Boom of the Eighties in Southern California

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First published in 1944, The Boom of the Eighties is a companion volume to The Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Southern California 1850-80 by Robert Glass Cleland. Boom takes the story forward from the early days of Anglo settlement of the region in the nineteenth century to the period when the immigration explosion created the Southern California of the twentieth century. The 1880s were remarkable in Southern California history for a land boom of unprecedented proportions. In the decades after the Civil War, the great ranchos of Southern California were breaking up, and vine and citrus culture gradually replaced the Spanish-Mexican pastoral economy. The arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 increased immigration, and prospective settlers swarmed in from most of the United States and many countries of Europe. Millions of dollars changed hands in realty transactions: fortunes were made and lost. The city of Los Angeles, nucleus of the boom, increased in size by 500 percent. Many new suburban towns were incorporated. Where once cattle had grazed on the Mexican ranchos, the American citizen built trolley lines, founded banks, and irrigated orange groves.