Imperial (43 page)

Now, in the forty-two hundred square miles of western San Diego, which will be all that remains of that county once Imperial and Riverside counties break away, we find seven main rivers, flowing more or less in parallel southwest into the Pacific. Proceeding northwards from the border, we first encounter the Tia Juana, which loops in and out of Mexico and whose main American extension, Cottonwood Creek,
to a limited extent . . . may be advantageously utilized for winter irrigation on bottom lands near the coast.
Small springs in the Tia Juana’s upper watershed could be tapped in the future. Next comes the Otay,
comparatively insignificant as a source of irrigation supply,
but it might be good for two reservoirs. The Sweetwater gets dammed in 1886-87, as a result of which twenty or twenty-five thousand irrigable acres come into being. Then comes the San Diego, whose flow only a realtor would dare call perennial; the San Dieguito, which on the contrary is eminently tappable, has been tapped, but can be quite a bit more; the San Luis Rey, which comprises
the largest and most reliable water-supply in the county;
we pass over the Temecula, which requires damming due to the scantness of its summer trickle; and the San Jacinto
⁶⁶
with its various branches
(local testimony on the relative permanence and volume of these tributaries is conflicting).

All
of these rivers fail in summer. Moreover, the amount of annual rainfall in their waterscapes can vary by more than a factor of seven. Good Boy Scouts had better plan for the worst case! Throughout the early years of the approaching century, our water frequently falls short. (In 1904 the citrus groves of National City and Chula Vista will die of thirst.) But have faith; since
WATER IS HERE
, all the engineers need to do is convey it to
THERE
, where we’ll bank it in dams and withdraw it through wells and ditches. The Mount Tecarte Land and Water Company has already picked out eight reservoir sites on the Tia Juana River.
A subsidy of one fourth of certain large bodies on these lands is being negotiated by the company with land owners, as a consideration for water-rights for the remainder.
Meanwhile, the Riverside Water Company builds three main canals and diversions. Orange groves, arise!

HOME ROCKET SCIENCE

This era reminds me of the science-fiction novels I used to read. Two boys build their own spaceship and blast off to Mars! An inventor and an entrepreneur construct a sphere of Cavourite, and they shoot straight up to the moon! Who could have imagined a government space agency, whose salaried astronauts follow the orders of Mission Control?
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea;
and by
ours
I mean not the government’s but
mine,
should I only get enough money to take it. In short, private enterprise builds its own reservoirs. For instance, here is a fine extra-Imperial fable of success and reconciliation which the
California Cultivator
entitles
Up-to-date Cattle Raising.
Henry Miller is
the greatest cattle-raiser in California, a man whose ranches extend from the Tehachapi to Oregon . . .
He and his partner Lux
with their barbed wire fences, and branding chutes, did their part to change the rope-swinging cowboy into a hired man.
(In other words, no more roping, boys; that makes the stock lose weight.) What gave Miller and Lux their leg up? It might have been that 1886 State Supreme Court decision that awarded them the entire Kern River:
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
Upon protest of the lawsuit’s losers, who will presently become the Kern County Land Company, our two neighborly cattle barons give back two-thirds of the river, in exchange for which the rival company builds them a reservoir in which to bank their one-third. And in material advantages they are well supplied.

Private enterprise, I said, builds its own reservoirs. And so it will continue to do until 1928, when the spectacular collapse of William Mulholland’s Saint Francis Dam, killing half a thousand Angelenos, compels the coroner’s jury to conclude:
The construction of a municipal dam should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent.

WATER RIGHTS
, or,
A DEFENSE OF R. R. SUTHERLAND

A 1933 children’s primer on
Our California Home
explains that
at first, you see, each farmer tried to get a farm that was beside a stream. Then he built his own dam, dug his own ditch . . . That worked well enough for awhile. But soon another man would take land on the same stream, higher up . . . The trouble was, each man tried to work alone, for himself.

The doctrine of unhindered sovereignty over the watercourse adjoining one’s landholdings is an ancient one, known as riparian rights. It happens to be well suited to bullies. As late as 1920, a power company begins to lower the water level of Lake Tahoe for its own purposes; in the end, the public has to go all the way to Washington to stop it.

In Los Angeles I hear gunfire between the men of the Azusa and Corvina neighborhoods! They’re fighting over the water that runs down San Gabriel Cañón. Thus Los Angeles in the 1880s. On the other hand, what with all the barroom gunfights, Mexican bandits, woman-knappings in Nigger Alley, what else is new? I can’t help believing in people.

Since
WATER IS
not only
HERE
but infinite, California still hopes that riparianists can continue to enjoy unrestricted use of the streams within their domains, returning the water when they are finished with it (never mind that much or most of it will sink into their fields); meanwhile, the rest of us can get what we need from reservoirs. And so
The City and County of San Diego,
published in 1882, enthuses about various “large schemes” to catch the riverine outflows of that huge zone, and then store them. The Hemmet Valley Reservoir Company, the San Marcos Water Company along the coast and in Encinitas; the San Luis Rey Flume Company, the Otay Valley Water Company, the Fallbrook Water and Power Company, all busy themselves on the Temecula River. I’ve already intimated that the Sweetwater Valley Water Company is digging for our good at Jacumba,
and whenever it will be safe to trust a flume outside of the American line, the Tia Juana may be brought in from Mexico to reclaim some twenty thousand
acres
more.
After all, there are hardly any Mexicans at Tia Juana; they won’t need that water!
⁶⁷
Besides, President Díaz is a friend of Northside; he’ll write us a concession anytime . . .

Unfortunately, even if we take it all for Northside, not enough
WATER IS HERE
; and so, in a series of court cases, riparian doctrine gets superseded by the doctrine of
first appropriation for beneficial use.

The methods of beneficial use have been defined as
those that produce the
best results
from the most
economical
use.

H.R. 13846, the genesis of the 1902 Reclamation Act, contains this language:
The right to the use of water shall be perpetually appurtenant to the land irrigated and beneficial use shall be the basis, the measure, and the limit of the right.

The builders of private dams learn to roll the phrase
beneficial use
out of their mouths,
⁶⁸
and the game goes on. Here’s news from 1904:
R. R. Sutherland filed
notice at Riverside Monday, of his appropriation of 1500 inches of water in the east fork of Snow creek, 1500 inches in the west fork of Snow creek and 2500 inches in White water, all for power purposes.

We now pause to discuss the ostensible setting of this book. A rival volume on Imperial accuses the valley’s irrigators, Chaffey and Rockwood, of criminal hubris:
They sought economic gain by means of appropriating as their private property the waters of a free-flowing river . . . Equally, their shared objective required that they deliberately and systemically undermine the land laws of the United States . . .
But what did they do that R. R. Sutherland didn’t do?

BLYTHE’S OASIS

Onward to the Salton Sink: In 1877, evidently with the assistance of our Riverside boomer friend L. M. Holt, California passes the Wright Act, which explicitly undoes riparian law and thereby facilitates the creation of local water districts. In that same year, Congress passes the Desert Land Act of 1877, which in the accurately leftist view of one historian is
founded upon a false assumption: that the desert could be watered simply by giving 320 acres to anyone who would agree to irrigate it.
The result, he insists: monopoly. Will that be so? This book hopes to learn the answer.

Once again in 1877, the boomer Thomas Blythe begins to underwrite the irrigation of his eponymous acres, which enjoy the rare advantage of lying both adjacent to and below the Colorado. (The long valley from Coachella through Mexicali is similar in this respect, but it will be five years yet before George Chaffey even gets to Etiwanda, let alone the Salton Sink.)

If you go north from Pilot Knob, where the irrigation of the Imperial Valley will begin not quite a quarter-century hence, you can crawl for many miles across the desert’s dry breast; then presently there will be a bit of yellow grass and purple mountain ahead. Steer past the orange maze to the west, over which purple rocks crookedly jut; dip down into the small green world of Palo Verde, a world which Thomas Blythe began. The native American intaglios near Blythe roll westward on a gravel road. Then comes a mons veneris of earth, whose pubic hair consists of rays of white and black. Here where the land rises away from the Colorado, the red rocks often have scorched-looking edges; in summer they’re nearly too hot to touch. I remember a rock like a burned horse’s hoof, with two bonelike yellow cylinders embedded in it. Rocks tinkle underfoot in the searing breeze. Now you are high enough to gaze downward and get a comprehensive glimpse of one of the giant intaglio figures. Is that a rounded letter
W
on its side, or veins in an insect’s wing? And then you can lift up your eyes a trifle to gaze across the Colorado and down into the blue-green squares of field on the Arizona side. The entity that I call Imperial begins here.

Blythe’s gamble deserves to be called shrewd; for not only does the Colorado never fail, but in this epoch it still reaches the sea! In 1880 another boomer stands on Blythe Townsite and praises the
water communication from the center of the tract with all the harbors of the world.

THE SONG OF NANAYA

We now prepare and improve ourselves for irrigation. The California Convention of 1878-79 inserts a three-hundred-and-twenty-acre limitation on state grants into the constitution. Thank God we’ve saved ourselves from monopolists!
(Henry Miller is the greatest cattle-raiser in California, a man whose ranches extend from the Tehachapi to Oregon . . .)

Then what?

At the Irrigation Congress of 1891 (this body will assemble almost yearly in various Western cities throughout the decade), Francis G. Newlands of Nevada warns that
irrigation has reached almost a stationary period . . . The field of individual effort has been almost exhausted . . .

Why exhausted? Our leftwing historian, Paul S. Taylor (once the husband of Dorothea Lange, whose heartrending photograph of a migrant mother and child will achieve more fame than any project of his), sums up the tale of California’s waterscape improvements thus far as follows: Cooperative development by farmers has failed due to cost; development by capital will produce monopoly; development by government is the only alternative. That will begin with the Reclamation Act, a year after George Chaffey’s headgates open in Imperial.—And so the Irrigation Congress, following just this logic, calls upon the United States to cede public lands to individual states and territories for irrigation. For Imperial, the eventual result will be great dams on the Colorado, not to mention the All-American Canal.

Meanwhile, Chaffey irrigates Etiwanda; Rockwood seeks partners; and at last the day comes when Imperial opens her eyes, spreads her legs and sings a song as ancient as Sumer—the Song of Nanaya:

Dig no canal; I’ll be your canal.

Plough no field; I’ll be your field.

Farmer, seek no wet place;

My precious sweet, I’ll be your wet place.

Chapter 31

THEIR NEEDS ARE EASILY SATISFIED (1871-1906)

You look at a man’s eyes, you see that he expects pidgin and a shuffle, so you speak pidgin and shuffle.

—Lee, character in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, 1952

I
have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
The Indians,
as I said before,
do all the hard work,
but unfortunately we’re running out of Indians!

Here come the Chinese, about whom an Angeleno explains:
In fact, now that they are here, their presence has become essential to most inhabitants of California . . . They make especially capable laundrymen. Chinamen are hard workers and do not drink excessively. Since their needs are easily satisfied they are contented to work for much lower wages than white workers.
He adds:
All in all, they are not popular and in Los Angeles the anti-Chinese feeling is highly developed.

By 1871, Chinese laborers have set to work in Riverside ranches. A decade later they are in the citrus groves, taking over from Indians. I see two pigtailed Celestials in snow-white clothes and hats (their garments would actually have been blue) planting a white narcissus, one of them standing with his hand on his hip, leaning on the shovel, while the other kneels on the near-blank flat foregrounds of this 1870s-era engraving, smoothing the bright dirt around the plant with his hand, and an orange tree ripe with moon-white fruit frames them as a young orange grove organizes itself military-wise behind them, and then on the white horizon stands a vast white house of many gables and chimneys and a shaded porch all around.