The suburban citizen., 1902-12-27
S 9g %
place 10 look for Yankees


extensive Western civilization to-day.
He is thoroughly typical OF a country
about which little has been said in its
interesting entirety.
The writer recently Travelled cXten-
sIvely throughout the Pacific Coast
New England and was impressed that
in many ways it was a veritable off,
spring Of genuine, true.D!ue Yankee
dom.
Our Yankee OF the Golden Cate State
left New England in the days OF 40, He
still tells about his trip Around the
Horn in Wind Jammer" and al
though he has been ia his Central Call
fornia home for fifty years, he is still
a Yankee. and a New England Yankee
at that, with nasal twang that would
mark him anywhere. He was one of
a generation that has done big things
wherever they have operated; naturally
he has done some of his blgges things
out here on the Pacific Coast, where he
found a new land and the biggest kind
of opportunities for exercising his Wig
Orous Yankee spirit. His principal op-
-erations have been confined TO the
big Central Valley OF the State OF Cali
fornia, although his influence has been
felt in every city and township in the
State. Now just listen to whist he did
last year in his Central California en-
Dire:
He raised $50 times rs much wheat
as New England twelve times as much
barley and one-half as much corn.
He raised sixty times as much fruit,
with at least double the market rating.
He owns four times as many sheep,
and more cattle and swine.
He deposited $110 in the savings bank
for each member Of his family ,nd for
each employe on his farm.
He raised $4,000 tons of ralslns and
harvested from a vineyard larger than
all his New England cousins cornfield.
In point OF population he is only one
eighth as large, but he lives in the
great Central Valley of California and
owns nearly one-half as much land.
He goes at things in big way, and
almost everything he has is big. He
has the biggest trees in his woods, the
largest fruit trees in his orange or
chard. He owns a vineyard that COW
ers 10000 acres, and even his onion
patch is more than four miles square.
In Death Valley he has the depeest
valley in the United States, and in Mt.
Whitney the highest mountain peak.
He is a great fisherman and owns one.
fourteenth of all the fishing in the
Union, while in San Francisco Harbor
he has the largest inland harbor in the
world.
His Western neighbors all call him
a California Yankee" and le deserves
the title, for he is as versatile as when
he left the New England Coast fifty
odd years ago.
He cuts his grain with great COM
bined harvester that is really the larg-
est automobile in the world, since it
moves by steam, but this big automobile
is also a fast and effective worker, for
as It advances over field of standing
grain, cutting a swath thirty-two feet
wide, it leaves the sacks Of grain in its
wake all threshed and sacked.
This California Yankee is a married
man, and he usually las four children
(3.S2).
He owns his own farm, which is
not mortgaged, and his account in the
savings bank has increased for the
past eleven years.
He lives out of doors great deal of
the time, and for this reason he is
twenty-seven pounds heavier than his
Yankee cousin.
His wife loves flowers. and she has
one little bed of violets thirty acres in
all, from which she makes perfume.
She also has 5000 acres of sweet peas,
and a bed of wild pOppies covering
many square miles As TO her table
she is very particular, having 2500
acres in her largest asparagus bed.
Her husband sometimes takes TO
mining. and the queerest phase in
which he INDUCES is in dredging the
bottoms of streams. He has thirty
four dredgers, in which he has invested
$1,000000, at work. These dredgers
bring up gold and mud from twenty
five feet below the surface Of water,
and fifteen feet beneath the bottom
of the river bed. Our California Yam
kee is the only man in the world who
takes a try at this sort Of mining, but
then it netted him $3,000,00O last year,
and he believes he will be Sj000,000
the better at the close of the present
year.
The country in which he lives Is 400
miles long, and he is quite different
from other Califomians or Westerners.
His voice sometimes has the real New
England twang, and he often wears a
black slouch hat.
Strange that for Yankee he is
something OF river man, and in 1861
he taught Mark Twain how to pilot
fiatboat up the Sacramento River.
The year before that he started in the
newspaper business and he saw Mark
Twain and Bret Harte co-workers on
the Weekly California. 1t was not
much of n paper Mark Twain says
/. 1t was weakly paper" but Twain
land Bret Harte worked very hard at
1870 and 500 n week