562 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[December, 
Chinese Farming Around San Francisco. 
The stranger who happens to make an early 
visit to the streets of San Francisco, witnesses a 
vegetable farmers throve so well that other com¬ 
patriots followed suit, and the housewives of San 
Francisco soon became familiar with the queer 
yoked figures and their heaped-up baskets, who an- 
Fig. 1.—A CHINESE FARMER AND HIS DONKEY. — Drawn and Engraved for the American Agriculturist. 
sight which he is not likely to soon forget. From 
early dawn a singular procession begins to move 
along the silent thoroughfares, coming out of and 
vanishing into the morning mist. Now a long 
string of men, in single file, each with a yoke over 
his shoulders and baskets dangling from its ends, 
goes trotting by. Again comes a donkey, the pan¬ 
niers covered with a blanket or tarpaulin, and a 
driver at his side. These are followed by a rickety- 
wagon, drawn by a phantom of a horse, and behind 
these a drove of jackasses similarly loaded. The 
vegetable supplies of San Francisco, borne by the 
market gardeners, defile before you. These ghosts 
of the dawn are all Chinamen. Even before it is 
light enough for you to see them, their voices sat¬ 
isfy you of their nationality. As they trot along 
under their yokes, beside their donkeys, or behind 
their shadowy' steeds, they keep up that chatter to 
which your ears soon become accustomed in cer¬ 
tain districts where the Mongolian flourishes. In 
a string of half a dozen yoke bearers, the leader- 
will be talking to a man in the middle, while he 
chats with the man next to the leader, the words 
and sentences flying back and forth without any one 
turning his head, until you wonder how the threads 
of conversation can keep out of tangle anyhow. 
The Chinaman began his usefulness as a market 
gardener in and around San Francisco nearly thirty 
years ago, in the days when the Americans had 
greater treasures to dig for in the earth than vege¬ 
tables. Men enjoying the prospect of turning up 
a gold mine with their spades, were not likely to 
apply them to a potato patch. Yet these men had 
to eat, and others, not above the humbler occupa¬ 
tions, worked to feed them. The first of the Chinese 
uounced their coming with a shrill cry, not unlike 
that of a New York milkman. At first each far¬ 
mer made his day’s trade on the contents of two 
baskets. Then the more enterprising hired men 
to carry additional supplies. The farmer himself 
always led, and still leads, the van iu these pro¬ 
dreams of utilizing them; also down in ravines and 
gullies which he had to reclaim from the original 
wilderness. We remember one Chinese farm in a 
deep and once savage gully, which used to be the 
bed of a creek that the spring floods transformed 
into a furious torrent. On one side the railroad 
passes over a steep embankment; on the other is 
an abrupt and rocky bluff. By damming the 
creek at the head of the gully and diverting the 
water down the hill range of which the bluff is a 
part, the ingenious Mongolian has turned the bed 
of the ancient torrent into a productive farm, and 
so fertilized the barren slope that lie can raise a 
crop upon it also. He utilizes every available foot 
of ground. He will even build his house on piles 
over a creek, or on stilts beside an embankment, 
in order to save surface soil he finds so precious. 
All his farm work is done by hand, usually on 
the methods of his native country'. His vegetable 
farms are as neat and trim as the great flower- 
studded gardens of the millionaires whose tables 
he helps to supply. He has, apparently, measured 
the productive capacity of the earth to an inch, 
and crams more into a given space of soil 
than would seem credible but for the fact itself. 
His system of cultivation seems to be as mathe¬ 
matical as his calculation of the resources of his 
plot. He measures the ground in feet and inches 
instead of by acres and rods, and allots spaces to 
his beans, potatoes, peas, tomatoes, cabbages, etc., 
in proportion to the demand for them ; and he 
never cultivates any thing for which there is not 
immediate call. Wheat, grapes, and fruit do not 
seduce him, they require too much space and care; 
the competition in them is too great, and the mar¬ 
ket too fluctuating. He works not for the whole 
world, like the farmers who have made the State 
famous, but for a single city whose denizens must 
have a certain amount to eat each day. So his 
venture is a sure one, and only a rare convulsion 
of nature can impair his prosperity. An earth¬ 
quake, or a landslide, or a season of heavy rains, 
Fig. 2.—CHINESE TRUCK BOATS IN SAN FRANCISCO BAT.— Drawn and Engraved for the American Agriculturist. 
Fig. 3.— CHINESE FARMERS CARRYING VEGETABLES 
cessions, which number from two to a dozen men. 
He carries the same burden as his hired hands, and 
does the bargaining for them; and as their baskets 
are emptied they are sent to the rear, instead of 
back to the farm to work. The proces¬ 
sion leaves town as it entered it, in 
single file, -while the usual chatter 
is still continued, as if keeping time 
to the pattering of their slipshod feet. 
The business has expanded until 
some Chinamen now come in daily with 
several wagons or droves of pack don¬ 
keys ; but the majority of them con¬ 
tinue to do business on a moderate scale, 
because lacking the means to amplify- it. 
The Chinaman farmer lives on the 
most economical basis, and does his cul¬ 
tivating on strips of waste land, by road¬ 
sides, and on hillsides so abrupt and nat- 
to market, urally sterile that the white man never 
may cut into his profits, but the climate is so 
friendly that it soon repairs the ravages. His 
crops are perennial, too. When one product is not 
flourishing, he manages to have another that is in 
season, and he thus keeps busy' all the year round. 
The Chinese cheap farmer is cheap only in 
his methods of production, and in expenditure. 
His market prices are regulated by the larger 
markets of the white man, and, like him, 
he gets the most he can for what he sells, but 
spends the least he can and exist. When his little 
fortune is heaped up, he sells his farm to a fore¬ 
man, whose thrift has made him a small capitalist, 
and returns to China to end his days there in aris¬ 
tocratic leisure. The farms pass from hand to 
hand for years, until the march of progress claims 
the land, and new ground is broken elsewhere. 
The Chinese began in the suburbs of San Fran¬ 
cisco itself, on waste land, for which they paid no 
rent, and, as the city spread, retreated and now 
