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animal, we can see nothing to be gained in a continuance of native blood in ill-formed carcasses. If they do not possess even the quality of hardiness or powers of subsistence on scanty forage, we can conceive of no reason for perpetuating them."

They were not perpetuated. They were eaten when meat was high: they were killed for hides and tallow when meat could not be sold and when pasturage was scant, as in 1864, when it was estimated that a million head had perished. Out of the depression in the early sixties which little survived unless it was top-crossed enough to be Americanized, there came the common stock from which drives were made to the new range states of the interior when their development began, as has been outlined. During all the decades since that time the use of well-bred sires has increased until the legislature of 1921 passed a law that on the open range no bull should be allowed to live unless "bred in a herd of the recognized beef breeds, the ancestral sires of which must have been registered bulls of the same breed for at least four generations and the dams cows of the same breed and of good quality."

Only during about two decades of her history has California had a sufficient fresh meat supply of her own growing and even in that period her supply of cured meats was chiefly by importation. The decades of sufficiency lay between the in-driving of herds for the feeding of the mining rush of the first decade and the invasion of the valley ranges by irrigated horticulture, beginning in the third

decade and continuing to the present day, and by irrigated dairying on an alfalfa basis which began soon after and has also continued to the present with rapidly increasing production. The first limitation of valley cattle ranging came with the spread of wheat-growing and the no-fence laws which were passed in that period requiring a cattleman to drive. his herds across the valleys between parallel lines of vaqueros to keep them off the plowed ground or the growing grain. This was a costly hardship but it was only a foretaste of the exclusion which came with the subdivision of valley areas into farms and the planting of fruits to be grown both by rainfall and by irrigation as the local meteorology determined. This practically put an end to cheap or free ranging in the valleys and in much of the foothill country and forced the cattlemen to become land owners lessees for the winter carrying of their stock and to follow long drives to the mountain and high plateau lands and forests for summer grazing. Then came the closing of mountain pastures by forest reservations and by prohibition of including public lands in range fencing. This was undoubtedly a matter of abstract justice but at the same time it rendered many enterprises for the turning of such pasturage into beef and mutton impracticable, caused such lands to be idle instead of productive and increased the hardships of the range industry. Fortunately a part of this handicap was soon lifted by a better policy of rendering public lands useful to stockmen, as noted in Chapter III.

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Plate VIII. Rural homes in the citrus district of southern California.

Thus cattle-growing became notably a hard business in marked contrast to the ease of its beginning. This condition, in connection with the low price of wool, almost extinguished the sheep industry in 1880, and had it not been for the money in beef which came with increasing local population and the readiness of wholesale butchers to invest capital in land and to grow their own cattle for slaughtering, there was at the time a good chance that California would close her career as a pastoral country except in districts devoted to dairying. One butchering firm

bought land until it held title to lands equal to the area of Rhode Island and owned a hundred thousand head of cattle which could be driven to San Francisco over a distance of about three hundred miles, passing each night on a ranch of its own. Others owned land and cattle in less amount and the beef supply of California cities continued to be a big business in an American instead of in the Spanish way.

It is interesting to note that the maintenance of the cattle industry in California has always been chiefly an urban contribution to rural development. The first state fair was held in San Francisco in 1853, but it was wholly an exhibition of plants and their products. and was popularly criticized as incomplete. The second state fair was also in San Francisco in 1854, and it was rounded out by a branch consisting of a cattle show which was of course richer in popular Spanish equine exploits than in improved stock, but involved a conception and impulse toward the latter. The state fair of 1855 was in Sacramento

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