Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/375

Rh fanegas to 32,700 fanegas per year, or more than 40 per cent. Solano and San José were the only missions that gained in their average; while the largest loss was 73 per cent at San Juan Capistrano. The best total crop was 40,000 fanegas in 1831, and the worst was 25,000 fanegas in 1833.

For this period of four years I may say, as I have said of the last decade, that the losses in the different branches represented in the statistics obtainable are much less than would be expected from what is known of the current mission history; but, as I have already warned the reader, these statistics are much less reliable than those of former years.

I find no evidence that there occurred in the years 1831-5 any noticeable season of flood or drought; though both have been rather vaguely ascribed to that period by newspaper writers, who founded their statements ostensibly on the recollections of old residents. As there is no agreement on the subject, the statements are not worth particular reference, one of the most widely circulated being that of a flood in 1832 — though a terrible drought is also ascribed to the same year — in support of the theory of decennially occurring inundations. Memoranda of Thomas O. Larkin at Monterey show light rains in the autumn of 1833, heavy rains in February and April 1834, a dry spring, with three days' rain after the middle of May, and no heavy rains until the last half of December in 1835. A terrible pestilence, an intermittent fever often prevalent in that region, is reported as having almost depopulated the whole valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin in 1833. Warner, with Ewing Young and a party of trappers, passed up the valleys in the autumn of 1832, noting a dense Indian population; but in the following summer when the party returned the country was strewn with the remains of the dead wherever a village had stood, and