The National tribune., 1900-09-06
FIFTY YEARS OF CALIFORNIA.
Her Farms as Rich as Her Mines.
AiRsLce's.

Half Il century comes to an end on tn,
9th of September of the current year since
| California, taken from the lap of Mexican
Incidence and tossed into the arms OF
American Adventures, was delivered al
the bosom of Columbia an infant State
with gold nuggets i'll her fists and ships OF
commerce at her feet. The story of these
30 years, considered even without the en-
thusiasm which the contemplation of un.
usual things stimulates, is one of those re-
markable dramas of human history that
can happen only i'll such Il country as
| America.
Beginning in an environment of Latin
| laZinesS and religious contentment, plunged
suddenly into Il whirl of money getting
with all the attendant unconventional.
| ties. vices and opportunities, separated
by 2,G0O miles from the then farthest
Western settlements of the country, and
with no resources ether than her own the
! Golden State has had long and note
worthy struggle, to build herself up into
the full glory of statehood which she now
! possesses.
For more than 10 years after the first
| rush of immigrants, California did almost
nothing but tear the earth to pieces to find
gold. With 1JS,GOO square miles of terri
| tory TO wander over, with no use for the
! land other than to make it yield nuggets
and DUST the prospcctors went at the
work on Il scale whose vastness has since
| stamped itself on all the doings of the
community. lnventing gigantic hydraulic
| dredges, they dug holes in the banks of
streams and washed away the sides OF
mountains, rccklesSly and without regard
| to the future. Within nine years from
the time Marshall picked up the first shin
ing piece VI ore i'll the tail-race of Suffers
mill, S456,COO,0U0 has been contributed to
| the world's supply of gold; and market
lnn
ming to be affected. The sense of bigness
at home and bigness abroad mingled itself
with the sense of the ease, od-felloW-
ship and the comparative irreSponsibiity
which characterized the life of the time.
Yet, although such was the great rich
ness and the breadth of things when con-
sidered in lump, and although such was
California's initial contribution to the
worlds history, the benefit to the individ-
ual was slight. With 100000 men in the
State, nine-tenths of whom We're engaged
in actual mining, it was estimated that
the average remuneration to the miner
was only $500 per year--a very meager
morsel of reward for men who had strug-
gled across the deserts or roughed il
around the Horn and over the Isthmus in
the hope of becoming rich. AS the first
decade closed, and miners worked back
to the seashore and the cities, leaving the
foothills scared with the ruin they had
wrought, yaWnlng with the evldenccS of
the power of their inventions, and the
heedlessness of their quest for gold. Huge
hills stand to the present day washed
half away or ripped and followed to the
depth of hundreds of feet until their nat
ural shape is as much distorted as if n
volcano or an earthquake had been at
work among them.
Men who could not find work in the
placers, or whose claims petered out so
that only Cinnamon could find profit in
working them, turned to the old standby
of farming. Here again the territory to
be exploited was wide and unoccupicd
Most of the richest land was held in Span
ish grants of great acreage, and the new
farmers were brought at once into the
presence of the idea of large fields. In
stead of occupying and tilling 40 to 16O
acres, as was done in the Eastern States
the Californians thought themselves poor
when they could not have above 400 acres.
As lately as in 1870 there were in the