344 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



DELIVERED AT THE NINTH ANNUAL FAIR OF THE CONTRA COSTA COUNTY 



AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, SEPTEMBER FOURTEENTH, EIGHTEEN 



HUNDRED AND SIXTY-NINE. 



By O. F. ALLEY, President. 



Officers and Members of the Contra Costa Agricultural Society. Ladies and 

 Gentlemen : I am very happy to be able to meet you to-night under such 

 favorable auspices. Never in any age has the ear of progress been so 

 heavily loaded with fruitful events as at the present time; never since 

 the time of our first parents in the garden has the effort of man achieved 

 such might}' results. I congratulate you, then, that you are of this 

 nineteenth century. I am pleased to meet you as citizens of this great 

 American republic; this God-given land; the home of the free and the 

 asylum of the oppressed. I am gratified to claim fellowship with you 

 as citizens of glorious California, the empire of the West and queen of 

 all her sisters in Uncle Sam's broad domain ; and I am more than proud 

 to be able to claim you as citizens of the County of Contra Costa. We 

 meet to-night in social reunion to commemorate the ninth birthday of 

 our society. Since our last annual gathering, the greatest undertaking of 

 modern times has been successfully accomplished. The East and the West 

 have been bound together with bands of iron. What but a few years ago 

 was considered the idle fancy of a disordered mind is to-day an estab- 

 lished fact. Tonight, while we are talking, the pioneers of twenty years 

 ago are speeding their way across the continent, travelling in regal lux- 

 ury. Who of all these pioneers that left their homes twenty years ago and 

 embarked perhaps on board some ship that was to make her weary and 

 pathless track through two oceans; buffeting the waves and storms of 

 the pitiless and much dreaded Cape Horn ; experiencing the climes of 

 every zone, and consuming from four to six months in reaching this, to 

 them, haven of hope, would have been bold enough to have predicted 

 that in eighteen hundred and sixty-nine he would take a trip back to the 

 old homestead by rail? Is there one of all those who landed on the 

 Isthmus and was transported up the Chagres River in the log canoe 

 propelled by naked muscle, that would have had the temerity to have 

 said, God willing, in twenty years from now I will go back to rny old 

 home overland by steam ? 



Which one, think you, of all the hardy yeomen that came " mid the 

 plains across," embarking all their household gods in a " prairie 

 schooner," travelling over a trackless waste at the rate of twelve or fif- 

 teen miles a day, camping each night, weary and footsore, with no com- 



