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Updated: June 14, 2025
The general statement is this, that whatever has a worth has also a cost. "The law of the universe," says a wise thinker, "is, Pay and take." If you desire silks of the mercer or supplies at the grocery, you, of course, pay money. Is it a harvest from the field that you seek? Tillage must be paid. Would you have the river toil in production of cloths for your raiment?
But still she produces at least four million bales of cotton, and great changes are now in progress: railways are pervading the country; canals are being dug for irrigating, and irrigation quadruples the crop, while it improves the staple; and the diversion of a few districts from the ordinary crops, with improved tillage, will increase the production to an indefinite extent.
Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the tulares. It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra.
To make the ill-fenced and misshapen fields seem trim paddocks, wavering and serpentining furrows appear straight and regular lines of tillage, weed-grown fields look marvels of cleanliness and care, while the lounging and ragged population were to be passed off as a thriving and industrious peasantry, well paid and contented, were difficulties that Mr. Kearney did not propose to confront.
As they rode, the land began to get less fertile and less, till at last there was but tillage here and there in patches: of houses there were but few, and the rest was but dark heathland and bog, with scraggy woods scattered about the country-side.
But while the population increased, the tillage failed to increase in the needed proportion. I have, unfortunately, no statistics for all periods; but the general tendency is shown by the following table: Six mou are about one acre. In 1578, there were 66 mou land per family of the total population. By 1729 it was only 35 mou per family, i.e. the land had to produce almost twice as much as before.
It is true, however, that the malaria may to a certain extent be banished by thoroughness of tillage a fact which has not yet received its full explanation, but may be partly accounted for by the circumstance that the working of the surface accelerates the drying up of the stagnant waters.
The sides of this vale are steep, and, in many places, high, perpendicular, and rocky. Every foot of earth is cultivated; and where the natural inclination of the hill is too great to admit of tillage, stone walls are built to sustain terraces, which rise one over another like giant steps to the mountain-tops.
The gardens and other lands for tillage are inclosed by willow hedges. Elevated hills, or mountains, bound this valley on the east and west. Large herds of cattle were scattered over the valley, greedily cropping the fresh green herbage, which now carpets mountain and plain. Colonel Fremont marched from San Juan this morning, and encamped, as we learned on our arrival, ten miles south.
Scotland is the best farmed country in Europe, and Ireland about the worst. One pair of horses in Scotland were then supposed to cultivate fifty acres of tillage, and in Ireland the average was one horse to five acres. Indeed it is in both cases much the same to-day. In reality a farm is a workshop from which you turn out as much produce as possible.
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