190 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



census returns, but sixty thousand pounds. The pioneer wool- 

 grower in California, Colonel Hollister, having led a company of 

 emigrants to that State in 1852, saw, at the head of San Francisco 

 Bay, a band of some two thousand Mexican sheep herded by two 

 dogs, with no man in view. " If dogs can do this," said the 

 colonel to himself, " what may not men do with sheep in a country 

 like this, where grazing is perpetual, where no shelter is required, 

 and where the natural increase is one hundred per cent, annually?" 

 Starting, in 1853, with eight hundred sheep, secured for himself 

 from three thousand brought into California from Ohio in 1852, he 

 formed a partnership with the Messrs. Diblee Brothers, who had 

 been successful wool-growers in Los Angelos county. In 1863, 

 the partners bought the great L impoc rancho for sixty thousand 

 dollars, and stocked it with ten thousand sheep. In 1874, the 

 landed property was worth a million and a half of dollars, — all 

 the result of sixty thousand dollars originally invested, and ten 

 thousand sheep well handled. The product of four hundred pure 

 merino ewes purchased in 1862 was, in 1875, fourteen thousand 

 one hundred and nine-three pure merino ewes, descended from the 

 parent band, in addition to the males reared. In 1874, the sales 

 of wool and sheep amounted to one hundred and twenty-four 

 thousand two hundred and forty-nine dollars. With all these 

 splendid results, in the words of his biographer, Colonel Otis, 

 " Colonel Hollister himself looks upon sheep husbandry, not as an 

 exclusive interest, to be prosecuted indefinitely on the extensive 

 scale which now characterizes the pursuit, but rather as a pioneer 

 industry for a new country, useful to bridge over the gap between 

 a sparse and a dense population, and which ought to be gradually 

 retired before the advance of settlement and the advent of the 

 plough." 



These words indicate precisely the part which the pastoral 

 sheep husbandry plays in the settlement of a country. The sheep 

 grower moves to new lands after opening those first occupied, to 

 permanent agriculture. Sheep husbandry will advance from the 

 foot-hills of California to the parks of the Rooky Mountains ; and 

 regions as wide as Australia or the Pampas of South America,* 

 supplied with aromatic grasses, preserving their nutritiousness 

 during winter. He open for pasturage between the Missouri and 

 the Pacific. To give but one illustration : The Valley of the Re- 

 publican is two hundred and fifty miles long and one hundred 

 miles wide ; containing two thousand five hundred square miles, 



