88 RURAL CALIFORNIA 



conviction as to the length the State should go in 

 actually placing qualified persons on good land, there 

 remains the assurance that the State has shown the 

 way, and if the Land Settlement Board should never 

 go beyond the two colonies which it now has in opera- 

 tion, it has already rendered a public service of vast 

 and lasting advantage. 



By an act of the legislature of 1921 the State has 

 identified itself more closely with the operation of 

 land settlement by discontinuing the special com- 

 mission which has conducted it since 1917 and merged 

 the enterprise in a newly created Board of Public 

 Works. The plan has worked so well that the State 

 will not only continue its own operations but may 

 also sponsor and supervise settlement by private 

 owners, providing such enterprises are projected and 

 carried out strictly in accordance with its own rules 

 and requirements. 



RELATIONS OF MINING AND AGRICULTURE 



From several points of view, mining in California 

 may be looked on as the father of farming. The 

 Spanish farming that had been pursued for seventy- 

 five years at the missions and haciendas, before the 

 Americanization of California began in 1848, was 

 utterly incapable of sustaining the population which 

 the gold discovery, in the same year, induced. Food 

 supplies of all kinds were brought by sea by all ships 

 which could be chartered for San Francisco Bay, gold- 

 seekers and provisions for their support arriving 



