Part 10

The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda, watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water. The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing. Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, there is no real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated, and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however, there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.

Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust the intrenched middlemen and speculators. A few years ago the growers found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy. They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers, who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino, in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But, as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal, technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big central exchange, as a result of which the growers have been enabled to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country. No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or his acreage.

Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for, as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow. Notwithstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty acres of oranges.

“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton stockings, either.”

I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for yourself.

* * * * *

Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime has asserted that Pasadena means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is, to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the same _cielo sereno_ that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from _La Puebla de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles_, to give the second city of California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the following:

“My Lady would remind you, please, Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’ Nor Angy anything whatever. She trusts her friend will be so clever To share her fit historic pride, The _g_ should not be jellified; Long _o_, _g_ hard and rhyme with ‘yes’ And all about Los Angeles.”

It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure, Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches, and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two fashionable churches in Colorado Street.

Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three “sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. We drove along it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors. Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they are too much of a horticultural _pousse-café_ to be wholly satisfying. Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges and the _jets d’eau_ suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades, bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.

The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up Mount Lowe. You can no more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you speculate as to what would happen if the cable _should_ break. When two thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded, moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums) and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great Artist has but rarely equalled.

Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer the whoop-and-hurrah of popular seaside resorts can gratify their tastes to the limit at any one of the long and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa Monica, Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the amusements which await the visitor are limited only by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. The splendid sands are alive with bathers; the promenades, lined with all the peripatetic shows of a popular seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling, happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is the rule rather than the exception at similar resorts in the East, and there is amazingly little vulgarity, the boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, to the fact that several of the beaches have “gone dry.” At Long Beach the really beautiful Virginia, than which there are not half a dozen finer seaside hotels in the United States, provides accommodation for those who wish to combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach with the more sedate pleasures of Marblehead or Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck on the largest scenic railway in the world (they called them roller-coasters when I was a boy), or you can bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool in the world, or you can go down on the beach and disport yourself in the surf of the largest ocean in the world, though it is only fair to add that this last is not the exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat fried sand-dabs—a fish for which this portion of the Californian littoral is famous and which is as delicious as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian extraction in white ducks and a red sash pilots you through a series of lagoons and canals, and, if you have a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able to make yourself believe that you are in the city of the Doges. Though somewhat noisy and nearly always crowded—which is, of course, precisely what their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide the cleanest amusements and the most wholesome atmosphere of any places of their kind that I know.

Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea as the aeroplane flies, and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district. Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion of the Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast. When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a toast.

“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been blowing this evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”

* * * * *

Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large, there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of Nova Scotia.

Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is the group of which Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, it takes the _Cabrillo_, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the passage, which is as notorious for producing _mal de mer_ as that across the Straits of Dover.

The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age, and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate, but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.