Excerpt from Lower California: Its Geography and Characteristics, With a Sketch of the Grant and Purposes of the Lower California Company

Historical Summary of Lower California, by Alexander S. Taylor. See Appendix.to five thousand Indians each, who with their families were employed by the Jesuits in cultivating land or herding stock. They lived in plenty. The climate enabled them to grow not only the most valuable grains, but also sugar, figs, oranges, dates, and other tropical productions; while of cotton, they always raised sufficient to supply their wants in clothes. We search-in vain among the records of these people for accounts of those great drouths which are said to render the country incapable of culture. We find, on the contrary, that the fathers had a System of agriculture which was entirely reliable. They consulted with intelligence the characteristics of the country, and those very features which the impatient and the ignorant have reported as discouraging, were, turned to account and proven to be providential. The missions were usually planted on the hill sides so that they overlooked the valleys, and when the rains fell, contin gent water was secured by a system of enormous dams of stone, which were projected from hill to hill quite across the valleys, so as to back up the water in artificial streams till the next rain fell. These rude works were as creditable to the Jesuits of Lower California as were the aqueducts of Egypt and of Rome to the Pharoahs and the Caesars; and their ruins are to this day a rebuke to the present dero gate condition of the territory. The truth is, that Lower California, instead of being worthless or even undesirable, has simply retrogaded. Nevertheless, with all of its misfortunes, it is not today as desolate as the Roman Campagna, or as worthless as many of the once fertile districts of the Nile.

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