Is It To Sketch A
Waterfall, To Engrave A Portrait, To Write A Sonnet, To Mend A Saddle,
To Sing A Song, To Build An Engine, Or To "Bust A Bronco," There Is
Someone At Hand Who Can Do It, And Do It Artistically.
Varied ingenuity
California demands of her pioneers.
Their native originality has been
intensified by circumstances, until it has become a matter of tradition
and habit. The processes of natural selection have favored the survival
of the ingenious, and the quality of adequacy has become hereditary.
The possibility of the unearned increment is a great factor in the
social evolution of California. Its influence has been widespread,
persistent, and, in most regards, baneful. The Anglo-Saxon first came to
California for gold to be had for the picking up. The hope of securing
something for nothing, money or health without earning it, has been the
motive for a large share of the subsequent immigration. From those who
have grown rich through undeserved prosperity, and from those who have
grown poor in the quest of it, California has suffered sorely. Even now,
far and wide, people think of California as a region where wealth is not
dependent on thrift, where one can somehow "strike it rich" without that
tedious attention to details and expenses which wears out life in effete
regions such as Europe and the Eastern states. In this feeling there is
just enough of truth to keep the notion alive, but never enough to save
from disaster those who make it a working hypothesis. The hope of great
or sudden wealth has been the mainspring of enterprise in California,
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 up the vast farms into small holdings
which become permanent homes.
On land well chosen, carefully planted and thriftily managed, an orchard
of prunes or of oranges, of almonds or apricots, should reward its
possessor with a comfortable living, besides occasionally a generous
profit thrown in. But too often men have not been content with the usual
return, and have planted trees with a view only to the unearned profits.
To make an honest living from the sale of oranges or prunes or figs or
raisins is quite another thing from acquiring sudden wealth. When a man
without experience in fruit-raising or in general economy comes to
California, buys land on borrowed capital, plants it without
discrimination, and spends his profits in advance, there can be but one
result. The laws of economics are inexorable even in California. One of
the curses of the state is the "fool fruit-grower," with neither
knowledge nor conscience in the management of his business. Thousands of
trees have been planted on ground unsuitable for the purpose, and
thousands of trees which ought to have done well have died through his
neglect. Through his agency frozen oranges were once sent to Eastern
markets under his neighbor's brands, and most needlessly his varied
follies for a time injured the reputation of the best of fruit.
The great body of immigrants to California have been sound and earnest,
fit citizens of the young state, but this is rarely true of seekers of
the unearned increment. No one is more greedy for money than the man who
can never get much and cannot keep the little he has. Rumors of golden
chances have brought in a steady stream of incompetents from all regions
and from all strata of social life. From the common tramp to the
inventor of "perpetual motions" in mechanics or in social science, is a
long step in the moral scale, but both are alike in their eagerness to
escape from the "competitive social order" of the East, in which their
abilities found no recognition.
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