SANTA ANA TO SAN DIEGO.
A railroad trip from Santa Ana to San Diego offers many points of interest. It carries us through both the most highly cultivated and through the absolutely vacant, not to say barren, lands. We leave the orange grove and walnut plantations of Santa Ana, and are carried almost immediately past the lovely and shaded Tustin, where pepper groves and lime hedges, gardens and splendid villas, combine nature with art, taste and enterprise to create a veritable oasis for those favored ones who can remain there. We rush for a few minutes through these highly cultivated lands, and suddenly find ourselves out on a wide, open plain, comprising about eighty thousand acres, without a house to be seen anywhere, with no orchards, no vineyards, no signs of civilized life. And still the soil is the richest, the native vegetation of grasses the most luxuriant. The soil is apparently subirrigated, and could grow almost anything the farmer might plant there. Along the horizon, stretching from the mountains way down on the plains like an immense plumed serpent in its wavy and coiling track, is seen a continuous band of sycamore trees, outlining the bed of a stream. It is like stepping out of one room into another. What can be the reason of the sudden change? This vast body of land, containing over 126,000 acres, is an old Mexican grant, the remnant of one of those Mexican cancers, which to such an extent has retarded the development of California. Sure enough, we see wire fences everywhere, and cattle with spreading horns and sheep without number. But we see no sign of the cultivator, no horses, no signs of progress. The owner held onto the land, probably expecting it to bring a price many times the sum it was worth. He died, and so died the boom, and now the land is under administration. When the time comes that this large San Joaquin grant can be sold to farmers in small tracts, it will very greatly increase the cultivable area of Orange county.
But we pass on, leaving the open country; we are soon in among the rolling lands, among foothills not unlike those of the Sierra Nevada in the San Joaquin valley. To the left are the San Bernardino Mountains, here and there a peak of boldest outline, and streams and cañons winding their way to the sea. At El Toro a number of passengers got off to take the stage to Laguna, a seaside hotel, where the farmers and business men of every color, from the heated interior valleys, delight to spend a day in fishing, hunting for abalones, or in watching the breakers roll against the sandy beach. A little farther on we stop at El Capistrano, or rather at San Juan Capistrano, the old ruined mission, situated in the most beautiful little valley, with its winding and sycamore shaded creek. The mission must have been one of the very largest in the State. The ruins are yet very extensive, consisting of long and regular adobe walls, and one-half of a yet magnificent looking church, in the regular Spanish style of architecture. A rather large size town of Mexican houses, with a Mexican population, and venerable fig trees, tall and wavy palm trees, and large but unkempt gardens, give the place a rather more important look than it perhaps deserves. There is but little sign that the boom was ever here. Still the valley is so beautiful and evidently so fertile, that it needs only work and taste to make it equal to the very best. We see yet the old mission pear trees, large and untrimmed, not unlike our drooping oaks, loaded with pears to such an extent that there appears hardly room for a blackbird to get through. The mission grapevines are all dead. Gigantic vines, which covered trellises and arbors, and which perhaps bore tons of grapes, with trunks as heavy as the body of a boy, are there yet, but without leaves and young shoots; they are dead, having surrendered to the vine pest of the country.
After leaving Capistrano we follow the little creek to the sea. The valley is from one-half to one mile wide. Here and there are flourishing little vineyards, but mostly pastures and cornfields or patches of beans. At last we reach the sea, the Pacific, calm and blue, with breakers lashing the shore. To the right we leave the rocky promontory of the Capistrano Mountains, and for an hour or more run on the very beach. In stormy weather the spray of the breakers must wet the cars, which run only a stone’s throw from the water’s edge. This part of the route is the most interesting and the most refreshing to one coming from the interior plains. We are now in San Diego county. The shore is abrupt and bluffy, the hills bordering on the sea.
At Oceanside we meet the first of the boom towns, one of those that sprang up for pleasure and profit, towns of magnificent villas, broad streets and avenues, lined with infant blue gums, with rows and hedges of the ever-bright geraniums, and with large and splendid-looking hotels, with airy balconies, verandas and lookout towers, swept by the fresh breezes of the sea. The vicinity of every such station is heralded by the characteristic white stakes that mark the town lots, and by rows of small, intensely blue, gums; by a sprinkling of cottages, small and large, perhaps a mile or two before the whistle of the steam-engine brings us to a standstill. The first things that meet our eye at every station are large and splendid lawns, young plantations of palm trees and other plants characteristic of the Southern coast climate, flowers of brightest hue, all started by the enterprising immigrants who came here to buy climate, sun and air, and to enjoy the breakers and the ocean every day in the year. After Oceanside, we touch at Carlsbad and Del Mar, both seaside resorts with magnificent villas costing from twenty to forty thousand dollars each, and with fine but young plantations and gardens. I was especially charmed with Del Mar, with its large, tasteful hotel on the bluff, and quite a large colony of villas and mansions in various sizes and styles close around,—a bright and charming picture, a place where a traveler feels at home at once, where he would like to pass the balance of all the days he can spare from business and toil.
The scene changes again as the cars carry us through the foothills, along the bed of creeks, or across lagoons connected with the sea, or over gaping chasms. We look down deep into the valleys below, where shady sycamores and white cottages mark the farmers’ homes, and where vine-clad hills offset the native brown of the country. I am surprised to see how the grapevines thrive so luxuriantly so very close to the shore. In some places there are fine and thrifty vines within a stone’s throw of the breakers, only protected by a slight undulation in the ground from the most direct wind. Of course, grapes on those vines cannot be expected to be very sweet; it is wonderful enough that they are there at all.
The water supply of this part of San Diego county has been very much underrated. The railroad crosses perhaps a dozen different creeks, all showing living water, and which are far from being entirely dried up. With a Supreme Court more enlightened, and with proper legislation as to the needs of the country, San Diego county may yet be able to store water enough to irrigate very large areas of land, where colonies of thrifty farmers may create and maintain prosperous orchards and vineyards as a support and backbone to the many pleasure resorts.
But we are out of the hills. Smiling and glistening in the evening sun lies San Diego Bay, with the elevated Point Loma, the ever-present breakers on the bar, and away out on the low peninsula the gigantic and turreted pile of the Hotel del Coronado, to say nothing of San Diego itself, with its miles of marked town lots and villas. But I shall not endeavor to describe this town and its bay and climate. The latter may possibly not be excelled anywhere; the former lacks a most essential thing,—an abundance of trees and vegetation. Still, with the water that has lately been brought here the trees and flowers will come soon enough we hope, when green lawns, bananas and palms will be ready to tell the tale, and young plantations will be seen on the hills and around roadway homes. But I forget I am bound for El Cajon and its raisin vineyards, and must catch the train.