Our Italy

by Charles Dudley Warner

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GENERAL OUTLOOK.—LAND AND PRICES.

From the northern limit of California to the southern is about the same distance as from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Charleston, South Carolina. Of these two coast lines, covering nearly ten degrees of latitude, or over seven hundred miles, the Atlantic has greater extremes of climate and greater monthly variations, and the Pacific greater variety of productions. The State of California is, however, so mountainous, cut by longitudinal and transverse ranges, that any reasonable person can find in it a temperature to suit him the year through. But it does not need to be explained that it would be difficult to hit upon any general characteristic that would apply to the stretch of the Atlantic coast named, as a guide to a settler looking for a home; the description of Massachusetts would be wholly misleading for South Carolina. It is almost as difficult to make any comprehensive statement about the long line of the California coast.

It is possible, however, limiting the inquiry to the southern third of the State—an area of about fifty-eight thousand square miles, as large as Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—to answer fairly some of the questions oftenest asked about it. These relate to the price of land, its productiveness, the kind of products most profitable, the sort of labor required, and its desirability as a place of residence for the laborer, for the farmer or horticulturist of small means, and for the man with considerable capital. Questions on these subjects cannot be answered categorically, but I hope to be able, by setting down my own observations and using trustworthy reports, to give others the material on which to exercise their judgment. In the first place, I think it demonstrable that a person would profitably exchange 160 acres of farming land east of the one hundredth parallel for ten acres, with a water right, in Southern California.

YUCCA-PALM.

In making this estimate I do not consider the question of health or merely the agreeability of the climate, but the conditions of labor, the ease with which one could support a family, and the profits over and above a fair living. It has been customary in reckoning the value of land there to look merely to the profit of it beyond its support of a family, forgetting that agriculture and horticulture the world over, like almost all other kinds of business, usually do little more than procure a good comfortable living, with incidental education, to those who engage in them. That the majority of the inhabitants of Southern California will become rich by the culture of the orange and the vine is an illusion; but it is not an illusion that twenty times its present population can live there in comfort, in what might be called luxury elsewhere, by the cultivation of the soil, all far removed from poverty and much above the condition of the majority of the inhabitants of the foreign wine and fruit-producing countries. This result is assured by the extraordinary productiveness of the land, uninterrupted the year through, and by the amazing extension of the market in the United States for products that can be nowhere else produced with such certainty and profusion as in California. That State is only just learning how to supply a demand which is daily increasing, but it already begins to command the market in certain fruits. This command of the market in the future will depend upon itself, that is, whether it will send East and North only sound wine, instead of crude, ill-cured juice of the grape, only the best and most carefully canned apricots, nectarines, peaches, and plums, only the raisins and prunes perfectly prepared, only such oranges, lemons, and grapes and pears as the Californians are willing to eat themselves. California has yet much to learn about fruit-raising and fruit-curing, but it already knows that to compete with the rest of the world in our markets it must beat the rest of the world in quality. It will take some time yet to remove the unfavorable opinion of California wines produced in the East by the first products of the vineyards sent here.

DATE-PALM.

The difficulty for the settler is that he cannot "take up" ten acres with water in California as he can 160 acres elsewhere. There is left little available Government land. There is plenty of government land not taken up and which may never be occupied, that is, inaccessible mountain and irreclaimable desert. There are also little nooks and fertile spots here and there to be discovered which may be pre-empted, and which will some day have value. But practically all the arable land, or that is likely to become so, is owned now in large tracts, under grants or by wholesale purchase. The circumstances of the case compelled associate effort. Such a desert as that now blooming region known as Pasadena, Pomona, Riverside, and so on, could not be subdued by individual exertion. Consequently land and water companies were organized. They bought large tracts of unimproved land, built dams in the mountain cañons, sunk wells, drew water from the rivers, made reservoirs, laid pipes, carried ditches and conduits across the country, and then sold the land with the inseparable water right in small parcels. Thus the region became subdivided among small holders, each independent, but all mutually dependent as to water, which is the sine qua non of existence. It is only a few years since there was a forlorn and struggling colony a few miles east of Los Angeles known as the Indiana settlement. It had scant water, no railway communication, and everything to learn about horticulture. That spot is now the famous Pasadena.