Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands Part 11

said one very successful sheep farmer to me; "and we must do this all the time, else our flocks will go back." "It is more profitable to keep fewer sheep of the best kind than more not quite so good. It is more profitable to keep a few sheep always in good condition than many with a period of semi-starvation for them in the fall," said another; and added, "I would rather, if I were to begin over again, spend my money on a breed worth six dollars a head, than one worth two or three dollars, and I would rather not keep sheep at all than not fence." He had his land--about twenty-five thousand acres--fenced off in lots of from four to six thousand acres, and into one of these he turned from six to eight thousand sheep, leaving them to graze as they pleased. He had noticed, he told me, that whereas the sheep under the usual corral system feed the greater part of the day, no matter how hot the sun, his sheep in these large pastures were lying down from nine in the morning to four or five in the afternoon; and he often found them feeding far into the night, and rising again to graze long before daylight. They were at liberty to follow their own pleasure, having water always at hand. An abundant supply of water he thought of great importance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INDIAN SWEAT-HOUSE.]

Of course, where the sheep are turned out into fenced land no shepherds are required, which makes an important saving. One man, with a horse, visits the different flocks, and can look after ten or fifteen thousand head.

The farmer whom I have quoted does not dip his sheep to prevent or cure scab, but mops the sore place, when he discovers a scabby sheep, with a sponge dipped into the scab-mixture.

He gets, he told me, from his flock of ten thousand merinoes, an average of seven pounds per head of wool, and he does not shear any except the lambs, in the fall. It is a common but bad practice here to shear all sheep twice a year; and where, as is too often the case, a flock is very scabby, no doubt this is necessary.

He had long sheds as shelter for his ewes about lambing-time, so as to protect them against fierce winds and cold rain storms; and he saved every year about two hundred tons of hay, cut from the wild pastures, to feed in case the rain should hold off uncommonly late. His aim was to keep the sheep always in good condition, so that there should never be any weak place in the wool. His sheds cost him about one dollar per running foot.

The sheep found their own way to them.

I find it is the habit of the forehanded sheep-grazers in the Sacramento Valley to own a range in the foot-hills and another on the bottom-lands.

During the summer the sheep are kept in the bottoms, which are then dry and full of rich gra.s.ses; in the fall and winter they are taken to the uplands, and there they lamb, and are shorn. Where the range lies too far away from any river, they drive the sheep in May into the mountains, where they have green gra.s.s all summer; and about Red Bluff I saw a curious sight--cattle and horses wandering, singly or in small groups, of their own motion, to the mountains, and actually crossing the Sacramento without driving; and I was told that in the fall they would return, each to its master's rancho. I am satisfied that, except, perhaps, for the region north of Redding, where the winters are cold and the summers have rain and green gra.s.s, and where long-wooled sheep will do well, the merino is the sheep for this State; and "the finer the better," say the best sheep men.

Near Red Bluff I saw some fine Cotswolds, and in the coast valleys north of San Francisco these and Leicesters, I am told, do well.

A great deal of the land which is now used for sheep will, in the next five, or at most ten years, be plowed and cropped. There is a tendency to tax all land at its real value; and, except with good management, it will not pay to keep sheep on land fit for grain and taxed as grain land, which a great deal of the grazing land is. As the State becomes more populous, the flocks will become smaller, and the wool will improve in quality at the same time.

I have seen a good deal of alfalfa in the Sacramento Valley, but I have seen also that the sheep men do not trust to it entirely. They believe that it will be better for sheep as hay than as green food; and this lucerne grows so rankly, and has, unless it is frequently cut, so much woody stalk, that I believe this also. It makes extremely nice hay.

Every man who comes to California to farm ought to keep some sheep; and he can keep them more easily and cheaply here than anywhere in the East.

For persons who want to begin sheep-raising on a large scale and with capital the opportunities are not so good here now; but there are yet fine chances in Nevada, in the valley of the Humboldt, where already thousands of head of cattle, and at least one hundred thousand sheep, are now fed by persons who do not own the land at all. I am told extensive tracts could be bought there at really low prices, and with such credit on much of it as would enable a man with capital enough to stock his tract to pay for the land out of the proceeds of the sheep. The white sage in the Humboldt Valley is very nutritious, and there is also in the subsidiary valleys bunch-gra.s.s and other nutritious food for stock. Not a few young men have gone into this Humboldt country with a few hundreds of sheep, and are now wealthy. The winters are somewhat longer than in California, but the sheep find feed all the year round; and they are shorn near the line of the railroad, so that there is no costly transportation of the wool. Mutton sheep, too, are driven to the railroad to be sent to market, and for stock, therefore, this otherwise out-of-the-way region is very convenient.

Riding through the foot-hills near Rocklin--where I had been visiting a well-kept sheep-farm--I saw a curious and unexpected sight. There are still a few wretched Digger Indians in this part of California; and what I saw was a party of these engaged in catching gra.s.shoppers, which they boil and eat. They dig a number of funnel-shaped holes, wide at the top, and eighteen inches deep, on a cleared s.p.a.ce, and then, with rags and brush, drive the gra.s.shoppers toward these holes, forming for that purpose a wide circle. It is slow work, but they seem to delight in it; and their excitement was great as they neared the circle of holes and the insects began to hop and fall into them. At last there was a close and rapid rally, and half a dozen bushels of gra.s.shoppers were driven into the holes; whereupon hats, ap.r.o.ns, bags, and rags were stuffed in to prevent the mult.i.tudes from dispersing; and then began the work of picking them out by handfuls, crushing them roughly in the hand to keep them quiet, and crowding them into the bags in which they were to be carried to their rancheria.

"Sweet--all same pudding," cried an old woman to me, as I stood looking on. It is not a good year for gra.s.shoppers this year; nothing like the year of which an inhabitant of Roseville spoke to me later in the day, when he said, "they ate up every bit of his garden-truck, and then sat on the fence and asked him for a chew of tobacco."

The sheep ranges of the northern interior counties are less broken up than in the coast counties farther south; and it is better and more profitable, in my judgment, to pay five dollars per acre for grazing lands in the Sacramento Valley than two dollars and a half for grazing lands farther south and among the mountains. The grazier in the northern counties has two advantages over his southern compet.i.tor: first, in the ability to buy low-lying lands on the river, where he can graze from three to six or even ten sheep to the acre during the summer months, and where he may plant large tracts in alfalfa; and, secondly, in a safe refuge against drought in the mountain meadows of the Sierras, and in the little valleys and fertile hill-slopes of the Coast Range, where there is much unsurveyed Government land, to which hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle are annually driven by the graziers of the plain, who thus save their own pastures, and are able to carry a much larger number of sheep than they otherwise would.

Moreover, nearness to the railroad is an important advantage for the sheep-farmer; and I found that the most enterprising and intelligent sheep men in the northern counties send their wool direct by railroad to the Eastern States, instead of shipping it to San Francisco to be sold.

Finally, much of the land now obtainable for grazing in the Sacramento Valley, at prices in some cases not too dear for grazing purposes, is of a quality which will make it valuable agricultural land as soon as the valley begins to fill up; and thus, aside from the profit from the sheep, the owner may safely reckon upon a large increase in the value of his land. This can not be said of much of the grazing land of the southern coast counties, which is mountainous and broken, and fit only for grazing.

Of course I speak here of the average lands only. There are large tracts or ranchos in the southern coast counties, such as the Lampoe rancho of Hollester & Diblee, and lands in the Salinas Valley, which are exceptionally fine, and to which what I have said of the coast panchos generally does not apply.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANOTHER COAST-VIEW, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA.]

CHAPTER V.

THE CHINESE AS LABORERS AND PRODUCERS.

As I crossed from Oakland to San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon last July, there were on the ferry-boat a number of Chinese. They were decently clad, quiet, clean, sat apart in their places in the lower part of the boat conversing together, and finally walked off the boat when she came to land as orderly as though they had been Ma.s.sachusetts Christians.

There were also on the boat a number of half-grown and full-grown white boys, some of whom had been fishing, and carried their long rods with them. These were slouchy, dirty, loud-voiced, rude; and, as they pa.s.sed off the boat, I noticed that with their long rods they knocked the hats of the Chinese off their heads, or punched them in the back, every effort of this kind being rewarded with boisterous laughter from their companions.

Nor did they confine their annoyance entirely to the Chinese, for they jostled and pushed their way out through the crowd of men and women very much as a gang of pickpockets on a Third Avenue car in New York conducts itself when its members mean to steal a watch or two.

These rowdies were "Hoodlums;" and it is the Hoodlums chiefly who clamor about the Chinese, and who are "ruined by Chinese cheap labor." The anti-Chinese agitation in San Francisco has led me to look a little closely into this matter, and I declare my belief that there are not a hundred decent men who work for a living in that city engaged in this crusade against the Chinese. If you could to-day a.s.semble there all who join in this persecution, and if then you took from this a.s.semblage all the Hoodlums, all the bar-room loafers, and all the political demagogues, I don't believe you would have a hundred men left on the ground. That is to say, the people who actually earn the bread they eat do not persecute the Chinese.

If an Eastern reader suggests that it argues a lack of public spirit in the decent part of the community to allow the roughs to rule in this matter, I take leave to remind him of the time, not very long ago, when the same combination of Hoodlum and demagogue mobbed negroes in New York, and threatened vengeance if colored people were allowed to ride in the street-cars. Here, as there then, there are unfortunately newspapers which ignorantly pander to this vile cla.s.s, and help to swell the cry of persecution. And here, as in New York a few years ago, it results that the proscribed race is hardly dealt with, not only by the roughs, but sometimes in the courts, and gets scant and hard justice dealt out to it.

The courageous and upright action of Mayor Alvord in vetoing the inhuman and silly acts of the city supervisors, which, by-the-way, has made him one of the most popular men in California, for the moment shamed the demagogues and silenced the rowdies; but there are means of annoying the Chinese within the law, which are still used. For instance, there is an ordinance declaring a fine for overcrowding tenement-houses, and requiring that in every room there shall be five hundred cubic feet of air for each occupant, and for violating this a fine of ten dollars is imposed. This ordinance is enforced only against the Chinese--so I am a.s.sured on the best authority, and they only are fined. But justice would seem to demand not only that the law should be enforced against all alike, but that the owner of the property should be made liable for its misuse as well as the unfortunate and ignorant occupants.

The Chinese quarter in San Francisco consists, for the most part, of a lot of decayed rookeries which would put our own Five Points to the blush. The Chinese live here very much as the Five Points' population lives in New York. And here, as there, respectable people--or people at any rate who would think themselves insulted if you called their respectability in question--own these filthy and decayed tenements; live in comfort on the rent paid them by the Chinese; perhaps go to church on Sunday, and, no doubt, thank G.o.d that they are not as other people. It is very good to fine a poor devil of a Chinaman because he lives in an overcrowded tenement; but what a stir there would be if some enterprising San Francisco journal should give a description of these holes, and the different uses they are put to, and add the names and residences of the owners.

California has, according to Cronise--a good authority--40,000,000 acres of arable land. It has, according to the last census, 560,247 people, of whom 149,473 live in San Francisco, and yet nowhere in the United States have I heard so much complaint of "nothing to do" as in San Francisco.

One of the leading cries of the demagogues here is that the Chinese are crowding white men out of employment. But one of the complaints most frequently heard from men who need to get work done is that they can get n.o.body to do it. A hundred times and more, in my travels through the State, I have found Chinese serving not only as laborers, but holding positions where great skill and faithfulness were required; and almost every time the employer has said to me, "I would rather, of course, employ a white man, but I can not get one whom I can trust, and who will stick to his work." In some cases this was not said, but the employer spoke straight out that he had tried white men, and preferred the Chinese as more faithful and painstaking, more accurate, and less eye-servants.

A gentleman told me that he had once advertised in the San Francisco papers for one hundred laborers; his office was besieged for three days.

Three hundred and fifty offered themselves, all presumably ruined by Chinese cheap labor; but all but a dozen refused to accept work when they heard that they were required to go "out of the city."

The charge that the Chinese underbid the whites in the labor market is bosh. When they first come over, and are ignorant of our language, habits, customs, and manner of work, they no doubt work cheaply; but they know very accurately the current rate of wages and the condition of the labor market, and they manage to get as much as any body, or, if they take less in some cases, it is because they can not do a full day's work. It is a fact, however, that they do a great deal of work which white men will not do out here; they do not stand idle, but take the first job that is offered them. And the result is that they are used all over the State, more and more, because they chiefly, of the laboring population, will work steadily and keep their engagements.

Moreover, the admirable organization of the Chinese labor is an irresistible convenience to the farmer, vineyardist, and other employer.

"How do you arrange to get your Chinese?" I asked a man in the country who was employing more than a hundred in several gangs. He replied: "I have only to go or send to a Chinese employment office in San Francisco, and say that I need so many men for such work and at such pay. Directly up come the men, with a foreman of their own, with whom alone I have to deal.

I tell only him what I want done; I settle with him alone; I complain to him, and hold him alone responsible. He understands English; and this system simplifies things amazingly. If I employed white men I should have to instruct, reprove, watch, and pay each one separately; and of a hundred, a quarter, at least, would be dropping out day after day for one cause or another. Moreover, with my Chinese comes up a cook for every twenty men, whom I pay, and provisions of their own which they buy. Thus I have n.o.body to feed and care for. They do it themselves."

This is the reply I have received in half a dozen instances where I made inquiry of men who employed from twenty-five to two hundred Chinese. Any one can see that, with such an organization of labor, many things can be easily done which under our different and looser system a man would not rashly undertake. So far as I have been able to learn, such a thing as a gang of Chinese leaving a piece of work they had engaged to do, unless they were cheated or ill-treated, is unknown. Then they don't drink whisky. With all this, any one can see that they need not work cheaply.

To a man who wants to get a piece of work done their systematic ways are worth a good deal of money. In point of fact, they are quick enough to demand higher wages.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SAW-MILL PORT ON PUGET SOUND.]

Of the population of Califoraia when the census of 1870 was taken, 49,310 were Chinese, 54,421 were Irish, 29,701 were Germans, and 339,199 were born in the United States. In an official return from the California State prison, the number of convicts in 1871, the last year reported, is given at 880; of whom 477 were native born, 118 were Chinese, 86 were Irish, 29 were German. This gives, of convicts, one in every 635 of the whole population of the State; one in 711 of the native born; one in 417 of the Chinese; one in 632 of the Irish born; and one in 1024 of the Germans.

That is to say, of the different nationalities the Germans contribute the fewest convicts, the native born next, the Irish next, and the Chinese the greatest number proportionately.

But pray bear in mind the important fact that the Chinese here are almost entirely grown men; they have no families here, and but a small number of women, almost all of whom are, moreover, prost.i.tutes.

If, then, you would compare these figures rightly you would have to leave out of the count the women and children of all the other nationalities; it would, perhaps, then appear that the Chinese furnish a much smaller proportion of criminals than the above figures show; and this in spite of the well-known fact that Dame Justice commonly turns a very cold shoulder toward a Chinaman. I wonder that the comparison shows so favorably for them.

It is said that they send money out of the country. I wonder who sends the most, the Chinaman or the white foreigner? If one could get at the sums remitted to England, Ireland, and Germany, and those sent to China, I don't know which would be the greater.

But a Chinese, to whom I mentioned this charge, made me an excellent answer. He said: "Suppose you work for me; suppose I pay you; what business I what you do with money? If you work good for me, that all I care. No business my what you do your pay." Surely he was right; the Chinaman may send some part of his wages out of the country, though not much, for he must eat, must be clothed and lodged, must pay railroad and stage fares, must smoke opium, and usually gamble a little. When all this is done, the surplus of a Chinaman's wages is not great. But suppose he sent off all his pay; he does not and can not send off the work he has done for it, the ditches he has dug, the levees he has made, the meals he has cooked, and the clothes he has washed and ironed, the harvest he has helped to sow and gather, and the vegetables he has raised; the cigars, and shoes, blankets, gloves, slippers, and other things he has made. These remain to enrich the country, to make abundance where, but for his help, there would be scarcity, or importation from other States or countries.

But lately it is a.s.serted that the Chinese have brought or will bring the leprosy hither. This is a genuine cry of anguish and terror from the Hoodlums; for, bear in mind that, according to the best medical opinion in the Sandwich Islands, where this disease is most frequent and has been most thoroughly studied, it is communicated only by cohabitation or the most intimate a.s.sociation. If you ask a policeman to pilot you through the Chinese quarter of San Francis...o...b..tween eight and eleven o'clock any night, you will see the creatures who make this outcry. They are Hoodlums, gangs of whom per ambulate the worst alleys, and pa.s.s in and out of the vilest kennels.

I was curious to know something about the "Chinese Companies" of which one frequently hears here, and which exercise important powers over their countrymen all over the State. What follows concerning these organizations I derived from conversation with several Chinese who speak English, and with a missionary who labors among them.

There are six of these companies, calling themselves "Yong Wong,"

"Howk Wah," "Sam Yup," "Yen Wah," "Kong Chow," and "Yong Woh." They are benevolent societies; each looks after the people who come from the province or district for whose behalf it is formed.

When a ship comes into port with Chinese, the agents of the companies board it, and each takes the names of those who belong to his province.

These then come into the charge of their proper company. That lodges, and, if necessary, feeds them; as quickly as possible secures them employment; and, if they are to go to a distant point, lends them the needed pa.s.sage-money. The company also cares for the sick, if they are friendless and without means; and it sends home the bones of those who die here.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAPE HORN, COLUMBIA RIVER.]

Moreover, it settles all disputes between Chinese, levies fines upon offenders; and when a Chinaman wishes to return home, his company examines his accounts, and obliges him to pay his just debts here before leaving.