Los Angeles Daily Herald

The Real Outlook

The remarkable era of development which has lately taken place in Los Angeles has been looked upon abroad as the feverish and unsubstantial outcome of a boom. There has never been a greater mistake, and we shall briefly tell why. We will preface our remarks with the true statement that in 1831, the city of Chicago, which now contains eight hundred thousand inhabitants, was a mere village of four thousand souls. It was located in a swamp, and nothing to speak of was grown in its neighborhood. But Chicago had position, and the building of the Illinois Central Railway shortly justified the confidence of those who had early cast in their lot with the nascent metropolis. These people knew that lakes were not created as a mere incident of chance; and they saw, in their mind's eye, the wonderful water system, which constituted the great claim of the drowsy and putrid Chicago of fifty years ago crowded with the argosies of a continent's commerce.

Los Angeles, like Chicago, has position. She is on the shortest line, in the territory of the United States, between Pacific and Atlantic tidewater. While she has no Lake Michigan before her, she has the boundless spread of the Pacific ocean in her front. The comparison in that respect is like a duckpond to a lake. The possibilities of oriental commerce are as yet merely in their infancy. In the roadstead of San Pedro Los Angeles has a port which will shortly become one of the best on the Pacific Coast, and far preferable to many of the natural harbors which subserve all the purposes of commerce on the Atlantic Coast and in Europe. The government of the United States and the Southern Pacific Railway will hereafter emulate each other in improving its facilities.

Instead of the single Illinois Central, which was the great original impetus in the growth of Chicago, Los Angeles has a number of transcontinental railways which will be rapidly added to. She is already one of the greatest railway centers of the world. She is as truly the terminus of the Central and Union Pacific railways as is San Francisco. In addition, she is the terminus of the Sunset route and of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe systems. Through these roads she commands all the facilities of the Texas Pacific and of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway. The Union Pacific will shortly have a more direct terminus in Los Angeles through the Utah Southern Railway, a project which will be completed in the near future. The Carson and Colorado road will also shortly reach this city, while the Salt Lake and Los Angeles Railway is a scheme which is certain to materialize soon. In addition, we have innumerable local railways which traverse every portion of Los Angeles county.

All this has been done during the last fifteen years. In April, 1873, the writer made a stage coach trip from Los Angeles to San Bernardino. At that time he and a single fellow-passenger were the only inmates of the coach. He had the same experience coming down. The population of the county at that time was about eight thousand. It is now quite one hundred and sixty thousand. Where Pasadena now stands there was simply a single edifice, the old San Pasqual ranch house. The moiety of that ranch had recently been sold to the Indiana colony for a fraction over eight dollars an acre. Pomona, Santa Ana, Orange, Westminster and a score of other prosperous communities, had no existence. South of Anaheim, where Santa Ana and Tustin City now stand, there were not half a dozen houses until San Juan Capistrano was reached. The city of Los Angeles itself was a sleepy adobe town of about five thousand inhabitants.

What a magical change has come over this imperial land! Who can set a limit to the changes of the future? If, starting with a few stage lines, we have seen such a wonderful transformation, what may we not see, in a decade, as the result of our superb railway development? The railways which were tributary to the growth of the young Chicago, traversed a country in which corn and a few other of the cereals were the principal staples. The manifold tributary railways of Los Angeles run through a region in which the products are manifold almost beyond the power of enumeration. These roads are instruments in the development of products without end of a section where the orange and the vine, the pomegranate and the potato, the cereals and fruits of the temperate zones flourish side by side with the banana and Japanese plum.

We have said nothing about the climate of this matchless region. Superadded to our partial inventory it forms an attraction which would of itself, aided by our unrivaled transportation facilities, make this county one of the most heavily populated regions of the globe.

It does not lie in the power of man to arrest this region in its onward and upward course. We have now reached the stage at which manufactures are being added to our other sources of growth. Speed the good work. The time has at last arrived for the development of natural gas, with which the earth hereabouts abounds, and for fully developing the limitless oil fields which have been already partially exploited. By the time, quite brief, that we have set ourselves in earnest to the work which lies ready for our hands to do, Angelenos will awaken to the fact that they are living in the most eclectic metropolis on the continent.