Moreover, nearness to the railroad is an important advantage for the sheep-farmer; and I found that the most enterprising and intelligent sheep men in the northern counties send their wool direct by railroad to the Eastern States, instead of shipping it to San Francisco to be sold.
Finally, much of the land now obtainable for grazing in the Sacramento Valley, at prices in some cases not too dear for grazing purposes, is of a quality which will make it valuable agricultural land as soon as the valley begins to fill up; and thus, aside from the profit from the sheep, the owner may safely reckon upon a large increase in the value of his land. This can not be said of much of the grazing land of the southern coast counties, which is mountainous and broken, and fit only for grazing.
Of course I speak here of the average lands only. There are large tracts or ranchos in the southern coast counties, such as the Lampoe rancho of Hollester & Diblee, and lands in the Salinas Valley, which are exceptionally fine, and to which what I have said of the coast panchos generally does not apply.
CHAPTER V.
THE CHINESE AS LABORERS AND PRODUCERS.
As I crossed from Oakland to San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon last July, there were on the ferry-boat a number of Chinese. They were decently clad, quiet, clean, sat apart in their places in the lower part of the boat conversing together, and finally walked off the boat when she came to land as orderly as though they had been Massachusetts Christians.
There were also on the boat a number of half-grown and full-grown white boys, some of whom had been fishing, and carried their long rods with them. These were slouchy, dirty, loud-voiced, rude; and, as they passed off the boat, I noticed that with their long rods they knocked the hats of the Chinese off their heads, or punched them in the back, every effort of this kind being rewarded with boisterous laughter from their companions. Nor did they confine their annoyance entirely to the Chinese, for they jostled and pushed their way out through the crowd of men and women very much as a gang of pickpockets on a Third Avenue car in New York conducts itself when its members mean to steal a watch or two.