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NOT ALL GLITTER THAT GLOWS
Letter from M. M. Buckley
[Welland Tribune, 1 April 1898]
Editor Welland Tribune :
I send you the Santa Cruz Daily Sentinel of March 17th. There is a letter in it from San Diego about Southern California; I wish you would insert it in the TRIBUNE, it will give the readers of the
TRIBUNE a better account of Southern California as it is at present than I can. The young men of
Canada will do better stopping in their own country; they can do better and make more money raising fruit in Niagara or Welland county than they can here. I don’t see any opening of any kind here for a young man either with money or without. All kinds of fruit growing is overdone, and fruit is getting cheaper and cheaper every year, so the grower scarcely gets anything for it. The freight, boxing, packing, commission, etc., eat up all the profits. I heard of one man who had nine tons of raisins last fall ; he hauled them to the packers, they put them up in boxes and sent them east ; he got his statement a few weeks since and they brought him in debt to them $14. The boxes, packing, freight, hauling, commissions &c. came to $14 dollars more than the fruit sold for, I also heard of a man sending 80 boxes of peaches to a commission house at San Francisco. They returned him 50 cents for the 80 boxes; the expenses took all the rest; you hear of lots of such cases. It is a standing joke in California that the only way to make a fruit farm pay is to sell it to a green Englishman just out. They get from one to five thousand dollars down and then they are sure to get the farm back in two or three years. Property of all kinds is almost unsaleable here at any price. I heard one land agent say he had not sold a lot in the last five years. The taxes are fearful here in Santa Cruz. They are $3.65 on $100. The Santa Cruz “Surf” of the
19th said:–
“Transcontinental railway rates continue to be cut lower and lower, as the fight between competing lines grows in bitterness. But there is little to come west for. Our factories are mostly closed, our building is at a standstill, our agriculturalists have all they can do to make ends meet, and our state county and city taxation is almost confiscation. They assess everything you have got here in this state, furniture, pianos, pictures, notes mortgages, fruit trees if they are over five years old, hens if you have more than twelve.”
The Sentinel of this morning says: “Who can engage in this manufacturing in California in competition with the East or Europe? Who can successfully raise wheat on the high priced and high taxed land of California, in competition with cheap land and lower taxes of every other state in the union, and the Dominion of Canada? Who can afford to make any kind of an investment in a city like Santa Cruz, where the axes are $3.65 on the $100, all that real estate ought to net, absolute confiscation in nine-tenths of the cities of the Union.
I have not met one Englishman or one Canadian out here, that are better off than they were at home, and most of them would like to return if they could sell out at almost any price. I heard of one Englishman that has spent over $15,000 on a fruit farm, besides a five years labor, and he is offering the whole of it for $5,000 and can’t get it.
This is a beautiful country to live in, if you have the income to keep it up, but no country for any other kind of people at present.
M. M. BUCKLEY,
Santa Cruz, March 22, 1898.
//aj
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