454 Transactions of the 



requited when the final reckoning is made after the crop has been 

 gathered. 



MARKET FOR FRUIT. 



The question of a market for fruit has been a serious consideration 

 with our fruit growers in past years. The fertility of our soil and cli- 

 mate enabled us to raise fruit in such great abundance that we had no 

 market within our own borders for the half that could be produced, and 

 labor was too high for fruit growers in California to dry their surplus, 

 with the difference in exchange between gold and greenbacks, for suc- 

 cessful competition with the eastern markets. But within a few years 

 everything has been changed; the completion of the great overland 

 railroad has brought us in such quick communication with the vast 

 mining regions of the Territories, that we can supply them with every 

 variety of fruit grown in the country, and they must ever remain 

 entirely dependent upon California for their supply. The overland 

 railroad has also opened up the whole United States for a market for 

 California fruits — both green, dried, and canned. I have shipped fruit 

 grown by myself to New Orleans and Boston, with satisfactory results. 

 I have made one shipment of green pears to London, but have not 3 r et 

 received returns, and cannot tell what the result has been. I have 

 seen California dried fruits and canned fruits selling in the markets of 

 New York and Boston at prices that would pay the producer well. 

 We have shipped from California by the Pacitic fiailroad, during the 

 year eighteen hundred and seventy, seventy full car loads of fruit; < 

 and during the year eighteen hundred and seventy-one, there has 

 been shipped one hundred and fifteen car loads of fruit (a year of ex- 

 treme drought). The most of this fruit has been pears, and shipped east 

 of the Eocky Mountains and as far as Chicago, St. Louis, New Or- 

 leans, Memphis, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The business of 

 shipping green fruit alone should coutinue to increase until we can 

 send one thousand car loads annually from California. There is a 

 market in the East, and we can send that much with a profit to the 

 producer with a little modification in present rates of freight. 



But recently the doors of China and Japan have been opened to com- 

 mercial relations with this country, and the increase in exports from 

 San Francisco alone to those countries has increased during the past 

 year over six millions of dollars; and I believe our fruit product in 

 future years will be an important article of commerce with those coun- 

 tries. 'Thus we see before us an almost unlimited market — a market 

 exclusively our own — greater than any other locality within the bor- 

 ders of the United States, and with facilities for producing fruit un- 

 equalled by any other country. What greater inducements can fruit 

 growers desire for enlarging and extending their operations with a cer- 

 tainty of meeting a suitable reward for their labor? 



VARIETIES FOR SHIPPING. 



Now I wish to add, in this connection, that there are but few varieties, 

 compared with the many, that will be profitable for shipping or drying, 

 and no one must expect they can ship any kind of fruit they happen to 

 grow, with satisfactory results; on the contrary, you cannot ship any- 

 thing but ' fruit grown to the greatest perfection, and which costs no 

 more than the poorest fruit, grown in the most inferior manner. A\ ready 

 there has been shipped a great deal of inferior fruit to the Eastern 



