The county has a sea-coast line of one hundred miles, and contains three millions of acres; two thirds mountain and desert, the remaining million good pasturage and tillable land. What is known as the great Los Angeles valley has an area of about sixty miles in length by thirty in width, and contains the three rivers of the county,—the Los Angeles, the Santa Ana, and the San Gabriel. Every drop of the water of these rivers and of the numberless little springs and streams ministering to their system is owned, rated, utilized, and, one might almost add, wrangled over. The chapters of these water litigations are many and full; and it behooves every new settler in the county to inform himself on that question first of all, and thoroughly.
In the Los Angeles valley lie several lesser valleys, fertile and beautiful; most notable of these, the San Gabriel valley, where was the site of the old San Gabriel Mission, twelve miles east of the town of Los Angeles. This valley is now taken up in large ranches, or in colonies of settlers banded together for mutual help and security in matter of water rights. This colony feature is daily becoming more and more an important one in the development of the whole country. Small individual proprietors cannot usually afford the purchase of sufficient water to make horticultural enterprises successful or safe. The incorporated colony, therefore, offers advantages to large numbers of settlers of a class that could not otherwise get foothold in the country,—the men of comparatively small means, who expect to work with their hands and await patiently the slow growth of moderate fortunes,—a most useful and abiding class, making a solid basis for prosperity. Some of the best results in South California have already been attained in colonies of this sort, such as Anaheim, Riverside, and Pasadena. The method is regarded with increasing favor. It is a rule of give and take, which works equally well for both country and settlers.
The South California statistics of fruits, grain, wool, honey, etc., read more like fancy than like fact, and are not readily believed by one unacquainted with the country. The only way to get a real comprehension and intelligent acceptance of them is to study them on the ground. By a single visit to a great ranch one is more enlightened than he would be by committing to memory scores of Equalization Board Reports. One of the very best, if not the best, for this purpose is Baldwin's ranch, in the San Gabriel valley. It includes a large part of the old lands of the San Gabriel Mission, and is a principality in itself.
There are over a hundred men on its pay-roll, which averages $4,000 a month. Another $4,000 does not more than meet its running expenses. It has $6,000 worth of machinery for its grain harvests alone. It has a dairy of forty cows, Jersey and Durham; one hundred and twenty work-horses and mules, and fifty thoroughbreds.
It is divided into four distinct estates: the Santa Anita, of 16,000 acres; Puente, 18,000; Merced, 20,000; and the Potrero, 25,000. The Puente and Merced are sheep ranches, and have 20,000 sheep on them. The Potrero is rented out to small farmers. The Santa Anita is the home estate. On it are the homes of the family and of the laborers. It has fifteen hundred acres of oak grove, four thousand acres in grain, five hundred in grass for hay, one hundred and fifty in orange orchards, fifty of almond trees, sixty of walnuts, twenty-five of pears, fifty of peaches, twenty of lemons, and five hundred in vines; also small orchards of chestnuts, hazel-nuts, and apricots; and thousands of acres of good pasturage.
From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in May, he will drive through a wild garden,—asters, yellow and white; scarlet pentstemons, blue larkspur, monk's-hood; lupines, white and blue; gorgeous golden eschscholtzia, alder, wild lilac, white sage,—all in riotous flowering.
Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he will look southward down gentle slopes of orchards and vineyards far across the valley, the tints growing softer and softer, and blending more and more with each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze. Driving from orchard to orchard, down half-mile avenues through orchards skirting seemingly endless stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what comes of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of hundreds of acres, and the Equalization Board Statistics no longer appear to him even large. It does not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in vines, when here on one man's ranch are five hundred acres. The last Equalization Board Report said the county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees. It would hardly have surprised him to be told that there were as many as that in the Santa Anita groves alone. The effect on the eye of such huge tracts, planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase enormously the apparent size of the tract; the mind stumbles on the very threshold of the attempt to reckon its distances and numbers, and they become vaster and vaster as they grow vague.
The orange orchard is not the unqualifiedly beautiful spectacle one dreams it will be; nor, in fact, is it so beautiful as it ought to be, with its evergreen shining foliage, snowy blossoms, and golden fruit hanging together and lavishly all the year round. I fancy that if travellers told truth, ninety-nine out of a hundred would confess to a grievous disappointment at their first sight of the orange at home. In South California the trees labor under the great disadvantage of being surrounded by bare brown earth. How much this dulls their effect one realizes on finding now and then a neglected grove where grass has been allowed to grow under the trees, to their ruin as fruit-bearers, but incomparably heightening their beauty. Another fatal defect in the orange-tree is its contour. It is too round, too stout for its height; almost as bad a thing in a tree as in a human being. The uniformity of this contour of the trees, combined with the regularity of their setting in evenly spaced rows, gives large orange groves a certain tiresome quality, which one recognizes with a guilty sense of being shamefully ungrateful for so much splendor of sheen and color. The exact spherical shape of the fruit possibly helps on this tiresomeness. One wonders if oblong bunches of long-pointed and curving fruit, banana-like, set irregularly among the glossy green leaves, would not look better; which wonder adds to ingratitude an impertinence, of which one suddenly repents on seeing such a tree as I saw in a Los Angeles garden in the winter of 1882,—a tree not over thirty feet high, with twenty-five hundred golden oranges hanging on it, among leaves so glossy they glittered in the sun with the glitter of burnished metal. Never the Hesperides saw a more resplendent sight.
But the orange looks its best plucked and massed; it lends itself then to every sort and extent of decoration. At a citrus fair in the Riverside colony in March, 1882, in a building one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty wide, built of redwood planks, were five long tables loaded with oranges and lemons; rows, plates, pyramids, baskets; the bright redwood walls hung with great boughs, full as when broken from the tree; and each plate and pyramid decorated with the shining green leaves. The whole place was fairly ablaze, and made one think of the Arabian Nights' Tales. The acme of success in orange culture in California is said to have been attained in this Riverside colony, though it is only six years old, and does not yet number two thousand souls. There are in its orchards 209,000 orange-trees, of which 28,000 are in bearing, 20,000 lemon trees, and 8,000 limes.
The profits of orange culture are slow to begin, but, having once begun, mount up fast. Orange orchards at San Gabriel have in many instances netted $500 an acre annually. The following estimate, the result of sixteen years' experience, is probably a fair one of the outlay and income of a small orange grove:—
| 10 acres of land, at $75 per acre | $750.00 |
| 1000 trees, at $75 per hundred | 750.00 |
| Ploughing and harrowing, $2.50 per acre | 25.00 |
| Digging holes, planting, 10 cents each | 100.00 |
| Irrigating and planting | 10.00 |
|
Cultivation after irrigation
|