HER CITY AND COUNTY.
"Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces,
Limes and citrons and apricots,
And wines that are known to Eastern princes."
In walking through the streets of Santa Barbara you may still see the various types, but not so clearly defined as of old. Holy Fathers still intone the service within the massive mission walls; they still cultivate the large garden, from which woman is sedulously excluded. But the faces are German and Irish. At a street corner two men are talking earnestly, and as you pass you get a glance from Mexican eyes, dark and soft, but the hair shows Indian blood. A real old Mexican vaquero rides by in the genuine outfit, well worn and showing long use; next a carriage full of fashionable visitors; then a queerer combination than the Anglomaniac with his trousers legs turned up if the cable reports a rainy day in London. This is the American vaquero—usually a short, fat man with dumpy legs, who dons a flapping sombrero, buys a new Mexican saddle, wooden stirrups, and leather riata, sometimes adding a coil of rope at left side, wears the botas with a corduroy suit at dinner at hotel, and doesn't know at all how comical an appearance he presents. The very next to pass is one of the pioneers, who, although worth a million or more, puts on no style, and surveys the mongrel in front with a twinkle in his eye. Every one should own a horse or pony or burro here, for the various drives are the greatest charm of the place. Through all Southern California the happy children ride to school, where the steeds, fastened to fence in front of building, wait patiently in line, like Mary's lamb. But in Santa Barbara you see mere tots on horseback, who look as if it were no new accomplishment. I believe the mothers put them on gentle ponies to be cared for, or safe, as mothers in general use the cradle or high-chair. One of the old Mexican residents of Santa Barbara, when over eighty years of age, had the misfortune to break his leg. He lay in bed uneasily until a surgeon could be summoned and the fractured bones set and duly encased in plaster. He then insisted on being carried out and placed upon his favorite horse, where he sat during each day with patient serenity until the damage was repaired by nature.
The drives are all delightful. You cannot make a mistake; there are twenty-eight drives distinct and beautiful. Those best known are, to the Mission Cañon, to the Lighthouse, to Montecito and Carpenteria, Cooper's Ranch, through the far-famed Ojai Valley, and the stage or coaching trip to San Luis Obispo, not forgetting La Vina Grande (the big grapevine), the trunk eighteen inches in diameter, foliage covering 10,000 square feet, producing in one year 12,000 pounds of grapes; and the Cathedral Oaks. I jotted down a few facts at the Lighthouse a la Jingle in Pickwick Papers: gleaming white tower, black lantern, rising from neat white cottage, green window-shutters, light 180 feet above sea-level, fine view from balcony, fields of young barley down to water's edge, bluest blue in sea and sky, the lamp holds only one quart of oil, reflectors do big business, considering, throwing the light 417 miles.
The keeper, a woman, has been there over thirty years, never goes away for a single night, trim, quaint, and decided, doesn't want to be written up, will oblige her, don't believe a woman ever did so much good with a quart of kerosene daily before. Been a widow a long time, heard of one woman, wife of lighthouse-keeper, he died, she too stout to be gotten out of the one room, next incumbent married her.
Montecito, as Roe described it, is a village of charming gardens and green lawns, with a softer climate even than Santa Barbara—a most desirable situation for an elegant country retreat. I had the privilege of visiting the home of Mr. W. P. Gould, a former resident of Boston, who has one of the most perfect places I have ever seen. He has been experimenting this year with olive oil in one room of his large house for curing lemons, and has perfected a machine which expresses the "virgin oil" without cracking a single pit or stone. This is a great improvement, as one crushed stone will give an acrid taste to a quart of oil. There is a fashion in fruits as much as in bonnets or sleeves. Olive culture is just now the fad. Pears, prunes, almonds, walnuts, have each had their day, or their special boom. Pomona is headquarters for the olive industry. Nursery men there sold over 500,000 trees last year. The tree does not require the richest soil. Hon. Elwood Cooper's olive oil is justly famous, but the machinery designed by Mr. Gould makes a much purer oil, pronounced by connoisseurs to be the finest in the world. The olives are sun-dried; the ponderous rollers and keen knives of the masher mash the fruit, and every after-process is the perfection of cleanliness and skill. There is a nutty sweetness about this oil, and a clear amber color, which makes it most desirable for the fastidious invalid.
This new process has been purchased by a company who are going to try to give the country what it has never known before—pure olive oil, free from a bit of the stone. No pure oil is brought to our country. The public think the price too high; they prefer to buy cotton-seed oil at thirty-five cents a gallon, and this is adulterated with peanuts, sunflowers, and so on. This will do for the masses, but the best is none too good if it can be found.
Few appreciate the medicinal value of olive oil. Nations making use regularly of this and the fruit are freed from dyspepsia. A free use in the United States would round out Brother Jonathan's angular spareness of form, and make him less nervous and less like the typical Yankee of whom the witty Grace Greenwood said: "He looks as if the Lord had made him and then pinched him." One does not see the orange groves here, but the lemon trees and walnuts and olives are an agreeable change—just for a change.
"Who ever thinks of connecting such a commonplace article of diet as the lemon with the romantic history of ill-fated Anne Boleyn? Yet, indirectly, she was the cause of its first introduction into England, and so into popular notice. Henry VIII., who, if he rid himself of his wives like a brute, certainly won them like a prince, gave such splendid feasts and pageants in honor of the coronation of Anne and of their previous nuptials as had seldom been accorded to queens of the royal blood. These kingly entertainments were in turn followed by the great civic feast of London, for which the whole world was searched for delicacies to add to the splendor. At one such banquet, graced by the presence of the royal pair, a lemon was introduced as an elegant novelty. To an epicure such as Henry, the acquisition of a castle in France would have proved less acceptable, and such was the importance attached to the discovery—so says an old biographer—that a special record was made of the fact that the cost of this precious lemon was six silver pennies."
We hear nothing of irrigation, but almost everything will thrive without it. The soil grows well all varieties of fruits found in the Eastern and New England States, besides all the semi-tropical fruits, as guavas, loquats, persimmons, dates, etc. As the Rev. Mr. Jackson says: "Could it be shown that the primitive Eden bore as many fruits pleasant to the taste, it would add a new pang to the thought of original sin."
The number of native trees seems small, but trees have been naturalized here from every part of the world. The pepper tree is from Peru, also the quinine tree: from Chili, the monkey tree and the Norfolk Island pine.
Mr. Cooper imported the eucalyptus from Australia. It grows rapidly, and is planted for windbreaks. It is used for firewood, and when cut down nearly to the ground will start up with the same old courage and ambition. Its roots are so eager for water that they make long detours, sometimes even climbing up and down a stone wall, if it is in their route, or into a well. From the same country comes the acacia, the rubber tree, and a large number of shrubs. New Zealand contributes her share, and to China and Japan they are indebted for the camphor tree, the gingko, the loquat, and the chestnuts. To South Africa they are indebted for the silver tree, and from the northern part of that country the date-palm and the tamarind.
One sees side by side here, and in Pasadena, trees from almost opposite climes: the New England elm and a cork tree, a cedar of Lebanon and a maple or an English oak. Then the glorious palm—twenty-two varieties in Montecito Valley alone.
Sydney Smith said of the fertility of Australia, "Tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest." But in California even the hoe is not needed, for "volunteer crops" come up all by themselves, and look better than ours so carefully cultivated. They say that if a Chinaman eats a watermelon under a tree the result is a fine crop of melons next year. And I read of a volunteer tomato plant ploughed down twice that measured twelve feet square, and bore thousands of small red tomatoes.
Alfalfa is an ever-growing crop—can be garnered five times each year.
And as for flowers, I really cannot attempt to enumerate or describe in detail. There are hundreds of varieties of roses. They were found growing wild by myriads, and have been most carefully cultivated and improved. One rose tree in the grounds of the Arlington Hotel has spread over sixty feet of the veranda, and three lady guests have climbed into its branches at once. As one man said: "The roses here would climb to the moon if a trellis could be provided."
A friend sent me twenty-five large bunches of the choicest roses from her garden one morning in April, each bunch a different variety. Their roses are shipped in large quantities to San Francisco, and Chicago has her churches decorated at Easter from the rose gardens of Santa Barbara.
Honey naturally is thought of. Apiculture here is a great business. The bee has to be busy all day long and all through the year—no rest. One ingenious fellow proposed crossing the working bee with the firefly, so it could work all night long by its own lantern. But this is better. I hear wondrous stories of bees getting into cracks of church towers or upper stories, and bulging out the buildings with their accumulated stores—positively cartloads of sweetness. Think of honey made from orange flowers selling at five cents a pound!
A clergyman writing of Santa Barbara County says that twenty-five years ago all their vegetables were imported. Now beans yield a ton to the acre, potatoes two hundred and fifty bushels per acre, and he has seen potatoes that weighed six, seven, and eight and a half pounds—as much as an ordinary baby; beets, seventy-five tons to the acre; carrots, thirty. Mr. Webster once declared in Congress that this State could never raise a bushel of grain. Corn yields fifty bushels to the acre; barley, sixty; wheat, thirty. Others give much higher records: corn, one hundred and thirty bushels; barley, eighty; potatoes, four hundred; forty tons of squashes, four tons of hay, sixty tons of beets.
I have spoken of stock-raising. Dairying is a profitable industry. Poultry farming a little uncertain. If interested in mining there is much to explore. Just in this county are found gold, silver, copper, asphaltum, bituminous rock, gypsum, quicksilver, natural gas, and petroleum.
And what sort of a climate does one find? Santa Barbara is an all-year-round resort. It has all that one could ask.
"The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea."
It is a perpetual summer—sometimes a cold and rainy June, sometimes a little too warm, sometimes a three days' sand-storm, disagreeable and trying; but it is always June, as we in New England know June. At least it is Juney from 9 A.M. until 4 P.M. Just before sunset the temperature falls. Then when the sun goes rapidly in or down it is like being out at sea. And to a sensitive patient, with nerves all on outside, chilled by the least coolness, it is unpleasantly piercing.
When any one describes Santa Barbara to you as a town
"Where winds are hushed nor dare to breathe aloud,
Where skies seem never to have borne a cloud,"
remember that this applies truthfully to "a Santa Barbara day," but not to all days. Surf bathers go in every month of the year. But this does not alter the fact that a person would be disappointed and consider himself deceived if he accepted the general idea of absolute heaven on earth. The inhabitants do not wish such exaggerations and misrepresentations to go forth. California can bear to have the whole truth told, and still be far ahead. Who wants eternal sunshine, eternal monotony?
The temperature during the day varies little. I see that one resident compares it with May in other parts of the country. I think he has never tried to find a picnic day in early May in New England. He says: "Our coldest month is warmer than April at Philadelphia, and our warmest one much cooler than June at same place." They did have one simoon in 1859, when the mercury rose to 133°, and stayed there for eight hours. Animals and birds died, trees were blasted and burned, and gardens ruined. But that was most "unusual."
Flannels are worn the year round. Average of rain, seventeen inches. There are sixty-one mineral and medicinal springs in California that are already famous. Here we can take hot sulphur baths, and drink the nauseous water that is said to cure almost all diseases.
Farming is comparatively easy. But grapevines are smitten by a mysterious disease called "cellular degeneration," and phylloxera; a black scale that injures orange and olive, and a white scale that is worse. Apples are not free from worms; the gopher is sure to go for every root it can find. There was a serpent even in the original Eden. The historian remarks: "The cloddish, shiftless farmer is perhaps safer in Massachusetts." I think of experiences at "Gooseville," and decide not to buy, nor even rent a ranch, nor accept one if offered. "Fly to ills I know not of?" No, thank you!
I'm tired now of agriculture and climate, and will turn to less practical themes. You sympathize. We will stop and begin a new chapter, with a hope of being more interesting.