A history of California and an extended history of its southern coast counties, also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I, Part 33

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1184

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Walker's career is an anomaly in the history of mankind. Devoid of all the characteristics of a great leader, without a commanding presence, puny in size, homely to the point of ugliness, in disposition, cold, cruel, selfish, heartless, stol- idly indifferent to the suffering of others, living only to gratify the cravings of his inordinate ambition-it is strange that such a man could attract thousands to offer their lives for his aggrandizement and sacrifice themselves for a cause of which he was the exponent, a cause the most ignoble, the extension of human slavery, that for such a man and for such a cause thou- sands did offer up their lives is a sad commen- tary on the political morality of that time. It is said that over ten thousand men joined Walker in his filibustering schemes and that fifty-seven hundred of these found graves in Nicaragua. Of the number of natives killed in battle or who died of disease, there is no record, but it greatly exceeded Walker's losses.

While Walker was attaining some success in Nicaragua, another California filibuster entered the arena. This was Henry A. Crabb, a Stock- ton lawyer. Like Walker, he was a native of Tennessee, and, like him, too, he was a rabid pro-slavery advocate. He had served in the assembly and one term in the state senate. It is said he was the author of a bill to allow slave- holders who brought their slaves into California before its admission to take their human chattels back into bondage. He was originally a Whig. but had joined the Know-Nothing party and was a candidate of that party for United States sen- ator in 1856; but his extreme southern princi-

ples prevented his election. He had married a Spanish wife, who had numerous and influential relatives in Sonora. It was claimed that Crabb had received an invitation from some of these to bring down an armed force of Americans to overthrow the government and make himself master of the country. Whether he did or did not receive such an invitation, he did recruit a body of men for some kind of service in Sonora. With a force of one hundred men, well armed with rifles and revolvers, he sailed, in January, 1857, on the steamer Sea Bird, from San Fran- cisco to San Pedro and from there marched over- land. As usual, no attempt was made by the federal authorities to prevent him from invading a neighboring country with an armed force.

He entered Sonora at Sonita, a small town one hundred miles from Yuma. His men helped themselves to what they could find. When ap- proaching the town of Cavorca they were fired upon by a force of men lying in ambush. The fire was kept up from all quarters. They made a rush and gained the shelter of the houses. In the charge two of their men had been killed and eighteen wounded. In the house they had taken possession of they were exposed to shots from a church. Crabb and fifteen of his men at- tempted to blow open the doors of the church with gunpowder, but in the attempt, which failed, five of the men were killed, and seven, including Crabb, wounded. After holding out for five days they surrendered to the Mexicans, Gabilondo, the Mexican commander, promising to spare their lives. Next morning they were marched out in squads of five to ten and shot. Crabb was tied to a post and a hundred balls fired into him; his head was cut off and placed in a jar of mescal. The only one spared was a boy of fifteen, Charles E. Evans. A party of sixteen men whom Crabb had left at Sonita was surprised and all massacred. The boy Evans was the only one left to tell the fate of the ill-starred expedition. This put an end to fili- bustering expeditions into Sonora.

These armed forays on the neighboring coun- tries to the south of the United States ceased with the beginning of the war of secession. They had all been made for the purpose of ac- quiring slave territory. The leaders of them

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were southern men and the rank and file were mostly recruited from natives of the slave states. Bancroft truthfully says of these filibustering expeditions: "They were foul robberies, covered by the flimsiest of political and social pretenses, gilded by false aphorisms and profane distortion of sacred formula. Liberty dragged in the mud for purposes of theft and human enslavement; the cause of humanity bandied in filthy mouths to promote atrocious butcheries; peaceful,

blooming valleys given over to devastation and ruin; happy families torn asunder, and widows and orphans cast adrift to nurse affliction; and finally, the peace of nations imperiled, and the morality of right insulted. The thought of such results should obliterate all romance, and turn pride to shame. They remain an ineffaceable stain upon the government of the most progres- sive of nations, and veil in dismal irony the dream of manifest destiny."

CHAPTER XXIX.

FROM GOLD TO GRAIN AND FRUITS.

U NDER the Spanish and Mexican jurisdic- tions there was but little cultivation of the soil in California. While the gardens of some of the missions, and particularly those of Santa Barbara and San Buenaventura, pre- sented a most appetizing display of fruit and vegetables, at the ranchos there were but mea- ger products. Gilroy says that when he came to the country, in 1814, potatoes were not cul- tivated and it was a rare thing outside of the mission gardens to find any onions or cabbages. A few acres of wheat and a small patch of maize or corn furnished bread, or, rather, tortillas for a family. At the missions a thick soup made of boiled wheat or maize and meat was the stand- ard article of diet for the neophytes. This was portioned out to them in the quantity of about three pints to each person. Langsdorff, who witnessed the distribution of soup rations to the Indians at Santa Clara, says: "It appeared in- comprehensible how any one could three times a day eat so large a portion of such nourishing food." The neophytes evidently had healthy ap- petites. Frijoles (beans) were the staple vege- table dish in Spanish families. These were served up at almost every meal. The bill of fare for a native Californian family was very simple.

A considerable amount of wheat was raised at the more favorably located missions. It was not raised for export, but to feed the neophytes.

The wheat fields had to be fenced in, or perhaps it would be more in accordance with the facts to say that the cattle had to be fenced out. As timber was scarce, adobe brick did duty for fencing as well as for house building. Some- times the low adobe walls were made high and safe by placing on top of them a row of the skulls of Spanish cattle with the long, curving horns attached to them pointing outward. These were brought from the matanzas or slaughter corrals where there were thousands of them lying around. It was almost impossible for . man or beast to scale such a fence.

The agricultural implements of the early Cali- fornians were few and simple. The Mexican plow was a forked stick with an iron point fas- tened to the fork or branch that penetrated the ground. It turned no furrow, but merely scratched the surface of the ground. After sow- ing it was a race between the weeds and the grain. It depended on the season which won. If the season was cold and backward, so that the seed did not sprout readily, the weeds got the start and won out easily. And yet with such primitive cultivation the yield was sometimes astonishing. At the Mission San Diego the crop of wheat one year produced one hundred and ninety-five fold. As the agriculturist had a large area from which to select his arable land. only the richest soils were chosen. Before the discovery of gold there was little or no market

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for grain, and each ranchero raised only enough for his own use. For a time there was some trade with the Russians in grain to supply their settlements in Alaska, but this did not continue long.

When some of the Americans who came in the gold rush began to turn their attention to agriculture they greatly underrated the produc- tiveness of the country. To men raised where the summer rains were needed to raise a crop it seemed impossible to produce a crop in a country that was rainless for six or eight months of the year. All attempts at agriculture hitherto had been along the rivers, and it was generally believed that the plains back from the water courses could never be used for any other pur- pose than cattle raising.

The mining rush of '49 found California with- out vegetables and fresh fruit. The distance was too great for the slow transportation of that day to ship these into the country. Those who first turned their attention to market gar- dening made fortunes. The story is told of an old German named Schwartz who had a small ranch a few miles below Sacramento. In 1848, when everybody was rushing to the mines, he remained on his farm, unmoved by the stories of the wonderful finds of gold. Anticipating a greater rush in 1849, hie planted several acres in watermelons. As they ripened he took them up to the city and disposed of them at prices ranging from $t to $5, according to size. He realized that season from his melons alone $30,000. The first field of cabbages was grown by George H. Peck and a partner in 1850. From defective seed or some other cause the cabbage failed to come to a head. Supposing that the defect was in the climate and not in the cabbage, the honest rancher marketed his crop in San Francisco, carrying a cabbage in each hand along the streets until he found a customer. To the query why there were no heads to them the reply was, "That's the way cabbages grow in California." He got rid of his crop at the rate of $1 apiece for each headless cabbage. But all the vegetable growing experiments were not a financial success. The high price of po- tatoes in 1849 started a tuber-growing epidemic in 1850. Hundreds of acres were planted to

"spuds" in the counties contiguous to San Francisco, the agriculturists paying as high as fifteen cents per pound for seed. The yield was enormous and the market was soon overstocked. The growers who could not dispose of their potatoes stacked them up in huge piles in the fields; and there they rotted, filling the country around with their effluvia. The next year no- body planted potatoes, and prices went up to the figures of '49 and the spring of '50.

The size to which vegetables grew astonished the amateur agriculturists. Beets, when allowed to grow to maturity, resembled the trunks of trees; onions looked like squash, while a patch of pumpkins resembled a tented field; and corn grew so tall that the stalks had to be felled to get at the ears. Onions were a favorite vege- table in the mining camps on account of their anti-scorbutic properties as a preventive of scurvy. The honest miner was not fastidious about the aroma. They were a profitable crop, too. One ranchero in the Napa valley was re- ported to have cleared $8,000 off two acres of onions.

With the decline of gold mining, wheat be- came the staple product of central California. The nearness to shipping ports and the large yields made wheat growing very profitable. In the years immediately following the Civil war the price ranged high and a fortune was some- times made from the products of a single field. It may be necessary to explain that the field might contain anywhere from five hundred to a thousand acres. The grain area was largely extended by the discovery that land in the upper mesas, which had been regarded as only fit for pasture land, was good for cereals. The land in the southern part of the state, which was held in large grants, continued to be de- voted to cattle raising for at least two decades after the American conquest. After the dis- covery of gold, cattle raising became immensely profitable. Under the Mexican régime a steer was worth what his hide and tallow would bring or about $2 or $3. The rush of immigration in 1849 sent the price of cattle up until a fat bul- lock sold for from $30 to $35. The profit to a ranchero who had a thousand or more marketa- ble cattle was a fortune. A good, well-stocked

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cattle ranch was more valuable than a gold mine.

The enormous profits in cattle raising dazed the Californians. Had they been thrifty and economical, they might have grown rich. But the sudden influx of wealth engendered extrava- gant habits and when the price of cattle fell, as it did in a few years, the spendthrift customs were continued. When the cattle market was dull it was easy to raise money by mortgaging the ranch. With interest at the rate of 5 per cent per month, compounded monthly, it did not take long for land and cattle both to change hands. It is related of the former owner of the Santa Gertrudes rancho that he borrowed $500 from a money lender, at 5 per cent a month, to beat a poker game, but did not suc- ceed. Then he borrowed more money to pay the interest on the first and kept on doing so until interest and principal amounted to $100,- 000; then the mortgage was foreclosed and property to-day worth $1,000,000 was lost for a paltry $500 staked on a poker game.

Gold mining continued to be the prevailing industry of northern California. The gold pro- duction reached its acme in 1853, when the total yield was $65,000,000. From that time there was a gradual decline in production and in the number of men employed. Many had given up the hopes of striking it rich and quit the business for something more certain and less illusive. The production of gold in 1852 was $60,000,000, yet the average yield to each man of the one hundred thousand engaged in it was only about $600, or a little over $2 per day to the man, scarcely living wages as prices were then. It has been claimed that the cost of producing the gold, counting all expenditures, was three times the value of that produced. Even if it did, the development of the country and impulse given to trade throughout the world would more than counterbalance the loss.

At the time of the discovery of gold nearly all of the fruit raised in California was produced at Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. In Spanish and Mexican days, Los Angeles had been the prin- cipal wine-producing district of California. Al- though wine, as well as other spirituous liquors, were in demand, the vineyardists found it more

profitable to ship their grapes to San Francisco than to manufacture them into wine. Grapes retailed in the city of San Francisco at from twelve and one-half to twenty-five cents a pound. The vineyards were as profitable as the cattle ranches. The mission Indians did the labor in the vineyards and were paid in aguar- diente on Saturday night. By Sunday morning they were all drunk; then they were gathered up and put into a corral. On Monday morning they were sold to pay the cost of their dissipa- tion. It did not take many years to kill off the Indians. The city has grown over the former sites of the vineyards.

The first orange trees were planted at the Mission San Gabriel about the year 1815 and a few at Los Angeles about the same time. But little attention was given to the industry by the Californians. The first extensive grove was planted by William Wolfskill in 1840. The im- pression then prevailed that oranges could be grown only on the low lands near the river. The idea of attempting to grow them on the mesa lands was scouted at by the Californians and the Americans. The success that attended the Riverside experiment demonstrated that they could be grown on the mesas, and that the fruit produced was superior to that grown on the river bottoms. This gave such an impetus to the industry in the south that it has distanced all others. The yearly shipment to the eastern markets is twenty thousand car loads. The cit- rus belt is extending every year.

The Californians paid but little attention to the quality of the fruit they raised. The seed fell in the ground and sprouted. If the twig survived and grew to be a tree, they ate the fruit, asking no question whether the quality might be improved. The pears grown at the missions and at some of the ranch houses were hard and tasteless. It was said they never ripened. A small black fig was cultivated in a few places, but the quantity of fruit grown outside of the mission gardens was very small.

The high price of all kinds of fruit in the early '50s induced the importation of apple, peach, pear, plum and prune trees. These thrived and soon supplied the demand. Before the advent of the railroads and the shipment east the quan-

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tity of deciduous fruit produced had outgrown the demand, and there was no profit in its pro- duetion. All this has been changed by eastern shipment.

Sheep were brought to the country with the first missionary expeditions. The Indian in his primitive condition did not use clothing. A coat of mud was his only garment and he was not at all particular about the fit of that. After his conversion the missionaries put clothing on him, or, rather, on part of him. He was given a shirt, which was a shirt of Nessus, being made of the coarse woolen cloth manufactured at the mission. It was irritating to the skin and com- pelled the poor wretehes to keep up a continual scratching; at least, that is what Hugo Reid tells us. During the Civil war and for several years after, the sheep industry was very profit- able. The subdivision of the great ranehos and the absorption of the land for grain growing and fruit enlture have contracted the sheep ranges until there is but little left for pasture except the foothills that are too rough for cultivation.

Up to 1863 the great Spanish grants that cov- ered the southern part of the state had, with a few exceptions, been held intaet and cattle rais- ing had continued to be the principal industry. For several seasons previous to the famine years of 1863 and 1864 there had been heavy rainfalls and consequently feed was abundant. With the price of cattle declining, the rancheros over- stocked their ranges to make up by quantity for decrease in value. When the dry year of 1863 set in, the feed on ranches was soon ex- hausted and the cattle starving. The second famine year following, the eattle industry was virtually wiped out of existence and the cattle- owners ruined. In Santa Barbara, where the eattle barons held almost imperial sway, and, with their army of retainers, controlled the political affairs of the county, of the two hun- dred thousand cattle listed on the assessment roll of 1862, only five thousand were alive when grass grew in 1865. On the Stearns' ranchos in Los Angeles county, one hundred thousand head of cattle and horses perished, and the owner of a quarter million acres and a large amount of eity property could not raise money enough to pay his taxes.

Many of the rancheros were in debt when the hard times eame, and others mortgaged their land at usurious rates of interest to carry them through the famine years. Their cattle dead, they had no income to meet the interest on the cancerous mortgage that was eating up their patrimony. The result was that they were com- pelled either to sell their land or the mortgage was foreclosed and they lost it. This led to the subdivision of the large grants into small hoid- ings, the new proprietors finding that there was more profit in selling them off in small traets than in large ones. This brought in an intelli- gent and progressive population, and in a few years entirely revolutionized the agricultural conditions of the south. Grain growing and fruit raising became the prevailing industries. The adobe ranch house with its matanzas and its Golgotha of cattle skulls and bones gave place to the tasty farm house with its flower garden, lawn and orange grove.

The Californians paid but little attention to improving the breed of their cattle. When the only value in an animal was the hide and tallow, it did not pay to improve the breed. The hide of a long-horned, mouse-colored Spanish steer would sell for as much as that of a high-bred Durham or Holstein, and, besides, the first could exist where the latter would starve to deathı. After the conquest there was for some time but little improvement. Cattle were brought across the plains, but for the most part these were the mongrel breeds of the western states and were but little improvement on the Spanish stock. It was not until the famine years vir- tually exterminated the Spanish eattle that bet- ter breeds were introduced.

As with cattle, so also it was with horses. Little attention was given to improving the breed. While there were a few fine raee horses and saddle horses in the country before its American occupation, the prevailing equine was the mustang. He was a vicious beast, nor was it strange that his temper was bad. He had to endure starvation and abuse that would have killed a more aristocratic animal. He took care of himself, subsisted on what he could pick up and to the best of his ability resented ill treat- ment. Horses during the Mexican régime were

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used only for riding. Oxen were the draft ani- mals. The mustang had one inherent trait that did not endear him to an American, and that was his propensity to "buck." With his nose between his knees, his back arched and his legs stiffened, by a series of short, quick jumps, he could dismount an inexperienced rider with neatness and dispatchi. The Californian took delight in urging the bronco to "buck" so that he (the rider) might exhibit his skillful horse- manship. The mustang had some commenda- ble traits as well. He was sure-footed as a goat and could climb the steep hillsides almost equal to that animal. He had an easy gait under the saddle and could measure off mile after mile without a halt. His power of endurance was wonderful. He could live off the country when apparently there was nothing to subsist on ex- cept the bare ground. He owed mankind a debt of ingratitude which he always stood ready to pay when an opportunity offered. The passing of the mustang began with the advent of the American farmer.

The founding of agricultural colonies began in the '50s. One of the first, if not the first, was the German colony of Anaheim, located thirty miles south of Los Angeles. A company of Germans organized in San Francisco in 1857 for the purpose of buying land for the cultiva- tion of the wine grape and the manufacture of wine. The organization was a stock company. Eleven hundred acres were purchased in a Spanish grant. This was subdivided into twenty and forty acre tracts; an irrigating ditch brought in from the Santa Ana river. A por- tion of each subdivision was planted in vines and these were cultivated by the company until they came into bearing, when the tracts were divided among the stockholders by lot, a cer- tain valuation being fixed on each tract. The man obtaining a choice lot paid into the fund a certain amount and the one receiving an infe- rior tract received a certain amount, so that each received the same value in the distribution. The colony proved quite a success, and for thirty years Anaheim was one of the largest wine- producing districts in the United States. In 1887 a mysterious disease destroyed all the vines and the vineyardists turned their attention

to the cultivation of oranges and English walnuts.

The Riverside colony, then in San Bernardino county, now in Riverside county, was founded in 1870. The projectors of the colony were eastern gentlemen. At the head of the organiza- tion was Judge J. W. North. They purchased four thousand acres of the Roubidoux or Jurupa rancho and fourteen hundred and sixty acres of government land from the California Silk Cen- ter Association. This association had been or- ganized in 1869 for the purpose of founding a colony to cultivate mulberry trees and manu- facture silk. It had met with reverses, first in the death of its president, Louis Prevost, a man skilled in the silk business, next in the revoca- tion by the legislature of the bounty for mul- berry plantations, and lastly in the subsidence of the sericulture craze. To encourage silk cul- ture in California, the legislature, in 1866, passed an act authorizing the payment of a bounty of $250 for every plantation of five thousand mul- berry trees two years old. This greatly stimu- lated the planting of mulberry trees, if it did not greatly increase the production of silk. In 1869 it was estimated that in the central and southern portions of the state there were ten millions of mulberry trees in various stages of growth. Demands for the bounty poured in upon the commissioners in such numbers that the state treasury was threatened with bank- ruptcy. The revocation of the bounty killed the silk worms and the mulberry trees; and those who had been attacked with the sericulture craze quickly recovered. The Silk Center As- sociation, having fallen into hard lines, offered its lands for sale at advantageous terms, and in September, 1870, they were purchased by the Southern California Colony Association. The land was bought at $3.50 per acre. It was mesa or table land that had never been cultivated. It was considered by old-timers indifferent sheep pasture, and Roubidoux, it is said, had it struck from the tax roll because it was not worth tax- ing.

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A history of California and an extended history of its southern coast counties, also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I, Part 33

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918 Publication date: 1907 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1184

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1184