Adobe Days/Chapter 9
Chaptr IX
Flocks and Herds
Sheep were the main interest of the ranches, in fact were the prime reason for them. I do not know how many there were all told, but on the Cerritos alone there were often as many as thirty thousand head, and upwards of two hundred thousand pounds of wool were marketed annually in San Francisco. At first the wool was shipped from Newport Landing, but in my day it went from San Pedro.
There was little demand for mutton in the south, so from time to time, in order to dispose of aged surplus stock a band of several thousand sheep would be driven overland to San Francisco. The start would be made in the spring when the grass was green on the hills, so that as the stock moved slowly on they found good feed and reached the city happy and fat,—to meet their doom.
In the early days I understand that Flint, Bixby & Co. imported merino sheep and materially improved the quality of California wool. I remember that at the San Justo there was a majestic ram with wool that hung to the ground, who lived in state in the fine sheep barn with a few favored wives. I know that the little girl was warned not to be friendly with him as he was not kind and gentle.
Most of the sheep, however, lived out on the ranges, in bands of about two thousand, under the care of a sheepherder and several dogs. These men lived lonely lives, usually seeing no one between the weekly visits of the wagon with supplies from the ranch. Many of the men were Basques. Often there was some mystery about those who took this work,—a life with the sheep was far away from curious observation, and served very well for a living grave. Once I overheard talk of a herder who had been found dead in his little cabin. He had hanged himself. And no one knew what tragedy in his life lay behind the fatal despondency!
One of the men who had been a cabinet maker made me a set of tiny furniture out of cigar box wood, a cradle, table, bureau, book case and three chairs, all delicately fashioned and showing him to be a skilled craftsman. I suppose this man so cut off from normal human relationships enjoyed the occasional visits of the little girl who rode about the ranch with her father.
Every week a man from the ranch made the rounds of the sheep camps, carrying mail, tobacco, and food,—brown sugar, coffee, flour, bacon, beans, potatoes, dried apples. On the morning when this was to happen I have watched the flickering light of the lantern travel back and forth over the ceiling of the room where I was supposed to be asleep, as the finishing touches were put on the load, and the horses were brought and hitched to the wagon before daylight, so that the long rounds could be made before night.
Twice a year, spring and fall, the sheep came up to be sheared, dipped and counted. Father usually attended to the count himself as he could do it without confusion. He would stand by a narrow passage between two corrals, and as the sheep went crowding through he would keep tally by cutting notches in a willow stick.
During shearing time we heard new noises out in the dark at night, after we were put to bed, the candle blown out, and the door to the upper porch opened. Always there were crickets and owls and howling coyotes, and overhead the scurrying footsteps of some mouse on its mysterious business, or the soft dab of an errant bat on the window, but now was added the unceasing bleat of thousands of sheep in a strange place, and separated, ewe from lamb, lamb from ewe.
Shearing began on Monday morning, and on Sunday the shearers would come in, a gay band of Mexicans on their prancing horses, decked with wonderful, silver-trimmed bridles made of rawhide or braided horsehair, and saddles with high horns, sweeping stirrups, and wide expanse of beautiful tooled leather. The men themselves were dressed in black broadcloth, ruffled white shirts, high-heeled boots, and high-crowned, wide sombreros which were trimmed with silver-braided bands, and held securely in place by a cord under the nose. They would come in, fifty or sixty strong, stake out their caballos, put away their finery, and appear in brown overalls, red bandanas on their heads, and live and work at the ranch for more than a month, so many were the sheep to be sheared. They brought their own blankets and camped out. Their meals were prepared in a cook wagon.
Once at the Alamitos, a number of men had sleeping places in the hay in the old adobe barn, each holding his chosen bed most jealously from invasion. Half a dozen of us children, starting after breakfast on the day’s adventure, after taking slices from the raw ham stolen from the smoke-house and secreted in the hay, spied some clothes carefully hung on the wall above the mow, and the idea of stuffing the clothes into the semblance of a man was no sooner born than it was adopted. Our whole joy was in doing a life-like piece of work. Fan gave us a paper bag for the head, which we filled and covered with the hat. Little we knew how seriously a hot-tempered Mexican might object to being fooled. In the evening when the men came into the barn the owner of the particular hole in which our dummy was sleeping was furious at finding his place occupied. He ordered the stranger out. No move. He swore violently. Still no move. He kicked. And as he saw the man come apart and spill out hay instead of blood, his rage knew no bounds, his knife came out, and it was only by good luck that we children were not the cause of a murder that night. Uncle John made rather vigorous remarks to us about interfering with the workmen.
There were wool-barns at all three of the ranches that I knew, but I officiated at shearing most often at the Cerritos. Here the barn was out beyond the garden, facing away from the house, and toward a series of corrals of varying sizes. The front of it was like a covered veranda, with wide cracks in the floor. Opening from this were two small pens into which a hundred sheep might be turned. The shearer would go out among these sheep, feel critically the wool on several, choose his victim and drag it backward, holding by one leg while it hopped on the remaining three to his regular position. Throwing it down, he would hold it with his knees, tip its head up, and begin to clip, clip, until soon its fleece would be lying on the floor, the animal would be dismissed with a slap, and the wool gathered up and placed on the counter that ran the length of the shearing floor. Here the grown boys of the family tied each fleece into a round ball and tossed it into the long sack that hung in a nearby frame, where a man tramped it down tight. When the Mexican delivered his wool at the counter he was given a copper check, the size and value of a nickel, marked J. B., which he presented Saturday afternoon for redemption. It is a fact that frequently the most rapid workmen did not get the most on pay day, simply because they were less skillful or lucky as gamblers than as shearers.
I remember going one evening out into the garden and peering through a knot-hole at a most picturesque group of men squatting about a single candle on the wool barn floor, playing with odd looking cards, not like the ones in the house. The pile of checks was very much in evidence.
George told me that it was his father’s custom for many years to carry the money for the ranch payroll from Los Angeles to Cerritos in a small valise under the seat of his buggy, sometimes having several thousand dollars with him. This habit of his must have been known, but he was never molested. George maintained that there was a code of honor among the prevalent bandits to respect the old citizens as far as possible.
I had beautiful days during shearing. Sometimes I was entrusted with the tin cup of copper checks and allowed to deal them out in return for the fleeces delivered. I spent much time up on this same counter braiding the long, hanging bunches of twine that was used for tying up the fleeces into balls. I worked until I became expert in braiding any number of strands, either flat or round. A few times I was let climb up the frame and down into the suffocating depths of the hanging sacks, to help tramp the wool, but that was not a coveted privilege,—it was too hot and smelly. I loved to watch the full sack lowered and sewed up and then to hold the brass stencils while the name of the firm and the serial number was painted on it before it was put aside to wait for the next load going to Wilmington. Never was there a better place for running and tumbling than the row of long, tight wool sacks in the dark corner of the barn.
Many a check was slipped into our hands, that would promptly change into a watermelon, fat and green, or long and striped, for during the September shearing there was always, just outside the door, a big “Studebaker” (not an auto in those days) full of melons, sold always, no matter what the size, for a nickel apiece. It has ruined me permanently as a shopper for watermelons; nothing makes me feel more abused by the H. C. L. than to try to separate a grocer and his melon.
I seem to have gotten far away from my subject, but, really I am only standing in the brown mallows outside the open end of the wool barn, watching the six horse team start for Wilmington with its load of precious wool that is to be shipped by steamer to “The City,” San Francisco, the one and only of those days.
As soon as the shearing was well under way the dipping began. This was managed by the members of the family and the regular men on the ranch. In the corral east of the barn was the brick fireplace with the big tank on top where the “dip” was brewed, scalding tobacco soup, seasoned with sulphur, and I do not know what else. This mess was served hot in a long, narrow, sunken tub, with a vertical end near the cauldron, and a sloping, cleated floor at the other. Into this steaming bath each sheep was thrown; it must swim fifteen or twenty feet to safety, and during the passage its head was pushed beneath the surface. How glad it must have been when its feet struck bottom at the far end, and it could scramble out to safety. How it shook itself, and what a taste it must have had in its mouth! I am afraid Madam Sheep cherished hard feelings against her universe. She did not know that her over-ruling providence was saving her from the miseries of a bad skin disease.
Now the sheep are all gone, and the shearers and dippers are gone too. The pastoral life gave way to the agricultural, and that in turn to the town and city. There is Long Beach. Once it was a cattle range, then sheep pasture, then, when I first knew it, a barley field with one small house and shed standing about where Pine and First Streets cross. And the beach was our own private, wonderful beach; we children felt that our world was reeling when it was sold. Nobody knows what a wide, smooth, long beach it was. It was covered near the bluffs with lilac and yellow sand verbenas, with ice plant and mesembreanthemum and further out with shells and piles of kelp and a broad band of tiny clams; there were gulls and many little shore birds, and never a footprint except the few we made, only to be washed away by the next tide. Two or three times a summer we would go over from the ranch for a day, and beautiful days we had, racing on the sand, or going into the breakers with father or Uncle Jotham who are now thought of only as old men, venerable fathers of the city. Ying would put us up a most generous lunch, but the thing that was most characteristic and which is remembered best is the meat broiled over the little driftwood fire. Father always was cook of the mutton chops that were strung on a sharpened willow stick, and I shall never forget the most delicious meat ever given me, smoky chops, gritty with the sand blown over them by the constant sea breeze. I wonder if the chef of the fashionable Hotel Virginia, which occupies the site of our outdoors kitchen, ever serves the guests so good a meal as we had on the sand of the beautiful, empty beach.