It was an unhappy Mary on that first trip to Los Angeles, Owen Moore having passed up his little sweetheart on account of the weekly ten dollars he thought Mr. Griffith should have added to his salary. The day’s work over, came her lonesome hour. On the long rides home from location, cuddled up in her seat in the car, she dreamed of home and dear ones. And one day passing the eastbound Santa Fé Limited, out of a deep sad sigh the words escaped, “God bless all the trains going East and speed the one we go on”--the Irish in her speaking. An urge to do “Ramona” in a motion picture possessed Mr. Griffith all the while we were in California, for the picturesque settings of Helen Hunt Jackson’s deep-motived romance were so close at hand. Several conferences had been held on the subject in New York, before we left. But in order to make a screen adaptation of this story of the white man’s injustice to the Indian, arrangements would have to be made with the publishers, Little, Brown & Company. They asked one hundred dollars for the motion picture rights and the Biograph Company came across like good sports and paid it, and “Ramona” went on record. It was conceded to be the most expensive picture put out by any manufacturer up to that time. To Camulos, Ventura County, seventy miles from Los Angeles, we traveled to do this production of “Ramona.” For Camulos was one of the five homes accredited to the real Ramona that Mrs. Jackson picked for her fictional one. She picked well. What a wealth of atmosphere of beautiful old Spain, Camulos’s far-famed adobe offered! Scenes of sheep-shearing; scenes in the little flower-covered outdoor chapel where Ramona’s family and their faithful Indian servants worshiped; love scenes at Ramona’s iron-barred window; scenes of heartache on the bleak mountain top but a few miles distant where Alessandro and Ramona bury their little baby, dead from the white man’s persecutions; and finally the wedding scene of Ramona and Felipe amid the oranges and roses and grass pinks of the patio. Even bells that were cast in old Spain rang silently on the screen. The Biograph Company brought out a special folder with cuts and descriptive matter. The picture was Mr. Griffith’s most artistic creation to date. Nor did we neglect the oil fields, for oil had its romance. So at Olinda, that tremendous field, we “took” plungers innumerable and expensive oil spilling out of huge barrels into little lakes, all black and smooth and shiny. The picture, called “Unexpected Help,” had Arthur Johnson and little Gladys Egan as star actors. One other oil picture we did, “A Rich Revenge,” a comedy of the California oil fields, with Mary Pickford and Billy Quirk. We had located a picturesque oil field. A crabbed-looking man in dirty blue jeans seemed the only person about. We asked him would there be any objection to our working, and he gruffly answered in the negative.