Imperial (44 page)

In the homes and ranches of the whites, Chinese cooks and servants stand ready to work for sixteen to twenty-five dollars a month. Chinese citrus packers make a dollar a day, working from six in the morning until seven at night, with an hour off for the lunch they must bring themselves. You see,
since their needs are easily satisfied they are contented to work for much lower wages than white workers.
⁶⁹

(One Riverside historian has noticed that photographs of fruit packers at the beginning of the twentieth century tend to show mainly Anglo women. He wonders whether Chinese and Japanese were deliberately excluded from these images in deference to
popular antagonism.
)

In 1876, a saloonkeeper named Al Rodgers starts the first Anti-Chinese Society in San Bernardino. I wonder what set him off; did the Chinese refuse to patronize his bar? Anyhow, he enjoys good timing; for that year Chinese are the victims of violence all over the state. In 1878 the San Bernardino Town Board expels Chinese prostitutes but not prostitutes of other nationalities. In 1880, the Glenwood City Hack prohibits Chinese passengers between Riverside and Colton.

In 1881, the
Pacific Rural Press
worries:
It is difficult to see how the present fruit crop, which is bringing such fine prices, or the immense grape crop now ripening, could be handled at all without Celestial aid.
In 1885 the Chinese are growing and delivering nearly the entirety of Riverside’s produce.

All the same, their future prospects are as slender as the circular Chinese bone-chess pieces, each inscribed with the character for horse, which resemble many windblown grassblades. From his headquarters at Eighth and Orange, L. M. Holt, that boomer of Coachella and Imperial, editorializes against them in the
Riverside Press and Horticulturist,
which he has owned since 1880; in its pages he calls for a race war. That fall, rents to some Chinese go up astronomically; the others are simply evicted. An arsonist solves the Chinatown problem. The new Chinatown will be tolerated at the center of town. Then comes 1893, year of the Great Chinatown Fire in Riverside.

In 1897, regarding the possibility of delegating a Riverside policeman to protect Chinese laborers, Holt pitilesssly opines: . . .
if packers persisted in hiring Chinamen they should protect them.

Call him a man in touch with the popular pulse. He’s a true American Californian, all right. In the glorious year 1882, the First Chinese Exclusion Act is signed by President Arthur. In 1889 we begin to hear of illegal Chinese laborers crossing the border from Mexico, and I can almost hear Border Patrolman Dan Murray say:
They’ll pop their heads up in a minute.
—By 1891, Chinese are already coming from Los Angeles to help with Etiwanda’s grape harvest; so in 1892 the Geary Act prohibits Chinese immigration for ten years. Accordingly, Colis Huntington the railroad magnate begins soliciting Mexican labor in 1893. (Judge Farr, 1918:
Cotton has been especially valuable on the Mexican side of the line on account of the favorable labor conditions where Chinese could be imported and where Mexican labor was available . . .
) Fresno fruit packers threaten to sue the county if their Chinese workers are deported, but they’re swimming against the good old American tide. That year, Deputy U.S. Marshals take five Chinese into custody in Cahuenga and deport them. Later they arrest ten Chinese in Riverside. And there are many other raids; I might as well be reading today’s newspaper, except that there is no Border Patrol yet, which is why good citizens must get proactive for the sake of their beloved country. Hence the patriots of Burbank expel their Chinese residents, all eight of them; they were merely railroad workers; we don’t need them anymore. Here comes a similar occurrence in Norwalk.

In 1906, a Chinese is discovered to be dying of leprosy in Santa Ana’s Chinatown. They put him in a wire stockade for a week or two until he dies. The City Council condemns Chinatown, and burns it down. Once upon a time, two hundred people lived there.

BROKEN TREASURES

When the burnt, buried remains of Riverside’s Chinatown got dug up at the end of the twentieth century, archaeologists found more opium-related artifacts there than at any other single site in America. The inventory includes a man’s jade bracelet, hairpicks of carved bone, opium pipes of orange or grey paste earthenware. The marks on opium pipe bowls included
chiu,
the number nine;
meng,
the budding of plants; and
tung,
meaning east. They uncovered wooden Chinese dominoes with circular holes bored shallowly into them for the numbers.

I myself would soon descend into the half-mythical Chinese tunnels of Mexicali, discovering my own rat-gnawed treasures; and when we get to that part of Imperial’s history I will tell you all about it. But for now we ought to return to the nineteenth century, because we are closing in on Imperial’s birth-by-irrigation; meanwhile, in the highest interests of democratic Americanism, the Chinese have been legally excluded, and to replace them, in come the Japanese, who are expected to work harder and for less . . .

Chapter 32

LOS ANGELES (1875)

The constant ripening of fruits and the maturing of vegetables in this county . . . astonish persons unfamiliar with the peculiar nature of the soil and climate.

—An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, 1889

O
nce upon a time was still once upon a time, when Imperial contained Los Angeles. To be sure, Los Angeles’s almost bygone acorns, deer and shell-beads wouldn’t hold on much longer. Nobody cared that Yang-Na had been the Indian name for Ranchería Los Angeles. Sonag-na was now known as Mr. White’s place. In 1851 and 1852, federal commissioners met with tribes all over California to extinguish title to most of their lands, granting them reservations in exchange. The editor of the
Los Angeles Star
warned that if these treaties were ratified,
the most degraded race of aborigines upon the North American Continent
would receive dangerously unwarranted respect.
We can see no solution of the difficulties which will grow up around us . . . except a general and exterminating war . . .
Fortunately, the treaties remained unratified. More fortunately still, in 1863 most of the Indians in Los Angeles died of smallpox. We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by. For the rest of the century, Los Angeles would be periodically distinguished by smallpox, flower festivals and Chinese festivals, fires, floods, murders and improvements.

The telegraph line to San Jose had been in existence ever since 1860. In 1868 Los Angeles began to expand rapidly, getting its first three-storey building. Two years later it possessed a hundred and ten liquor establishments.
Drunkenness and pistol shooting rampant for months, especially among the Indians of the town . . . “Nigger Alley” described as the vilest of resorts.
In 1872 Los Angeles had a day of three bullfights, one bull being ridden bareback while crowned with firecrackers; two years after that the population was eleven thousand. By 1882, electricity arrived.

Best of all, two years after that, Los Angeles gained title to all water rights of the Los Angeles River. Moreover, artesian wells could be
had at pleasure, at depths of 40 to 200 feet.
A boomer accordingly assured us that the water supply is
ample for a very large city.

Indeed, Los Angeles was now a city of sorts. In 1887, five hundred devotees of the latest land boom waited in line all night to buy lots in Paradise; men sold their places in line for up to a hundred and fifty dollars. All the same, Los Angeles remained nearly as much of an enclave as a seventeenth-century mission in the Baja; for in the midst of the land boom, two brothers killed a seven-hundred-pound grizzly in Tejunga Cañón, and coyotes were still preying on Angelenos’ chickens, lambs and piglets. Compared to the Los Angeles of my own time, the place might as well have been what it was to a young American wanderer in 1829: a
small town,
remarkable only for the
bituminous pitch
with which its houses were roofed.

In 1856 the Los Angeles assessor had found no more than a hundred and fifty-one bearing orange trees to record. In a promotional guide to
Homes in Los Angeles City and County,
published in 1873, we read of Miss Francisca Wolfskill’s inheritance of eighteen hundred orange trees on the west side of Alameda Street. Fifteen hundred oranges per tree!
Broad carriage-ways lead through and around the grove, and almost every day may be seen tourists on horseback and handsome coupes and barouches . . . visiting this golden Hesperides. Here and there rippling streams
(
called
zanjas)
reflect the shadows of the scene above . . .

Meanwhile, in the San Fernando Mountains lies the largest beehive in the world, in a rocky cleft containing at least eight to ten tons of honey!

Chapter 33

THE SECOND LINE (1893)

A map of the real world is no less imaginary than the map of an imaginary world.

—Alberto Blanco, 1998

BUT WHAT ABOUT MASSACHUSETTS?

Exactly forty years after William Walker’s attempt to liberate Sonora for the greater good of slavery, we Californians score another wound upon the wide silt-flesh of Imperial: Riverside County breaks the brainpan of Lake Cahuilla, now marked on maps as Dry Lake, in two.

Were I a more accurate old gentleman, which is to say a “historian,” I should have dated this chapter 1853, the year of Walker’s foray, because it was then that San Diego County, which once reached all the way to Death Valley, got robbed of San Bernardino County, which is presently the largest in the United States; call that theft the second line. But then again, perhaps I should have set my sights on 1851, the precise year when Los Angeles County nibbled a prior bite out of San Diego; or for that matter on 1866, when Inyo County cost San Diego its northern triangular knife-edge. No, I’ll stand my ground; the following two sentences will vindicate me to posterity:
Most of present-day Riverside County
(to be precise, six thousand and forty-four square miles of it)
was within 1850 San Diego County until 1893.
As a matter of fact, there was no Riverside County at all until 1893.
A small northwestern portion
(which we’ll neglect in this decidedly unpedantic book)
was part of Los Angeles County until 1853 and a northern strip
(five hundred and ninety square miles)
was in San Bernardino County between 1853 and 1893.

If you wish, I can make this chapter even more tedious than the polygon of Riverside County itself, which is immensely complex in shape, requiring the spelling out of many ranchos, townships and sections for its accurate delineation. (In 1907, defining the limits of Imperial County will not take nearly so many words.) Computing the area of this geometric form is no mere schoolchild’s exercise, as proved by the fact that on page 133 of the book I’m cribbing from, Riverside County is the size of Massachusetts; on page 168 it’s twice the size of Masachusetts. I wish I had a hundred pages to devote to the subject of Riverside’s elasticity;
⁷⁰
unfortunately, the northwestern part of Riverside County avoids coming anywhere near the entity which I call Imperial; nor does that irrelevant strip of San Bernardino. Conclusion: Until 1893, Imperial was not galled by any delineation excepting the international frontier.

THE CUT

On W. E. Elliott’s map of California in 1883, San Diego County still forms an immense triangle whose base is the international line and whose hypotenuse wanders down from Los Angeles to Yuma, encompassing the famed Imperial landmarks of New River Station, Dry Lake (that will be Salton Sea to us), Coyote Village, Indian Wells (which looks awfully like Indio), Soda Spring (gone without a hint), Agua Calienta, or Caliente (which is to say Palm Springs), another Palm Springs now dried up and gone to hell, a Green Palms, a White Water.

But on all maps after 1893, the line comes crashing through the Santa Rosa Mountains, which are of absolutely no interest to you and me, then sunders the ancient sea valley at Imperial’s heart, already once sundered by the international line, into those imaginary constructs, the Imperial and Cahuilla valleys. I grant you that the gentle green star-spiders of palms are more populous in Cahuilla; maybe that means something. Still and all, the absurdity of the separation will be proved after the Salton Sea accident, when a county division runs foolishly through water. Well, so what? It’s only a line; and since 1893 happens to mark the worst economic depression thus far in United States history, it may well be that people in Ohio or New York or Virginia fail to give this latest subdelineation their best attention. But now the destinies of “Imperial” and “Cahuilla” (soon to be “Coachella”) will begin to draw away from each other ever more visibly.

THE BUCK STOPS HERE

The line of 1848 was a tragedy for Mexico, of course; and a century after that, with the completion of the All-American Canal, the ecological, economic and moral effects of the line will become ever more hurtful to the portion of Imperial which remains on Southside; that is why Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez looked across the fence near Chula Vista on that day in 1999 and said to me:
I think we all feel sorry for ’em.
Nonetheless,
la línea
does enrich Imperial much as the Salton Sea does: By subdividing so strikingly, it creates mysteries and stories.

What about the line of 1893?