Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/41

Rh he is apt to say to himself as he looks at parts of the rest of the country: "I have seen all this before."

The people are as diverse as their environment. The tide of newcomers who arrived on foot, in prairie schooners, on clipper ships when California became American territory were from every corner of the land: New England farm boys, Irish-Americans from the streets of New York, younger sons of southern slave-owning families, and mid-westerners imitating their fathers' trek from still farther east. Before this onrush of men with the "California fever," the leisure-loving pastoral civilization of the Spanish-Californians was swept into oblivion. It disappeared as fast as the way of life of the short, dark aborigines had disappeared three-quarters of a century before. The Yankee conquerors, all citizens of the same Nation, were still "of every possible variety," as traveler Bayard Taylor wrote in 1849. They differed individually from each other almost as much as they differed collectively from their predecessors.

People from nearly every nation of the earth still mingle in a polyglot conglomeration. In the dark and grotesque alleyways of Chinatowns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller cities live the Chinese, descendants of pioneers who came in the Gold Rush. The Japanese are found in Los Angeles' "Little Tokyo," and in small towns and farms in southern California. In Imperial Valley, in Los Angeles and its suburbs thousands of Mexican field workers live in rude shacks. The short brown men of the Philippine Islands gather in employment agencies and shabby roominghouses of the big cities. The vineyards around Santa Rosa and Napa, the fishing fleets of the seaports, the shops of San Francisco's North Beach give employment to the Italians. On the dairy farms of Alameda County live the Portuguese; in the lumber towns of the northern coast, the Scandinavians. In the big cities are colonies of Russians, Germans, French, and people of every other nation in Europe. Negroes live in the Central Avenue District of Los Angeles and the West End of Oakland—railroad porters and waiters, domestics and bootblacks, entertainers, and businessmen.

The people differ in more than their place of origin. Their lives have been shaped by the parts of the State in which they have settled. The sawmill workers of the bleak mountain shack towns of Weed and Westwood are a world removed from the orange growers of garden-surrounded Whittier and Pomona. It is a far cry from the tough-skinned, wizened old-timers of the Mother Lode ghost towns to the comfortable, retired midwestern farmers and storekeepers of Long Beach and San Diego, and a farther cry from the cowboys and sheepherders of Susanville and Alturas to the cameramen and movie extras of Hollywood. The vineyardgrowers of the sun-warmed Napa and Sonoma valleys, the grease-stained oil workers of the torrid Kettleman