122 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



roads one came on bands of chattering Mexicans or 

 silent Indians at work in shady corners, sorting and 

 packing into crates heaps of onions, cantaloupes, or 

 tomatoes: or met wagons creeping to the railway 

 with juicy freight of watermelons. Plantations of 

 young dates met the eye on all sides, and here and 

 there were palms already bearing clusters of ripen- 

 ing fruit so suggestive of the ancient Assyrian fash- 

 ion of hair-dressing that I think the idea must have 

 been copied from this source. 



One hears wondrous tales of the profits that are 

 being made by the owners of these first fruiting 

 palms. The pioneer date experimenter, Mr. Fred 

 Johnson, showed me four trees from which he had 

 realized in the previous year between four hundred 

 and five hundred dollars. (It must be remembered 

 that in these early days of American-grown dates 

 they bring the price of a novelty, as much as a dollar 

 a pound for the best fruit, which is a temporary 

 condition, of course.) Tempted by these phenomenal 

 figures, desert farmers are raising seedling date- 

 plants by hundreds of thousands, while those w^ho 

 can afford it are planting "offshoots" ; that is, young 

 palms imported from the famous regions of Tunis, 

 Algeria, Arabia, and Persia. The industry is well 

 past its experimental stage, and my forecast of the 

 future of this valley is that twenty years from now it 

 will be a waving forest of palms, with millionaires 

 competing for acreage in the renowned date-garden 

 of the United States. 



From this locality come also the earliest of figs, 

 apricots, melons, and grapes. The growth of these 



