As soon as the shearers perceived that their pictures were being drawn by the artist in our party, they were all agog; by twos and threes they left their work and crowded around the carriage, peering, commenting, asking to have their portraits taken, quizzing those whose features they recognized; it was like Italy rather than America. One tattered fellow, whose shoeless feet were tied up in bits of gunny-bags, was distressed because his trousers were too short. "Would the gentleman kindly make them in the drawing a little farther down his legs? It was an accident they were so short." All were ready to pose and stand, even in the most difficult attitudes, as long as was required. Those who had done so asked, like children, if their names could not be put in the book; so I wrote them all down: "Juan Canero, Juan Rivera, Felipe Ybara, José Jesus Lopez, and Domingo Garcia." The space they will fill is a little thing to give; and there is a satisfaction in the good faith of printing them, though the shearers will most assuredly never know it.
The faces of the sheep being shorn were piteous; not a struggle, not a bleat, the whole of their unwillingness and terror being written in their upturned eyes. "As a sheep before her shearers is dumb" will always have for me a new significance.
The shepherd in charge of the Puente ranch is an Italian named Gaetano. The porch of his shanty was wreathed with vines and blossoms, and opened on a characteristic little garden, half garlic, the other half pinks and geraniums. As I sat there looking out on the scene, he told me of a young man who had come from Italy to be herder for him, and who had gone mad and shot himself.
"Three go crazy last year," he said. "Dey come home, not know noting. You see, never got company for speak at all."
This young boy grew melancholy almost at once, was filled with abnormal fears of the coyotes, and begged for a pistol to shoot them with. "He want my pistol. I not want give. I say, You little sick; you stay home in house; I send oder man. My wife she go town buy clothes for baptism one baby got. He get pistol in drawer while she gone." They found him lying dead with his catechism in one hand and the pistol in the other. As Gaetano finished the story, a great flock of two thousand shorn sheep were suddenly let out from one of the corrals. With a great burst of bleating they dashed off, the colly running after them. Gaetano seized his whistle and blew a sharp call on it. The dog halted, looked back, uncertain for a second; one more whistle, and he bounded on.
"He know," said Gaetano. "He take dem two tousand all right. I like better dat dog as ten men."
On the list of South California's outdoor industries, grain stands high, and will always continue to do so. Wheat takes the lead; but oats, barley, and corn are of importance. Barley is always a staple, and averages twenty bushels to the acre.
Oats average from thirty to forty bushels an acre, and there are records of yields of considerably over a hundred bushels.
Corn will average forty bushels an acre. On the Los Angeles River it has grown stalks seventeen feet high and seven inches round.
The average yield of wheat is from twenty to twenty-five bushels an acre, about thirty-three per cent more than in the States on the Atlantic slope.