# Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 27

XXVII.
VISALIA, BAKERSFIELD, AND LIFE ON A SPACIOUS RANCH.
I.
visalia, capital of Tulare County, thirty- four miles south of Fresno, is one of the older towns left aside by the railroad. I put it in the most obvious way, but a patriotic Visalian, on the other hand, said to me with warmth, "Left by the railroad! Visalia left by the railroad! I guess not. It is the railroad that is left by Visalia, as it will find out."
Visalia is reached, from the junction of Goshen, by a short branch-road of its own. It is larger than Fresno, but less animated. It has perhaps twenty-five hundred people, a court-house of the pattern described, and a United States land-office.
When the epithet "old" is used of any California town not of Spanish origin it simply means an approximation to the year 1849. The building of most hoary antiquity in Visalia dates only from the year 1852. It has been government-house, jail, and store in turn, and is now decorated with the legend "Mooney's Brewery." The town was founded by one Vise, an erratic person, who came across the plains from Texas, and had followed in his life such various professions, besides that of pioneer, as preacher, trader, gambler, foot-racer, and jockey. It happened that the quarter section of land upon which he settled was at the time unsurveyed, and not legally open
FIRST BUILDING IN VISALIA
to pre-emption. This irregularity was not discovered till years later, when the town had grown up on the site. It was brought to light by an employe of the land-office, who thereupon ingeniously undertook to preempt the ground for himself.
"And what came of this bold attempt upon vested interests?"
"The party was promptly fired out of town," was the reply.
Visalia is rather prolific in stories, if an "old-timer" of the right sort can be stirred up to tell them. Cattle kings, whose herds once filled the San Joaquin Valley, have retired hither. You may hear how Cattle King "Pat Murray" won his wife. She was a fascinating person in her youth, the daughter of a landlady with whom Pat Murray, then struggling and impecunious, boarded, in company with numerous mates. There was great aspiration and rivalry for her hand. Pat Murray stole a march in this wise. As they were setting off in company on an expedition he said, "The trip is a rough and dangerous one, boys. I propose that we leave our money and valuables with the old lady for safe-keeping." The rest agreed, and handed over to him their property to deliver to her. The shrewd Pat Murray represented ​it all as his own, and obtained in this way such consideration in her eyes—as a person exceptionally well-to-do in the world—that she advised her daughter to "set her cap" at him, and all was happily accomplished before the ruse was discovered.
On another occasion—whether in this same courtship or not the chronicles do not say—Pat Murray disposed of rivals, who visited in the evenings a comely damsel of the general acquaintance, by soft-soaping the log serving as approach to her cabin across a small stream. Having thus arranged, he sat calmly enjoying the fair one's society, and listening with appreciative ear to the splash of the successive victims as they slid off into the water.
Stories are told of Spanish bandits and treasure of precious metals in the mountains, and of the wild administration of justice in early times, when offenders were occasionally executed first and sentenced afterward.
AN OLD-TIMER.
At Visalia I first observed "Spanishtown," a community which begins to appear regularly alongside of "Chinatown" as we go southward. It is composed of persons of Mexican blood, poor, shiftless, and not always of the most reputable character.
Charming views of the high Sierras, now powdered with the first snows of winter, are had. The surface is more rolling than at Fresno, and strewn with fine clumps of chestnut-oaks. There are big trees back in the great mountains equalling in size those of the Yosemite. Lumbermen at work there cut down numbers which, though insignificant as compared to the very largest, are monstrous in themselves.
The water for the irrigation of this district is drawn out of Kings, Tule, and Kaweah rivers by companies, who give to their principal canals such names as the People's Ditch, the Last Chance Ditch, the Mussel Slough Ditch, and the Lower Kings River Ditch. The main ditches or canals range from twelve to forty feet in width. Wing dams confine and direct into them such portions as are desired of the wide, meandering rivers.
LOGGING, BACK OF VISALIA.
Though irrigation be yet in its infancy its belongings have attained great dimensions. There are three hundred miles of canals of the requisite size in Tulare County, and more than three thousand miles in California all together. One main canal, that of the San Joaquin and Kings River, has a length of seventy-four miles and a width of nearly seventy feet.
II.
A branch-road westward from Goshen, a continuation of that from Visalia, conveys the traveller to the bustling, fast-growing little towns of Hanford and Lemoore, in the Mussel Slough country. This district, adjoining Tulare Lake, was recently part desert and part swamp. It has been redeemed so as to rank now among the best farming land in California. Its chief product is wheat. The inhabitants raise hardly the vegetables needed for their own use. Malaria is rather prevalent, but it is said to arise, as in many other irrigated districts, from the careless use of water rather than the fundamental situation. The water, instead of being carefully drained off, is too often allowed to lie in stagnant pools. The Mussel Slough was the scene, in the month of May, 1880, of a bloody conflict between the settlers and railroad authorities which has become celebrated. Officers of the law, acting for new claimants, attempted to take possession of the land under a railroad title. Legally in the wrong, though perhaps morally in the right, the settlers organized to resist, put out stirring manifestos, which read like the declarations of oppressed people struggling for their liberty, and called on gods and men ​to witness the justice of their cause. In the fight that ensued five settlers lost their lives, all at the hands of a single man—one Crowe, a United States marshal, who displayed a prowess and coolness under fire never surpassed in any of the narratives of sensational literature. Crowe himself was despatched. A number of the survivors were tried for their part in the affair, condemned to eight months' imprisonment, and served out their term in Santa Clara jail. They had but just been released, say a month before our arrival. Their brethren and well-wishers had received them on their return with an ovation, the noise of which hardly yet ceased to ring in the air.
III.
Bakersfield, capital of Kern County, seventy-five miles farther south, somewhat smaller than Visalia, boasted at one time the distinction of a malady peculiar to itself. The Bakersfield form of malarial fever, whatever the fine difference that distinguished it from others, had a position apart in the medical works. The sanitary condition of the place, however, has been greatly improved by the extension of drainage and irrigation works, and can, no doubt, be made all that could be desired.
Of the three lakes, Tulare, Buena Vista, and Kern, which make so large a showing on the map, the latter two, with their surrounding marshes, have been dried up, and the former is on its way to extinction also. These lakes had for me, on the map, a mysterious and important air. I seized the first opportunity to penetrate their mystery, by riding down to Tulare Lake on horseback. You cannot reach the margin, for fear of miring. Nor is the approach on foot much "easier. The tules, or rushes, rise high above your head, and are infested with
​a dangerous breed of wild hogs, descended from vagrant deserters from the ranches. In such fragmentary glimpses as are had between and over the tules an expanse of dreary surface appears which may be either water or the alkali-whitened bed from which the water has receded. The vicinity swarms with wild fowl. Their multitudinous chatter has a kind of metallic clang in it. Now white, now dark, as they are before or against the sunlight, they flutter above the reeds and stubble-fields like autumn leaves blown by the wind.
The drying up of the lakes is occasioned by the diversion of the surplus waters of the Kern River for the redemption of desert lands. This gave rise to a controversy, lately settled by a legal decision which is a step in the crystallization into shape of a system of water jurisdiction for California. The great firm of real-estate men and ranchmen, Miller & Lux, owned the lands below; the almost equally great firm of Haggin, Carr & Tevis, those, for the improvement of which the water was taken out, above. The first-named complained of the diversion of the waters as a detriment to them, and an infringement of their riparian rights. Riparian right, it will be remembered, in the English common law, gives to the resident on a stream the right to have it flow as it was wont through his grounds without diminution or alteration.
The contest at first promised to be one of physical force. Miller & Lux endeavored to close the sluices at which the water was taken out. Just, as in Scripture, the herdsmen of Gerara strove against the herdsmen of Isaac, saying, "It is our water," the hardy vaqueros of Haggin, Carr & Tevis were mustered in opposition to them, with orders to lasso and throw into the canal anybody who should interfere with the sluices. This deter- ​mined show of resistance prevented a conflict, and the ease went to the civil courts.
The decision spoken of holds that the doctrine which prevails in California is not that of riparian right, but that of "prior appropriation for beneficial uses."
That is to say, the greatest good of the greatest number is consulted. The point had been raised before in controversies about the diversion of water for mining purposes. In these cases the ruling was, that the doctrine of riparian right is "inapplicable, or applicable only in a very limited extent, to the necessity of miners, and inadequate for their protection." It was furthermore held that all of the English common law is not in force in California, but only such portions of it as are adapted to the peculiar conditions of the State. The agricultural and mining interests, therefore, are now put, in this respect, on the same footing.
Bakersfield takes its tone essentially from live stock. It has special resorts for drovers and sheep-herders. Its streets are generally full of horses, caparisoned in the Spanish style, tied to hitching-posts and awaiting their owners before the stores and taverns. The sheep-herders, a lonely race, become morose and melancholy in their long wanderings with their flocks apart from the habitations of men and human speech. They are far removed from the shepherds of Boucher and Watteau. Some are said to go insane through the monotony of their lives; and it is an occupation taken up only as a last resort, and unfitting him who pursues it for any other. Strangely enough, there is a rather English tone among them. Young prodigals of good family are found who, after trying their fortunes in Australia, India, and elsewhere, are eating the husks of repentance here in true Scriptural fashion. ​The shops in Bakersfield, as throughout our travels, are kept principally by the Jews, who are great pioneers. No people are growing up more ardently with the new West; and where they are found business is pretty sure to be good.
The Chinatown is a district of compact little streets, of an extent that indicates a population almost equal to that of the rest of the place. An irrigating ditch surrounds it like a moat. The cabins along this, picturesquely reflected in it, are gray and weather-beaten, varied with patches of bright Orientalism, and shaded by a line of tall poplar-trees. The Spanishtown, close by, is a cluster of dance-houses and corrals, between which swarthy Joses and Juanitas are seen passing.
As if this were not foreignness enough already, we stumble upon a camp of strolling gypsies, their tents pitched on the borders of Spanishtown. They are English, and have come from Australia, dropping their "h's" all along the way, no doubt, as liberally as here. They are like types of Cruikshank and Dickens. An apple-faced Mrs. Jarley appears in a large velvet bonnet with plumes. A very tightly-dressed, slender individual, with a weed on his hat, might pass for Sam Weller. He is a horse-tamer and jockey. At his heels follows a belligerent bull-dog. Behind one of the tents a child of nine, Cassie by name, with fine, dark eyes, is making a toilet before a bit of cracked mirror. She pastes down her wet hair into a semblance of the "water-waves" of fashionable society. When interrupted with a compliment on the arrangement she affects displeasure, and tosses it all abroad again with a native coquetry.
CHINATOWN, BAKERSVILLE.
IV.
The possessions of some of the great land-owners are prodigious. It is a favorite story that certain ones can drive a herd of cattle from the northern counties of the State to San Diego, its southern limit, and quarter them every night on their own ground. Haggin, Carr & Tevis, whose property I was privileged to examine in detail, have at Bakersfield four hundred thousand acres nearly in one body. Much of this was secured for a trifle in the condition of desert land, and has been redeemed.
One ranchman who had acquired a great estate of this kind chiefly while surveyor-general of the United States was the occasion of drawing forth one of the best bon mots of Lincoln.
"I congratulate you," said our humorous President. "You have become monarch of about all you have surveyed."
The owners do not often live upon their estates; they leave them in the hands of managers, and draw the revenues. The Haggin, Carr & Tevis property is divided into a number of separate ranches, each with its resident superintendent. The "Bellevue Ranch" is the centre and focus of authority. Here are the residence and office of the general manager, and a force of book-keepers, engineers, and mechanics, who keep the accounts, map, plan, supervise, construct, repair, and give to the whole the clock-work regularity of a great commercial enterprise. The numerous buildings constitute a considerable settlement. There is a "store" of general mer-
GYPSY CAMP AT BAKERSFIELD.
department is devoted to "road-scrapers," "buck-scrapers," and ploughs of various sorts used in the construction and dredging of the irrigating ditches. The soil is, fortunately, free from stones, and the work, for the most part, easy. One enormous plough is seen which was designed to be drawn by sixty yoke of oxen, and to cut at once a furrow five feet wide by four deep. Like the famous Great Eastern, it has defeated itself by its own mass, and its use has been abandoned.
More than $500,000 has been expended in the item of fencing alone. An average of four hundred laborers is employed, and, in the harvest season, seven hundred. The rate of wages is from two and a half to three dollars per day for mechanics, and a dollar per day for common hands. This seems low as compared with information from other sources, and the chronic complaints of the scarcity of farm labor, in the California papers.
No great portion of this domain appears to be in the market for settlers of small means, though the intention is avowed of offering some of it in this way when thoroughly reclaimed. Tracts, however, are occupied on favorable terms by "renters," who take from 120 to 600 acres. Very many of these are Portuguese and Italians. They are usually unmarried, and work in companies of ​from six to fifteen persons. You see them, dark and swarthy, going about in the traditional Garibaldi shirt, with hardly a word of English among them.
The renter is provided with a house, artesian well, credit to a moderate amount at the store, and the use of some cows. He has the milk of these, but must give their increase to the estate. His lease runs three years, and he pays in rent one-third of his crop. Instances of large profits are frequent among these persons, and the same opportunities are open to others who wish to follow their example.
The superintendents and upper employés on the place are largely Southern men. California was a favorite point for Southern immigration at one time, so much that the course of the State in the war, influenced by the historic Judge Terry and Senator Gwin, was considered problematical. These that I speak of, however, are gentlemen who have come here to repair their fortunes at a later period. They have for the most part titles from the service of the extinct Confederacy, and the gentle voices and friendly courtesy characteristic of the Southern type.
A typical ranch-house, that, for instance, of our hospitable friend Major McClung, on his section of the subdivided property, is a long, two-story dwelling, painted in the Indian-red so popular throughout the country. It is raised on posts considerably above the ground, to allow of a free circulation of air underneath. There is an open hall through the centre for the same purpose. An irrigating ditch resembling a moat passes in front, crossed by a little rustic bridge.
A TYPICAL RANCH-HOUSE.
cot trees. The young orange-trees were, as at Fresno, put up in mufflings of straw for the winter. The weather is very hot at noon-day, but so cool at morning and evening that wood-fires are burned. The chill in the air is of a penetrating kind, felt the more by contrast with the heat of the day, and fire is a necessity. The house-servants were clean, white-aproned Chinamen; those out-of-doors, Mexicans, One of these latter had ​trained a goose, "Dick," to follow him like a pet dog, and nothing was more curious than to see the pride of both master and biped in this ridiculous relation.
Cattle-raising is the leading industry; alfalfa, for carrying the stock over periods of scarcity, is the leading crop. Stacks of alfalfa of great size, one containing seven hundred tons, were seen. It is the ordinary color of hay externally, but when cut into is green. A successful experiment has also been made in the raising of cotton. The hands were in the field going about among the white pods for the second picking.
Though out of season, a rodeo was organized for our benefit, to show the method of handling the roving cattle on a large scale. A number of vaqueros rode out in various directions till lost to sight. Presently traces of dust arose on the several horizons. The plain, on which a few cows had been peacefully feeding, was filled with stamping and lowing herds, driven toward the centre by the careering vaqueros. When gathered in sufficient numbers feats of lassoing the animals, by either leg or horn, separating special animals or classes, and the like, were under-taken, and carried through with marvellous dexterity. As a culmination, hats and ropes were picked up from the ground, the rider going at full speed. A silver half-dollar, placed on edge in the dust of the roadway, was seized after several attempts by a swarthy Aztec.
The herders are usually Mexicans, equipped in the Mexican style, but with the greater part of the finery left out. The bosses, who often even excel them in pure horsemanship, are generally Americans.
The ranch known as the Livermore borders Kern and Buena Vista Lakes, and is the southernmost in the tier. The herds are gathered there in the early spring, and driven to the ranch of San Emidio, in the mountains.
SAN LUIS OBISPO.
At the Livermore Ranch you are at the apex of the San Joaquin Valley. Here the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range effect a junction, and oppose a natural barrier to farther progress. The railroad has to cross this barrier by a wonderful piece of engineering, the Tehachapi (Te-hatch-a-pe) Pass. At one place five different lengths of track pass and repass at different levels. By the singular "Loop" the road enters a tunnel, emerges, twists spirally round the mountain, and reappears above itself.
At San Emidio we are on the boundary-line of San Luis Obispo County, and could make our way directly, no doubt, to its pretty, mountain-encompassed capital. This is more easily reached, however, with attractive Santa Barbara below, by steamer, or stage-road along the coast.
Returning to Bakersfield, you may ride west to the wild cañon of the Kern River, and the mining towns of Kernville and Havilah. The mining industry has never taken the same development south of the San Joaquin River as north. It is probable both that there is less ore and that the ventures have been managed with less skill.
At Kernville is a quartz-mill, with a hundred stamps, which after many vicissitudes has fallen into the hands of its former workmen for debt, and is now run by them on the co-operative principle.
A RODEO
THE KERN RIVER CAÑON.
ground, up hill and down dale, to the savage and splintered granite gorge.
We fell in with an isolated sheep ranchman, "Captain Jack Barker," an enterprising man, who had created a garden spot in the waste, and showed what even this is capable of. He was engaged on a project for leading the
​water, by means of a flume and ditches, from the river at the canon's mouth down upon several thousand acres of land under cultivation. In the spring-time, he told us, all this bareness is hidden by a perfect carpet of flowers, chiefly a small orange-scarlet poppy. His sheep at present seemed living on air. He had among them some Angora goats, a hardy animal, once very profitable, but now, since the decline in alpaca goods, being used by him for food.
The Kern River tumbles down a gorge four miles in length, between granite walls six hundred feet high. Its water is translucent green in deep, untroubled pools, again churned into milk-white floods, with black bowlders among them. The canon is all but impassable. It acts like a funnel, and produces a local disturbance of its own on the atmosphere. While all around is still, a column of air will blow out of it, and, striking the table-land a quarter of a mile away, raise a chronic dust at the point of contact, like a cannon-shot.
Driving across the front of it we were nearly blown out of our wagon. We descended into it, nevertheless, and upon this experience returned to dine on ribs of Captain Jack Barker's Angora goats, and then take the railway and cross the Tehachapi Pass.