THIRD DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. ">•">!) 



goodly heritage. I remember when, in 1873, I came down the Sacramento 

 Valley for the first time. It seemed to me that in three rainless months 

 God had sealed his withering, blighting curse upon that bleak and sallow 

 landscape. I said, surely these people live on manna from heaven or 

 bacon from Chicago. But I have since learned that the great valleys of 

 California are like horns of plenty pouring down their wealth at the Golden 

 Gate, and that that parched and brown soil was more fertile than the 

 ancient valley of the Nile, and that the Sierras, the snowy bulwarks of 

 this State, ''although their lower slopes are as rich in gold as their crests 

 at eve with the gold of sunset, and their farther slopes veined with silver 

 only less white than those great crests at noon," hoard no such wealth as 

 the soil yields in its billowing wheat fields, and its clustered vineyards, 

 and its opulent orchards. The true golden age of California began when 

 the mining industries gave place in some degree to agriculture. It is that 

 that more than all else has given stability and prosperity to the popula- 

 tion of this State. The pioneers, the argonauts of '49, came for gold, most 

 of them with no purpose of settling here. They were a nomadic tribe, liv- 

 ing in tents or under the open sky, wandering along river courses, climbing 

 up mountain slopes, and diving into canons and gulches, and when they 

 obtained the coveted booty, hurrying East again, leaving California nothing 

 to remember them by but scars and scratches upon her face. Thus for 

 years wealth flowed steadily out of the Golden Gate, and there was no 

 counter current. So the steady outflow of gold from this coast for many 

 years, while a good thing for the Eastern States, was very hard on Califor- 

 nia. But the development of, its agricultural resources has changed all 

 this by giving permanency to our population, and so turned capital toward 

 us instead of away from us. The farmers and mechanics had $60,000,000 

 in the savings banks of this State last year, and have earned in thirty-one 

 years a total of $800,000,000. We have arable land here to support a pop- 

 ulation of thirty million, and then our population would be less dense than 

 the population of some of the states of Europe. We have an empire of our 

 own here as large as Spain, stretching itself over ten degrees of latitude, 

 washed on one side by the sea and walled on the other by mountain ranges. 

 Our soil, if tickled with a plow, laughs a bountiful harvest, the yield aver- 

 aging double to the acre that of the Eastern States. The salubrity and 

 variety of our climate is proverbial; its scenery is grander than any 

 beneath European skies, and its productions are so wonderful as to defy 

 even the American genius for exaggeration. 



The star of empire stops in its westward course, and stands still over 

 our young State as did the star of Bethlehem above the manger, and many 

 of the wise men of the east are laying their gold at her feet, and asking 

 for an interest in her future and to sit on the right hand and on the left in 

 her kingdom. 



It remains with the farmer more than with any other class to say what 

 that future shall be, and to prove that as a people we are worthy of so 

 goodly an inheritance. Their toil and skill alone can crown our young 

 State a queen here by the western sea, and place in her hands the scepter 

 and at her feet the treasures of material prosperity. Their intelligence 

 and integrity are her strongest bulwarks against the evil teachings and 

 tendencies of our time, which threaten the very foundations of the social 

 fabric in other lands. As conservators of the public weal and the public 

 morals, the sons of the soil will ever be found, I doubt not, as true and 

 trusty as when at Lexington, as an invincible phalanx of liberty and the 

 rights of man. " The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard 

 round the world." 



