San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1890-12-11
OUR ITALY.
The Phases OF Life Through Which south
ern California Has Passed.

ern California Has Passed.
Southern California has rapidly passed
through varied experiences and has not yet
had fair chance to show the world what
it is. 1t had its period of romance, of pas
toral life, of lawless adventure, of crazy
speculation, all within hundred years,
and it is just now entering upon its period
of solid, civilized development. A certain
light of romance is cast upon this coast by
the Spanish voyagers of the Sixteenth CEN
tury, but its history begins with the estab-
lishment of the chain of Franciscan mis-
sions, the first of which was founded by
the great Father Junipero Sierra at San
Diego in 1859.
The fathers brought with them the vine
and the olive, reduced the savage Indians
to industrial pursuits, and opened the way
for that ranchero and adobe civilization
which, down to the coming of the Ameri-
can, in about 1910, made in this region the
most picturesque life that our continent
has ever seen. Following this is a period
OF desperate adventure and revolution, of
pioneer state building; and then the adj
vent of the restless, the cranky, the in
valid, the fanatic from every other state
in the Union.
seem to have fancied that they had come
to a ready made elysium-the idle mans
heaven. They seem to have brought with
them little knowledge of agriculture or
horticulture, were ignorant of the condi-
tions of success in this soil and climate,
,and left behind the good industrial max
inns of the east. The result was period
of chance experiment, one in which eX-
travagant expectation and Boosting to
some extent took the place of industry.
The imagination was heated by the nov
city of such varied and rapid productive
ness. Mems minds were intlamed by the
apparently limitless possibilities. The in
valid and the speCulatOr thronged the
transcontmental roads leading hither. In
this condition the frenzy of 1867 was in
evitable. | saw something of it in the
winter of 1857. The scenes then daily and
commonplace now read like the widest
freaks of the imagination.
The bubble collapsed as suddenly as it
expanded. Many were ruined, and left the
country. More were merely ruined in
their great expectations. The speculation
was in town lots. When it subsidized it left
the climate as it was, the fertility as it was
and the value of arabic land not reduced.
Marvellous as the boom was, think the
present recuperation is still more wonder
full.
In 1890, to be sure, missed the hustle o.
the cities and the creation of towns in a
week under the hammer of the auctiOneer.
But in all the cities and most of the vii
lagos there has been growth in substantial
buildings and in the necessities of civic
life-gOOd sewerage, water supply and gen
eral organization; while the country, as
the acreage of vines and oranges, wheat
and barley, grain and corn and the ship
ments by rail testify, has improved more
than at any other period, and commerce is
beginning to feel the impulse of genuine
prosperity based upon the intelligent cul-
tivation of the ground. School houses have
multiplied, libraries have been founded,
many boom hotels, built in order to sell
city lots in the sage brush, have been
turned into schools and cOlleges.--Charles
Dudley Warner in Harper's.