narrow border of cultivated lands separating it from the wide, almost treeless, valley.
An exception to this general condition was the district to the East, centering about the San Gabriel; this mission early won the title Queen of the Missions, not because of the size or beauty of church or location, but because of the large number of Indians under its care, and the extent of its herds, orchards, vineyards and grainfields. Its cattle, estimated variously from 75,000 to a 100,000, roamed the great valley even to the foot of the mountains San Gorgonio and San Jacinto; for convenience in administration a branch, or asistencia, was established at San Bernardino in 1810.
The San Gabriel vineyard numbered a hundred and fifty thousand vines, from cuttings brought from Spain, and the making of wine and brandy (aguadiente) became an important industry. Its orchards, at their peak, contained over twenty-three hundred trees, most of them oranges, which the padres introduced, together with olives, pomegranates, and lemons. The gardens were surrounded with adobe walls or cactus hedges as a protection against marauding cattle or people, who, as one padre once quaintly said, “put out the hand too often.”
The first San Gabriel oranges were planted in 1804 by Padre Tomas Sanchez. Thirty years afterward the earliest grove in Los Angeles was set out by Don Luis Vignes, to be followed in 1841 by that of William Wolfskill, whose orchard later became famous as the largest in the United States. He was instrumental in
