough to afford a chance to drive across the river into Mexican soil. The El Paso papers try hard to induce the passengers in quest of health to stay there, and have a very poor opinion of California. The Herald which I bought, editorially described the “recent terrific rainstorms” in that State, and found it difficult to decide which was a worse place for invalids, “Holland with her damp marshes, or the Golden State.” The editor probably mixed up that State with Arizona; for on arriving in California we discovered there had not been a drop of rain for several weeks, while in Arizona we found the deserts, as far as the eye could reach, one vast plain of shining, semi-liquid mud, interspersed with large temporary lakes. The rain poured down in blinding torrents and with true tropical violence, forming channels several feet deep across the desert, and whirling aside thirty-feet iron rails like straws.

The spectacle of this rain-storm in the desert was so weird and sublime that we gladly in return accepted the fate of reaching Los Angeles twelve hours behind time; for the train, owing to the numerous washouts and soft places, could only creep along, and beyond Tucson we had to wait five hours for daylight, as the engineer did not dare to proceed farther in the dark. Such storms and washouts are obviously frequent in this region, for ties and rails are scattered all along the road for emergencies. Nature, provoked by the “soft thing” which the Southern Pacific had in building this level road, seems to have taken this means of getting square with it. At Colton, California, the scenery becomes snow-mountainous and interesting, and remains so as far as Los Angeles.

During my first visit to Southern California, in 1887, I was amused to notice the vast contempt with which the fifty thousand inhabitants of the city of Los Angeles looked down on the three hundred and fifty thousand benighted denizens of a certain northern village known as San Francisco, and on other places that have the effrontery to grow rapidly, and to claim special advantages of climate, situation, and commerce. The Los Angeles Herald informed its admiring readers that⁠—

“Pasadena and Los Angeles will be one city in a brief period, and form a continuous municipality from the Sierra Madre to the sea—an extent of thirty miles in length by at least six in width, with five hundred thousand people contained therein, and will be the capital of the richest State in the Union. The claim of New York as the Empire State is already in dispute, but the dispute will soon be settled by the pre-eminence of South California.”

It must be admitted that much had happened to justify this Los Angelic grandiloquence. Seventeen years ago the City of Angeles had only ten thousand inhabitants, no street-cars, and only one railway. To-day it has at least sixty thousand inhabitants, electric street-cars, and more than half-a-dozen railways, with about seventy-five daily trains. Orange-trees have increased in the county from twenty-five thousand to a million or more; grape-vines from three millions to twenty millions; and other agricultural products in proportion.

Its very disadvantages have proved advantages to Los Angeles. For instance, the fact that coal, like wood, is expensive, made the city the first in the country to adopt a general system of electric street-lighting. It has seventeen masts one hundred and fifty feet high, fourteen masts sixty feet high, and hundreds of private lights. The electric railroad is also being rapidly extended. The cars run at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, which can be increased to twenty outside the city limits. The road’s capacity is said to be four times that of a horse road, and its cost only one-half, while there is no torturing of poor horses in the hot noonday sun. A ride or a walk along the streets of Los Angeles conveys the impression that the city is quite as large and as “metropolitan” as it claims to be; the natural bustle and activity being increased by the winter visitors from the East.

In every country the smaller cities are apt to take after the metropolis. Thus, Rouen constantly suggests Paris; Linz, Vienna; the English cities, London, etc. Similarly, Los Angeles suggests San Francisco in many details,—the appearance of the stores, hotels, Chinese shops, and the gardens, although the gardens have a more decided semi-tropical aspect, and there is a general appearance of more open-airness, if the word be permissible. The city is surrounded on all sides by high mountains and buried among groves and gardens. Orange, lemon, “pepper,” and fig trees adorn the gardens everywhere, side by side with many luxuriant shrubs and flowers, dwarfed apologies for which are often seen in Eastern gardens. In size and brilliancy of color these California flowers are incomparable, but the same causes which tend to give quinces, for instance, a less pronounced flavor than they have in the East, appear to impair the fragrance of some flowers. This fact has often been commented on, but I believe that too much emphasis has been placed on it. Repeated experiment has convinced me that the verbena and heliotrope, and perhaps the geranium, have a less delicious fragrance in California than in New York, at least in October; but the same is not true of roses and pinks and lilies; and the countless varieties of wild flowers that adorn the hill-sides in spring have a most intoxicating fragrance, wherewith they allure so many bees that honey can be sold at four cents a pound.

The present ambition of the Los Angeles people is to surpass all the rest of the world in as many things as possible. In one thing certainly they were pre-eminent, a few years ago,—in the number of real-estate offices that decorated their town. Neither San Francisco nor any mining town ever had so many saloons to the number of inhabitants as Los Angeles had of these land offices; and the day after my arrival I heard a mother scolding her baby for putting a handful of dirt in its mouth—doubtless because she thought real estate was too valuable to be thus wasted in luxurious living. Almost every landowner, whether he had a sign over his door or not, was willing to part with some or all of his property for a consideration—not a slight one, by any means; and the whole county was affected with this epidemic, there being places of only a few thousand inhabitants where corner lots were sold almost at New York City prices.

One day, driving along a country road about twenty miles from Los Angeles, I noticed half-a-dozen well-dressed men resting under a tree. My companion informed me they were doubtless a syndicate looking about for a place to locate a new town. At Fullerton, a few miles from Anaheim, I saw one of these new towns. It consisted of the framework of a large hotel and of a few hundred yards of elegant cement sidewalk, not in front of the hotel, but in another part of the “town.” Elsewhere towns get pretty large before any one begins to think of a sidewalk, even of the most primitive kind; but the residents in Los Angeles County of course would not be satisfied with a sidewalk in any way inferior to that in front of Mr. Vanderbilt’s house in Fifth Avenue. I may add that since then Fullerton has grown up into quite a little town.

Having built his sidewalk and his large hotel (with real-estate office) in place of the saloon which usually is the pioneer building in Western towns, the Southern Californian begins to cast about for a supply of water; not so much for domestic use—since wine is almost as cheap as water—as for the irrigation of his garden and fields. If a river or brook is near by, a water company is formed, ditches are dug, and each shareholder, after paying his dues, may have his water “on tap” whenever he wants it. In the absence of a river, wells are made to supply the water. Sometimes these wells are bored horizontally into the mountain side, thus creating an artificial spring; but, as a rule, the wells are vertical, from eighty to five hundred feet deep, or even more, although at one hundred to two hundred feet the water is generally obtained in abundance. A windmill is then erected over the well, which pumps the water into a large, high tank, whence it is easily conveyed to the garden or field by hose. There is no lack of wind to drive these mills; for the charm of Southern California’s climate lies in this, that although the sky is commonly cloudless, and the sun warm, winter and summer, there is almost always a brisk breeze to temper the solar rays, and deprive them of their sting.

This is true especially of Los Angeles County, which is situated between the deep sea and an imposing circular range of mountains, that send their breezes down over the valley as soon as the ocean breezes cease; and although at some seasons both these air-currents, near their source, would be unpleasantly cold for invalids, they are almost always mellowed and warmed by the sun’s rays before they reach the centre of the valley. The morning—till about two o’clock—is the warmest part of the day; but in the autumn the morning heat is tempered by a daily fog, which remains till about ten o’clock. It is not a depressing fog, and is rather enjoyed by the natives, as a temporary change from the everlasting sunshine. In fact, sunny monotony is the gravest charge that can be brought against the climate of Southern California. In the autumn and spring a few rainy days afford refreshing variety; but summer and winter are alike in their cloudless skies, warm sunshine, and alternating mountain and ocean breezes. As a physician at Anaheim remarked to me, the seasons do not differ in character, but only in flavor, like the differences between several kinds of apples. He also informed me that, although the temperature sometimes rises above a hundred in the shade, he has never seen a case of sunstroke—thanks to the dryness of the air and the almost incessant breezes. Yet, like all southern climates, it fosters indolence, mental and physical; and he would not recommend it, therefore, to young persons, except for money-making purposes. But for invalids and for elderly persons, it is the best place in the world. The somnolence brooding in the air (except in Switzerland I have never slept so soundly in my life as here) would cure the worst case of Wall Street insomnia; and the incessant sunshine and constant life in the open air can hardly fail to add ten years or more to the life of old men or women who desert their over-heated and ill-ventilated Eastern homes for the open air and winter sunshine of Los Angeles County.

The general irrigation now resorted to, and the numerous green oases which have in consequence sprung up amid the deserts of prickly cactus, have already exerted some influence on the climate, and there is reason to believe that rain will be more abundant in the future than it has been in the past. A potent factor in producing this change will be the groves of trees that are being planted everywhere. There are some poplars and locusts and other trees that appear to flourish tolerably well, but the two species that most triumphantly defy sunshine, dust, and drought are the red-pepper-tree and the Australian eucalyptus, both of them beautiful to behold. The red-pepper-tree, with its gracefully drooping branches, resembles a weeping willow, but its growth is more luxuriant, its dimensions larger, and it is adorned with bunches of beautiful small red berries. The leaves, when bruised, have a strongly pungent cayenne odor, whence the name of the tree. The leaves and fruit of the eucalyptus have a still more objectionable odor when crushed (very much like assafœtida), but the tree has a most stately appearance, and its marvellously rapid growth—a seed becoming a large tree in a few years—causes it to be raised on a large scale for fuel and for shady avenues.

But although Los Angeles County can raise the Australian eucalyptus and the pepper-tree, there is a point at which the climate draws the line further south. Thus, the banana and the pineapple, although they can be raised here, do not usually thrive well, and the same is true of the almond. Yet the Los Angeleños do not despair on that account, as they have a superabundance of other fruits to fall back on. Of the vast and fruitful orange and lemon orchards of this region every one has read. Figs grow abundantly and are in good demand, especially those of the Smyrna variety, which are now displacing the others. The demand for California olive oil is greater than the supply, and it is equal in quality to the best Italian oil. English walnut-trees yield a profitable crop. Peaches are so abundant that they are fed to the cows, and some varieties (but not all) are equal in flavor to the New Jersey and Delaware crop. Ears of corn a foot long, with twenty rows to the ear, can be seen in the market, side by side with gigantic twenty-horse-power onions, and potatoes weighing from two to five pounds. Sugar-beets are on exhibition, weighing fifty pounds, and pumpkins of one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy-five pounds. Pumpkins, melons, tomatoes, and other creepers grow wild, without any care, and may even become a weedy nuisance. If a Chinaman eats a watermelon under a tree along the road, the chances are that a crop of wild melons will be found in that neighborhood the following season; and on one farm I saw a volunteer tomato plant which the owner said he had ploughed down twice, but when I saw it, it measured at least twelve feet square, and had thousands of small red fruit on it of the kind which is only used for preserves, although, like the little yellow ones, it is of a much more delicate flavor than the large tomatoes, which alone, for some inscrutable reason, are ever seen on our tables.

This list is very far from complete and is being constantly extended; for California is still largely in an experimental stage of development. The experiment with ostrich-farming near Anaheim has resulted successfully, and other farms have been started near Los Angeles. I visited the original farm near Anaheim. The keeper, an Englishman imported from Africa, showed me a fine lot of healthy birds and some beautiful specimens of feathers, naming prices which, if they were advertised by a New York house, would create a riot among “bargain”-seeking women; for it is to be hoped that women, having abandoned the vulgar fashion of wearing stuffed bird-corpses on their hats, will return to their old love, the delicate plumes of the ostrich, the wearing of which involves no cruel massacre of innocents. And California has another kind of plume to which the attention of women should be directed, the product of what might be called the vegetable ostrich,—pampas grass. Nothing more exquisite for a vase or for a (fan-shaped) wall ornament could be imagined than these bushy white (or colored) plumes, which in Los Angeles County attain the height of thirty-six inches, not including the stem. Formerly, when these plumes were imported from South America, florists charged a dollar or even a dollar and a half apiece for them; now the retail price is twenty-five cents, and the wholesale price three or four cents. Vast quantities are being exported to Europe, and Southern California is able to supply the demand of several continents, as the pampas grass, like most plants, grows there like a weed.

A dark cloud has, however, lately risen, and is for the moment casting an ominous shadow over the cheerful prospects of California. All the products so far mentioned are, of course, subordinate in importance to the grape crop; and the California grape-vine has been for several years threatened by an enemy more dangerous, because more obscure, than the phylloxera. A few years ago some of the grape-vines in Los Angeles County suddenly began to die out. Among these were some of the oldest vineyards, eighty years old or more. Indeed, the old Mission grape was the first to be attacked. Then followed other varieties, always in the same order in each vineyard. The disease begins at the tip of the vines and slowly spreads downwards, the roots being affected last. The second season the crop is a comparative failure, and the third the vineyard is a graveyard. One lady told me she had dug up and used for fuel as many as eighty thousand of her vines within a few years. The disease is said to be not phylloxera nor mildew; nor have the chemical experts who have examined the vines been able to throw any light on the matter, except by attributing the decay to a kind of cellular degeneration. Various theories are being discussed, and the owners of the vineyards meanwhile console themselves with the statement that a similar mysterious disease affected the grapes of Sicily and Madeira at one time, and disappeared after a few years, allowing the young vines to grow as before. What causes them to look with comparative indifference on this temporary (as they hope) interruption of business is the fact that there has been an over-production of grapes, in consequence of which the price of wine has fallen to unprofitable figures. An interruption of a few years in this excessive production would raise the prices, and thus pay for the losses now sustained.

OSTRICH FARM—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

In the meantime the wine-growers would do well to ponder the fact that quality is of much more value, financially and gastronomically, than quantity. Labor is scarce in harvest-time, and, to save trouble, too many of the small growers neglect to pick out the green and sour grapes, which therefore vitiate the juice of the whole bunch; or else they intrust the cleaning of their old barrels to ignorant Chinamen (the Indians have all disappeared), with equally disastrous results. Too many Eastern people have contracted absurd prejudices against California wines, because chance threw some of this sour wine into their cellars. But it may be safely stated that the average California claret and white wine and port are superior to the wine that may be bought for the same money in France and Germany and elsewhere. The labels of famous French wines and Cognacs are for sale openly in the show-cases of country stores in Los Angeles County! These honest folks are practically compelled to use this stratagem. They would much prefer to sell their best wines under California labels, in order to build up their reputation. And if California wine-growers used the same caution as those of Europe, this subterfuge would no longer be necessary. I have tasted old Zinfandel equal to the best French château wines, because made with the same care, and it fetched almost as high a price in San Francisco as foreign wines.

Whatever may be the outcome of the present vineyard epidemic, Southern California will have plenty of other things to fall back upon. A few years ago it looked as if all the crops were to be neglected, comparatively, and a specialty made of building hotels for invalids and tourists. Among the special attractions for tourists is quail-hunting in the foothills. The physician already referred to kindly took me out on an afternoon hunt. We drove in a tough two-horse buggy, up and down hill and along the dry bed of a brook, carefully dodging the bristling cactus bushes, which are apt to make a deep impression on “tenderfoot” visitors, less by the grotesque manner in which their fleshy leaves are stuck on one another at odd angles than by their fish-hook-like spines. These prickly leaves are so arranged that nothing larger than a quail or a rabbit can get under their protecting shadows. The dogs give them a wide berth, and the quail can only be shot on the wing if they are alarmed and fly from one group of cactus bushes to another. The result of an hour’s buggy-hunting was nine quails, three pigeons, and two rabbits.