CALIFORNIA AS I SAW IT IN 1883

After fourteen days of travel from Boston, we arrived in Truckee, California, on the third of November 1883.
We had been traveling through a dreary desert country for several days, the ground in many places covered with snow, the wind piercing cold. Our car was heated by a coal stove located in one end of the car, and those sitting near it had too much heat, while at the other end it was freezing cold.

We occupied a section in a tourist car, being one of three hitched on the rear end of a freight train, often loaded with cattle. Every time we stopped, we felt the bump as each car hit the one in front of it, and when we started, it reversed the operation. It was hard for one to keep his feet if he were standing in the aisle of the car, until the last car had started rolling. Everybody was tired and worn out. Sick people kept us awake nights.

I was supposed to be an invalid on my way to take advantage of that wonderful California climate that we had heard so much about and had high hopes of getting well. You can imagine how disappointed I was when they told me that we were in California that memorable day in November 1883. There was six inches of snow on the ground and the air was chilly with a few flakes of snow that was driven by a strong wind. It reminded me of that far off country of northern Maine we had left.

After leaving Truckee, we began to climb the mountains and pass through snow sheds. These sheds were built of heavy timbers to protect the railroad track from being blockaded with snow in the winter time. Great slides of snow frequently cut off travel between California and the East.

Going down the western side of the range of mountains that is known as the Sierra Nevadas, our attention was called to many trees which had their tops cut off forty or fifty feet from the ground. They were not far from the railroad and it was a mystery to me why they were cut so high from the ground. We were told that before the railroad was built, it was necessary to keep the road open through the mountains as this pass was the U.S. Route and the only pass through the mountains for many miles north or south.

After each snowfall, oxen were driven over the road to pack the snow so as to make the road passable for the stage carrying mail and express Many trees grew close to the road. In years of heavy snowfall the road built up to where the tops of the trees extended over the road so they had to cut them. The sight of those tall stumps of trees with the marks of the woods­ mans' axe plainly showing stood as a silent witness of the great depth of snow that at one time enabled mei4to stand on the crust and cut the tops of trees many feet from the ground.

As I looked at this undisputed evidence of the depth of the snow in the years that had passed, my memory turned back to a picture that was vividly impressed on my mind. A group of men sitting around a stove on a cold winter night waiting for the mail. The Post Office was in one end of a general store and this was the only clubroom we had in town. Among the men were several who had traveled in other countries. Among them was Fred Lufkin, a good entertainer, who had spent several years in California. I think it was listening to his wonderful stories that awakened within me a great desire to see that marvelous country. He told of seeing snow forty feet deep; logs that required ten yoke of oxen to haul to the mill; mountains so high one could not see the top; Sometime I would repeat his statements, and someone would say "O, that is one of Fred Lufkin's stories. He is the biggest liar in the state."

I have learned since being in California that Fred Lufkin was well within the truth in his statements. I am sure that he awoke in the minds of many of us a desire to learn more of that great state. If you have any doubts of it, look over the register of this county.

In descending the mountains, the railroad followed the river, one of the branches of the Sacramento. We passed within sight of many of the works of the miners of '49. A vast amount of work had been done by them; great piles of stones and coarse gravel could be seen that they had moved to get the gold that had been deposited in the sands and on the bedrock of ancient streams and riverbeds.

We saw great streams of water thrown by pressure hundreds of feet and still active in tearing down the sides of the hills to wash out any small particles of gold still left from previous washings.
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The debris from the hydraulic workings of the hills has so filled the channel of the Sacramento River that the streets of the city of Sacramento are below the bed of the river. The city is protected by levies thirty feet in height. I doubt if all the gold taken out by the miners would pay for the damage to the country below their workings.

We reached Sacramento before noon. The weather was fine and everything looked green. The trees, lawns and a great variety of flowers made us think that at last we had arrived at the gate of the Promised Land. We took dinner at the Western Hotel where we had plenty of fresh vegetables, fruits and meats, all for 25 cents. We visited the State House and had a good view of surrounding country from its dome.
I had never seen such large tomatoes as they had on display. Unlike most of the people from the East at that time, I did not have to acquire a taste for them. It seems strange to the people of this generation that the taste for tomatoes had to be cultivated by nearly all Eastern people fifty years ago. The same is true of fresh figs and olives.

In going down the great Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, we saw thousands of acres of wheat and barley just covering the ground with a carpet or dark green. Here again we were reminded or another or Fred Lurkin's stories. He told of seeing thousands of wild geese destroying the wheat and barley crops of the farmers in the valleys of California. We saw hundreds of geese that men on horseback were trying to keep from lighting, by firing into them to keep them on the move. In other places we saw men with dogs chasing rabbits out of fields of alfalfa and vineyards.

We passed through Fresno, a thriving town, where many grapes and fruit trees had been planted. We were interested in this section of the country as we had read much of the literature sent us by real-estate agents, or chambers of commerce, setting forth the great inducements to home seekers in the way of climate and variety of farm and orchard products. This literature was written by the same type of men who later exploited the sheep pastures around Los Angeles and built up a great city.

Our fellow townsman, the Hon. J.D. Teague, came to this section a few years before, and looked it over quite thoroughly with a view to locating his family. He had read much of the highly colored literature telling him of the wonderful climate, fine fruits and vegetables. They told of the wonderful large pumpkins that grew around Fresno. He hired a team one morning to drive to a field a few miles out of town where he had been told were some large pumpkins. After driving some distance he met a man and asked if he could direct him to the field that grew the large pumpkins. The man said he had heard of them but never had been out to see them but could tell how to reach them. Keep straight ahead on this road until you come to a pumpkin vine that crosses it. Follow the vine for about three miles and you will come to the field of pumpkins. Teague said he did not go to see the pumpkins as the vine was too big to drive over.

The next town we remember seeing was Bakersfield, it is situated in a tule swamp and is a small town of a few hundred people. We were told it is the headquarters for horse and cattle thieves.

There were but a few settlers in that great stretch of country known as the San Joaquin Valley. Vast herds of cattle and sheep pastured in the foothills that touched its borders on either side. Very few fences or shade trees were to be seen. The air was filled with dust by a strong wind, the road through the valley was anywhere one wanted to drive. You could see the movements of the cattle for many miles by the dust they made.

We passed over the Tehachapi mountains in the night. I looked out of the car window as we passed around that wonderful piece of engineering, the Tehachapi Loop.

When we arrived at Mojave, we found a very different climate than in the San Joaquin Valley. The air was lighter, cool and dry. It is said to be the windiest railroad station in the United States. There are no trees to be seen, only a few scattered bunches of short brush. A few miles from the station is a group of hills which divide Mojave De ort from Antelope Valley. There were no settlers in this Valley and it was here that I saw for the first time the Joshua tree in its natural state, or as they told me its name was the Yucca tree.

At Newhall, we found the family of Uncle Harvey, who were living in a tent. He was superintending the drilling of a well at Peco, about seven miles up in the hills.

Newhall was the headquarters for the Pacific Coast Oil Co. and the Hardison and Stewart Oil Co. The Pacific Coast Oil Co. had several wells at Peco Canyon, and the Hardison and Stewart Co. had leased some territory from them and had put down several wells that were of little value. They were drilling two more.
Newhall had a railroad station, one hotel, one store and a saloon. The P.C.O. Co. had an office and a tool shed, the H.&s. Co. had an office and warehouse with the largest stock of oil well supplies in the state.
We stayed in Newhall several days waiting for our trunks that had gone to Los Angeles. While waiting for them, Frank Whittier who was working for the H&S Oil Co. took a horseback ride up Placerita Canyon to the place where gold was first discovered in California. We met an old '49er from our native state. At first he would not talk and seemed rather suspicious of us, but when we told him we were tenderfoots from Maine out to see the country he asked us from what part of Maine. We told him and he said he was from Bangor. He became quite friendly with us and showed us how to pan gold. He showed us some fine gold he had in a bottle and told. us he had made several fortunes since the days of '49. He was living all alone in a small cabin and said he could make about $2.50 a day.

Uncle Wallace Hardison had located, and was building a house, in Santa Paula Canyon, a short distance from the small town of Santa Paula. This was about 38 miles from Newhall, down the Santa Clara Valley. The H&S Co. were putting down some wells not far from that town and advised me to go down there with him.
We left Newhall early in the morning in a spring wagon drawn by two fine mules. We drove 12 miles over land owned by one man, Newhall. It was our first experience with big ranches, where the neighbors were few and far between. The first place we came to was Camulos, a place made famous by Helen Hunt Jackson as the home of Ramona. Here we saw our first orange trees with ripe oranges on them. We bought a dozen for fifty cents.

The Camulos Rancho was a part of an old Spanish grant. It had quite a settlement of Mexicans and Indians around it. It is noted for its fine wines, and oranges, and has a large set of ranch buildings and a Catholic Church built in the Spanish style. At this ranch, we saw our first California Indians. They are a shorter and darker race than our Eastern Indians.

At Piru we saw several families of Indians living in adobe and willow huts. The Warrings lived at the Buckhorn ranch and were engaged in stock raising and a little farming. The stage from Santa Barbara changed horses here.

Several families lived near where the town of Fillmore now stands. Among these, was a man named Kellogg whom we had met at Newhall. He was quite a character. He was a traveling merchant, with a covered wagon and trailer drawn by six horses. He had a regular country store on wheels and carried everything usually found in such stores. He exchanged his wares with the country people for butter, eggs, dried fruits, honey and poultry. He made the rounds of Ventura County and Los Angeles about every three weeks.

The Santa Clara Valley from Newhall to Santa Paula looked to us to be too narrow and rough to support much of a population. I did not see any land on which I thought I could make a living. It appeared to be covered with brush and stones. Some patches were covered with wild mustard, which I was told indicated that it was good land.

There was not a mile of improved road between Newhall and Santa Paula and only one short bridge over a deep gulch near where John Levens now lives. The road through the Valley, where there were not too many stones, had several tracks. You could take your choice, and after going a short distance you wished you had taken one of the other tracks.

Santa Paula was a small hamlet of about twenty houses. It had three stores, two saloons, one drug store, a blacksmith shop, a small school house, a Methodist Episcopal Church and a small hotel. The town is situated on the north bank of the Santa Clara River and west of the Mupu or Santa Paula Creek on very stony ground. N.W. Blanchard had about 80 acres set to oranges and lemons, just commencing to bear. Alexander Gray had a small family orchard, and about ten acres of apricots. Warmsley Easley had an orchard of about ten acres of different kinds of fruit trees. John Saltmarsh, Gilbertson, Brown and several others had small family orchards near the river Crumrine, Sam Todd and several others had small orchards up the Santa Paula Canyon above the mill.

The first Sunday we were in Santa Paula, we walked around the town and saw the most wonderful flowers that we had ever seen, rose bushes were trees, geraniums made hedges, as high as our heads, nearly every front yard had many varieties of flowers; in one yard we saw cotton in bloom and tobacco growing.
Uncle Wallace gave several of us a ride down the valley as far as the M.D.L. Todd place, to show us a field of pumpkins, some of them took two strong men to lift from the ground. We estimated that they would weigh
250 lbs. Mr. Todd told us that it required two men to roll them on a plank on to the wagon.

The valley below Santa Paula has a very rich and deep soil and will grow nearly every kind of fruit and vegetable that can be grown in the state or Union. Fresh peas, and strawberries, as well as all kinds of vegetables, were in the market, we thought it a most wonderful country and decided to
buy a small place.

The doctors advised me to seek a higher altitude than Santa Paula. We went up to String Town, sometimes called Bardsdale to look the country over. We met Mr. Serdam who was agent for the land and he offered me fine land at $100.00 per acre on easy terms. The east wind was blowing so hard we failed to see the beauty of the landscape, the gnats were so thick they filled our eyes and nose and ears. We became deaf to the high pressure salesman as well as blind to the beauti. es he pointed out. We noticed that the natives wore handkerchiefs or netting around their necks for protection against the gnats. We decided we did not want any land in Bardsdale.

Our next exploration was to the upper Ojai. We went up Seesaw or Sisar creek, which united the Santa Paula about five miles above its mouth. The road up the Santa Paula canyon was quite passable, following the Sisar creek was a rather difficult task for a man from the East. There was no public road, only a squatter’s right to pass over the land belonging to the Ojai grant. Several gates barred out the way. One was a Mormon gate made of wire, the other built of lumber which was too heavy for me to open.

We were advised to see the N.J. Ireland place that was situated at the mouth of the canyon that ran into the mountains. He was one of the early settlers in the county and had about a dozen orange trees, two lemon trees and one ff the largest grape vines in the state, several hundred stands of bees which made him a fine living, a ditch of very fine water ran past his door. I was interested in the place and wanted to buy it, he had nothing but squatters right, a rather poor title to offer me for the wonderful climate.

On our trip to the Ojai we saw great quantities of oil that had seeped out of the mountains and dried into asphalt. We went past wells that were put down by T.R. Bard in 1967 [sic]. They were known as No. 6 and were producing a few barrels of oil a day.

On the upper Ojai were several fine farms, considerable wheat, oats, barley and corn. Some of the farmers had small farms of different kinds of fruits and nuts. It is rather cold for oranges or lemons. Jim Brackin, Thompson and Clark had several acres of grapes each, and each had a small winery. These places faced them north side of Sulphur Mountain which is covered with live oak, wild walnuts, sycamore and other kinds of trees.

The upper Ojai Valley must: at one time have been thickly populated by Indians as traces of their works can be seen all over the valley. On the Bracken place can be seen a round ring that looked like the ring lift by a circus tent. It was about 50 feet in diameter and 2 feet high and several in thickness. What was it used for and what became of the builders? No one seems to know. Very few Indians are to be seen in Ventura County at this time.

We could not find a place for sale in the upper Ojai. The lower Ojai Valley had no water and we were told that no white man could live there during the summer months as it was too hot both night and day.
At Ventura we had our first sight of the Pacific Ocean. The town of San Buena Ventura is situated near the mouth of a river by that name.

It has a Mission church and parsonage that was built in 1782, destroyed by an earthquake in 1812 and rebuilt on higher ground by Indians under the supervision of the Mission Fathers.

Ventura would be a good harbor if the water were deeper. They have a short wharf where schooners could tie up and unload lumber and merchandise and load wheat, barley, beans, wool, honey and such other products as the people had to ship out. Honey is quite an item of export. In 1884 Ventura County produced more than 600 tons, the producer receiving about $80.00 per ton for it.

The people of Ventura did not seem to have any enterprise. They appeared to be waiting for something to turn up. They did not want any more laborers to come in as they had plenty of help. I’ve been unable to find anything for sale between a house lot and a large tract of land.

It’s sixteen miles from Ventura to Santa Paula. There are twelve water courses, or as the natives called them "barranca” between the two towns. Some of them are quite deep and only one had bridge across it. The Harmond Barranca. I do not think there was a mile of graded road in the county, the dust was so deep that if you moved faster than a walk, your horses would kick up such a dust that you could not see the road, and it would nearly smother you. It took two days to make the round trip between the two towns if you had a load.
The land below Santa Paula was divided into farms of 20 to 640 acres, the soil being of a sedimentary loam, very rich and deep. The farmers dumped all manure into the gulches, burnt the straw or put it on the roads, to an Easterner it looked like very poor farming.

South of the Santa Clara River is a great stretch of level land, mostly sandy soil. The wet portion of it is covered with a white substance that looks like snow, they told me it was alkali. 11ost of the land produced good crops. It is held in large tracts and I saw ten eight horse teams plowing with Stockton plows, following each other on one land. They told me they made four rounds a day.

A dozen men owned 90% of the land on the south side of the river. It is a very windy country and the farmers had to wear nets over their faced to keep the mosquitoes and gnats from eating them up. They had no water for irrigation.

On higher land, further east, is the Simi Valley. It furnishes pasture to hundreds of horses, cattle and sheep. We saw many stands of bees that gather honey from the white and brown sage that covered the hillsides.
Many of the settlers of Ventura county were the remnants of miners of the early fifties. They had come from the mines further north when mining ceased to pay. They had tried farming and stock-raising, but few had kept step with the march of time, progress had left them behind. Others had come from the south after the Civil War. They had no use for the people of the North and did not consider them desirable neighbors. We did not get much encouragement to settle among them.

One morning we started for Los Angeles by way of the Conejo Grade. We camped at a Sulphur spring not far from the foot of the grade, about twenty miles from Santa Paula. There was a crude wooden tub with the shade of brush over it. We had had a long ride and were very tired, as were our horses. We took a bath and spread our bedding on a thick mat of bur clover that grew near the spring. We went to sleep in spite of the howling and barking of the coyotes.

The next morning after an early breakfast, we started to climb the Conejo grade. We found it some grade, I think it is 30% in some places. Our brakes would not hold and Mrs. Hardison walked and triged the wheels sometimes as often as fifty feet, to give the horses a rest. It took us two hours to climb the grade. The road through the Conejo Valley was very rough and wound through great oak trees that made it a beautiful drive.
We camped a few miles out of Los Angeles where Hollywood with its great buildings now stand, under some pepper trees near a watering trough.

We had passed through the noted Coalllnga Pass. The next morning, we drove through the city of Los Angeles, a city of about 15000 people. Most of the business houses were on Spring Street and Main Street. above Third. At the Courthouse we saw some of the old cannons captured from the Mexicans. They were placed on end in the ground for hitching posts.

Around the Plaza the street was paved with cobble stones and in not very good repair, saddle horses were hitched around the Plaza and on the Streets. It was more of a Mexican town than American.
In between Los Angeles and Orange, the country is one vast sheep pasture. We had to take our own feed for the horses with us, as the sheep kept the grass so short that horses would starve on what they left.
On our route we forded several rivers as there were no bridges. The so-called rivers were just stretches of sand with no water in sight. The road was just a track in the sand full of chuckholes. We camped at Fullerton overnight, our first chance to water our horses since we left Los Angeles. The well at Fullerton was pumped by a windmill and was for watering the sheep that were driven in every night for water and protection from coyotes. This was a rather poor place to camp for not only did they keep up a bleating all night but it seemed they had attracted all the coyotes in the country and so the dogs were busy all night, to say nothing of fleas.
The town of Orange was laid out with its business district around a Plaza, which was in the center of a tract of land divided into small holdings.

These were being planted to oranges and raison grapes which seemed to thrive and pay well. The water for irrigating and domestic purposes was brought in in open ditches and there appeared to be plenty of it.
The San Fernando Valley is connected with Los Angeles City by a narrow valley through which the Los Angeles River runs. It is nearly surrounded by mountains, and contains about two hundred thousand acres of land, mostly grazing. A few large wheat fields could be seen, but few settlers lived in the valley. There was no water for irrigation and only a few wells for domestic purposes near the old Mission.

The old San Fernando Mission is about twenty miles from Los Angeles. It is quite a curiosity to us as we had never seen any ruins before. It looked as if at one time they had about twenty acres enclosed by an adobe wall twelve feet high. The l2rgest cactus I had ever seen grew close to the wall. It looked as if the cacti were planted for protection as it would take a man some time to cut his way through them. We were told the Mission had been attacked several times but the Indians were unable to force the gates or scale the walls.
A short distance from the Mission is the old town of San Fernando. It had a railroad station, stables, store, saloon and a grain warehouse.

Among the foothills of the San Fernando Valley were the ruins of many adobe houses that had been built by the Indians and Mexicans. After the Mexican r, the United States by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo agreed to recognize all the Spanish and Mexican grants. That meant it granted all they claimed, but by chicanery they suckered those people out of their homes where they had lived for many generations. The history of the old grants made by the Spanish and Mexican Governments reads like ancient history where a few men ruled the world and divided it among themselves and their friends.