third, J. Bixby & Co., another third and young John Bixby in as manager with the chance to earn his third.
This ranch, like the Cerritos, had been cattle range before it became sheep range; unlike the former it has continued to this day as a stock ranch, and although it is many years since there have been sheep it is well known for its cattle, horses, and mules. All the eastern portion of Long Beach, including Bixby Park, that famous center of annual state picnics, came from the Alamitos, and it was John Bixby himself who bought and planted the trees that now shelter the multitudes and afford foci for the gathering of the wandering inhabitants from each and every Iowa county. (There were sixty thousand of them at the last picnic, I have been told.)
Many people now familiar with Southern California have seen the old house surrounded by trees that is on the brow of a hill out on Anaheim Road beyond the Long Beach Municipal Golf Links. That is the old Alamitos Ranch house. When my uncle and aunt first went there to live it was almost a ruin, having fallen during the Reese period from the high estate it had known when it was the summer home of the lovely Arcadia de Bandini de Stearns. The only growing things about it were one small eucalyptus tree and one fair sized pepper tree.
The front room had been used as a calf-pen and the whole house was infested with rats. Uncle John told me that the first night they slept there the baby demanded a drink, and in his passage to the kitchen to
