San Diego County CA Archives History - Books .....The Awakening 1888
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Book Title: The City And County Of San Diego

CHAPTER VI,
THE AWAKENING.

   THROUGHOUT the long line of lovely days that dawned and died on San Diego Bay
without shining on a new roof or a happy face, the interior of the country was
steadily settling. But stores in the country kept such even pace with the growth
that there were few if any more wagons in town in 1S84 than in 1S75.
Considerable trade was of course done, but mainly with eight or ten-mule teams
and two or three wagons that loaded quietly and departed, making little stir
upon the streets of San Diego. Settlers crept from National City up the
Sweetwater Valley and from San Diego to El Cajon, which rancho was opened to
settlement as early as 1869. The mines discovered near Julian about that time
brought in many miners; a little town was started there, and a few settlers took
up some of the rich little valleys around it. The tracts of Government land
surrounding the large ranchos were soon sought out by the new-comers. They
scaled the rugged hills that surround Bear Valley, climbed the heights of Mesa
Grande and even the high Volcan and Palomar. A few of these were ex-boomers from
San Diego who saw more money in bees than in corner lots. Some were old
forty-niners from the North in search of anything new. Others were restless
wanderers moving farther West and looking for a home of any kind in this
farthest West. Many others were people more or less impaired in health, in
search of a mild and comfortable climate where they could make a living by some
light out-of-door work. In this way the American population outside the city of
San Diego increased from a few hundred in 1868 to some twelve thousand or nearly
five times that of the city in 1884. Yet the effect upon the city was almost
inappreciable.

   In the early part of 1885 work was begun upon the extension of the California
Southern to Barstow. This was quickly construed to mean that the great Santa Fe
railroad system would make San Diego its Pacific terminus. In the spring of the
same year the first one of the series of extensive water systems that are
shortly to make San Diego County the most attractive county in the State, was
begun on the San Diego River on a scale so immense that the usual number of
sages made the usual number of predictions about what cannot be done by people
who are determined to do something.

   During all these years that San Diego was waiting and watching, the counties
of San Bernardino and Los Angeles were increasing in population at a much
greater rate than San Diego County, and with a far greater proportion of people
of wealth. From very early times people had been coming to California on account
of its climate. But for many years their numbers were very few and confined to
the class of decided invalids. After the completion of the Central and Union
Pacific lines a few began coming to spend the winter just as the many went to
Florida. For a long time the impression among them was that they must flee as a
matter of course at the opening of the spring, just as they would from Florida.
San Diego from its first start had a few of these. In the winter of 1875-76 for
a few weeks the Horton House and all the adjacent lodging-rooms around the plaza
were full and a large and fashionable boarding-house kept by J. O. Miner on the
Cajon had at one time some twenty-five guests at twelve dollars a week. This
travel resulted in no settlement or improvement except a very temporary one in
the pockets of hotel and livery stable keepers, barbers, saloons, etc. But in
Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties there was a decided difference. The
early development of water there and its surprising results captured a goodly
proportion of the visitors, many of whom bought and built, while the fairest
portions of San Diego, for lack of water development, which was here more
costly, showed nothing of what they can readily do. The new settlers on the
north quickly discovered that instead of paying a high price in summer for the
luxury of the winters they had actually gained quite as much by the change from
the Eastern summer as by the change from the Eastern winter. A remarkable
feature of the whole was that though few, if any, of the fine vineyards or
orchards or beautiful places paid anything on the investment, and most of them,
owing to the lack of transportation to market, were a dead loss, yet the owners
were perfectly satisfied. Not one in fifty could be driven out of Southern
California. If anyone wished to sell it was only to get money to buy another
place with, and for everyone who wanted to sell a dozen were ready to buy. There
the lands commanded a price which purchasers with eyes wide open plainly saw was
far too great, if values are to be measured by the interest that can be made
from the land. There was then for lack of transportation little prospect that it
ever would pay full interest on the investment. Yet they bought and improved and
the faster prices rose the more numerous and eager became the buyers. It was
plain that they were in fact buying comfort, immunity from snow and slush, from
piercing winds and sleet-clad streets, from sultry days and sleepless nights,
from thunder-storms, cyclones, malaria, mosquitoes, and bed-bugs. All of which,
in plain language, means that they were buying climate, a business that has now
been going on for fifteen years and reached a stage of progress which the world
has never seen before and of which no wisdom can forsee the end. The proportion
of invalids among these settlers was very great at first; but the numbers of
those in no sense invalids but merely sick of bad weather, determined to endure
no more of it, and able to pay for good weather, increased so fast that by 18S0
not one in twenty of the new settlers could be called an invalid. They were
simply rich refugees.

   In 1880 the rich refugee had become such a feature in the land and increasing
so fast in numbers that Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties began to feel a
decided "boom." From 1880 to 1885 Los Angeles City grew from about twelve
thousand to thirty thousand, and both counties more than doubled their
population. But all this time San Diego was about as completely fenced out by a
system of misrepresentation as it was by its isolation before the building of
the railroad. Much of this misrepresentation was simply well-meaning ignorance:
but the most of it was—pure, straight lying so universal from the editor to the
brakeman on the cars and the bootblack on the street that it seemed to be a
regularly organized plan. So thorough was its effect that at the opening of 1885
San Diego had felt scarcely any of the great prosperity under full headway only
a hundred miles north.

   But when the extension of the railroad to Barstow was begun and recognized as
a movement of the Santa Fe railway system to make its terminus on San Diego Bay,
the rich refugee determined to come down and see whether a great railroad was
foolish enough to cross hundreds of miles of desert for the sake of making a
terminus in another desert. He came and found that though the country along the
coast in its un-irrigated state was not as inviting as the irrigated lands of
Los Angeles and San Bernardino, there yet was plenty of water in the interior
that could be brought upon it. He found there was plenty of "back country" as
rich as any around Los Angeles, only it was more out of sight behind hills and
table-lands, and less concentrated than in the next two counties above. He found
a large and beautiful bay surrounded by thousands and thousands of acres of fine
rich slopes and table-hinds, abounding in the most picturesque building sites on
earth. He found a climate made, by its more southern latitude and inward sweep
of the coast, far superior to that of a hundred miles north, and far better
adapted to the lemon, orange, and other fine fruits. He found the only harbor on
the Pacific Coast south of San Francisco; a harbor to which the proud Los
Angeles herself would soon look for most of her supplies by sea; one which
shortens by several hundred miles the distance from the lands of the setting sun
to New York; a harbor which the largest merchant vessels can enter in the
heaviest storm and lie at rest without dragging an anchor or chafing paint on a
wharf.

   The growth of San Diego now began in earnest, and by the end of 1885 its
future was plainly assured. A very few who predicted a population of fifty
thousand in five years were looked upon as wild, even by those who believed most
firmly in its future. Even those who best knew the amount of land behind it and
the great water resources of its high mountains in the interior believed that
twenty-five thousand in five years would be doing well enough. Its growth since
that time has exceeded fondest hope. It is in truth a surprise to all and no one
can truthfully pride himself upon superior sagacity, however well founded his
expectations for the future may be. At the close of 1885 it had probably about
five thousand people. At the close of 1887, the time of writing this sketch, it
has fully thirty thousand with a more rapid rate of increase than ever. New
stores, hotels and dwellings are arising on every hand from the center to the
farthest outskirts in more bewildering numbers than before, and people are
pouring in at double the rate they did but six months ago. It is now impossible
to keep track of its progress. No one seems any longer to know or care who is
putting up the big buildings, and it is becoming difficult to find a familiar
face in the crowd or at the hotels.

   It may well be doubted if any city has ever before had such a growth of the
same character. Mushroom towns there have been of course. Mines and railroads
have built up some towns with great speed. But the buildings, the improvements
and the people have all shown that it was but a temporary gathering liable to
dissolve at any time.

   Not so with San Diego. The hundreds of costly residences, the thousands of
less expensive but still luxurious homes, the scores of solid business blocks,
the great wharves, machine shops, and warehouses, the miles of street railway,
water and gas pipes, tell of a different class of people from those that settle
ephemeral towns. The electric lights, the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent
in grading the streets, cutting down hills and filling up low ground, the
perfect system of glazed-pipe sewers costing four hundred thousand dollars,
indicate a people who are not building for to-day. The shipping in the harbor,
the millions of feet of lumber landed every week, the loaded wagons and cars
that daily start for the interior, have no temporary look about them. The number
of the new residents who are very wealthy is certainly such as no new city ever
before received in so short a time.

   The whole bay region of which San Diego is the center is enjoying-to a great
extent the same prosperity and settling with the same class of people. Some
forty miles of steam-dummy road now run in various directions around it and
extensions of fully forty more are under construction. An electric road is now
running to the farthest end of University Heights and will have miles of
branches; while a cable-road is about to climb the table-lands fir out into the
outskirts. The fine lands about National City are fast being- covered with fine
residences and the new water works, costing over six hundred thousand dollars
and now complete, will hasten its progress. Coronado Beach has reached a stage
of development that few ever dreamed of seeing, yet Pacific Beach, a few miles
above it, is already close upon its heels with great and costly improvements,
and the first day's sales of lots there amounted to two hundred thousand dollars.

   Three things now appear certain:—

   First, that the San Diego Bay region is, for a certain class of people, the
most desirable residence on earth.

   Second, that it is to be the greatest summer resort as well as the greatest
winter resort on either coast of America.

   Third, that it is to be the harbor and distributing point not only for its
own interior, Lower California, which, under the work of the International
Company of Mexico is now fast settling, but for San Bernardino County, and also
for Los Angeles as soon as the short line of the Santa Fe, now graded to Santa
Ana, is done.

   The whirligig of time brings in its revenges but it is surely a strange freak
of the wheel that turns into San Diego's back country the two counties that have
so long retarded her growth by the oft-repeated story that she had "no back
country." Yet the great Maker of harbors has so decreed.


Additional Comments:
From:

THE
CITY AND COUNTY
OF
SAN DIEGO.
ILLUSTRATED,
AND CONTAINING
BI0GRAPHICAL SKETCHES
OF
PROMINENT MEN AND PIONEERS.

SAN DIEGO, CAL.
LEBERTHON & TAYLOR
1888


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