In summer the roads get very dusty in California, and this dust is a disadvantage to the tobacco planter. On the Culp farm I found they were planting double rows of shade trees along the main roads, and graveling the interior roads; also, they seem to feel the high winds which sweep through the California valleys, and were planting almonds and cotton-woods for windbreaks in the fields. It seemed odd to see long rows of almond-trees used for this purpose.
This process has so far won the confidence of experts in tobacco in this State, that a company with large capital has undertaken not only the raising of tobacco by its method, but also the manufacture into cigars, and plug, smoking, and fine-cut chewing-tobacco. They are just beginning operations in Gilroy, on a scale which will enable them to manufacture all the tobacco grown this year on about six hundred acres, and they mean to plant next year one thousand acres, and expect that from fifteen hundred to two thousand acres will be planted and cured by others under licenses from the patentee. Commercially, of course, their undertaking is yet an experiment, though excellent cigars and tobacco have been made already; but the year 1874 will decide the result; and if it should prove as successful as is hoped, and as there is good cause to believe it will, a new and very profitable branch of agriculture will be opened for the farmers of this State; for tobacco will grow in almost all parts of it.
CHAPTER XII.
THE FARALLON ISLANDS.
If you approach the harbor of San Francisco from the west, your first sight of land will be a collection of picturesque rocks known as the Farallones, or, more fully, the Farallones de los Frayles. They are six rugged islets, whose peaks lift up their heads in picturesque masses out of the ocean, twenty-three and a half miles from the Golden Gate, the famous entrance of San Francisco Bay. Farallon is a Spanish word, meaning a small pointed islet in the sea.
These rocks, probably of volcanic origin, and bare and desolate, lie in a line from south-east to north-west—curiously enough the same line in which the islands of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Island group have been thrown up. Geologists say they are the outcrop of an immense granite dike.
The southernmost island, which is the largest—just as Hawaii, the southernmost of the Sandwich Island group, is also the biggest—extends for nearly a mile east and west, and is three hundred and forty feet high. It is composed of broken and water-worn rocks, forming numerous angular peaks, and having several caves; and the rock, mostly barren and bare, has here and there a few weeds and a little grass. At one point there is a small beach, and at another a depression; but the fury of the waves makes landing at all times difficult, and for the most part impossible.