My talking cow on a Monrovia street corner.
Once upon a time in SoCal history there were, as one author put it, “Cattle on a Thousand Hills.” Nowadays the most any of us suburbanites ever see is a plastic bovine like this one standing outside Rigo’s drive-up market in Monrovia.
I was pondering this fact outloud as I snapped this picture, when I swear the plastic cow spoke to me:
“Did you know that we cattle first came to this region with the Spaniards in the late 1700s?” she asked rhetorically.
“Um. I guess I never really thought about it,” I replied, checking nervously about to make sure no one was witnessing my rather bizarre conversation.
“By the 1830s we were the backbone of the Californio ranching economy under Mexico. Our disappearance from the landscape after American statehood, however, had less to do with encroaching civilization than a host of other factors,” she lectured.
I looked it up and, by golly, the cow was right. In the 1850s, California’s rancheros were riding high on the hog, so to speak. According to the “Los Angeles A-Z” almanac:
“Before the Gold Rush, California herds may have numbered 400,000 head, with each animal worth about $4. During the Gold Rush, when beef was in demand up north, the value rose to between $50 and $500.”
The cow.
“That was at a time when land went for about $3 per acre, and Californio rancheros lived like royalty,” said the cow. “We called those days The Days of the Dons, but they didn’t last long. In 1863, drought struck southern California, culling our herds by the thousands. Then, floods, disease and pestilence followed in 1864. Our carcuses could be seen rotting everywhere. It was a huge disaster.”
She went on to explain how the bottom quickly fell out of the cattle industry, and many once-lordly rancheros found themselves bankrupted and ripe for American swindlers and real estate speculators.
“Within a very short period, southern California was shifting from a ranching to a farming economy, helping set the stage for the region’s land and population booms in the late 1800s,” she concluded.
I thanked the cow for her brief history lesson and turned to walk back to my Jeep, still a little disconcerted by the whole exchange. Then, suddenly, I thought of one last question.
“By the way, just what breed of cow are you?” I asked. “Jersey? Holstein?”
“Polyethylene, silly!” she winked.
Further Reading: