Greater than any contribution which agriculture in California has ever received from mining and more profound in its influence on the development of satisfied citizenship and industrial permanence in the commonwealth was the quickly discerned opportunity in agriculture, which has already been suggested. It amounted to nothing less than a change in the point of view and complete transformation of purpose among the argonauts. These eager adventurers came with the determination "to make their pile and go back home." They nearly all hoped it would be very soon when such competence would be attained. They declared they had "no use for the country except to get the gold out of it." Of course such a purpose and ambition or the methods that many employed to achieve them would never have made a prosperous and permanent state nor have ministered to the attainment of high ideals of manhood and citizenship. It was the discernment of the opportunities in agriculture and the desirability of becoming a part of a durable industrial and home-making population in a country affording new advantages in profitable work and enterprise and exceptional delights in living, which so quickly transformed a dream of adventure into a resolution toward permanent development.

"Our climate and soil will not only produce all the cereals, grasses, vegetables of mammoth growth and superior quality, all the northern fruits to perfection but the most delicate fruits, trees and shrubs of the tropics. Our even, healthy and delicious climate is

unsurpassed even by the world-renowned Italian-a climate that at once gives life and strength to the newly arrived invalid and renovates broken-down constitutions from other climes. In short what other country presents so many inducements to the man of the northern states, who is six months chilled with frost and four months living in snow-banks; or the man of the south, who once a year flees from the pestilential heat; or the western man, whose first god is his rifle as a protector from the Indian? To establish the fact that this is the best country to live and die in, seventy-five in one hundred who leave this state return again, fully satisfied that California is the country!" 1

It is interesting to note that this declaration was not made from any idea of the decline of mining, for none was anticipated. The gold product was still going at upwards of fifty millions a year. It was merely the awakening of the public mind to a greater industry of which California was capable and the direction of effort and investment toward its realization. Agriculture was not either a successor to nor a supplanter of mining, for the latter still continues as a great industry, and made an output for 1920 valued at nearly two hundred and fifty millions of dollars for all kinds of mineral substances.2 However, agriculture supplemented mining and has attained an annual value of output two or three times

1 Rept. of "Visiting Committee" to investigate Calif. farms: in Rept. of Calif. State Agr. Soc., 1857, p. 30.

2 An official enumeration of the mining products is given in the Appendix D.

as great. It gave a new objective in the building of a permanent state to those who had come for personal enrichment alone. It opened a greater field for the high average intelligence, daring, initiative and resourcefulness. Mining lifted California out of the inertia and hopelessness of the preceding régime. Agriculture, by what it achieves and by what it inspires and provides for, still holds California aloft.

Of course the fact should not be concealed that California mining and farming have not always sidled against each other in mutuality and reciprocation. Sharp issues have arisen which aroused conflicts engendering much ill feeling. The most serious was the injury to navigable streams and the ruin of river bottom lands by deep deposits of débris from hydraulic mining which is now prohibited by law wherever such streams are within reach of mining wastes. Another problem, still pending solution, is the destruction of considerable areas of river bottom land by a system of dredge-mining which lifts good land from the surface to a depth of many feet, transforming a part of the landscape from a stretch of orchards and meadows into a desolate unproductive welter of cobble stones and coarse gravel. The dredge miners buy at high prices the land they desire and thus far have the undisturbed right to destroy it. As the gold product by dredging has averaged for a number of years upwards of seven million dollars annually and is greater than all other forms of placer mining combined, the permanent ruin of large areas

of deep rich land is involved and the State is impoverished to an extent which must be looked on as a multiple of any possible present profit. This outlook naturally alarms all those who are not personally advantaged by the operation. It is an interesting fact that on these lands which are now. being destroyed, the farmers were the first miners, for they found that it was easy to have wells in all their pasture lots because the gold washed from the gravel they took out in well-digging would often pay the cost of getting the well.

DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

From the point of view of demand and supply of food products, a unique situation arose immediately on the mining rush to California. A floating population of perhaps a hundred thousand arrived within a few months in a territory which had before supported perhaps ten thousand. This one hundred thousand concentrated themselves in a district in which hardly one thousand had hitherto resided and they were at an average distance of perhaps two hundred and fifty miles from the settlements with which they were connected only by bridle paths and cattle trails. The local population had largely joined in the gold rush, leaving the old men and the women to care for the ranchos as best they could.

The field opened to local production and the prices which promised unusual reward can best be appreciated by citation of the quantities and values of a

Obviously these were only a few staples and no higher class foods and provisions are included. Although the rancheros gained much gold by selling their flocks and herds to furnish meat for the miners, they did not conceive the purpose of multiplying animals for that trade but were soon driving herds and flocks in from Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and from old Mexico to furnish a supply which they could probably have met by wisely farming the breeding stock they already possessed.

Quite in contrast with the foregoing was the American recognition of the opportunity for profitable agriculture and their zeal to realize it. The first fresh fruits for San Francisco and the mines came from trees and vines surviving the partial abandonment of the old mission orchards and restored to fruitfulness by Americans who leased or purchased them. This was only a side issue of the general effort. Almost immediately on their assurance that the soil was surprisingly fertile if farmed aright, the newcomers began to plant everything which they conceived to be acceptable in the local markets and they