this and many other
parts of our land is that nature seems to work with a man, and not
against him.

CHAPTER III.

EARLY VICISSITUDES.--PRODUCTIONS.--SANITARY CLIMATE.

Southern California has rapidly passed through varied experiences, and
has not yet had a fair chance to show the world what it is. It had its
period of romance, of pastoral life, of lawless adventure, of crazy
speculation, all within a hundred years, and it is just now entering
upon its period of solid, civilized development. A certain light of
romance is cast upon this coast by the Spanish voyagers of the sixteenth
century, but its history begins with the establishment of the chain of
Franciscan missions, the first of which was founded by the great Father
Junipero Serra at San Diego in 1769. The fathers brought with them the
vine and the olive, reduced the savage Indians to industrial pursuits,
and opened the way for that ranchero and adobe civilization which, down
to the coming of the American, in about 1840, made in this region the
most picturesque life that our continent has ever seen. Following this
is a period of desperado adventure and revolution, of pioneer
State-building; and then the advent of the restless, the cranky, the
invalid, the fanatic, from every other State in the Union. The first
experimenters in making homes seem to have fancied that they had come to
a ready-made elysium--the idle man's heaven. They seem to have brought
with them little knowledge of agriculture or horticulture, were ignorant
of the conditions of success in this soil and climate, and left behind
the good industrial maxims of the East. The result was a period of
chance experiment, one in which extravagant expectation and boasting to
some extent took the place of industry. The imagination was heated by
the novelty of such varied and rapid productiveness. Men's minds were
inflamed by the apparently limitless possibilities. The invalid and the
speculator thronged the transcontinental roads leading thither. In this
condition the frenzy of 1886-87 was inevitable. I saw something of it in
the winter of 1887. The scenes then daily and commonplace now read like
the wildest freaks of the imagination.

The bubble collapsed as suddenly as it expanded. Many were ruined, and
left the country. More were merely ruined in their great expectations.
The speculation was in town lots. When it subsided it left the climate
as it was, the fertility as it was, and the value of a