Who that saw the many-footed dragon that wound its silken, glistening way out of Chinatown into our streets can ever forget its beauty. Or the floats that carried the bewitching little Chinese children wearing their vivid embroidered garments and beaded headdresses? Alas, they are buried now in their American coveralls and corduroys.
What happened to us? Did we grow too unwieldy, or too sophisticated or were we swamped with midwest sobriety? We gave our parade to Pasadena, who put it in wintry January instead of fragrant, flowering April; San Bernardino has the orange show, fiesta has disappeared altogether. But I have heard whispers that indicate that mayhap the spirit of pageantry and frolic is about to return to Los Angeles.
Many changes have come but each phase as it exists seems the natural condition; the old days that I have been recalling were the “Now” that we knew. In the past there was less hurry and more room in our streets that were built to be but ways between cottage homes where now and then a wagon or carriage might go. However, there were no more hours a day to fill or dispose of than we have now. We could stroll down the street to do our errands, meeting friends at every turn; we could drive if preferred, and although Harry Horse and the phaeton made slower progress than Henry Ford or Lionel Limousin, he did not have so far to go and he could stand as long as he wished before the shop door, so that the time consumed by my lady was no more than in these days of suburban homes, and parking places far, far from where she really wants to go.
In the matters of health, friendship, intelligence, the number of inhabitants in a city are of little moment; happiness does not increase with population.
I find it interesting, however, to have in my mind pictures of the little vanished village that once was Los Angeles. I also find it interesting to watch its present turmoil and energy and to speculate on its future; to see signs of intellectual, artistic and social vitality that exist among the scattered groups and individuals now pouring into this seething community; to wonder how soon the wheels of progress are going to stop rattling long enough for us to hear ourselves think, catch our breath and develop some sort of cohesive social organism.
It is the fashion just now to make a butt of Los Angeles, to see only its obsessions, its crudities, its banalities. Those who really comprehend the amazing number of people daily crowding in upon us, and remember that the bulk of the people are inevitably strangers to each other, each ready to shift responsibility to someone supposedly an older citizen, cannot but have patience, cannot but rejoice in the really fine things that have been done and are doing.
CHAPTER XII
THE BACK COUNTRY AND THE ADMIRAL
For seventy years after its founding in 1781 Los Angeles was the only pueblo, as distinguished from presidio or mission, in the southern part of this state; and until the sudden growth of San Francisco during the gold excitement, it was the largest city in California, boasting about twenty-five hundred inhabitants when it came under American rule. Of the three neighboring missions, San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano antedate Los Angeles by a few years, while San Fernando was founded about twelve years later.
During the Spanish and Mexican regimes California’s population was largely scattered upon the ranchos, and this condition remained for nearly a generation after the settlement of the northern counties. The story of the life in this grazing land is familiar,—the story of its leisureliness and hospitality; of its life on horseback, of the great herds of black, lean, long-horned cattle, the offspring of the few animals brought in by the padres; of the devotion of the founders of the missions, of their prosperity and then of their decline under the secularization of the Mexican law. Even as late as the time of my childhood the country was still very empty and Los Angeles was a little city set in gardens and orchards, a narrow border of cultivated lands separating it from the wide, almost treeless, valley.
An exception to this general condition was the district to the East, centering about the San Gabriel; this mission early won the title Queen of the Missions, not because of the size or beauty of church or location, but because of the large number of Indians under its care, and the extent of its herds, orchards, vineyards and grainfields. Its cattle, estimated variously from 75,000 to a 100,000, roamed the great valley even to the foot of the mountains San Gorgonio and San Jacinto; for convenience in administration a branch, or asistencia, was established at San Bernardino in 1810.