flock of two thousand shorn sheep were suddenly let out from one of the corrals. With a great burst of bleating they dashed off, the colly running after them. Gaetano seized his whistle and blew a sharp call on it. The dog halted, looked back, uncertain for a second; one more whistle, and he bounded on.
"He know," said Gaetano. "He take dem two tousand all right. I like better dat dog as ten men."
On the list of South California's outdoor industries, grain stands high, and will always continue to do so. Wheat takes the lead; but oats, barley, and corn are of importance. Barley is always a staple, and averages twenty bushels to the acre.
Oats average from thirty to forty bushels an acre, and there are records of yields of considerably over a hundred bushels.
Corn will average forty bushels an acre. On the Los Angeles River it has grown stalks seventeen feet high and seven inches round.
The average yield of wheat is from twenty to twenty-five bushels an acre, about thirty-three per cent more than in the States on the Atlantic slope.
In grains, as in so many other things, Los Angeles County is far in advance of the other counties. In 1879 there were in the county 31,500 acres in wheat; in 1881, not less than 100,000; and the value of the wheat crop, for 1882 was reckoned $1,020,000.
The great San Fernando valley, formerly the property of the San Fernando Mission, is the chief wheat-producing section of the county. The larger part of this valley is in two great ranches. One of them was bought a few years ago for $275,000; and $75,000 paid down, the remainder to be paid in instalments. The next year was a dry year; crops failed. The purchaser offered the ranch back again to the original owners, with his $75,000 thrown in, if they would release him from his bargain. They refused. The next winter rains came, the wheat crop was large, prices were high, and the ranch actually paid off the entire debt of $200,000 still owing on the purchase.
From such figures as these, it is easy to see how the California farmer can afford to look with equanimity on occasional droughts. Experience has shown that he can lose crops two years out of five, and yet make a fair average profit for the five years.
The most beautiful ranch in California is said to be the one about twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, belonging to Elwood Cooper. Its owner speaks of it humorously as a little "pocket ranch." In comparison with the great ranches whose acres are counted by tens of thousands, it is small, being only two thousand acres in extent; but in any other part of the world except California, it would be thought a wild jest to speak of an estate of two thousand acres as a small one.
Ten years ago this ranch was a bare, desolate sheep ranch,—not a tree on it, excepting the oaks and sycamores in the cañons. To-day it has twelve hundred acres under high cultivation; and driving from field to field, orchard to orchard, one drives, if he sees the whole of the ranch, over eleven miles of good made road. There are three hundred acres in wheat, one hundred and seventy in barley; thirty-five hundred walnut trees, twelve thousand almond, five thousand olive, two thousand fig and domestic fruit trees, and one hundred and fifty thousand eucalyptus trees, representing twenty-four varieties; one thousand grape-vines; a few orange, lemon, and lime trees. There are on the ranch one hundred head of cattle, fifty horses, and fifteen hundred sheep.
These are mere bald figures, wonderful enough as statistics of what may be done in ten years' time on South California soil, but totally inadequate even to suggest the beauty of the place.
The first relief to the monotony of the arrow-straight road which it pleased an impatient, inartistic man to make westward from Santa Barbara, is the sight of high, dark walls of eucalyptus trees on either side of the road. A shaded avenue, three quarters of a mile long, of these represents the frontages of Mr. Cooper's estate. Turning to the right, through a break in this wall, is a road, with dense eucalyptus woods on the left and an almond orchard on the right. It winds and turns, past knolls of walnut grove, long lines of olive orchard, and right-angled walls of eucalyptus trees shutting in wheat-fields. By curves and bends and sharp turns, all the time with new views, and new colors from changes of crop, with exquisite glimpses of the sea shot through here and there, it finally, at the end of a mile, reaches the brink of an oak-canopied cañon. In the mouth of this cañon stands the house, fronting south on a sunny meadow and garden space, walled in on three sides by eucalyptus trees.
To describe the oak kingdom of this cañon would be to begin far back of all known kingdoms of the country. The branches are a network of rafters upholding roof canopies of boughs and leaves so solid that the sun's rays pierce them only brokenly, making on the ground a dancing carpet of brown and gold flecks even in winter, and in summer a shade lighted only by starry glints.
Farther up the cañon are sycamores, no less stately than the oaks, their limbs gnarled and twisted as if they had won their places by splendid wrestle.
These oak-and-sycamore-filled cañons are the most beautiful of the South California cañons; though the soft, chaparral-walled cañons would, in some lights, press them hard for supremacy of place. Nobody will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable chaparral. Matted, tangled, twisted, piled, tufted,—everything is chaparral. All botany may be exhausted in describing it in one place, and it will not avail you in another. But in all places, and made up of whatever hundreds of shrubs it may be, it is the most exquisite carpet surface that Nature has to show for mountain fronts or cañon sides. Not a color that it does not take; not a bloom that it cannot rival; a bank of cloud cannot be softer, or a bed of flowers more varied of hue. Some day, between 1900 and 2000, when South California is at leisure and has native artists, she will have an artist of cañons, whose life and love and work will be spent in picturing them,—the royal oak canopies; the herculean sycamores; the chameleon, velvety chaparral; and the wild, throe-built, water-quarried rock gorges, with their myriad ferns and flowers.
At the head of Mr. Cooper's cañon are broken and jutting sandstone walls, over three hundred feet high, draped with mosses and ferns and all manner of vines. I saw the dainty thalictrum, with its clover-like leaves, standing in thickets there, fresh and green, its blossoms nearly out on the first day of February. Looking down from these heights over the whole of the ranch, one sees for the first time the completeness of its beauty. The eucalyptus belts have been planted in every instance solely with a view to utility,—either as wind-breaks to keep off known special wind-currents from orchard or grain-field, or to make use of gorge sides too steep for other cultivation. Yet, had they been planted with sole reference to landscape effects, they could not better have fallen into place. Even out to the very ocean edge the groves run, their purples and greens melting into the purples and greens of the sea when it is dark and when it is sunny blue,—making harmonious lines of color, leading up from it to the soft grays of the olive and the bright greens of the walnut orchards and wheat-fields. When the almond trees are in bloom, the eucalyptus belts are perhaps most superb of all, with their dark spears and plumes waving above and around the white and rosy acres.
The leading industry of this ranch is to be the making of olive oil. Already its oil is known and sought; and to taste it is a revelation to palates accustomed to the compounds of rancid cocoanut and cotton-seed with which the markets are full. The olive industry will no doubt ultimately be one of the great industries of the whole country: vast tracts of land which are not suitable or do not command water enough for orange, grape, or grain culture, affording ample support to the thrifty and unexacting olive. The hill-slopes around San Diego, and along the coast line for forty or fifty miles up, will no doubt one day be as thickly planted with olives as is the Mediterranean shore. Italy's olive crop is worth thirty million dollars annually, and California has as much land suited to the olive as Italy has.
The tree is propagated from cuttings, begins to bear the fourth year, and is in full bearing by the tenth or twelfth. One hundred and ten can be planted to an acre. Their endurance is enormous. Some of the
