The third belt lies back of this, farther from the sea; and the land, without irrigation, is worthless for all purposes except pasturage. That, in years of average rain-fall, is good.
The soils of South California are chiefly of the cretaceous and tertiary epochs. The most remarkable thing about them is their great depth. It is not uncommon, in making wells, to find the soil the same to a depth of one hundred feet; the same thing is to be observed in cañons, cuts, and exposed bluffs on the sea-shore. This accounts for the great fertility of much of the land. Crops are raised year after year, sometimes for twenty successive years, on the same fields, without the soil's showing exhaustion; and what are called volunteer crops, sowing themselves, give good yields for the first, second, and even third year after the original planting.
To provide for a wholesome variety and succession of seasons, in a country where both winter and summer were debarred full reign, was a meteorological problem that might well have puzzled even Nature's ingenuity. But next to a vacuum, she abhors monotony; and to avoid it, she has, in California, resorted even to the water-cure,—getting her requisite alternation of seasons by making one wet and the other dry.
To define the respective limits of these seasons becomes more and more difficult the longer one stays in California, and the more one studies rain-fall statistics. Generally speaking, the wet season may be said to be from the middle of October to the middle of April, corresponding nearly with the outside limits of the north temperate zone season of snows. A good description of the two seasons would be—and it is not so purely humorous and unscientific as it sounds—that the wet season is the season in which it can rain, but may not; and the dry season is the season in which it cannot rain, but occasionally does.
Sometimes the rains expected and hoped for in October do not begin until March, and the whole country is in anxiety; a drought in the wet season meaning drought for a year, and great losses. There have been such years in California, and the dread of them is well founded. But often the rains, coming later than their wont, are so full and steady that the requisite number of inches fall, and the year's supply is made good. The average rain-fall in San Diego County is ten inches; in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, fifteen; in Santa Barbara, twenty. These five counties are all that properly come under the name of South California, resting the division on natural and climatic grounds. The political division, if ever made, will be based on other than natural or climatic reasons, and will include two, possibly three, more counties.
The pricelessness of water in a land where no rain falls during six months of the year cannot be appreciated by one who has not lived in such a country. There is a saying in South California that if a man buys water he can get his land thrown in. This is only an epigrammatic putting of the literal fact that the value of much of the land depends solely upon the water which it holds or controls.
Four systems of irrigation are practised: First, flooding the land. This is possible only in flat districts, where there are large heads of water. It is a wasteful method, and is less and less used each year. The second system is by furrows. By this system a large head of water is brought upon the land and distributed in small streams in many narrow furrows. The streams are made as small as will run across the ground, and are allowed to run only twenty-four hours at a time. The third system is by basins dug around tree roots. To these basins water is brought by pipes or ditches; or, in mountain lands, by flumes. The fourth system is by sub-irrigation. This is the most expensive system of all, but is thought to economize water. The water is carried in pipes laid from two to three feet under ground. By opening valves in these pipes the water is let out and up, but never comes above the surface.
The appliances of one sort and another belonging to these irrigation systems add much to the picturesqueness of South California landscapes. Even the huge, tower-like, round-fanned windmills by which the water is pumped up are sometimes, spite of their clumsiness, made effective by gay colors and by vines growing on them. If they had broad, stretching arms, like the Holland windmills, the whole country would seem a-flutter.
The history of the industries of South California since the American occupation is interesting in its record of successions,—successions, not the result of human interventions and decisions so much as of climatic fate, which, in epoch after epoch, created different situations.
The history begins with the cattle interest; hardly an industry, perhaps, or at any rate an unindustrious one, but belonging in point of time at the head of the list of the ways and means by which money has been made in the country. It dates back to the old mission days; to the two hundred head of cattle which the wise Galvez brought, in 1769, for stocking the three missions projected in Upper California.
From these had grown, in the sixty years of the friars' unhindered rule, herds, of which it is no exaggeration to say that they covered thousands of hills and were beyond counting. It is probable that even the outside estimates of their numbers were short of the truth. The cattle wealth, the reckless ruin of the secularization period, survived, and was the leading wealth of the country at the time of its surrender to the United States. It was most wastefully handled. The cattle were killed, as they had been in the mission days, simply for their hides and tallow. Kingdoms full of people might have been fed on the beef which rotted on the ground every year, and the California cattle ranch in which either milk or butter could be found was an exception to the rule.
Into the calm of this half-barbaric life broke the fierce excitement of the gold discovery in 1849. The swarming hordes of ravenous miners must be fed; beef meant gold. The cattlemen suddenly found in their herds a new source of undreamed-of riches. Cattle had been sold as low as two dollars and a half a head. When the gold fever was at its highest, there were days and places in which they sold for three hundred. It is not strange that the rancheros lost their heads, grew careless and profligate.
Then came the drought of 1864, which killed off cattle by thousands of thousands. By thousands they were driven over steep places into the sea to save pasturage, and to save the country from the stench and the poison of their dying of hunger. In April of that year, fifty thousand head were sold in Santa Barbara for thirty-seven and a half cents a head. Many of the rancheros were ruined; they had to mortgage their lands to live; their stock was gone; they could not farm; values so sank, that splendid estates were not worth over ten cents an acre.
Then came in a new set of owners. From the north and from the interior poured in the thriftier sheep men, with big flocks; and for a few years the wide belt of good pasturage land along the coast was chiefly a sheep country.
Slowly farmers followed; settling, in the beginning, around town centres such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Ventura. Grains and vegetables were grown for a resource when cattle and sheep should fail. Cows needed water all the year round; corn only a few months. A wheat-field might get time to ripen in a year when by reason of a drought a herd of cattle would die.
Thus the destiny of the country steadily went on toward its fulfilling, because the inexorable logic of the situation forced itself into the minds of the population. From grains and vegetables to fruits was a short and natural step, in the balmy air, under the sunny sky, and with the traditions and relics of the old friars' opulent fruit growths lingering all through the land. Each palm, orange-tree, and vineyard left on the old mission sites was a way-signal to the new peoples; mute, yet so eloquent, the wonder is that so many years should have elapsed before the road began to be thronged.
Such, in brief, is the chronicle of the development of South California's outdoor industries down to the present time; of the successions through which the country has been making ready to become what it will surely be, the Garden of the world,—a garden with which no other country can vie; a garden in which will grow, side by side, the grape and the pumpkin, the pear and the orange, the olive and the apple, the strawberry and the lemon, Indian corn and the banana, wheat and the guava.
The leading position which the fruit interest will ultimately take has been reached only in Los Angeles County. There the four chief industries, ranged according to their relative importance, stand as follows: Fruit, grain, wool, stock, and dairy. This county may be said to be pre-eminently the garden of the Garden. No other of the five counties can compete with it. Its fruit harvest is nearly unintermitted all