Glimpses of Three Coasts Part 2

"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.

In grains, as in so many other things, Los Angeles County is far in advance of the other counties. In 1879 there were in the county 31,500 acres in wheat; in 1881, not less than 100,000; and the value of the wheat crop, for 1882 was reckoned $1,020,000.

The great San Fernando valley, formerly the property of the San Fernando Mission, is the chief wheat-producing section of the county.

The larger part of this valley is in two great ranches. One of them was bought a few years ago for $275,000; and $75,000 paid down, the remainder to be paid in instalments. The next year was a dry year; crops failed. The purchaser offered the ranch back again to the original owners, with his $75,000 thrown in, if they would release him from his bargain. They refused. The next winter rains came, the wheat crop was large, prices were high, and the ranch actually paid off the entire debt of $200,000 still owing on the purchase.

From such figures as these, it is easy to see how the California farmer can afford to look with equanimity on occasional droughts.

Experience has shown that he can lose crops two years out of five, and yet make a fair average profit for the five years.

The most beautiful ranch in California is said to be the one about twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, belonging to Elwood Cooper. Its owner speaks of it humorously as a little "pocket ranch." In comparison with the great ranches whose acres are counted by tens of thousands, it is small, being only two thousand acres in extent; but in any other part of the world except California, it would be thought a wild jest to speak of an estate of two thousand acres as a small one.

Ten years ago this ranch was a bare, desolate sheep ranch,--not a tree on it, excepting the oaks and sycamores in the canons. To-day it has twelve hundred acres under high cultivation; and driving from field to field, orchard to orchard, one drives, if he sees the whole of the ranch, over eleven miles of good made road. There are three hundred acres in wheat, one hundred and seventy in barley; thirty-five hundred walnut trees, twelve thousand almond, five thousand olive, two thousand fig and domestic fruit trees, and one hundred and fifty thousand eucalyptus trees, representing twenty-four varieties; one thousand grape-vines; a few orange, lemon, and lime trees. There are on the ranch one hundred head of cattle, fifty horses, and fifteen hundred sheep.

These are mere bald figures, wonderful enough as statistics of what may be done in ten years' time on South California soil, but totally inadequate even to suggest the beauty of the place.

The first relief to the monotony of the arrow-straight road which it pleased an impatient, inartistic man to make westward from Santa Barbara, is the sight of high, dark walls of eucalyptus trees on either side of the road. A shaded avenue, three quarters of a mile long, of these represents the frontages of Mr. Cooper's estate.

Turning to the right, through a break in this wall, is a road, with dense eucalyptus woods on the left and an almond orchard on the right.

It winds and turns, past knolls of walnut grove, long lines of olive orchard, and right-angled walls of eucalyptus trees shutting in wheat-fields. By curves and bends and sharp turns, all the time with new views, and new colors from changes of crop, with exquisite glimpses of the sea shot through here and there, it finally, at the end of a mile, reaches the brink of an oak-canopied canon. In the mouth of this canon stands the house, fronting south on a sunny meadow and garden s.p.a.ce, walled in on three sides by eucalyptus trees.

To describe the oak kingdom of this canon would be to begin far back of all known kingdoms of the country. The branches are a network of rafters upholding roof canopies of boughs and leaves so solid that the sun's rays pierce them only brokenly, making on the ground a dancing carpet of brown and gold flecks even in winter, and in summer a shade lighted only by starry glints.

Farther up the canon are sycamores, no less stately than the oaks, their limbs gnarled and twisted as if they had won their places by splendid wrestle.

These oak-and-sycamore-filled canons are the most beautiful of the South California canons; though the soft, chaparral-walled canons would, in some lights, press them hard for supremacy of place. n.o.body will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable chaparral. Matted, tangled, twisted, piled, tufted,--everything is chaparral. All botany may be exhausted in describing it in one place, and it will not avail you in another. But in all places, and made up of whatever hundreds of shrubs it may be, it is the most exquisite carpet surface that Nature has to show for mountain fronts or canon sides. Not a color that it does not take; not a bloom that it cannot rival; a bank of cloud cannot be softer, or a bed of flowers more varied of hue. Some day, between 1900 and 2000, when South California is at leisure and has native artists, she will have an artist of canons, whose life and love and work will be spent in picturing them,--the royal oak canopies; the herculean sycamores; the chameleon, velvety chaparral; and the wild, throe-built, water-quarried rock gorges, with their myriad ferns and flowers.

At the head of Mr. Cooper's canon are broken and jutting sandstone walls, over three hundred feet high, draped with mosses and ferns and all manner of vines. I saw the dainty thalictrum, with its clover-like leaves, standing in thickets there, fresh and green, its blossoms nearly out on the first day of February. Looking down from these heights over the whole of the ranch, one sees for the first time the completeness of its beauty. The eucalyptus belts have been planted in every instance solely with a view to utility,--either as wind-breaks to keep off known special wind-currents from orchard or grain-field, or to make use of gorge sides too steep for other cultivation. Yet, had they been planted with sole reference to landscape effects, they could not better have fallen into place. Even out to the very ocean edge the groves run, their purples and greens melting into the purples and greens of the sea when it is dark and when it is sunny blue,--making harmonious lines of color, leading up from it to the soft grays of the olive and the bright greens of the walnut orchards and wheat-fields. When the almond trees are in bloom, the eucalyptus belts are perhaps most superb of all, with their dark spears and plumes waving above and around the white and rosy acres.

The leading industry of this ranch is to be the making of olive oil.

Already its oil is known and sought; and to taste it is a revelation to palates accustomed to the compounds of rancid cocoanut and cotton-seed with which the markets are full. The olive industry will no doubt ultimately be one of the great industries of the whole country: vast tracts of land which are not suitable or do not command water enough for orange, grape, or grain culture, affording ample support to the thrifty and unexacting olive. The hill-slopes around San Diego, and along the coast line for forty or fifty miles up, will no doubt one day be as thickly planted with olives as is the Mediterranean sh.o.r.e. Italy's olive crop is worth thirty million dollars annually, and California has as much land suited to the olive as Italy has.

The tree is propagated from cuttings, begins to bear the fourth year, and is in full bearing by the tenth or twelfth. One hundred and ten can be planted to an acre. Their endurance is enormous. Some of the orchards planted by the friars at the missions over a hundred years ago are still bearing, spite of scores of years of neglect; and there are records of trees in Nice having borne for several centuries.

The process of oil-making is an interesting spectacle, under Mr.

Cooper's oak trees. The olives are first dried in trays with slat bottoms, tiers upon tiers of these being piled in a kiln over a furnace fire. Then they are ground between stone rollers, worked by huge wheels, turned by horse-power. The oil, thus pressed out, is poured into huge b.u.t.ts or tanks. Here it has to stand and settle three or four months. There are faucets at different levels in these b.u.t.ts, so as to draw off different layers of oil. After it has settled sufficiently, it is filtered through six layers of cotton batting, then through one of French paper, before it is bottled. It is then of a delicate straw color, with a slight greenish tint,--not at all of the golden yellow of the ordinary market article. That golden yellow and the thickening in cold are sure proofs of the presence of cotton-seed in oil,--the pure oil remaining limpid in a cold which will turn the adulterated oils white and thick. It is estimated that an acre of olives in full bearing will pay fifteen hundred dollars a year if pickled, and two thousand dollars a year made into oil.

In observing the industries of South California and studying their history, one never escapes from an undercurrent of wonder that there should be any industries or industry there. No winter to be prepared for; no fixed time at which anything must be done or not done at all; the air sunny, balmy, dreamy, seductive, making the mere being alive in it a pleasure; all sorts of fruits and grains growing a-riot, and taking care of themselves,--it is easy to understand the character, or, to speak more accurately, the lack of character, of the old Mexican and Spanish Californians.

There was a charm in it, however. Simply out of suns.h.i.+ne, there had distilled in them an Orientalism as fine in its way as that made in the East by generations of prophets, crusaders, and poets.

With no more curiosity than was embodied in "Who knows?"--with no thought or purpose for a future more defined than "Some other time; not to-day,"--without greeds, and with the unlimited generosities of children,--no wonder that to them the restless, inquisitive, insatiable, close-reckoning Yankee seemed the most intolerable of all conquerors to whom they could surrender. One can fancy them shuddering, even in heaven, as they look down to-day on his colonies, his railroads, his crops,--their whole land humming and buzzing with his industries.

One questions also whether, as the generations move on, the atmosphere of life in the sunny empire they lost will not revert more and more to their type, and be less and less of the type they so disliked. Unto the third and fourth generation, perhaps, pulses may keep up the tireless Yankee beat; but sooner or later there is certain to come a slacking, a toning down, and a readjusting of standards and habits by a scale in which money and work will not be the highest values. This is "as sure as that the sun s.h.i.+nes," for it is the sun that will bring it about.

FATHER JUNIPERO AND HIS WORK.

A SKETCH OF THE FOUNDATION, PROSPERITY, AND RUIN OF THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA.

I.

During the years when Saint Francis went up and down the streets of a.s.sisi, carrying in his delicate unused hands the stones for rebuilding St. Damiano, he is said to have been continually singing psalms, breaking forth into e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of grat.i.tude; his face beaming as that of one who saw visions of unspeakable delight. How much of the spirit or instinct of prophecy there might have been in his exultant joy, only he himself knew; but it would have been strange if there had not been vouchsafed to him at least a partial revelation of the splendid results which must of necessity follow the carrying out, in the world, of the divine impulses which had blazed up in his soul like a fire. As Columbus, from the trend of imperfectly known sh.o.r.es and tides, from the mysterious indications of vague untracked winds, could deduce the glorious certainty of hitherto undreamed continents of westward land, so might the ardent spiritual discoverer see with inextinguishable faith the hitherto undreamed heights which must be surely reached and won by the path he pointed out. It is certain that very early in his career he had the purpose of founding an order whose members, being unselfish in life, should be fit heralds of G.o.d and mighty helpers of men. The absoluteness of self-renunciation which he inculcated and demanded startled even the thirteenth century's standard of religious devotion. Cardinals and pope alike doubted its being within the pale of human possibility; and it was not until after much entreaty that the Church gave its sanction to the "Seraphic Saint's" band of "Fratri Minores," and the organized work of the Franciscan Order began. This was in 1208. From then till now, the Franciscans have been, in the literal sense of the word, benefactors of men. Other of the orders in the Catholic Church have won more distinction, in the way of learning, political power, marvellous suffering of penances and deprivation; but the record of the Franciscans is in the main a record of lives and work, like the life and work of their founder; of whom a Protestant biographer has written: "So far as can be made out, he thought little of himself, even of his own soul to be saved, all his life. The trouble had been on his mind how sufficiently to work for G.o.d and to help men."

Under the head of helping men, come all enterprises of discovery, development, and civilization which the earth has known; and in many more of these than the world generally suspects, has been an influence dating back to the saint of a.s.sisi. America most pre-eminently stands his debtor. Of the three to whom belongs the glory of its discovery, one, Juan Perez de Marchena, was a Franciscan friar; the other two, Queen Isabella and Columbus, were members of Saint Francis's Third Order; and of all the splendid promise and wondrous development on the California coast to-day, Franciscan friars were the first founders.

In the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara is a daguerreotype, taken from an old portrait which was painted more than a hundred years ago, at the College of San Fernando, in Mexico. The face is one, once seen, never to be forgotten; full of spirituality and tenderness and unutterable pathos; the mouth and chin so delicately sensitive that one marvels how such a soul could have been capable of heroic endurance of hards.h.i.+p; the forehead and eyes strong, and radiant with quenchless purpose, but filled with that solemn, yearning, almost superhuman sadness, which has in all time been the sign and seal on the faces of men born to die for the sake of their fellows. It is the face of Father Junipero Serra, the first founder of Franciscan missions in South California. Studying the lineaments of this countenance, one recalls the earliest authentic portrait of Saint Francis,--the one painted by Pisano, which hangs in the sacristy of the a.s.sisi church. There seems a notable likeness between the two faces: the small and delicate features, the broad forehead, and the expression of great gentleness are the same in both. But the saint had a joyousness which his ill.u.s.trious follower never knew. The gayety of the troubadour melodies which Francis sung all through his youth never left his soul: but Serra's first and only songs were the solemn chants of the Church; his first lessons were received in a convent; his earliest desire and hope was to become a priest.

Serra was born of lowly people in the island of Majorca, and while he was yet a little child sang as chorister in the convent of San Bernardino. He was but sixteen when he entered the Franciscan Order, and before he was eighteen he had taken the final vows. This was in the year 1730. His baptismal name, Michael Joseph, he laid aside on becoming a monk, and took the name of Junipero, after that quaintest and drollest of all Saint Francis's first companions; him of whom the saint said jocosely, "Would that I had a whole forest of such Junipers!"

Studying in the Majorca Convent at the same time with Serra, were three other young monks, beloved and intimate companions of his,--Palon, Verger, and Crespi. The friends.h.i.+p thus early begun never waned; and the hearty and loving co-operation of the four had much to do with the success of the great enterprises in which afterward they jointly labored, and to which, even in their student days, they looked forward with pa.s.sionate longing. New Spain was, from the beginning, the goal of their most ardent wishes. All their conversations turned on this theme. Long years of delay and monastic routine did not dampen the ardor of the four friends. Again and again they pet.i.tioned to be sent as missionaries to the New World, and again and again were disappointed. At last, in 1749, there a.s.sembled in Cadiz a great body of missionaries, destined chiefly for Mexico; and Serra and Palon received permission to join the band. Arriving at Cadiz, and finding two vacancies still left in the party, they pleaded warmly that Crespi and Verger be allowed to go also. At the very last moment this permission was given, and the four friends joyfully set sail in the same s.h.i.+p.

It is impossible at this distance of time to get any complete realization of the halo of exalted sentiment and rapture which then invested undertakings of this kind. From the highest to the lowest, the oldest to the youngest, it reached. Every art was lent to its service, every channel of expression stamped with its sign. Even on the rude atlases and charts of the day were pictures of monks embarking in s.h.i.+ps of discovery; the Virgin herself looking on from the sky, with the motto above, "Matre Dei montravit via;" and on the s.h.i.+ps' sails, "Unus non sufficit orbis."

In the memoir of Father Junipero, written by his friend Palon, are many interesting details of his voyage to Vera Cruz. It lasted ninety-nine days: provisions fell short; starvation threatened; terrific storms nearly wrecked the s.h.i.+p; but through all, Father Junipero's courage never failed. He said, "remembering the end for which they had come," he felt no fear. He performed ma.s.s each morning, and with psalms and exhortations cheered the sinking spirits of all on board.

For nineteen years after their arrival in Mexico, Father Junipero and his three friends were kept at work there, under the control of the College of San Fernando, in founding missions and preaching. On the suppression of the Jesuit Order, in 1767, and its consequent expulsion from all the Spanish dominions, it was decided to send a band of Franciscans to California, to take charge of the Jesuit missions there. These were all in Lower California, no attempt at settlement having been yet made in Upper California.

Once more the friends, glad and exultant, joined a missionary band bound to new wildernesses. They were but three now, Verger remaining behind in the College of San Fernando. The band numbered sixteen.

Serra was put in charge of it, and was appointed president of all the California missions. His biographer says he received this appointment "unable to speak a single word for tears." It was not strange, on the realization of a hope so long deferred. He was now fifty-six years old; and from boyhood his longing had been to labor among the Indians on the western sh.o.r.es of the New World.

It was now the purpose of the Spanish Government to proceed as soon as possible to the colonization of Upper California. The pa.s.sion of the Church allied itself gladly with the purpose of the State; and the State itself had among its statesmen and soldiers many men who were hardly less fervid in religion than were those sworn exclusively to the Church's service. Such an one was Joseph de Galvez, who held the office of Visitor-General and Commander, representing the person of the King, and inspecting the working of the Government in every province of the Spanish Empire. Upon him rested the responsibility of the practical organization of the first expedition into Upper California. It was he who ordered the carrying of all sorts of seeds of vegetables, grains, and flowers; everything that would grow in Old Spain he ordered to be planted in New. He ordered that two hundred head of cattle should be taken from the northernmost of the Lower California missions, and carried to the new posts. It was he also, as full of interest for chapel as for farm, who selected and packed with his own hands sacred ornaments and vessels for church ceremonies. A curious letter of his to Palon is extant, in which he says laughingly that he is a better sacristan than Father Junipero, having packed the holy vessels and ornaments quicker and better than he. There are also extant some of his original instructions to military and naval commanders which show his religious ardor and wisdom. He declares that the first object of the expedition is "to establish the Catholic religion among a numerous heathen people, submerged in the obscure darkness of paganism, to extend the dominion of the King our Lord, and to protect this peninsula from the ambitious views of foreign nations."

With no clearer knowledge than could be derived from scant records of Viscayno's voyage in 1602, he selected the two best and most salient points of the California coast, San Diego and Monterey, and ordered the founding of a mission at each. He also ordered the selection of a point midway between these two, for another mission to be called Buena Ventura. His activity, generosity, and enthusiasm were inexhaustible.

He seems to have had humor as well; for when discussing the names of the missions to be founded, Father Junipero said to him, "But is there to be no mission for our Father St. Francis?" he replied, "If St.

Francis wants a mission, let him show us his post, and we will put one there for him!"

The records of this first expedition into California are full of interest. It was divided into two parts, one to go by sea, and one by land; the sea party in two s.h.i.+ps, and the land party in two divisions.

Every possible precaution and provision was thought of by the wise Galvez; but neither precaution nor provision could make the journey other than a terrible one. Father Junipero, with his characteristic ardor, insisted on accompanying one of the land parties, although he was suffering severely from an inflamed leg, the result of an injury he had received twenty years before in journeying on foot from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico. Galvez tried in vain to detain him; he said he would rather die on the road than not go, but that he should not die, for the Lord would carry him through. However, on the second day out, his pain became so great that he could neither sit, stand, nor sleep. Portala, the military commander of the party, implored him to be carried in a litter; but this he could not brook. Calling one of the muleteers to him, he said,--

"Son, do you not know some remedy for this sore on my leg?"

"Father," replied the muleteer, "what remedy can I know? I have only cured beasts."