Sarah Bixby-Smith

“ It had taken her an hour and a half to make the round trip amounting to three blocks.
There is no mud so powerful when it is in its prime as adobe, and when it dries in all its trampled ridges and hollows, it is as hard as a rock. It takes all summer to wear it down level, ready to begin over again with the new rains. There are a few places yet, where, some rainy day if you are feeling extra fit, you may try a stroll across a Los Angeles street and learn to sympathize with a captured fly. ”

“ I find it interesting, however, to have in my mind pictures of the little vanished village that once was Los Angeles. I also find it interesting to watch its present turmoil and energy and to speculate on its future; to see signs of intellectual, artistic and social vitality that exist among the scattered groups and individuals now pouring into this seething community; to wonder how soon the wheels of progress are going to stop rattling long enough for us to hear ourselves think, catch our breath and develop some sort of cohesive social organism. ”

“ The vision and industry of one little woman made from the dilapidated pile of mud bricks one of California’s most charming homes, whose generous hospitality, continued by her son and his wife, have made the old place widely known. It is a rare thing in this new country to find a house that has been occupied continuously by one family for almost fifty years.
In contrast to this ranch house the one at Cerritos has fallen from its high estate and is now but a shell of its old self. ”

“ It is the fashion just now to make a butt of Los Angeles, to see only its obsessions, its crudities, its banalities. Those who really comprehend the amazing number of people daily crowding in upon us, and remember that the bulk of the people are inevitably strangers to each other, each ready to shift responsibility to someone supposedly an older citizen, cannot but have patience, cannot but rejoice in the really fine things that have been done and are doing. ”

“ Near the house were flowers and shrubs, but further away grapes were planted, and oranges, pomegranates, and figs.
At the end of the rose-shaded path leading from the front door stood a summer house, bowered in the white-blossomed Madeira vine and set in a thick bed of blue-flowered periwinkle, which I never quite dared to invade, lest it harbor a snake. California children were taught never to step where they could not see. ”

“ Time went by slowly, slowly, as it does when one is young. All day there was play, except for the occasional stint of patchwork, or the reading lesson,—every day but Sunday, with its church in the forenoon and stories and walks in the afternoon. Mamma would say, “When I was a little girl in Maine,” until to me Maine meant Paradise. In that country there was a brook where one could wade, and the great river, on whose banks in the woods children could picnic and hunt for wild berries,—what a charm in the words, “going berrying!” ”

“ How good it is to wander in the sun, smelling wild celery, [124] or the cottonwood leaves, nibbling yellow, pungent mustard blossoms while pushing through the tangle; how good to feel a pulled tule give as the crisp, white end comes up from the mud and water, or to bury one’s face in the flowing sulphur well for a queer tasting drink, or to cut un-numbered jack-o-lanterns while sitting high on a great pile of pumpkins of every pretty shape and color, and singing in the salty air; how good to wander in the sun, to be young and tireless, to have cousins and ranches! ”

“ Each time I go back I find some new thing, now a garden, now a modern heating plant skillfully contrived to circumvent the cellarless condition and massive walls, last of all a cactus garden boasting some imported sand to simulate a desert, but crying out for rocks and stones, which are not to be found in adobe soil. ”

“ It has ruined me permanently as a shopper for watermelons; nothing makes me feel more abused by the H. C. L. than to try to separate a grocer and his melon.
I seem to have gotten far away from my subject, but, really I am only standing in the brown mallows outside the open end of the wool barn, watching the six horse team start for Wilmington with its load of precious wool that is to be shipped by steamer to “The City,” San Francisco, the one and only of those days. ”

“ I was clad in a daily clean blue-and-white checked gingham apron, Harry, although but seven, in long trousers, “like the men.” We romped in barn or garden, visited the corrals or gathered the eggs; we played in the old stage left in the weeds outside the fence, or worked with the tools in the blacksmith shop. When the long tin horn sounded at noon the call for the men’s dinner we returned to the house to be scrubbed. ”

“ Ying would put us up a most generous lunch, but the thing that was most characteristic and which is remembered best is the meat broiled over the little driftwood fire. Father always was cook of the mutton chops that were strung on a sharpened willow stick, and I shall never forget the most delicious meat ever given me, smoky chops, gritty with the sand blown over them by the constant sea breeze. I wonder if the chef of the fashionable Hotel Virginia, which occupies the site of our outdoors kitchen, ever serves the guests so good a meal as we had on the sand of the beautiful, empty beach. ”

“ But whatever changes have come there has always been the sky, sunny or starry, or hidden by fog or passing cloud; the same mountains with their wonder of changing color guarded the valley. The old carpet of gorgeous wild flowers is gone; cities creep over the plain and a network of roads covers the earth; there is scarcely a place where one cannot see against the sky the fretted tower that means oil. One beauty goes and perhaps another comes for those who have eyes to see,—especially if they have a fair sized blind spot, which I find sometimes is a most satisfying possession. ”

“ But now is as nothing, for the day is not far distant when Los Angeles and adjoining counties will become the greatest producing counties on the face of the globe; everything points to it, a soil of unsurpassed fertility, and a climate as perfect as is to be found upon earth. It is but for the people themselves to wake up and insist upon aid from government in accomplishing this noble work. ”

“ I tramped over the level lands on the north end of the ranch, trailing the surveyors who were marking off the acres that were going to the making of Clearwater, and saw it severed from the ranch without a pang, but when Harry and I learned about Mr. Willmore and the American Colony, who wanted Cerritos (Signal) Hill and the bluff and our beach we resented it greatly. There was a seaside town at Santa Monica,—what need of disturbing things as they were for the sake of another? Why should conditions that we had always known, that were as much a part of living as day and night be rudely changed? ”

“ I saw him stop there over our open-mouthed heads and flip a flap-jack in the pan he carried. I do not know why he thus showed his prowess nor what his reward, but he furnished a passing entertainment for the inhabitants of Los Angeles back in the later seventies, and his ghost still walks in mid-air for me whenever I go through that old part of town.
His is not the only walking spirit. There in the Plaza still stands the shade of the peripatetic dentist, fore-runner of Painless Parker, who once stood for several days in a red and gold chariot containing a gorgeous, throne-like chair ”

“ I have seen a city increase and multiply in an amazing manner, even an hundred fold, a strange experience for one who has no intention of being old for a long time yet. Those who realize how this infant prodigy of a town is daily swamped with hordes of new and unrelated people have patience with some things for which she can be justly criticised ”

“ Every week a man from the ranch made the rounds of the sheep camps, carrying mail, tobacco, and food,—brown sugar, coffee, flour, bacon, beans, potatoes, dried apples. On the morning when this was to happen I have watched the flickering light of the lantern travel back and forth over the ceiling of the room where I was supposed to be asleep, as the finishing touches were put on the load, and the horses were brought and hitched to the wagon before daylight, so that the long rounds could be made before night. ”

“ Anyone who has made the rail trip between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles can appreciate the references made in the diary to the rough and stony trails, the dust, the days without water or food for the animals, to sage-brush and cactus, and can but wonder how it was possible to get flocks across the desert country at all.
On the earlier part of this trail, where there was still some noticeable vegetation, they lost many sheep through the eating of poison weeds. They lost others through the drinking of poor water or the entire lack of it for many weary miles. ”

“ Orange blossoms, honey-suckle, lilac, and lemon verbena, roses, oleander and heliotrope made a heaven of fragrance. For years the bees had stored their treasure in the wall of grandfather’s room, which, being a wooden addition to the house, offered a hollow space; the odor of the honey mingled with that of the old leather bindings of his books in the room, and with the flowers outside. The linnets, friendly, and twittering, built about the porch, and the swallows nested under the eaves ”

“ The girls at the end sang pensively of Seniors about to be “lost in the wide, wide world.” I didn’t care or fear. I hastened to be lost, for the wide, wide world meant California, my homeland, to which I fled the instant I secured my diploma. The western girl who went East to college went West to live.
The years at Wellesley soon slipped back into the dim region of memory and Los Angeles became once more the familiar environment of my life. It was so good to be at home again—but Time was bringing changes and new responsibilities. ”

“ As for the supplies—the meat all came from the ranch. Every day a sheep was killed—occasionally a beef. Uncle John at the Alamitos built a smoke house and cured hams. There were chickens and ducks, tame and in season wild.
The staple groceries came from Los Angeles in wholesale quantities—sugar and flour in barrels, navy beans and frijoles and green coffee in sacks, the latter frequently the source of delicious odors from the kitchen oven while roasting; it was daily ground for the breakfast drink, and the sound of the little mill was almost the first indication of stirring life. ”

“ Until the stirring days of ’49, San Francisco was insignificance on sand hills. Then her rise was sudden and glorious and the Queen of the Angels was humble. But she was angelic only in name. She was a typical frontier town with primitive, flat-roofed dwellings of sun-dried bricks, much like those built in ancient Assyria or Palestine. Saloons and gambling houses were out of proportion in number, and there were murders every day. The present crime wave is nothing in comparison.
My father first saw Los Angeles in January, 1854, when he was camped with his sheep on the Rancho San Pasqual ”

“ This Christmas visit affords my earliest memories of Cerritos, although I know I had been there several times before. It was the long blissful summer when I was seven that packed my mind with vivid pictures and remembrance of joyful activity. Is not seven a peak in childhood,—old enough for self direction, young enough for thrills?
After this visit was over and we departed for nearby Los Angeles to make ourselves a new home my life went on in parallel lines, school days in town, vacation [80] days at the ranches. ”

“ Half a dozen of us children, starting after breakfast on the day’s adventure, after taking slices from the raw ham stolen from the smoke-house and secreted in the hay, spied some clothes carefully hung on the wall above the mow, and the idea of stuffing the clothes into the semblance of a man was no sooner born than it was adopted. Our whole joy was in doing a life-like piece of work. Fan gave us a paper bag for the head, which we filled and covered with the hat. Little we knew how seriously a hot-tempered Mexican might object to being fooled. ”

“ Every night when ready for bed, I opened the inside [148] blinds and looked at the mountains and up to the stars and enlarged my heart, for what can give one the sense of awe and beauty that the night sky does?
The location of our home on the brow of a hill was chosen because of the view and the sense of air and space. Below us was the little city, the few business blocks, the homes set in gardens on tree shaded streets, the whole surrounded by orchards and vineyards. On clear days we could see the mountains far in the east and the ocean at San Pedro, with Santa Catalina beyond. ”

“ PIONEERING AT POMONA COLLEGE
“It must be a college of the New England type—just where and how it is to be started is the question,” said one of the men who, one evening in the middle eighties, were discussing with my father and grandfather the possibility and need of a good college in Southern California, one of high standards of character and scholarship. There was no question of necessity—only of ways and means. The boys and girls must be given the same type of education as that offered in the far away homeland. ”

“ Many people now familiar with Southern California have seen the old house surrounded by trees that is on the brow of a hill out on Anaheim Road beyond the Long Beach Municipal Golf Links. That is the old Alamitos Ranch house. When my uncle and aunt first went there to live it was almost a ruin, having fallen during the Reese period from the high estate it had known when it was the summer home of the lovely Arcadia de Bandini de Stearns. The only growing things about it were one small eucalyptus tree and one fair sized pepper tree. ”