Few of newcomers to California in search of gold in 1848 were prepared for the rigors that gold mining demanded.

When "gold fever" ? abated, these newcomers sought other opportunities that might provide them a path to riches. Some of the disappointed ones returned to their home states, but vast numbers remained in the west, more often California, and in particular, in San Francisco.

When gold was first discovered, San Francisco claimed a population of 812 persons.

The town had two hotels and two wharves, neither of which was finished. When gold fever struck, San Francisco's population dropped very near to zero as everyone rushed to the mines.

San Francisco was close to becoming a ghost town, and probably would have if gold ore had not started pouring in from the mines. With this newfound wealth, the town revived.

Miners wanted supplies, and San Franciscans were more than willing to supply them. In doing so, San Francisco also provided a fine outlet for the miners gold while they were in town.

Hotels and lodging houses were not above putting 10 or 20 men in a single room at which they extracted an exorbitant price. There were booms and busts in a wide array of ventures, including great excitement in silkworm production. Newspapers and magazines were hailing the advantages of California as a silk producing center.

The culture of silkworms started in a small way, but soon developed into a first class boom. Millions of silkworms and silkworm eggs were imported from France and Japan, sometimes at ridiculous prices. Large tracts of land were planted to mulberry trees, a prime food supply for silkworms.

This boom went bust about as quickly as it started. Yet, remnants of the silk movement remained for years in some areas, marked by rows of mulberry trees that had been planted to feed the silkworms.

The silk industry experiment, some historians say, was a venture that was doomed from the start.

Another crop that first boomed, then busted, and then boomed again, was cotton. The development of irrigation brought on a growth in California agriculture that was unprecedented during the 1870 to 1890 era.

Some ranchers planted hundreds of acres of cotton. One farmer planted cotton on a large tract west of Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. Another company planted 10,000 acres of the fiber crop near Bakersfield.

The cotton plants yielded heavily, but the farmers had failed to allow for a very necessary element to growing cotton. That was labor.

The cotton would have to be harvested, but there were no pickers available to pick the white bolls from the vines. Cotton fields were allowed to become overgrown by grass and the cotton growers generally went into bankruptcy.

The early interest in cotton died out for a period, but years later farmers again experimented with cotton, eventually making California one of the world's major cotton producing areas of the world. Instead of human labor, machines now harvest the crop.

One real California success from the beginning was the planting of orange trees. The first oranges were planted at several of the Franciscan missions long before the coming of the Americans.

By 1875, there were a number of well-established orchards in Southern California from which as many as five million cartons of oranges were shipped each year to San Francisco.

These oranges, grown from seedlings, were quite different in both taste and appearance to the later-appearing Washington navel and Valencia varieties that now dominate California citrus orchards.

Indeed, it was the introduction of the Washington navel that brought about a major revolution in California horticulture. This introduction was spawned when a woman, who lived in Bahia, Brazil, sent 12 small orange trees to her friend, the Commissioner of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

Three of these trees were shipped to Mr. And Mr. L.C. Tibbetts, in Riverside, California, who planted them near their home. Some reports claim it was Mrs. Tibbetts, who dashed the trees with her daily dishwater, that played a major role in keeping the three trees alive and healthy.

This daily irrigation and perhaps whatever nutrients were available in the dishwater, kept the orange trees growing well.

When the trees reached maturity, buds were taken from them and grafted onto seedling rootstock. The Washington Navel eventually became the most popular orange in the U.S.

One of those three original trees shipped to Riverside still stands as a national monument. It is fenced in to preserve the tree and protect its buds from poachers.