Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 24
XXIV.
THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS.
I.
I had marked out as a field of travel Southern California.
It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern California should be deemed to comprehend. Most of the State, leaving out the mining and lumbering districts, displays some of those tropical features in which the idea of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate climates consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounding pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the north of San Francisco. One of the most important districts for raisin-culture is near Sacramento and Marysville, north-west. At the springs of Calistoga, seventy-five miles north, is found a group of the finest palm-trees in California. It is safe to assume, however, that all this will be found in the greater perfection as the low latitudes are approached.
San Francisco lies not far from midway of the State, and Southern California may conveniently be taken as all that part south of the seaport and metropolis. It was upon the area just below, around the Bay, that the Rev. Starr King lavished his most polished eulogies, describing the "flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile," which he saw there, in the spring. To the vicinity of San José,
fifty miles down, Bayard Taylor proposed (if he should
live to be old, and note his faculties failing) to retire in order to renew his youth. And but seventy-five miles farther south are the summer resorts—and winter resorts as well—of Santa Cruz and Monterey.
I set out in mid-autumn, the time of the county fairs, when the products of an agricultural country should be seen to particular advantage. There was held at San José the combined fair of the counties of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, and that I made my first objective point.
There are no means of exit from San Francisco by land except to the southward, the long, narrow peninsula on which it lies being surrounded on all other sides by water. One may cross, however, by ferry to Oakland—the Jersey City and Hoboken, as well as Brooklyn, of the place—and go around the bay on that side by a road which reaches San José also. In doing so you traverse Alameda County, which raises nearly a million bushels of wheat a year from a single township, together with tons of sugar-beets, and more hay than any other county in the State. It comes third also in rank for grape-vines, and has tropical pretensions of its own, making an exhibit of orange and lemon trees in certain favored nooks. But the more direct way is the coast division of the Southern Pacific Railway, down the peninsula.
Let us glance at topography a moment. California is fenced off into valleys by two long north and south ranges—the Sierra Nevadas, immensely high, and the lower Coast Range. These meet in acute points, north at Shasta, and south at the Tejon Pass, and become one. They enclose between them the vast central space known in its upper portion as the Sacramento Valley, and its lower as the San Joaquin Valley, from the two main rivers by which it is drained. The granite Sierra Nevadas
Railway Route
Southern California
And
Arizona.
contain the peaks of from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet elevation which have obtained an extensive fame in the world. The Coast Range, of softer materials, averages only from two to six thousand feet.
The Sierra Nevadas do not greatly divide their strength, but the Coast Range throws out frequent spurs parallel to itself. These take separate names, as Sierra Morena, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz mountains, and form numerous long, narrow valleys and benches of table-land between themselves and the Pacific Ocean. Down the large Santa Clara Valley, one of those formed in this way in the midst of a diversified region, our first excursion takes us.
By the time the files of freight-cars constituting the immediate environs of all American cities are passed we find ourselves running through a tract of small vegetable gardens and windmills. Clusters of buildings in white enclosures, that looked from town, on their hills, like Mexican haciendas, are "institutions" of various sorts. A long arm of San Francisco Bay accompanies us thirty miles south, and is seen gleaming to the left, with a wide stretch of marsh between. Ark-like structures on piles, at intervals along the water's edge, are guard-houses, keeping watch over beds of the small California oyster, which has never yet been either coaxed or driven into a grandeur commensurate with the pretensions of everything else about it.
The conception that has gone out about Southern California is that it is an earthly Paradise. I will say at once
that it is very charming, even in the dry season, but it is an earthly Paradise very different from the best idea of it one has been able to get by previous investigation. I found myself there, in short, in the dry season, and most writers have spoken of it only as viewed in the season of rains and verdure.
The guide-book promises, "after a few minutes' ride, orchards, vineyards, elegant farm-houses, prospects to
charm all who love the beauties of nature." But, really one—rubs his
eyes—where are they? The ground is
mournfully bare and brown. Hardly a tree or a bush is seen; not a green blade of grass. At length some small trees, a variety of scrub-oaks, at a little distance resembling the olive!
Farm-houses are few, and not at all
"elegant." The hills are of the color of camel's hide, and not unlike the camel's humps.
At Millbrae, finally, there is a glimpse of the wooden towers, in the American style, of a villa, and a large dairy barn. At Belmont the low hills are close at hand. At Menlo Park a charming flower-bed is cared for, by the track, as at foreign railway-stations. We are in the chosen site for villa residences of the San Francisco millionnaires. The surface is flat, and with its growth of oaks recalls the outskirts of Chicago, as at Hyde Park or Riverside.
The valley widens till the hills are distant and veiled in blue, with tawny grain-fields between; but still no verdure! And where are the wild flowers? One hardly expects them now "by the acre and by the square mile," it is true, since it is autumn; but of all the primroses, the larkspur, the lupin, the poppies of tradition, not one! Not a narcissus! not a chrysanthemum! Oh, my predecessors! what shall I think of you?
In the spring the flowers bloom and carpet the earth as grass carpets it elsewhere. Speaking of the spring the
eulogists do not say a word too much. But it is my originality to have seen Southern California in the autumn and winter—as it is for seven months of every
year, and as it may be, in exceptional seasons, the whole year through.
Not to make a great deal of this bareness and dryness would be to neglect a most essential feature. The annual rains begin in December, January, or February, and
continue till June, diminishing in May, which is sometimes itself a dry month. In the autumn the leaves fall—what comparatively few there are to fall—as elsewhere, and are not renewed.
"But you set up to be a land of perpetual summer, you know," one argues with the Californian, in the first state of surprise.
"So we are," he replies; "but that does not necessarily mean perpetual verdure. Look at the thermometer! look at the fertility of the land! You have but to run water on it by irrigation, and it will do whatever you please. Contrast this brown season with your own white one. The land is dry and easy to get about on, and the sky above is uniformly pleasant. Do you prefer your fields of sheeted snow, under the howling blasts? your quagmires of mud and slush, alternately freezing and thawing?"
"Very true," I admit, accepting this different point of view.
Then, perhaps, by way of finishing touch, he adds, rising to a dignity well justified by the facts, "California sets up to be a land of relations, commercial, agricultural, mineral, and social, which have made it a power in the world. It has revolutionized values, struck the key-note of new social conditions, and begun a new commercial era. California has arrived at a point where she takes
her place in the Union on the ordinary terms. We no longer depend upon a repute for astounding beauties and
eccentricities—though of these, too, there is no lack, as you will find."
II.
San José, a city of twenty thousand people, contests with Sacramento the honor of being third in importance in the State. You alight there at the small station. In the vicinity are a waiting horse-car, a blacksmith's shop, and rail-fences painted with advertisements. These have a very American look, to begin with, for a place with a romantic Spanish name—a place to which you are recommended to come in search of the elixir of life. And so have the small picket-fences an American look, and the comfortable little clapboarded wooden houses behind them, with scroll-sawed ornaments in their piazzas. With the exception of an unusual number of French and Italian names on the sign-boards, and some large, clean tuns in front of the shops of dealers in native wines, it is as downright a little Yankee town as ever was. There is much shade in the streets, and in a public green, but the trees are yet too small and low.
It is a clean, prosperous city, the centre of a rich agricultural district. It has excellent schools and all the other conveniences of life. A good deal of money has been spent on the principal business buildings. As in most other provincial towns throughout the State, they are much covered with bay-windows, in what might be described as the San Francisco style of architecture. An iron trestle-work tower was going up at the intersection of the two main streets, to rise to a height of two hundred feet, to contain an electric light and illuminate the town. The white Court-house, in the classic style, though not large, is agreeably proportioned, and quite a model of its kind.
The week's doings at the Fair Grounds resolved themselves chiefly into trotting-matches. I was told that the combined display of the two counties was poorer this year than either was in the habit of making alone.
There was racing and ornamental riding, one day, by young women, and those who took premiums were girls of but fourteen and sixteen. Another popular feature of these county fairs was "firemen's tournaments," in which different companies held contests of speed, equipped with all their paraphernalia.
There was but a scattering display of live-stock, and little or no fruit. The two-hundred-pound squash, the twenty-six-pound turnip, the beet five feet in length and a foot through, the apples and pears commensurate with these, were not shown. I had seen them before, and did not much regret their absence. I have a lurking suspicion that there is a standard of the vegetable as of the human race, and that the Tom Thumbs and General Bateses of the one are not more fortunate in their departure from it than those of the other.
The capacity of the country to produce fruits, not simply of abnormal size, but fine quality—excepting the apple, which requires extremes of heat and cold, and remains insipid—has, perhaps, been too well tested to need competitive exhibitions. What better county fair than the daily display of fruits and vegetables in the San Francisco market? The regular season for any and all of them is twice as long as on the Atlantic coast at corresponding latitudes.
I traversed the much-eulogized "Alameda," an avenue of willows and poplars, of three miles, set out, in 1799 by Spanish friars. These founded a mission among the
Indians at Santa Clara, to which town the avenue extends. There remains at Santa Clara the chapel of the mission, with its adobe walls, five feet "thick, and flat
wooden ceiling, rudely painted. It is now a part of a flourishing collegiate institution. Across the way is a clump of ruinous old adobe cottages of the same date; but we are adjured to pay no great heed to these, since we are going presently to Monterey, which has, as it were, a grand specialty of all that kind of thing.
The Alameda poplars and willows make but a moderate showing for their age, and can hardly be rated equal to New Haven elms, for instance. Behind them, along both sides of the road, are houses of a bourgeois comfort, as in the town. There are said to be residents of wealth and leisure who have been attracted here to pass the remainder of their days in peace. The Coast Mountains, they say, cut off the fogs and winds of the ocean, and a higher range on the other side bars out the heats of the country eastward. We endeavor to divine, in some superior refinement of taste and sentiment, the abodes of these particular ones. It is a pleasant conception, that of coming here to live for the pure physical delight in living, and highly interesting. Perhaps their daughters will stand by the gates with a certain repining mingled with their air of superior distinction, as if they, for their part, had not quite so willingly consented to abandon a world of larger opportunities. But we do not succeed. Some of these residents are simply rude mining men who have broken their constitutions in Nevada and Utah; and, after all, the desire to live a life of physical contentment does not imply taste in architecture and landscape gardening.
III.
One had expected a good deal of novelty and picturesqueness from these towns, of romantic "San" and "Santa," and "Los" and "Del," and feels rather aggrieved not to get so much of it. Its absence is explained in part by the fact that there were rarely original settlements corresponding to the present names. These are taken rather from ranches, springs, or mines in the neighborhood. On the arrival of the Americans in California there were but thirteen thousand Spanish, or Mexicans,
all told, while the territory was as large as New York, Pennsylvania, and the six New England States put together.
Let us believe that the pleasing designations will act as a stimulus, and these communities will live up to their names in time, as they never could have done were they simply Smithville and Jonesville.
The impressions at San José, and in the country at large, resulting from a second visit a month later, were more agreeable. Something like the proper point of view had then been attained. The face of nature was to be parched, and the towns rather commonplace; but the continued cloudlessness of the sky, and quality of the air, were more, and the peculiar form of pleasure was settled where it belonged.
The district of villa residences of the millionnaires, when penetrated, gained much in attractiveness. There are white-oaks and chestnut-oaks, as well as scrub-oaks, in groups of a park-like appearance, and live-oaks, with long, gray Spanish moss depending from them. If there are no wild flowers, there are plenty of the cultivated sort, with lawns kept green by fountains and hose. Where there is water, the winter, or brown season, need never extend.
As a rule, long stretches of white picket-fence surround the places, and the houses themselves are white.
The bonanza kings have been invested with a greater air of magnificence than really belongs to them. Their places cost them immense sums, it is true, but a reduction should be made to Eastern standards. The outpouring of untold millions put up the prices of land, labor, and every commodity entering into the result, so that less was obtained for the money than an equal expenditure would have procured here. The Menlo Park district is inferior to Llewellyn Park, Englewood, Irvington, and others, in the neighborhood of New York.
The builders have struck out a kind of style of their own, perhaps in too great haste to wait for imported ideas. The houses are chiefly of wood. Flood, of Flood & O'Brien, and "Consolidated Virginia" when the great bonanza was struck, had just completed one of great size, on an estate of five hundred acres, at Menlo Park. There was a terrace, with a fine bronze fountain. The main steps were of polished marble with bronze sphinxes, and bronze dragons studded the ornate stables the whole glaring, white, and over-gorgeous, like listening to the noise of a brass band.
There are some gentler, more home-like places, and recalling the tone of rural life at the East. Such a one is that of ex-Governor Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto. Here is a breeding farm for horses, one of the most complete of the kind in the world. Of seventeen hundred acres one hundred are occupied by stables, barns, and small paddocks, which, at the foot of a gentle rise of ground, make a small city by themselves. It is inhabited by a population of nearly five hundred animals, who return hither from business, as it were, in the pastures and race-tracks, and have two hundred persons employed in their domestic service. The spacious stables are uniformly floored and ceiled up with redwood, strewn with the freshest straw, and kept as neat as the most unexceptionable drawing-room.
Scions of the stock, representing the best thoroughbred 
PALO ALTO.
and trotting strains in the country, are
an important influence in improving
the breed of horses throughout the Pacific slope. It was here that the curious experiments were conducted, at the expense of Governor Stanford, for arriving at a better understanding of the speed of horses by photographing them in motion. The photographer, Muybridge, of San Francisco, succeeded, by an ingenious
arrangement of electrical wires, communicating with cameras, in securing twelve distinct views of a single stride.
The attitudes are of the most unexpected sort, and some of them even comic.
From the time of foaling the colts are gently handled, and made as familiar with the touch of harness as with that of human hands. As a consequence they are tame, gentle, and even affectionate, and never need formal breaking. The effect of the system of training has been apparent in some notable records of speed. On the Bay District Association track, at San Francisco, in 1880, the two-year-old Fred Crocker lowered the record for a one-mile trot to 2' 25¼". Last year Bonita, a two-year-old filly, cut it down to
2' 24½". At the same trotting
exhibition Wildflower, another two-year-old, made the mile in 2' 21"; and Hinda Rose, a yearling filly, added to the fame of the farm by cutting down the yearling record to 2' 36½".
The interiors of these fine villas are, as a rule, better than the exteriors. The Mills house, at Millbrae, residence of a banking and railway magnate, now of New York, is a notable collection of portières and Oriental rugs, and bed-chambers done in the finest woods, with a picture-gallery of works of Gérôme, Detaille, and Bouguereau, while from all the windows are vistas of fan-palms, flower-beds, greensward, and bronzes.
Ralston's old house, at Belmont, now the property of Senator Sharon, is of those of the greatest interest, through
interest in the remarkable man who built it. Starting from humble origin, he rose to be a great capitalist and the promoter of brilliant schemes of improvement, both
public and private. He conducted to success a hundred projects which in other hands would have been folly, and arrived thus at such an unbounded confidence in his star that he thought he could not fail. He was entangled at last, however, in schemes beyond his control. Strong and
athletic, and in the prime of life, he went down to "Harry Meigs's" wharf, in San Francisco—almost the very point
from which his great prototype sailed away to Peru—and swam out half a mile into the bay. It was for refreshment in his troubles, as some say, but, as the general opinion is, with the purpose of suicide. At any rate he was never seen alive again.
The house that was his is notched into the hill-side, in a rolling country, much pleasanter than the plain at Menlo Park. A pretty gorge behind it is dammed to furnish a water-supply. There are gas-works, a bowling-alley, and an elaborate Turkish bath among the out-buildings, and a grange-like barn of solid stone, ivy-grown, which cost $80,000. The immense house is wood, white, in the usual fashion, and, with its numerous stories and windows, is not unlike a large country hotel. A peculiar arrangement and great spaciousness give it a palatial air within. The principal rooms open into one another by glass partitions, which can be rolled away, so that in large gatherings there need be no crowding through doorways. There is an arcade above, around a grand staircase, with tribunes projecting, in which young women in colors, at an evening party, for instance, would look particularly houri-like. What in another house would be the ordinary veranda is here a delightful promenade, glazed in, and provided with easy furniture and a parquetry floor. Behind a row of such main apartments as drawing-room and library comes a parallel row, of which one is a great ball-room, entirely faced with mirrors. Pianos, mantels, and stair-posts are of California laurel—a new industry encouraged by the owner among many others.
We drove from Belmont back through a succession of cup-like dells in the lower mountains, a number of them dammed to form pretty lakes, the sources of supply for the Spring Valley Water Company—a corporation of great prominence at San Francisco. The slopes at first
RALSTON'S COUNTRY HOUSE
"milk ranch," or "chicken ranch." There are no farms in California: no matter how small the tract is, it is always a ranch.
In the strong, warm sunshine chance objects on the bare slopes cast intense, purplish shadows. That of a distant tree is as dark as if a pit had been dug under it. That of a bird, flying low, is followed as distinctly as the bird itself. You are reconciled at last to the brown tone. It is like Algeria. White stands out in brilliant relief against it. One would rather like it to be a different white, however, than that of the little wooden houses. The falconers of Fromentin might career or the rival Arab chiefs of Pasini hold conferences among such hills.