A history of the pear in America requires some mention of its introduction in the Pacific states since that region is now the greatest center of the pear industry in the country, and the home of several notable varieties. Franciscan monks established missions in California at about the time the colonies on the eastern coast were fighting for their independence. To these they brought the cultivated plants of Europe and among them the pear. Vancouver, in 1792, found all of the hardy fruits growing at Santa Clara and the mission of San Buena Ventura, California. Robinson, a little later, describes extensive orchards connected with the mission of San Gabriel in which there were pears in abundance. In 1846, Edwin Bryant found at the mission of San Jose six hundred pear-trees bearing fruit in great abundance and full perfection. The missions were secularized in 1834, and the orchards fell into decay. But the pear and the vine withstood neglect, drouth, and the browsing of cattle to furnish food to the Argonauts of '49. But little came of these early plantings that affects the present industry of growing pears in California either as to methods of culture or the introduction of new varieties. As an example of the remarkable recuperative power of the pear, however, the orchard which Bryant described in 1846 at the San Gabriel Mission is noteworthy. An enterprising pioneer, W. M. Stockton, grafted over the old orchard in 1854 to improved varieties, and by pruning, cultivation, and irrigation succeeded in rejuvenating it so that the orchard became a profitable commercial plantation--the first commercial pear orchard in California. There are other instances given in the early accounts of fruit-growing in California in which the youth of old pear-trees was renewed by generous treatment, showing that the pear in a congenial soil and climate is most self-assertive in maintaining life. It could hardly be otherwise than that the health and vigor of these old trees stimulated the planting of fruits by the gold-seekers who rushed to this region in 1849. Meanwhile, orcharding had been established as an avocation. In the rich Willamette Valley in Oregon, where the growing of wheat and cattle was the vocation, the plantations of hardy fruits made by Henderson Lewelling, near Portland, Oregon, in 1847, included pears and marked the beginning of pear-culture in Oregon. Lewelling's venture, so pregnant with results in pomology for the Pacific Northwest, has been described in _The Cherries of New York_, and needs no detailed description here. It is mentioned only to call attention to it as another landmark in the history of the pear.