STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 21 -'5 



THIRTEENTH ANNUAL REVIEW 



OF THE 



Raisin, Dried Fruit, Prune, Almond, Walnut, Peanut, Comb and Ex- 

 tracted Honey Product of California, for the Year 1887. 



By George W. Meade & Co., San Francisco. 



We believe it is a matter of only about thirty years ago, more or less, 

 when a United States Army officer, stationed on the Pacific Coast, being 

 relieved from duty and ordered East, made the remark, as he was about 

 leaving, "that there was not a foot of land in all California worth twenty- 

 five cents an acre, "and further "that any man would surely starve to 

 death, and quickly, who even attempted to make a living on the bleak and 

 barren deserts of the Pacific Coast." 



This officer has long since gone to his rest, and looking at the State as it 

 was then, his observations and conclusions may not have been so absurd 

 and so apparently foolish as they appear to us now. San Francisco was 

 then a city principally of tents scattered over sand-hills. The great rich 

 valleys of the State were given up to wandering herds of cattle. The pop- 

 ulation was sparse and largely composed of " greasers," half-breeds, with a 

 scattering of some Mexicans 'and Spanish. With the natural laziness of 

 these people, no attempt whatever to speak of had been made to demon- 

 strate what the rich soil of the State would produce even with half a 

 proper cultivation. 



So time run on until the " live" Yankee came in, who soon proved what 

 could be done in the way of fruit and agriculture in all portions of the 

 State, and although the "days of gold " had passed, this new blood re-dis- 

 covered California, and found even greater gold mines in its vast vineyards, 

 in its great fruit orchards, and its wheat fields, stretching along nearly a 

 thousand miles of seacoast on the west, and extending to the foothills of 

 the great mountains on the east. If this officer then could come back 

 to-day and look now upon the imperial city of San Francisco, with its 

 palaces, and a thousand millions of wealth; if he could realize that the 

 city of tents which he left thirty odd years ago, is to-day the eighth or ninth 

 city in the Union in point of population, the fourth in the amount of busi- 

 ness transacted through its Post Office, and the third in the value of its 

 importations and the revenue collected at its Custom House; and if, after 

 realizing these things, he should go still further in his investigations, and 

 should look upon the flourishing cities and towns that have grown up in all 

 portions of the State; and if he should visit the great wine and raisin vine- 

 yards which dot California, and which are commencing to supply the 

 Union with these products to the exclusion of the foreign; and if he should 

 view the thousands of square miles of great orchards, producing the finest 

 oranges, lemons, peaches, apricots, grapes, nectarines, prunes, plums, pears, 

 almonds, and walnuts, in the world — well might he, in a dazed way, think 



