USA > California > Los Angeles County > Los Angeles > A history of California and an extended history of Los Angeles and environs : also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I > Part 47
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But what of the cattle kings of the ranchos? They were ruined, their power and possessions were gone. Day by day they had seen their herds wasting away and themselves sinking to financial ruin and poverty. The pious among them had prayed for rain, they had sought the intercession of the saints, they had performed novenas of prayer, but in vain! The rain came not. It is the will of God. Why repine! With a bravery that might be taken for stoicism and a faith that bordered on fatalism they submit- ted to the inevitable.
Their doom came quickly. Nearly all of the great ranchos were mortgaged. With no means to restock them, and even if the owners had possessed the means it would have been use- less. The cattle industry of the south was dead and could never again be revived. With- out income to pay interest or principal the mortgagees foreclosed and took possession of the desolated cattle ranges. Within five years after the famine nearly all of the incumbered ranchos had changed owners.
Looking backward from our present high standard of real estate values it seems almost farcical that the owners of the great ranchos should have lost their possessions for the trifling amounts they owed. The possession of $20,000, at the critical moment when dis- possession threatened him, would have saved from bankruptcy the great cattle king who owned the ranchos Semi, Los Posos, Conejo, San Julian and Espodo, aggregating over 200,000 acres-lost on an incumbrance of ten cents an acre. Many of the best ranchos were mortgaged on the basis of twenty-five cents an acre. Figure interest at five per cent per month, the ruling rate of early days, and it is easy to see how a principality could be lost for what was a mere pittance at the beginning of the indebtedness. The loss of cattle and horses during the famine years was one of the greatest calamities that ever visited California. The assessed value of property in Los Angeles county in 1860-61 was $3,650,330, in 1864-65, $1,622,370. Over two million dollars of prop- erty was swept out of existence, a percentage of loss on the capital invested greater than that of San Francisco by the earthquake and fire of 1906. On the animals there was no insurance or salvage-the loss was total.
After the famine years the era of subdivision began. The great ranchos were cut into small farms and sold to settlers. The passing of the rancho had come. With the loss of their great land holdings the feudal barons of the cattle regime lost their political power and influence. The industry that once made them rich and powerful had, through changed sociological conditions and adverse elements of nature, been their downfall. Their passing is a tale ir. which "Unmerciful Disaster followed fast and followed faster."
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The conditions that wrought the undoing of the cattle barons can never return, but the story of their misfortunes, and the bravery and the fortitude with which they met the decrees of fate, and the manhood with which they sub- mitted to conditions beyond their control de- serve far more merit than has been accorded them, deserve a record in the history of a land they helped to make but which misfortune wrested from them.
With the passing of the rancho passed many of the old-time customs and observances that were concomitants of the rancho. Chief among them was the rodeo. Rodeo comes from the Spanish verb rodear, to go around, to encom- pass. The rodeo was an annual meeting of the rancheros of certain districts at some se- lected place, to which their herds were driven to enable the owners to pick out the stragglers which had straggled away from their own herd to that on some contiguous rancho. These were identified by the brand. It was also the time of branding the calves. It was always held in the spring because then the calves will follow their mothers, and the mothers being branded the calves could be identified.
The rodeo was a stately and formal affair in the olden times. It was held in turns upon the ranchos of the different rancheros, begin- ning usually at the most southern district and moving northward. Each ranchero entertained the company when it met on his estate. Some- times a dozen proprietors took part in a rodeo and from twenty to twenty-five thousand cat- tle would be gathered together. Festivities were always a part of the rodeo. The most skillful vaquero was the hero of the occasion. The skillful horsemanship and the feats per- formed with the riata seemed to partake more of magic or juggling than skill. The rodeo ended with a baile (ball). The jueces del campos-judges of the plains-were the offi- cials who set the time for the rodeo and regu- lated proceedings at it. They settled all cases of disputed ownership. There were no juries summoned to their courts. The bench of the juez del campo was the back of a mustang, his court room the plains, his code of laws com- mon sense ideas and a sense of justice in ad- ministering them. As there was no salary at- tached to the office he took his pay in honors. All this was changed under American rule.
The judges were paid salaries, their number increased, and a printed code of laws arranged for their guidance, but the salaried judge of the plains was no improvement on the codeless juez del campo who took his pay in honors.
The rancho, the rodeo and the vaquero have long since passed down and out. They are but the dimly remembered vision of a heroic age and of stalwart custom gone forever.
At the beginning of the famine years (1863) most of the great ranchos were intact. Por- tions of some of them had been set off to heirs or sold on foreclosure of mortgages, but no subdivisions into small farms had been made. The standard price for land in 1865, except the land with water rights and that contiguous to Los Angeles City, was twenty-five cents per acre. Four thousand acres of the northern part of San Pedro rancho was sold in 1865 to Tem- ple & Gibson for thirty-six cents per acre. It was considered a good price.
In 1867 the Rev. G. D. Compton bought the greater portion of this tract at $5 per acre and founded the town of Compton. To induce set- tlers to come to his colony he offered the land in small tracts to anyone purchasing land from him within six months from the date of his purchase for the same that he had paid. Many of the old residents of the county considered the land worthless for agricultural purposes, but after one crop which proved its product- iveness the land went up to $20 per acre.
The most extensive passing of the rancho that followed the famine years was the sub- division of the Stearns ranchos. These lay between the San Gabriel river and the Santa Ana and extended from the Santa Ana foothills to the sea. This body of land comprised the original ranchos of Los Coyotes, La Habra, San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana, Los Bolsas y Parrades, La Bolsa Chica and Los Alamitos. These had been bought up from time to time by Don Abel Stearns at merely nominal prices and stocked with horses and cattle. These ranchos aggregated about two hundred thou- sand acres of land. During the drouth years of 1863-64 nearly all of the stock on the ranchos starved to death and Stearns was reduced to the verge of bankruptcy.
In 1867 Stearns sold all these ranchos except the Alamitos to a syndicate, reserving a one- eighth interest. The government form of sur-
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vey was extended over them and the land was offered for sale in tracts from forty acres up at from $2 to $10 per acre on easy terms. In those days of large landed estates forty acres were considered too insignificant a holding for a man to waste his time on and the average settler spread his limited capital over as great an expanse of land as he could encompass with- out regard to future payment, hoping to make the land pay for itself. Many of the pioneers of the subdivision era met the fate of the cattle barons, the original owners of the ranchos; dry years, low price of products and mortgages, deprived them of their possessions.
Between 1774 and July, 1846, when the last Mexican governor was deposed by the con- quest, there were sixty grants, Spanish and
Mexican made, in what formerly constituted Los Angeles county. These were of various sizes, from a few acres to over a hundred thou- sand.
Of the vast estates held by the padres of the Mission of San Gabriel in trust for its neophytes, but a small portion was left to it after secularization. In the early years of the last century, when the mission was at the zenith of its power, it controlled more than a million acres. When the United States claims commission finished its work in California, all that was left to it was one hundred and ninety acres. The largest rancho in the county was the ex-mission of San Fernando, containing 121,619 acres and confirmed to Eulogio de Celis.
CHAPTER XLIII
EVOLUTION OF THE ORANGE INDUSTRY
Orange growing has become one of the chief, if not the principal, agricultural industry of Southern California. The history of its devel- opment is of more than passing interest to persons even in no way connected with the in- dustry. No other attraction that our part of the state can offer, except perhaps climate, has lured so many home seekers to Southern Cali- fornia as the orange. Sentiment and profit combined attract to it the capitalist as well as the man without capital but blessed with optim- ism and energy. It was not one of the primi- tive industries of the south and it was not until the beginning of the second century of California's settlement that attention began to be directed towards orange growing for profit. The subdivision of the great ranchos that fol- lowed the destruction of the cattle industry led to a number of agricultural experiments. The new owners of small fractions of the league wide grants once owned by the cattle barons sought to find some product from their newly acquired acres that would compensate them for labor and capital invested.
The first experiment tried was grain raising. The virgin soil was rich and the yield of cereals large, but machinery was expensive and labor costly and of poor quality. After harvest came
the problem of transportation. The only mar- ket on the coast then was San Francisco, five hundred miles away, and there were no rail- roads to it from the south. Los Angeles, then, was a city of vast area, but of limited popula- tion and small commerce. A ton of barley would have demoralized its market for a month. The inhabitants pastured their horses on Spring street lots and kept dairy ranches out on Grasshopper street, now Figueroa. In the olden time cattle transported themselves to market, but grain sacks had to be carried. The farmer found after his crop was marketed that the lighterage charges, freight charge, commis- sion, storage and other claims that ship owners, commission merchants and middlemen could trump up were as cancerous as the old-time mortgages that ate the cattle barons out of house and home. The farmer was fortunate, indeed, if after marketing his crop he did not have to mortgage his farm to pay the deficit ; actually pay a penalty for cultivating his land.
Then began a series of agricultural experi- ments to find some product that would pay the cost of production and leave a margin to the producer. One of the first of these was the seri-culture venture. To encourage silk pro- duction in California, the legislature in 1867
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passed an act giving a bounty of $250 for every plantation of mulberry trees two years old and one of $300 for every 100,000 merchantable cocoons produced. This greatly encouraged the planting of trees and the production of cocoons, if it did not add to the number of yards of silk in California. In 1869 it was esti- mated that in Central and Southern California there were ten million mulberry trees in various stages of growth. One nursery in San Gabriel, "The Home of the Silk Worm" as its proprietor called it, advertised 700,000 trees and cuttings for sale. Two million trees were planted in and around Los Angeles. The Los Angeles News of April 11, 1869, says: "We risk noth- ing when we express the belief that in two years from this time the silk products of this country will amount to several million dollars."
At first the profits from the sericulture indus- try were large, not, however, from the manufac- ture of silk, but from the sale of silk worm eggs. When the industry was launched eggs sold at $10 an ounce and the worms were good layers. One sericulturist reported a net profit of $1,000 made in sixty days from the sale of eggs. An- other realized $1.260 an acre in a single season. The net profits from his three acres of mul- berry trees and cocoons exceeded the net profits of his neighbor's 5,000 acres of grain. With such immense returns from such small invest- ments it is not strange that the sericulture craze became epidemic. Mulberry plantations multiplied until the bounties paid threatened the state treasury with bankruptcy. A san- guine writer in the Overland Monthly of 1869 says: "It is almost startling to think that from a calling so apparently insignificant we may be able to realize in a short time a larger sum and infinitely greater gains than from one half of all our other agricultural productions in the state."
With the increased supply the price of eggs declined until it was all supply and no demand. Then the sericulture epidemic came to a sud- den stop. The worms died of starvation and the bounty-bought mulberry plantations per- ished from neglect. Of the millions of trees that rustled their broad leaves in the breeze not even the fittest survived. They all died.
Another agricultural experiment which prom- ised good returns but resulted in failure was cotton growing. A number of experiments on
a small scale made at different times and in different places in the state had proved that cotton could be grown in California equal in quality to the Sea Island and Tennessee upland of the Southern States, but no attempt had been made to produce it in quantity.
The Civil war had demoralized the cotton industry in the south and greatly advanced the price of raw material. The legislature of Cali- fornia to encourage cotton growing in the state offered premiums for a certain number of the best bales produced. About 1866-67 Don Mateo Kellar, an old resident of Los Angeles and a promoter of various enterprises, for the bene- fit of his home city tried the experiment of growing cotton on irrigated lands. Eighty acres of land lying north of Jefferson street and west of Figueroa, now covered with fine resi- dences, was planted in cotton. The plants grew luxuriantly and produced abundantly. The bursting bolls whitened the field like the snows of winter in an Arctic landscape. Enthusiastic agriculturists rejoiced over the advent of a new industry and prophesied that cotton would be "King in California." Don Mateo built a gin and ginned a number of bales that took a pre- mium, but the profits from his venture were not sufficiently great to induce him to become a cotton planter.
Col. J. L. Strong, a cotton planter from Ten- nessee, in 1870 secured from the Los Angeles & San Bernardino Land Company a lease of six hundred acres located near the Santa Ana river in the Gospel Swamp country, a region famous in early times for mammoth pumpkins and monster camp meetings. On this he planted a large field of cotton. The cotton grew like the fabled green bay tree and produced fabulous returns, but not in money.
On the Merced river bottoms near Snellings was a plantation of a thousand acres and in Fresno county were a number of smaller ones aggregating about five hundred acres. The California Cotton Growers & Manufacturers Association purchased ten thousand acres of land adjoining, and covering part of the present site of Bakersfield, the oil metropolis of Kern county. On account of the difficulty of obtain- ing seed only three hundred acres were planted the first year ; a portion of this made a fine crop of excellent quality.
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The association announced that it would plant 2,000 acres next year, and to encourage others to plant would furnish growers with seed and gin their cotton free. To secure laborers the members of the association im- ported a colony of negro cottonfield laborers from the south, built cabins for them and hired them to plant, cultivate, pick and gin the pros- pective crop. The colored persons discovered that they could get much better wages at other employment and deserted their employers. The cotton crop went to grass and the cotton growers went into bankruptcy.
Experiments tried in various parts of the state demonstrated beyond a doubt that cotton of the finest quality could be grown in Cali- fornia, but when it came to figuring profits in the business "that was another story." The negro cotton picker was not in evidence in Cali- fornia ; the Mexican peon and the mission neo- phyte could pick grapes, but cotton picking was beyond their ken. White labor was too scarce and too expensive, so the coast wind did most of the picking.
For that which was gathered and baled there was no market nearer than Lowell or Liverpool -18,000 miles away via Cape Horn. There were no railroads then in Southern California and no cotton factories on the Pacific Coast ; so the cotton boll, like the silk cocoon, disap- peared from the land of the afternoon, the former to reappear after a lapse of nearly fifty years as a paying industry on the reclaimed Colorado desert.
Of all the numerous experiments tried with different agricultural products none had proved a panacea for our financial ills. Our long dis- tance from market and the consequent cost of transportation made it imperative to produce some commodity to which there could be little or no local competition when transported to and sold in an eastern market.
For nearly three quarters of a century after its settlement oranges had been grown in Southern California but not for exportation. The first oranges were produced at San Gabriel in 1805 from trees raised from seed brought from Mexico. The first grown within the limits of the pueblo of Los Angeles, according to Col. J. J. Warner, were planted in 1815. They were planted on a lot on Aliso street. They were in full bearing in 1831 when Colonel
Warner came to Los Angeles. There is no record of the name of the man who planted the first tree in the pueblo. During the Mexican era some of the wealthier families had a few trees in their gardens.
Oranges were grown in the gardens of all the missions of Southern California. Edwin Bryant, a lieutenant in Fremont's Battalion, in his book "What I Saw in California," describ- ing the Mission of San Fernando, where the battalion encamped January 11, 1847, says : "There are two extensive gardens surrounded by high walls, and a stroll through them af- forded a most delightful contrast from the usually uncultivated landscape we have been traveling through for so long a time. Here were brought together most of the fruits and many of the plants of the temperate and tropi- cal climates. Although not the season of flow- ers, still the roses were in bloom, oranges, lemons, figs and olives hung upon the trees and the blood-red tuna or prickly pear looked very tempting." The Mission of San Fernando was secularized in 1834. The orange and lemon trees were doubtless planted before the secular- ization of the mission.
William Wolfskill in 1841 planted a small grove of orange trees. Lieutenant Bryant, who visited Mr. Wolfskill, describes his vineyard. "Mr. W.'s vineyard is young and covers about forty acres of ground, the number of vines being 4,000 or 5,000. From the produce of these he told me that last year he made 180 casks of wine and the same quantity of aguar- diente ; a cask here is sixteen gallons. Mr. Wolf- skill's vineyard is doubtless a model of its kind. It was a delightful recreation to stroll through it, and among the tropical fruit trees bordering its walks."
Wolfskill's original grove was on what are now the Southern Pacific depot grounds on Alameda street. He added to his original or- chard until it covered seventy acres. But the additions were not made until long after the American occupation.
I have made an extensive search of the old records and of the reports in the early Los Angeles newspapers for statistics relating to the development of the orange industry in Los Angeles. The returns have been rather meager. The old-time editor was far more in- terested in state and national politics than in
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the local happenings of his town. A column editorial on the misdeeds and wickedness of his political opponents was much easier dished up to his readers than reports of the growth and development of the town and country where he lived.
In the early '50s there had been compara- tively little attention paid to fruit raising in Los Angeles except grapes. These formed one of the chief exports from San Pedro to San Francisco.
In 1856 an increased interest began to be taken in fruit products. The Los Angeles Star of November, 1856, commenting on the report of the county assessor to the surveyor-general on the products of the county says: "Our hor- ticulture from the decay it wore since taken out of the control of the mission padres has taken new life, and in the new hands which now preside over it are laboring to bring it back to its former luxuriance and excellence and are adding many new plants."
From the assessor's report above referred to we find there were in the county in 1856 one hundred fifty-one orange trees in full bearing and 4,200 young trees in different stages of growth. Col. J. J. Warner, in a communication published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1873, commenting on the profits of orange growing, says : "An orchard of 1,800 trees planted in 1856, between the years of 1864 and 1870, netted its owner $10,000. Another orchard of 600 trees planted the same year, when fourteen years old produced 600,000 oranges.
In 1856, according to the above report, there were only ten lemon trees in full bearing and fifty young trees. Evidently citrus growing for profit began about 1856.
The first record I have found of trees im- ported from foreign countries is an item in the Los Angeles Star of January 26, 1856: "Dr. Shaw has just returned from Central America with a large quantity of sweet orange trees, mangrove and coffee plants in excellent condi- tion." There was at one time an attempt made in Los Angeles county to grow the coffee tree. A number of trees were planted, but from some cause the experiment was a failure.
Dr. Joseph Shaw was one of the pioneer nurserymen of Los Angeles who did good work in promoting the culture of semi-tropical fruits. In the Star of 1856 he advertises his nursery
and gives the location "a mile and a half below the city." Its actual location was on the west side of San Pedro street between East Adams and Thirtieth street. ,
Major Ben C. Truman, who visited Dr. Shaw's place in 1874, thus describes it: "The thirty-five-acre lot comprising the nursery and adjacent grounds will in a few years be an orchard devoted exclusively to oranges, Sicily lemons and limes, twenty-five hundred of the two former and one thousand trees of the latter having been planted within the past year or two. At present there are in full bearing two hundred orange trees, twenty limes and twenty Sicily lemons.
"Dr. Shaw came to this part of the country about twenty years ago (he came in 1854), but did not turn his attention to semi-tropical fruit culture until several years later. When he made up his mind to do so he made a voyage to Nicaragua, and returning, brought with him seeds from oranges grown there of a superior variety. His seedlings are from fruit grown on trees raised from the Nicaragua seed and are justly renowned for their size and delicious flavor."
Major Truman says at the time of his visit there were seventy-five thousand young trees of various kinds in Dr. Shaw's nursery. "A very few years will transform this Los Angeles nursery into an estate perfect in its propor- tions and complete in its appointments."
This "estate" over which Major Truman grew enthusiastic and prophetic in but little more than a decade after his visit was swept by a besom of destruction. The great real estate boom of 1887 struck it. The real estate pro- moter cut swaths through its groves for streets and the cottony scale sucked the life out of the trees that remained. The only monument to the old pioneer horticulturist, who did much for the benefit of his city and state, is a re- corded map of the subdivision of the Shaw tract in the county recorder's office.
There is a very general impression that the orange trees at San Gabriel Mission furnished the seed for the early orange groves. This is doubtless true of the small orchards planted before the conquest. After the American occu- pation seed was imported. Gov. J. G. Downey, in the Overland Monthly of June, 1874, says: "In the year 1853 Mathew Keller and Dr.
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