As a result of these very infrequent rains, grass started up only to wither away, a small district around Anaheim independent of the rainfall on account of its fine irrigation system, alone being green; and thither the lean and thirsty cattle came by thousands, rushing in their feverish state against the great willow-fence I have elsewhere described. This stampede became such a menace, in fact, that the Anaheimers were summoned to defend their homes and property, and finally they had to place a mounted guard outside of the willow enclosures. Everywhere large numbers of horses and cattle died, as well as many sheep, the plains at length being strewn with carcasses and bleached bones. The suffering of the poor animals beggars description; and so distressed with hunger were they that I saw famished cattle (during the summer of 1864 while on a visit to the springs at Paso de Robles) crowd around the hotel veranda for the purpose of devouring the discarded matting-containers which had held Chinese rice. I may also add that with the approach of summer the drought became worse and worse, contributing in no small degree to the spread of smallpox, then epidemic here. Stearns lost forty or fifty thousand head of live stock, and was much the greatest sufferer in this respect; and as a result, he was compelled, about June, 1865, to mortgage Los Alamitos _rancho_, with its twenty-six thousand acres, to Michael Reese of San Francisco, for the almost paltry sum of twenty thousand dollars. Even this sacrifice, however, did not save him from still greater financial distress. In 1864, two Los Angeles merchants, Louis Schlesinger and Hyman Tischler, owing to the recent drought foreclosed a mortgage on several thousand acres of land known as the Ricardo Vejar property, lying between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Shortly after this transaction, Schlesinger was killed while on his way to San Francisco, in the _Ada Hancock_ explosion; after which Tischler purchased Schlesinger's interest in the ranch and managed it alone.