ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 221 



animal, we can see nothing to be gained in a con- 

 tinuance of native blood in ill-formed carcasses. If 

 they do not possess even the quality of hardiness or 

 powers of subsistence on scanty forage, we can con- 

 ceive of no reason for perpetuating them." 



They were not perpetuated. They were eaten 

 when meat was high: they were killed for hides and 

 tallow when meat could not be sold and when pastur- 

 age was scant, as in 1864, when it was estimated that 

 a million head had perished. Out of the depression 

 in the early sixties which little survived unless it was 

 top-crossed enough to be Americanized, there came 

 the common stock from which drives were made to 

 the new range states of the interior when their devel- 

 opment began, as has been outlined. During all the 

 decades since that time the use of well-bred sires 

 has increased until the legislature of 1921 passed a 

 law that on the open range no bull should be allowed 

 to live unless "bred in a herd of the recognized beef 

 breeds, the ancestral sires of which must have been 

 registered bulls of the same breed for at least four 

 generations and the dams cows of the same breed and 

 of good quality." 



Only during about two decades of her history 

 has California had a sufficient fresh meat supply of 

 her own growing and even in that period her supply 

 of cured meats was chiefly by importation. The 

 decades of sufficiency lay between the in-driving of 

 herds for the feeding of the mining rush of the 

 first decade and the invasion of the valley ranges 

 by irrigated horticulture, beginning in the third 



