I saw a large and prosperous place belonging to a woman of business ability, who came out all alone, took up a government grant, ploughed and planted and irrigated, sent for a sister to help her, sold land at great prices, and is now a wealthy woman. If I had not passed through such depressing and enthusiasm-subduing experiences as an agriculturist in the East I might be tempted here. I did look with interest at the ostrich farms, and had visions of great profits from feathers, eggs, and egg-shells. But it takes a small fortune to get started in that business, as eggs are twenty dollars each, and the birds are sometimes five hundred dollars apiece. And they are subject to rheumatism and a dozen other diseases, and a blow from a kicking bird will kill one. I concluded to let that dream be unrealized. Did you ever hear of the nervous invalid who was told by his physician to buy a Barbary ostrich and imitate him exactly for three months? It was a capital story. The lazy dyspeptic was completely cured. As a hen woman I will remark en passant that it is hard to raise poultry in this part of California. The climate is too exhilarating, and if the head of each chicken does not get a drop of oil at once it dies of brain disease.
Corn does not thrive. Mr. Brown at first put down ten acres to corn. It looked promising, but grew all to stalk. These stalks were over twelve feet high, but corn was of no value, so he sold the stalks for eighty dollars, and started his oranges.
The English are largely interested here, and have invested two or three millions, which will pay large interest to their grandchildren. Their long avenue is loyally named "Victoria." A thrifty Canadian crazed by the "boom," the queerest mental epidemic or delusion that ever took hold of sensible people, bought some stony land just under Rubidoux Mountain for $4000. It was possibly worth $100, but in those delirious days many did much worse. It is amazing to see what hard work and water and good taste will do for such a place. He has blasted the rocks, made fountains and cisterns, planted several acres of strawberries, set out hundreds of orange trees, has a beautiful garden, two pretty cottages, and some day he will get back his original price for a building site, for the view is grand.
Riverside, while leading the orange-producing section of Southern California, is not exactly the location which would have been selected by the original settlers had they possessed the experience of the producers of today. The oranges do not have to be washed, as in some other places; they are not injured by smut or scale; the groves are faultless in size of trees, shape, and taste of fruit. One orange presented to me weighed thirty-one ounces. But the growers, having lost $1,000,000 by Jack Frost several years ago, are obliged now to resort to the use of lighted tar-pots on cold nights to make a dense smudge to keep the temperature above the danger line. One man uses petroleum in hundred-gallon casks, one for each acre, from which two pipes run along between the rows of trees, with half a dozen elbows twenty feet apart, over which are flat sheet-iron pans, into which the oil spatters as it vaporizes. An intensely hot flame keeps off the frost. This I do not hear spoken of at Riverside; you must go to a rival for any disagreeable information. At Pasadena their severe winds are called "Riversiders"; at Anaheim they are "Santa Anas"; and friends write me from damp Los Angeles to the dry air of Riverside, "How can you stay in that 'damp' place?" The inhabitants of Riverside do not concede that Pasadena is a place for orange growers. At Redlands, luckily above frost terrors, the terrible losses at Riverside from that trouble are profusely narrated. San Diego gets its share of humorous belittlement from all. You hear the story quoted of the shrewd Chinee who went to that city to look for business, where one hears much of future developments, but did not settle, saying, "It has too muchee bym-bye." Friends, and especially hotel proprietors, exclaim in disgusted astonishment, "What! going to Riverside? Why, there's nothing there but oranges."
I find more: fine and charming drives, scenery that differs from that of Pasadena, "that poem of nature set to music beneath the swaying rhythm of the pine forests of the lofty Sierra Madres," but is equally enjoyable and admirable.
Still, above all, and permeating every other interest, is the orange. As to dampness, a physician threatened with consumption, and naturally desirous of finding the driest air, began while at Coronado Beach a simple but sure test for comparative degrees of "humidity" by just hanging a woolen stocking out of his window at night. At that place it was wet all through, quite moist at Los Angeles, very much less so at Pasadena, dry as a bone or red herring or an old-fashioned sermon at Riverside. Stockings will tell! (From April to September is really the best time to visit Coronado.) I experienced a very sudden change from a warm, delightful morning to an afternoon so penetrating by cold that I really suffered during a drive, although encased in the heaviest of Jaeger flannels, a woolen dress, and a heavy wrap. I thought of the rough buffalo coat my uncle, a doctor, used to put on when called out on a winter night in New Hampshire, and wished I was enveloped in something like it, with a heated freestone, for feet and a hot potato for each hand. If I can make my readers understand that these sudden changes make flannels necessary, and that one needs to be as careful here as in Canada as regards catching cold from night air and these unexpected rigors, I shall feel, as the old writers used to say, "that I have not written entirely in vain."
In one day you can sit under the trees in a thin dress and be too warm if the sun is at its best, and then be half frozen two hours later if the wind is in earnest and the sun has retired. In the sun, Paradise; in shade, protect yourself!