THE RAISIN INDUSTRY. 195 



seen on the hills and around roadway homes. But I forget I am 

 bound for El Cajon and its raisin vineyards, and must catch the train. 



EL CAJON. 



The country lying between San Diego and El Cajon does not at 

 this time of the year present many attractive features. The little 

 train, consisting of a locomotive, tender and a passenger car, wriggles 

 itself between brown, rolling hills, over small canons, dry and sandy, 

 without any other vegetation than grass, and here and there a few 

 evergreen shrubs. Close to San Diego we pass along the Chollas val- 

 ley and creek, where an attempt has been made at colonization, as 

 we understand it in the San Joaquin valley. The land is divided 

 up in ten and twenty-acre tracts and dotted over with small and un- 

 pretentious cottages, as well as with fine and expensive mansions. 

 Young orchards of pears, olives, prunes, oranges and figs are seen 

 wedged in between vacant and unbroken land. In the river bottom 

 are Chinese gardens, with windmills, and patches of cabbage, corn 

 and small truck. Much of this land is irrigated with water from the 

 Sweetwater dam, some twelve miles away on the Sweetwater river. 

 On the bottom land there are a few Muscat vineyards, for the supply 

 of the San Diego market. I noticed the grapes there. They were 

 of the Muscat of Alexandria variety, very large and fine both as to 

 bunch and berry, and very sweet. I have seen no finer Alexandrias 

 anywhere. 



But we have hardly time to observe this cultivated spot before we 

 are out again among the rolling hills. The engine pants heavily, and 

 we are constantly ascending. The same low hills everywhere, no 

 settlers, no gardens, no plantations of any kind. The soil is brown 

 adobe mixed with gravel and small boulders; in fact there is nothing 

 to see and admire. For twenty miles there are two or three small 

 stations, but there were no station houses to be seen nor any settle- 

 ments around. The railroad is apparently made to tap a better coun- 

 try in the interior. But even in this" uninhabited country the boom 

 started to penetrate in earnest. Large signs announcing the sale of 

 town lots, wide streets once plowed up across each other at right 

 angles, square blocks which are plowed around or otherwise mapped 

 out, here and there a white post with a number and a name, and 

 we have a good idea of a town where the lots sold for $250 apiece or 

 more. 



All at once the engine whistles, the area widens and we see in front 

 of us a large, flat valley, apparently almost circular, from four to five 

 miles across, bounded by lower and higher hills, behind which a few 

 higher peaks look down gray and solemn. This is El Cajon. We 

 step out on the platform of the station, and the view is fine. The 

 valley lies below us, the bottom is apparently flat, but in reality 

 slightly undulating and somewhat sloping towards the center. Rows 

 of vines begin at the station, and from here vineyards stretch in all 

 directions for miles and miles, sometimes in large blocks of regular 

 shape, then again in irregular patches among otherwise cultivated 



