Page 11 - hssc1928belderrain

The Awakening of Paredon Blanco 73

of a flood-gate and the water from the baths filled a pool
below, which was used for swimming. In 1850 my father
bought two slaves, a boy and a girl, Yuma Indians, from
Colorado, for five hundred dollars in horses. He brought
them to our home. The girl was a very good swimmer
and taught my sister to swim. I was too small then to
learn. This girl is still living. She grew up to become a
very fine woman, very pious, and married one of the men
who worked in the orchard. I do not know what became
of the boy, for he ran away when he was about twenty-five,
and we never heard from him again. A small glimmering
arroyo (creek) which divided the land into two parts, east
and west, made its way over the whitest sand and pebbles
I have ever seen. This arroyo was bordered with thickets
of willows, elder and other small trees.
At the northwest end of the orchard was another sugar-
cane patch from which molasses and panocha in big quan-
tities were manufactured. The sugar-cane itself found
profitable markets among the Mexicans and Chinese, in fact
everybody liked to chew it and extract its delicious juice.
The trapiches (sugar mills) were built about 150 feet north-
east of the house. They were a rude contrivance worked
by a horse hitched to a pole, the horse going around and
around, working the trapiches so that the cane was crushed
and the juice ran into a wooden trough, from which it was
taken and put into huge kettles and cooked until it got to
a certain consistency, then it was poured into round moulds
about two inches deep carved out on long thick planks which
were placed on hard, level surfaces. When the contents
of these moulds were hardened, they were taken out and
packed for export. Sometimes we children were allowed
to sit up late and wait for the syrup to cool.

Nearby were the tapeistes, twenty feet long by three feet
wide, set up on posts four feet high, made of carrizo (Califor-
nia bamboo) , where all kinds of fruit were dried by the sun.
My mother was a most efficient woman, supervising the work
of drying these fruits, also vegetables, and making delicious
jams, which were cleverly done up in com husks like the