STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 339 



that this industry is one of the most profitable pursuits in which a man of 

 small means may engage. The capital required is small, and the time 

 from planting to production is short. The industry has, indeed, passed the 

 experimental point. Merchants on this coast, as well as in the East, are 

 evincing a desire to handle the California raisin product, instead of the 

 foreigia article. The Sacramento Valley, it must be remembered, lies in 

 the same latitude as the famous raisin regions of Spain. The dry, warm 

 climate here presents all the conditions necessary for the production of a 

 choice raisin. But Colusa County is, in addition to this, most fully adapted 

 to the growth and production of a fine quality of peaches, apricots, pears, 

 cherries, figs, prunes, and kindred fruits. The foothills will also produce 

 apples of an exceptionally fine quality. 



The great irrigation canals now in contemplation by the several irriga- 

 tion districts already organized, will, when built, greatly promote the settle- 

 ment of the county, and the subdivisions of our large land holdings into 

 small tracts. There are more than half a million acres in the county that 

 are irrigable from the Sacramento River, and, although the county has 

 reached its present exalted rank in wealth and prosperity, absolutely with- 

 out irrigation, it is among the certainties that all the land in the county 

 within reach of water will, at no distant day, be brought into the highest 

 state of cultivation and production possible by the combination of the rich- 

 est soil in the world with the purest and softest water that the heavens shed 

 upon earth's most favored spot. All of California must, before many decades 

 pass away, be the homes of millions of winter-burdened people across the 

 mountains, who are year by year looking with a longing eye toward the 

 western horizon that conceals from them this golden shore. And of all this 

 landscape, shall not the fondest eye be cast upon that valley, over which 

 the sun, daily about to be engulfed in the broad waves of the Pacific, looks 

 back, selects the fairest appearing valley of the fast receding shore — our 

 own Sacramento — and sheds upon it the bounty intended for a continent. 



The writer of this has lived within the county for more than thirty-seven 

 years. He pushed out into this, that was then a weird, unknown land in 

 1850, and he found clothed in the unsullied garments of nature, a scope so 

 beautiful, a scene so enticing, that it took away from him all the enchant- 

 ment of the mines of gold, and made him turn a deaf ear to the stories of 

 bonanzas found and fortunes made, and planted his feet firmly on that land 

 to which he has clung with a fondness and affection that ever increases as 

 the years roll on. 



How often in those days did the boy allow his imagination to run on 

 adown the vista of time, when, perhaps, bent with age and frosted o'er 

 with Time's artistic touch, when the trackless plain he walked would be 

 covered over with garden, and orchard, and vineyard, and lowing herds, 

 possessed by a happy and prosperous people, while upon the bosom of the 

 river, so new, so beautiful, would float a commerce richer than that of the 

 fabled Indias, with stories of which our grandmothers whiled away the 

 winter nights. Aye, how often was it the dream of the boy, and how, year 

 by year, has it been the life dream of the man, and how is it now the 

 dream of the man who has passed the summit of the Alps of life, and is 

 so far down the other side that he can see the very foot of the hill where 

 winds the little stream around about the cemetery! But with the dreams, 

 and hopes, and prophecies, and ambitions of the past, he feels that now is 

 the fulfillment of them all near at hand. 



