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Updated: May 10, 2025
Throughout this region decay and ruin have set their seal on what was formerly one of the most prosperous parts of the republic. Orange trees grow in wild profusion on the spots where once stood farm-houses, while mud ranchos, tenanted by a few old women who sustain life with oranges and manioc, here and there disturb the monotony of desolation.
Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various parts of the State, down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live oaks and sycamores, and its Jesuit College for boys; and San José, where is the best girls' school in the State, kept by the Sisters of Notre Dame, a town now famous for a year's session of "The legislature of a thousand drinks," and thence to the rich Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side through the rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the vast grants of the Castro and Soto families, where farming and fruit-raising are done on so large a scale.
It would be a hundred years before the country would be populous enough to give his vast ranchos a reasonable value; and, although he had twenty thousand head of cattle, the market for their disposal was limited, and barter was the principle of trade, rather than coin. Toward the end of the month he hurried to Monterey to catch a bark about to sail for Mexico.
The horse, also, was anxious to get home. Signs of habitations thickened. The wide waste hills of the ranchos had been left behind. Here and there were outlying dwellings, or road houses, the objectives of pleasure excursions of various sorts and degrees of respectability from the city. From one of the latter came a hail. "Oh, Keith! I say, Keith!"
We met and passed many young Indian women, riding by two or three together on the same horse: they, as well as many of the young men, were strikingly handsome, their fine ruddy complexions being the picture of health. Besides the toldos, there were three ranchos; one inhabited by the Commandant, and the two others by Spaniards with small shops. We were here able to buy some biscuit.
With her tumbled hair and white face, her streaming upturned eyes and drawn mouth, she looked more like the Mater Dolorosa than the expressionless print she prayed to. "Mary! Mother!" she whispered, "have mercy on thy poor little daughter. Give him to me. I ask for nothing else in this world. I do not care for gold or ranchos, only to be his wife.
The merry-makings were carried on near the ranchos, where the more staid citizens of Ega, husbands with their wives and young daughters, all smoking gravely out of long pipes, sat in their hammocks and enjoyed the fun. Towards midnight we often heard, in the intervals between jokes and laughter, the hoarse roar of jaguars prowling about the jungle in the middle of the praia.
Chonita, whose pride never failed her, had drawn herself up and looked coldly indifferent. "Señor," murmured Valencia, "thou wilt tarry with us long, no? We have much to show thee in Santa Barbara, and on our ranchos." "I fear that I can stay but a week, señorita. I must return to Los Angeles." "Would nothing tempt thee to stay, Don Diego?"
The men go about naked with the exception of a cloth about the loins; and the women are equally unclad, some of them perhaps wearing an apron reaching from the hip to the knee. In the larger ranchos the women were decently clad in the usual Filipino fashion. If they were of no virtue, an old man remarked to me, the Spaniards would not employ them so numerously.
He had been rather overworked, but would most likely have got through, had we not stopped the last night at the Indian ranchos, where there was no forage but green maize leaves, a food our beasts were not accustomed to. It seems our men gave him too much of this, and then allowed him to drink excessively; and next morning he grew weaker and weaker, and died not long after we reached Jalapa.
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