Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

To define the respective limits of these seasons becomes more and more difficult the longer one stays in California, and the more one studies rain-fall statistics. Generally speaking, the wet season may be said to be from the middle of October to the middle of April, corresponding nearly with the outside limits of the north temperate zone season of snows. A good description of the two seasons would be—and it is not so purely humorous and unscientific as it sounds—that the wet season is the season in which it can rain, but may not; and the dry season is the season in which it cannot rain, but occasionally does.

Sometimes the rains expected and hoped for in October do not begin until March, and the whole country is in anxiety; a drought in the wet season meaning drought for a year, and great losses. There have been such years in California, and the dread of them is well founded. But often the rains, coming later than their wont, are so full and steady that the requisite number of inches fall, and the year's supply is made good. The average rain-fall in San Diego County is ten inches; in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, fifteen; in Santa Barbara, twenty. These five counties are all that properly come under the name of South California, resting the division on natural and climatic grounds. The political division, if ever made, will be based on other than natural or climatic reasons, and will include two, possibly three, more counties.

The pricelessness of water in a land where no rain falls during six months of the year cannot be appreciated by one who has not lived in such a country. There is a saying in South California that if a man buys water he can get his land thrown in. This is only an epigrammatic putting of the literal fact that the value of much of the land depends solely upon the water which it holds or controls.

Four systems of irrigation are practised: First, flooding the land. This is possible only in flat districts, where there are large heads of water. It is a wasteful method, and is less and less used each year. The second system is by furrows. By this system a large head of water is brought upon the land and distributed in small streams in many narrow furrows. The streams are made as small as will run across the ground, and are allowed to run only twenty-four hours at a time. The third system is by basins dug around tree roots. To these basins water is brought by pipes or ditches; or, in mountain lands, by flumes. The fourth system is by sub-irrigation. This is the most expensive system of all, but is thought to economize water. The water is carried in pipes laid from two to three feet under ground. By opening valves in these pipes the water is let out and up, but never comes above the surface.

The appliances of one sort and another belonging to these irrigation systems add much to the picturesqueness of South California landscapes. Even the huge, tower-like, round-fanned windmills by which the water is pumped up are sometimes, spite of their clumsiness, made effective by gay colors and by vines growing on them. If they had broad, stretching arms, like the Holland windmills, the whole country would seem a-flutter.

The history of the industries of South California since the American occupation is interesting in its record of successions,—successions, not the result of human interventions and decisions so much as of climatic fate, which, in epoch after epoch, created different situations.

The history begins with the cattle interest; hardly an industry, perhaps, or at any rate an unindustrious one, but belonging in point of time at the head of the list of the ways and means by which money has been made in the country. It dates back to the old mission days; to the two hundred head of cattle which the wise Galvez brought, in 1769, for stocking the three missions projected in Upper California.

From these had grown, in the sixty years of the friars' unhindered rule, herds, of which it is no exaggeration to say that they covered thousands of hills and were beyond counting. It is probable that even the outside estimates of their numbers were short of the truth. The cattle wealth, the reckless ruin of the secularization period, survived, and was the leading wealth of the country at the time of its surrender to the United States. It was most wastefully handled. The cattle were killed, as they had been in the mission days, simply for their hides and tallow. Kingdoms full of people might have been fed on the beef which rotted on the ground every year, and the California cattle ranch in which either milk or butter could be found was an exception to the rule.

Into the calm of this half-barbaric life broke the fierce excitement of the gold discovery in 1849. The swarming hordes of ravenous miners must be fed; beef meant gold. The cattlemen suddenly found in their herds a new source of undreamed-of riches. Cattle had been sold as low as two dollars and a half a head. When the gold fever was at its highest, there were days and places in which they sold for three hundred. It is not strange that the rancheros lost their heads, grew careless and profligate.

Then came the drought of 1864, which killed off cattle by thousands of thousands. By thousands they were driven over steep places into the sea to save pasturage, and to save the country from the stench and the poison of their dying of hunger. In April of that year, fifty thousand head were sold in Santa Barbara for thirty-seven and a half cents a head. Many of the rancheros were ruined; they had to mortgage their lands to live; their stock was gone; they could not farm; values so sank, that splendid estates were not worth over ten cents an acre.