ssociate
effort. Such a desert as that now blooming region known as Pasadena,
Pomona, Riverside, and so on, could not be subdued by individual
exertion. Consequently land and water companies were organized. They
bought large tracts of unimproved land, built dams in the mountain
canons, sunk wells, drew water from the rivers, made reservoirs, laid
pipes, carried ditches and conduits across the country, and then sold
the land with the inseparable water right in small parcels. Thus the
region became subdivided among small holders, each independent, but all
mutually dependent as to water, which is the _sine qua non_ of
existence. It is only a few years since there was a forlorn and
struggling colony a few miles east of Los Angeles known as the Indiana
settlement. It had scant water, no railway communication, and everything
to learn about horticulture. That spot is now the famous Pasadena.

What has been done in the Santa Ana and San Gabriel valleys will be done
elsewhere in the State. There are places in Kern County, north of the
Sierra Madre, where the land produces grain and alfalfa without
irrigation, where farms can be bought at from five to ten dollars an
acre--land that will undoubtedly increase in value with settlement and
also by irrigation. The great county of San Diego is practically
undeveloped, and contains an immense area, in scattered mesas and
valleys, of land which will produce apples, grain, and grass without
irrigation, and which the settler can get at moderate prices. Nay, more,
any one with a little ready money, who goes to Southern California
expecting to establish himself and willing to work, will be welcomed and
aided, and be pretty certain to find some place where he can steadily
improve his condition. But the regions about which one hears most,
which are already fruit gardens and well sprinkled with rose-clad homes,
command prices per acre which seem extravagant. Land, however, like a
mine, gets its value from what it will produce; and it is to be noted
that while the subsidence of the "boom" knocked the value out of
twenty-feet city lots staked out in the wilderness, and out of insanely
inflated city property, the land upon which crops are raised has
steadily appreciated in value.

So many conditions enter into the price of land that it is impossible to
name an average price for the arable land of the southern counties, but
I have heard good judges place it at $100 an acre. The lands, with
water,