Farming Facts for California Immigrants [pp. 176-183]

I76 FARMING FACTS FOR CALIFORNIA IMMIGRANTS. [AUG.
quarter was asked or shown. At last
the disheartened Tai-pings gave way,
and Tai-pingdum became history. The
rebel "Emperor" like the Abyssinian
King Theodore died by his own hand,
midst a bevy of his concubines, also
suicides. Our friends the "princes"
had escaped, and one of them is now in
a southern province still defying the
Tartar, while the other is reported to
have died of disappointment and shame.
Such was Nan-kin as we saw it, and
such the story of the Emperor-peasant
as we learned it from his tried and trusty
friends. What will history say! was
this remarkable man of our day mad,
demented, a fool, or an enthusiast?
We say he was not a Cromwell, not a
Napoleon, First or Third!-only, not
successful.
FARMING FACTS FOR CALIFORNIA IMMIGRANTS.
GRICULTURE in California is
in every respect so different
from farming in the Atlantic States,
that a brief description of its peculiarities cannot fail to be interesting and instructive.
The first peculiarity is the entire absence of rain, and the scanty dew from
May to November. The verdant hills
and meadows green, the babbling brooks
and velvet lawns, that make gay the
drapery of summer time, and wed us to
our rural homes in other lands, are all
unknown in California. A dull and
dusky brown pervades the face of Nature. No woods occur to give relief to
the eye, and shaded intervals on the
highways. Not a tree lines the roads.
Not a rivulet breaks the monotony of
blinding dust that attends the traveller,
and buries his wheels to the axles. No
rocks, no stumps, no hedges, not even a
worm fence to give the eye diversion.
The farm-house we admire in the Eastern States, with its wealth of comforts
and its adornment of shading trees, its
sweet shrubbery, its ample garden and
its gay beds of cultured flowers, its barn
and corn-crib, its spring house with
green pathways, weeping willows and
grassy slopes how many of these attractions can we number among those
that grace the homes of the farmers of
California? Not one! Each and all
are strangers to the landscape in the
great agricultural valleys that supply
the wheat crops which form the bulk of
agriculture and the great money-making
attraction. The fencing is all one monotony of horizontal boards, light and
temporary, but costly beyond conception. The houses are equally monotonous, comfortless, treeless, sun-stricken, fly-beset cabins. This is the general aspect of three-fourths of the present
agricultural country along the hundreds
of miles of the great farming valleys of
the Sacramento and the San Joaquin.
Let it not be supposed that this
nakedness is necessarily contingent to
the dry summer climate. Quite the
contrary. It is all owing to circumstances that are giving symptoms of impending change for the better. Hitherto
poor men have farmed the soil under
claim of first possession, but also under
uncertainty of legal tenure on account
of Mexican claims, that covered the
country in grants of twenty to forty
thousand acres, which have held the
preemptors in legal dispute since the
American advent.
The Courts have now settled most of
the land titles, and a better class of
farmers is fast taking the place of the
earlier settlers. Besides, till within the
past two years farming has not been
profitable, there being no outside mark