In 1889 the county of Orange was carved out of Los Angeles County. With the help of some money slipped to legislators in Sacramento, the border was set at Coyote Creek rather than the San Gabriel River, so that when it came time to choose the county seat, Santa Ana was more central and was chosen over Anaheim. Anaheim’s citizens were very upset.

So the little towns grew, and the farms around them. Despite all the feverish land speculation and real estate development going on, the actual number of people involved was not great. The largest towns, Santa Ana and Anaheim, had populations of only a few thousand, and the newer towns were much smaller than that. Between each town were miles of open land, covered by farmland or the old range, head high in mustard. The roads were few, the little rail systems even fewer. Under the constant sun there was an ease to life that drew people from the east, but in small waves that grew very slowly in size. Publicists based in Los Angeles trumpeted the virtues of southern California; it was America’s own Mediterranean, the golden land by the sea. The new orange groves contributed to that image, and orange growing was sold as a middle-class agriculture, more socially and aesthetically pleasing than the giant isolated wheat and corn farms of the Midwest. And perhaps it was so, at first; though many a man found himself working his grove and another job as well, to pay the grove off.

An American life of Mediterranean ease: perhaps. Perhaps. But there were disasters, too. There were floods; once it rained every day for a month, and the entire plain, from the mountains to the sea, was covered with water. All the new adobe buildings of Anaheim were melted back to mud. And once there was an outbreak of smallpox that finished off the last of the Indians at San Juan Capistrano, which remained as a silent remnant of the mission past. And the crops failed often; brought in from afar and usually planted in monocultural style, the grapes, the walnuts, and even the oranges suffered from blights that killed thousands and thousands of plants.

But by and large it was a peaceful life here, at the Victorian end of the frontier. Under the hot sun Americans from the East arrived and started up new lives, and most were happy with the results. The years passed and new settlers kept arriving and starting little towns; but it was a big land and they were accommodated without much change or sign of their arrival; they disappeared into the groves, and life went on.