a,
but it has also been the excuse for shiftlessness and recklessness, the
cause of social disintegration and moral decay. The "Argonauts of '49"
were a strong, self-reliant, generous body of men. They came for gold,
and gold in abundance. Most of them found it, and some of them retained
it. Following them came a miscellaneous array of parasites and
plunderers; gamblers, dive-keepers and saloon-keepers, who fed fat on
the spoils of the Argonauts. Every Roaring Camp had its Jack Hamlin as
well as its Flynn of Virginia, John Oakhurst came with Yuba Bill, and
the wild, strong, generous, reckless aggregate cared little for thrift,
and wasted more than they earned.

But it is not gold alone that in California has dazzled men with visions
of sudden wealth. Orange groves, peach orchards, prune orchards, wheat
raising, lumbering, horse-farms; chicken-ranches, bee-ranches,
sheep-breeding, seal-poaching, cod-fishing, salmon-canning--each of
these has held out the same glittering possibility. Even the humblest
ventures have caught the prevailing tone of speculation. Industry and
trade have been followed, not for a living, but for sudden wealth, and
often on a scale of personal expenses out of all proportion to the
probable results. In the sixties, when the gold-fever began to subside,
it was found that the despised "cow counties" would bear marvelous crops
of wheat. At once wheat-raising was undertaken on a grand scale. Farms
of five thousand to fifty thousand acres were established on the old
Spanish grants in the valleys of the Coast Range and in the interior,
and for a time wheat-raising on a grand scale took its place along with
the more conventional forms of gambling, with the disadvantage that
small holders were excluded, and the region occupied was not filled up
by homes.

The working out of most of the placer mines and the advent of
quartz-crushing with elaborate machinery have changed gold-mining from
speculation to regular business, to the great advantage of the state. In
the same manner the development of irrigation is changing the character
of farming in many parts of California. In the early days fruit-raising
was of the nature of speculation, but the spread of irrigation has
brought it into more wholesome relations. To irrigate a tract of land is
to make its product certain; but at the same time irrigation demands
expenditure of money, and the building of a home necessarily follows.
Irrigation thus tends to break u