Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/42

6 Hills, the wandering pea-and-cotton-pickers of the San Joaquin Valley's river-bottom camps—all are strangers to each other.

The Union's second largest State in area might well have been christened by its discoverers Las Californias, for there are several Californias. Of all the many rivalries that make the life of the State an exciting clash of opposites, the chief has always been the rivalry between San Francisco and its neighbor cities and Los Angeles and its neighbor cities. Northern California was peopled with Americans during the Gold Rush, four decades before real estate booms brought settlers to southern California. Los Angeles remained a lazy village long after San Francisco had grown into a thriving city. San Francisco, with its more deeply rooted population, has the charm and conservatism of an older town, holding still to some of the traditions of gold rush days. In the interior towns of the north, more characteristically rural than those of the south, are the old-fashioned houses and quiet, tree-lined streets of a country village "back East"—especially in the towns of the mining country, where descendants of forty-niners live in almost clannish isolation from the State's more up-and-coming sections. In rural southern California, on the other hand, the inhabitants are more likely to be recent immigrants from the Middle West, and their towns have the neon lights, the stucco "Spanish" bungalows, and the chromium-trimmed cocktail bars of their big-city neighbors. The southlanders, for the most part, have had only a short time to get used to what is still a strange wondrous land—which accounts, perhaps, for their famed susceptibility to unorthodox religions, architectures, and political movements frowned upon by northerners. The inter-sectional rivalry has often prompted demands for the division of the State; yet despite the geographical, temperamental and commercial differences, the sentiment for divorce has never grown very strong.

No matter how fervent his local patriotism, the Californian will stop arguing the claims of rival regions when faced with the challenge of an out-of-State visitor. At once he becomes a citizen of "the greatest State of all," just as the caballeros of pre-American days haughtily set themselves up as Californios, a race apart. Whether northerner or southerner, native son or transplanted Iowan, the true Californian develops a proprietary interest that prompts him to tell the world about his State. So fond is he of bragging about it that he is always ready to "sell" California to whoever will lend an ear. Few joys in life so please him as an opportunity to declare with pride—and perhaps even on occasion with justification—that it has the tallest trees, the highest mountains, the biggest bridges, the fastest-growing population—in fact, the best, the most, or the greatest of whatever is being discussed at the moment.

The Californian may possibly be pardoned his pride in the