The South California statistics of fruits, grain, wool, honey, etc., read more like fancy than like fact, and are not readily believed by one unacquainted with the country. The only way to get a real comprehension and intelligent acceptance of them is to study them on the ground. By a single visit to a great ranch one is more enlightened than he would be by committing to memory scores of Equalization Board Reports. One of the very best, if not the best, for this purpose is Baldwin's ranch, in the San Gabriel valley. It includes a large part of the old lands of the San Gabriel Mission, and is a principality in itself.
There are over a hundred men on its pay-roll, which averages $4,000 a month. Another $4,000 does not more than meet its running expenses. It has $6,000 worth of machinery for its grain harvests alone. It has a dairy of forty cows, Jersey and Durham; one hundred and twenty work-horses and mules, and fifty thoroughbreds.
It is divided into four distinct estates: the Santa Anita, of 16,000 acres; Puente, 18,000; Merced, 20,000; and the Potrero, 25,000. The Puente and Merced are sheep ranches, and have 20,000 sheep on them. The Potrero is rented out to small farmers. The Santa Anita is the home estate. On it are the homes of the family and of the laborers. It has fifteen hundred acres of oak grove, four thousand acres in grain, five hundred in grass for hay, one hundred and fifty in orange orchards, fifty of almond trees, sixty of walnuts, twenty-five of pears, fifty of peaches, twenty of lemons, and five hundred in vines; also small orchards of chestnuts, hazel-nuts, and apricots; and thousands of acres of good pasturage.
From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in May, he will drive through a wild garden,--asters, yellow and white; scarlet pentstemons, blue larkspur, monk's-hood; lupines, white and blue; gorgeous golden eschscholtzia, alder, wild lilac, white sage,--all in riotous flowering.
Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he will look southward down gentle slopes of orchards and vineyards far across the valley, the tints growing softer and softer, and blending more and more with each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze. Driving from orchard to orchard, down half-mile avenues through orchards skirting seemingly endless stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what comes of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of hundreds of acres, and the Equalization Board Statistics no longer appear to him even large. It does not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in vines, when here on one man's ranch are five hundred acres. The last Equalization Board Report said the county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees. It would hardly have surprised him to be told that there were as many as that in the Santa Anita groves alone. The effect on the eye of such huge tracts, planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase enormously the apparent size of the tract; the mind stumbles on the very threshold of the attempt to reckon its distances and numbers, and they become vaster and vaster as they grow vague.