There were wool-barns at all three of the ranches that I knew, but I officiated at shearing most often at the Cerritos. Here the barn was out beyond the garden, facing away from the house, and toward a series of corrals of varying sizes. The front of it was like a covered veranda, with wide cracks in the floor. Opening from this were two small pens into which a hundred sheep might be turned. The shearer would go out among these sheep, feel critically the wool on several, choose his victim and drag it backward, holding by one leg while it hopped on the remaining three to his regular position. Throwing it down, he would hold it with his knees, tip its head up, and begin to clip, clip, until soon its fleece would be lying on the floor, the animal would be dismissed with a slap, and the wool gathered up and placed on the counter that ran the length of the shearing floor. Here the grown boys of the family tied each fleece into a round ball and tossed it into the long sack that hung in a nearby frame, where a man tramped it down tight. When the Mexican delivered his wool at the counter he was given a copper check, the size and value of a nickel, marked J. B., which he presented Saturday afternoon for redemption. It is a fact that frequently the most rapid workmen did not get the most on pay day, simply because they were less skillful or lucky as gamblers than as shearers.
I remember going one evening out into the garden and peering through a knot-hole at a most picturesque group of men squatting about a single candle on the wool barn floor, playing with odd looking cards, not like the ones in the house. The pile of checks was very much in evidence.
George told me that it was his father’s custom for many years to carry the money for the ranch payroll from Los Angeles to Cerritos in a small valise under the seat of his buggy, sometimes having several thousand dollars with him. This habit of his must have been known, but he was never molested. George maintained that there was a code of honor among the prevalent bandits to respect the old citizens as far as possible.
I had beautiful days during shearing. Sometimes I was entrusted with the tin cup of copper checks and allowed to deal them out in return for the fleeces delivered. I spent much time up on this same counter braiding the long, hanging bunches of twine that was used for tying up the fleeces into balls. I worked until I became expert in braiding any number of strands, either flat or round. A few times I was let climb up the frame and down into the suffocating depths of the hanging sacks, to help tramp the wool, but that was not a coveted privilege,—it was too hot and smelly. I loved to watch the full sack lowered and sewed up and then to hold the brass stencils while the name of the firm and the serial number was painted on it before it was put aside to wait for the next load going to Wilmington. Never was there a better place for running and tumbling than the row of long, tight wool sacks in the dark corner of the barn.
Many a check was slipped into our hands, that would promptly change into a watermelon, fat and green, or long and striped, for during the September shearing there was always, just outside the door, a big “Studebaker” (not an auto in those days) full of melons, sold always, no matter what the size, for a nickel apiece. It has ruined me permanently as a shopper for watermelons; nothing makes me feel more abused by the H. C. L. than to try to separate a grocer and his melon.
I seem to have gotten far away from my subject, but, really I am only standing in the brown mallows outside the open end of the wool barn, watching the six horse team start for Wilmington with its load of precious wool that is to be shipped by steamer to “The City,” San Francisco, the one and only of those days.
As soon as the shearing was well under way the dipping began. This was managed by the members of the family and the regular men on the ranch. In the corral east of the barn was the brick fireplace with the big tank on top where the “dip” was brewed, scalding tobacco soup, seasoned with sulphur, and I do not know what else. This mess was served hot in a long, narrow, sunken tub, with a vertical end near the cauldron, and a sloping, cleated floor at the other. Into this steaming bath each sheep was thrown; it must swim fifteen or twenty feet to safety, and during the passage its head was pushed beneath the surface. How glad it must have been when its feet struck bottom at the far end, and it could scramble out to safety. How it shook itself, and what a taste it must have had in its mouth! I am afraid Madam Sheep cherished hard feelings against her universe. She did not know that her over-ruling providence was saving her from the miseries of a bad skin disease.
Now the sheep are all gone, and the shearers and dippers are gone too. The pastoral life gave way to the agricultural, and that in turn to the town and city. There is Long Beach. Once it was a cattle range, then sheep pasture, then, when I first knew it, a barley field with one small house and shed standing about where Pine and First Streets cross. And the beach was our own private, wonderful beach; we children felt that our world was reeling when it was sold. Nobody knows what a wide, smooth, long beach it was. It was covered near the bluffs with lilac and yellow sand verbenas, with ice plant and mesembreanthemum and further out with shells and piles of kelp and a broad band of tiny clams; there were gulls and many little shore birds, and never a footprint except the few we made, only to be washed away by the next tide. Two or three times a summer we would go over from the ranch for a day, and beautiful days we had, racing on the sand, or going into the breakers with father or Uncle Jotham who are now thought of only as old men, venerable fathers of the city. Ying would put us up a most generous lunch, but the thing that was most characteristic and which is remembered best is the meat broiled over the little driftwood fire. Father always was cook of the mutton chops that were strung on a sharpened willow stick, and I shall never forget the most delicious meat ever given me, smoky chops, gritty with the sand blown over them by the constant sea breeze. I wonder if the chef of the fashionable Hotel Virginia, which occupies the site of our outdoors kitchen, ever serves the guests so good a meal as we had on the sand of the beautiful, empty beach.
CHAPTER X
EL PUEBLO DE NUESTRA SEÑORA LA REINA DE LOS ANGELES
Los Angeles was about ninety years old and I about one when we first met, neither of us, I am afraid, taking much notice of the other. For over twenty years San Francisco had been a city, a most interesting and alive city, making so much stir in the world that people forgot that Los Angeles was the older; that her birth had been ordained by the governor and attended with formal rites of the church and salutes from the military way back in 1781, when the famous revolution on the east coast was just drawing to a successful close. Until the stirring days of ’49, San Francisco was insignificance on sand hills. Then her rise was sudden and glorious and the Queen of the Angels was humble. But she was angelic only in name. She was a typical frontier town with primitive, flat-roofed dwellings of sun-dried bricks, much like those built in ancient Assyria or Palestine. Saloons and gambling houses were out of proportion in number, and there were murders every day. The present crime wave is nothing in comparison.