direct from the boats, was estimated to be $4,000,000 a few years ago and since that time it has considerably increased, both in quantity and value. Of the product in commercial form canned salmon has also greatly advanced. The production of sardines in olive oil is the largest sardine output of the country and the great tuna of the Pacific seems to be just coming into its own as a canned fish.

Hunting and fishing are under State control in California and the issue of 250,000 licenses to individuals for hunting and fishing is the record of a recent year.

CHAPTER IV

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF
AGRICULTURE IN CALIFORNIA

As it is the purpose of this writing to characterize the rural life of California as an American State and to indicate agencies and influences which prevailed in its development toward present conditions and achievements, it would not be germane to pursue affairs that made no contribution thereto even though they are of great historical or ethnological interest. One such question is the aboriginal population. It is estimated that when California was entered for settlement by the Spanish missionaries in 1769 there may have been a third of a million Indians, living in groups comprising hundreds of self-governing tribes speaking more than a hundred dialects, scattered throughout the State. Although this density of aboriginal population gave California the leadership of the states, for it has been estimated that "with onetwentieth of the area of the United States California held one-eighth of the native population of the whole country," these strange people contributed to the Spanish development only inducement and opportunity. The inducement was the saving of their souls from paganism: the opportunity was wide open

because they had nothing of the war-like self-assertive character of the other Indians of the Pacific Slope and made no fight against being civilized. Nor did they contribute anything to the agriculture of the State, for they practiced no agricultural arts. They subsisted on nature's bounty and were not even hunters with prowess against big game. They were contented with vegetable food which they gathered from wild trees and shrubs and with such land and sea animals as they could catch in the fields and forests or dig from the sea shore. If they had been fierce like the Indians of the great plains, California settlement by the white race would have been delayed and accomplished with difficulty. If these Indians had ancestral agriculture, there would have been vestiges remaining as there are now of prehistoric farming in Arizona and New Mexico. Although the pious padres may have reinforced the heavenly hosts with California Indians, they did nothing to improve their hold on the earth. The early Spanish and Mexican settlers reduced them near to slavery and though their successors, the Americans, had perhaps more regard for their manhood and employed them at good wages, they did not otherwise advance their interests until quite recently. Of the large aboriginal population there now remain only about 15,000 living peaceably on reservations or doing useful work for farmers and in a few cases engaging in successful farming on their own account in American ways.

There is wide agreement among historians that the chief contribution to the development of Cali

fornia by Spanish possession (1769-1822) and by Mexican possession (1822-1846) consisted in holding the country for American occupation in 1846. It was loosely but still sufficiently held by Spanish possession and prestige to exclude adverse entrance. The agriculture and rural life was that of old Spain, expanded and rendered heroic by the abundance of rich land and of servile labor to be had for the taking and the very few adventurous settlers at hand to take them. These few naturally surfeited themselves with land and free labor and established over the areas they occupied a system of agriculture and a form of rural life wholly at variance with the American standards developed in the Atlantic states and being rapidly carried westward beyond the Mississippi River. California was as loosely held agriculturally by the people of Spanish birth and descent as it was politically, and both holdings disappeared together on American occupation.

Although the few Americans who came to California before the gold discovery in 1848 and the throng which poured into the State immediately afterwards included the most adventurous, the prevailing sentiment among them (except with a small percentage of the swash-buckling and criminal classes that was speedily suppressed) was to pursue undertakings honorably with regard to human rights, to establish enterprises on the basis of thrift and efficiency and to develop a State of high ideals, socially and industrially. In thrift and efficiency there were broader views and more expansive methods than in

the older states, and it is possible that an inheritance from the free life of old Spanish rancheros may have been added to the adventurousness of the American pioneers or have suggested new ways to embody the spirit of it. All the settlers felt, however, that the old way was not the method to farm, either for the success of rural life or for the up-building of the country.

The debt of existing California agriculture to the system that preceded it lies not in policies or in methods either of life or industry but in a demonstration of the producing capacity of the State for food crops and, in a few striking instances, for the introduction of agencies and materials of production which have rendered valuable service in the American development. A few of the old affairs, some of which have "passed in the night" and some endured, may be briefly cited:

The Spanish system of land grants and the confirmation of three-fourths of them to their holders by the United States compelled a new American State to set forth on its career with a handicap of feudalism. Spain was conservative and only made about twenty grants during fifty years and grantees were each restricted to three leagues (4,438 acres) of land: Mexico was lavish and gave nearly six hundred grants during twenty years and raised the limit to eleven leagues of land to each. Besides proper grants there were about two hundred which could not be established.

Such large areas under single private ownership