The San Gabriel Valley[12]
The sun valley of San Gabriel is one of the brightest spots to be found in all our bright land, and most of its brightness is wildness--wild south sunshine in a basin rimmed about with mountains and hills.
Cultivation is not wholly wanting, for here are the choices of all the Los Angeles orange groves, but its glorious abundance of ripe sun and soil is only beginning to be coined into fruit. The drowsy bits of cultivation accomplished by the old missionaries and the more recent efforts of restless Americans are scarce as yet visible, and when comprehended in general views form nothing more than mere freckles on the smooth brown bosom of the Valley.
I entered the sunny south half a month ago, coming down along the cool sea, and landing at Santa Monica. An hour's ride over stretches of bare, brown plain, and through cornfields and orange groves, brought me to the handsome, conceited little town of Los Angeles, where one finds Spanish adobes and Yankee shingles meeting and overlapping in very curious antagonism. I believe there are some fifteen thousand people here, and some of their buildings are rather fine, but the gardens and the sky interested me more. A palm is seen here and there poising its royal crown in the rich light, and the banana, with its magnificent ribbon leaves, producing a marked tropical effect--not semi-tropical, as they are so fond of saying here, while speaking of their fruits. Nothing I have noticed strikes me as semi, save the brusque little bits of civilization with which the wilderness is checkered. These are semi-barbarous or less; everything else in the region has a most exuberant pronounced wholeness. The city held me but a short time, for the San Gabriel Mountains were in sight, advertising themselves grandly along the northern sky, and I was eager to make my way into their midst.
At Pasadena I had the rare good fortune to meet my old friend Doctor Congar, with whom I had studied chemistry and mathematics fifteen years ago. He exalted San Gabriel above all other inhabitable valleys, old and new, on the face of the globe. "I have rambled,"
said he, "ever since we left college, tasting innumerable climates, and trying the advantages offered by nearly every new State and Territory. Here I have made my home, and here I shall stay while I live. The geographical position is exactly right, soil and climate perfect, and everything that heart can wish comes to our efforts--flowers, fruits, milk and honey, and plenty of money. And there," he continued, pointing just beyond his own precious possessions, "is a block of land that is for sale; buy it and be my neighbor; plant five acres with orange trees, and by the time your last mountain is climbed their fruit will be your fortune." He then led my down the valley, through the few famous old groves in full bearing, and on the estate of Mr. Wilson showed me a ten-acre grove eighteen years old, the last year's crop from which was sold for twenty thousand dollars. "There,"
said he, with triumphant enthusiasm, "what do you think of that? Two thousand dollars per acre per annum for land worth only one hundred dollars."
The number of orange trees planted to the acre is usually from forty-nine to sixty-nine; they then stand from twenty-five to thirty feet apart each way, and, thus planted, thrive and continue fruitful to a comparatively great age. J. DeBarth Shorb, an enthusiastic believer in Los Angeles and oranges, says, "We have trees on our property fully forty years old, and eighteen inches in diameter, that are still vigorous and yielding immense crops of fruit, although they are only twenty feet apart." Seedlings are said to begin to bear remunerative crops in their tenth year, but by superior cultivation this long unproductive period my be somewhat lessened, while trees from three to five years old may be purchased from the nurserymen, so that the newcomer who sets out an orchard may begin to gather fruit by the fifth or sixth year. When first set out, and for some years afterward, the trees are irrigated by making rings of earth around them, which are connected with small ditches, through which the water is distributed to each tree. Or, where the ground is nearly level, the whole surface is flooded from time to time as required. From 309 trees, twelve years old from the seed, DeBarth Shorb says that in the season of 1874 he obtained an average of $20.50 per tree, or $1435 per acre, over and above the cost of transportation to San Francisco, commission on sales, etc. He considers $1000 per acre a fair average at present prices, after the trees have reached the age of twelve years. The average price throughout the county for the last five years has been about $20 or $25 per thousand; and, inasmuch as the area adapted to orange culture is limited, it is hoped that this price may not greatly fall for many years.
