From such figures as these, it is easy to see how the California farmer can afford to look with equanimity on occasional droughts. Experience has shown that he can lose crops two years out of five, and yet make a fair average profit for the five years.
The most beautiful ranch in California is said to be the one about twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, belonging to Elwood Cooper. Its owner speaks of it humorously as a little "pocket ranch." In comparison with the great ranches whose acres are counted by tens of thousands, it is small, being only two thousand acres in extent; but in any other part of the world except California, it would be thought a wild jest to speak of an estate of two thousand acres as a small one.
Ten years ago this ranch was a bare, desolate sheep ranch,--not a tree on it, excepting the oaks and sycamores in the cañons. To-day it has twelve hundred acres under high cultivation; and driving from field to field, orchard to orchard, one drives, if he sees the whole of the ranch, over eleven miles of good made road. There are three hundred acres in wheat, one hundred and seventy in barley; thirty-five hundred walnut trees, twelve thousand almond, five thousand olive, two thousand fig and domestic fruit trees, and one hundred and fifty thousand eucalyptus trees, representing twenty-four varieties; one thousand grape-vines; a few orange, lemon, and lime trees. There are on the ranch one hundred head of cattle, fifty horses, and fifteen hundred sheep.
These are mere bald figures, wonderful enough as statistics of what may be done in ten years' time on South California soil, but totally inadequate even to suggest the beauty of the place.
The first relief to the monotony of the arrow-straight road which it pleased an impatient, inartistic man to make westward from Santa Barbara, is the sight of high, dark walls of eucalyptus trees on either side of the road. A shaded avenue, three quarters of a mile long, of these represents the frontages of Mr. Cooper's estate. Turning to the right, through a break in this wall, is a road, with dense eucalyptus woods on the left and an almond orchard on the right. It winds and turns, past knolls of walnut grove, long lines of olive orchard, and right-angled walls of eucalyptus trees shutting in wheat-fields. By curves and bends and sharp turns, all the time with new views, and new colors from changes of crop, with exquisite glimpses of the sea shot through here and there, it finally, at the end of a mile, reaches the brink of an oak-canopied cañon. In the mouth of this cañon stands the house, fronting south on a sunny meadow and garden space, walled in on three sides by eucalyptus trees.