Los Angeles, October 13, 1903.

We slept in Los Angeles with our windows wide open and felt no chill in the dry, balmy air, although a gentle breeze from seaward sifted through the lace curtains all night long. The sun was streaming in when at last we awoke to the sound of New England church bells. We breakfasted on plates piled high with big, red, sweet strawberries, dead ripe, evenly ripe, but not one whit over ripe. A ripeness and sweetness we have never before tasted, even in Oxford. In Seattle and Tacoma we met the royal crab of the Puget Sound, and found him big and bigger than the crabs of England and of France—big as dinner plates, all of them, and now we find in the great, luscious strawberry of Los Angeles another American product as big as those that grow in the gardens of merrie England.

Los Angeles! How can I tell you of it and of the lovely region of the American Riviera all round about it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams of Southern California and the country of Los Angeles, and when, during his seven long months of winter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to go there and to end his days among these orange groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And when he dies—so it is said—every good Yukoner and Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to Southern California! So I had imagined much for this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi-tropics, within the immediate borders of the United States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern city among all of this delight of climate and of verdure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapers far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are fine, but old in type—most or all erected thirty or forty years ago—while the many huge blocks of Los Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tramways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, and has put and is now putting his millions into the electric tramway system of Los Angeles.

During the morning we rode some thirty miles upon the tourist’s car, seeing the city, its many fine parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its extraordinary extent of imposing residences. And when we might ride no longer, we strolled on through Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place, and among those sections of the residence quarter where no tramways are allowed to profane the public way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los Angeles’ astonishing growth, for many of these superb homes are not built and owned by the business men making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but are built and owned by those who have already acquired fortunes in other parts of the United States and of the world, and who by reason of the genial climate of Southern California, have come here to live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are derived from sources elsewhere than in California, and they spend freely of those incomes in the region of their new homes. The exquisite lawns, the flowering shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the constant use of water and expert gardeners’ skill, give to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. Water does it all, and man helps the water.

Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the Methodist Church; the other under the control of the State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and bounds. It is the center of the gardens and orchards and citrus fruit trade of Southern California, and is the Mecca toward whose environs comes in perpetual procession the unending army of the world’s “One Lungers,” and their friends.

Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the swift, through electric train. Once a separate community, now already become a suburb of the greater growing city. “The finest climate on the earth,” they say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are there to prove it. A large town of residences, each standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes and occupied by a cultivated society.

We did not tarry to see the celebrated ostrich farm, which is one of the famous sights of Pasadena, but went on toward the mountain chain beyond and north of Pasadena to the base of towering Mount Low, and climbed right up its face a thousand feet on an inclined plane steeper than any of Kanawha’s, and then another thousand feet by five miles of winding electric railway. A wonderful ride into the blue sky, with a yet more wonderful panorama stretching for many miles beneath our feet. All the valley of the Los Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretching far as the eye could see until bounded by the mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated volcanic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified waves of a mighty sea. Below us the perfect verdure of irrigated land, the patches and masses of greenness everywhere threaded and interspersed by the irrigating ditches and pools and ponds whereby the precious water is impounded and distributed when used.

Los Angeles lies very near the center of an immense cove, whose sea line marks the great indenture on the southwest of the United States, where the coast bends in from Cape Conception and curves southeastward to the borders of Mexico, a total coastal frontage on the Pacific Ocean of near three hundred miles.

On the north, the mountains of the Coast Range, and the westward jutting spurs of the Sierra Nevada come together and form a barrier against the cold northern airs. Eastward their extension forms a high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Mountain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second finest harbor in California, is the most southern port and trade outlet. A vast “ventura,” as the Spaniards called it, upon this fertile plain and rolling upland anything will grow if only it has water. For three or four months in the year, from early November to March, the skies pour down an ample rainfall, and the world is a garden. During the other eight months, man—the active American—now irrigates the land with water stored during the rainy season, and thus a perpetual and prolific yield is won from the fecund soil. Here the famous seedless orange was discovered, perpetuated, and has become the most coveted citrous fruit. Fortunes have been made from the raising of these oranges alone. The immense and fragrant strawberries ripen every month the year round. Figs and pomegranates abound. Apples, pears, olives and grapes yield enormous and profitable crops. No frosts, no drouths. Last year Los Angeles and its contributing orchards shipped twenty-five thousand carloads of citrous fruit. This year they reckon to do yet more. Their capacity is only limited by the markets’ demand, and both seem boundless.

The air is dry like that of the Yukon Valley, and similarly, extremes of temperature are easily borne. It is never unpleasantly hot in Southern California, they say, just as the Yukoner vows he never suffers from the cold. “Only give us water to wash our gold;” “water to irrigate our crops,” cries each, “and we will become richer than the mind of man can think.” But the types of men and women are somewhat different in the two extremes. A sturdier race wins fortune from the soil in the Klondike land; there the children have rosier faces and are more alert. On the crowded streets of the southern city the pale presence of the “one lungers” is at once remarked. But for this, the people might be the same.

We left this gracious garden land, with its gentle climate, by the midday train, this time leaving the coast and following the interior San Joaquin Valley route. Just at the outskirts of the city our train halted a moment, and, looking from the window, I saw a most astonishing spectacle—an extensive enclosure with a large, wide-roofed building in its midst, and enclosure, roof and air all thick with myriads of pigeons. Here is the greatest pigeon roost of the world, where an enterprising bird lover raises squabs by the thousands, cans them in his own factory, and sends them all over the earth to the delight of the epicure. Just why such myriads of birds should not fly away, I do not know, but there they were covering the ground, the roof, and filling the air in circular flights, and seemed rarely or never to leave the borders of the enclosure.

For a few hours we retraced our way and then turned eastward across the edge of the great Mojave Desert. Crossing the barrier of the San Fernando Mountains on the north, through a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel, we left the greenness of olive grove and orange orchard behind, and came out into a continually more and more arid country. Cactus and yucca began to appear and to multiply, the dwarf shrunken palmetto of the Mexican plains grew more and more plentiful, and then we came through dry, parched gulches and caÑons, out onto a dead flat plain stretching away toward the eastern horizon as far as the eye could see—sand and sage brush and stunted cactus; a hundred miles or more away a faint blue mountain range showing in the slanting sunlight against the eastern sky. Dry and arid and hopeless to man and beast. A terrible waste to cross, or even to enter, and lifeless and desolate beyond concept.

During the night we crossed over the high, arid Tehachapi Mountains and descended into the San Joaquin Valley, traversing that wonderfully fertile garden land until in the morning we were at Oakland. We then crossed the five miles of wide harbor and took our last breakfast in the city of the Golden Gate.

After night had fallen and I sat with my cigar, I chanced to fall in with an interesting young Jap, “R. Onishi,” on his first visit to America, correspondent of the “Jije Shimpo,” Tokio’s greatest daily newspaper. He had come over to investigate the growing rice plantations of Texas, with a view to Japanese capital becoming interested in development there. He had been much impressed with the opportunity there offered, and should report favorably on the proposed enterprise. Not to use Japanese labor, but for Japanese capital under Japanese management to use American labor. So does the opportunity and natural wealth of our country begin to attract the investment of the stored wealth of Asia as well as of Europe. Like the rice dealer I met on the “Kaiser Frederich,” crossing the Atlantic two years ago, Mr. Onishi said that American rice brings the highest price of any in the markets of the world, and he looks for a large export trade to Asia of American rice, as well as wheat. And America, how vast and rich and hopeful a land it seemed to him!

I have now seen almost the entire Pacific Coast of our Northern American Continent. From Skagway, from Dawson to the sight of Mexico. Its old and its new towns and cities, its ports and trade centers have I visited, and greatly has the journey pleased and profited me. The dim perception of our future Pacific power that first dawned upon me at Vancouver has now become a settled conviction. We are just beginning to comprehend the future dominance and potency of our nation in Oriental trade, in commerce, in wealth, in enlightened supremacy. And it fills the imagination with boundless sweep to contemplate what are the possibilities of these great Pacific States.

Among the cities of the future upon the Pacific Coast, Seattle and Los Angeles are the two that impress me as affording the wider opportunity and certainty of growth, wealth and controlling influence in trade, in commerce, in politics. If I were a young man just starting out, I should choose one of them, and in and through Seattle I believe there is the larger chance. Or if I were on life’s threshold and, say, twenty-five and vigorous, I would pitch my tent within the confines of the continent of Alaska, and by energy, thrift and foresight, become one of its innumerable future millionaires.