Imperial (46 page)

A TOUR OF MEXICAN IMPERIAL

We introduced Tecate in 1830, when its sixteen hundred hectares were granted to poor Juan Bandini, metonym of the Mexican Californians; Tecate comes into civic being in 1885, the same year that white people begin to stake their claims at Agua Caliente, the future Palm Springs; or in 1876, when it becomes Colonia Agrícola Tecate; or in 1917, when heroic-villainous Governor Cantú enacts it into a municipality. Meanwhile, Chula Vista’s townsite has just been laid out in Northside.

In 1898, we find settlers at La Laguna del Alamo, the future site of Mexicali. It seems that there might have been a Cocopah Indian village in the neighborhood, but the Cocopahs have moved south. Mexicali snuggles sleepily closer to the commencement of her irrigated history. Guillermo Andrade has owned most of the Mexicali Valley for a good ten years now. Ever since 1874 his syndicate has been irrigating a settlement called Colonia Lerdo, forty-five miles south of Yuma. Shall I forewarn you of his next great plan? He’s going to sell out to Los Angeles.

Tía Juana’s sulphur springs are already growing famous; they’re as good as anything in Arkansas; lands down there now go for fifty to a hundred dollars an acre. Who knows what prices an oncoming century will bring? In the boom of the late 1880s, Tía Juana is called
the El Paso of California.
In 1901 the San Diego directory will obligingly extend its purview across the line to “Tia Juana,”
⁷³
listing twenty-three residents, including a fireman; several ranchers; Miss Alice G. Stearns, P.M.; two deputy U.S. Customs collectors and their Mexican counterpart; not to mention T. Arguelo, actual proprietor of the Tia Juana Hot Springs. In the guides and histories of this period there is no real difference between California and Mexico, no firm delineation; Mexico may be considered an attraction of San Diego. One book from 1887 advises “for recreation and health seekers”:
On the southeast, at Tia Juana, there is a well-kept hotel, and only half an hour’s drive farther on the well-known hot sulphur springs in Lower California, Mexico, are reached.
All the same, Imperial’s first and most consequential cut has already begun to bite. On 21 March 1895, Mr. Fred W. Wadham, who is Deputy Collector, etc., at Tia Juana, Cal., receives his instructions from San Diego:
I advise that you carefully search every person that crosses the line, making a careful examination by passing your hands over their clothing.

Chapter 37

THE BOOMERS (1880-1912)

They sold hundred-dollar property at $300 to $500 per acre, promising that it would yield $1,000 in orange profits . . .

—Glenn S. Dumke, 1944

H
olt didn’t do it alone, I repeat, but it isn’t for nothing that Holt (by whom I naturally mean W. F. Holt) was known as the Empire Builder.
He stood staunch as Mount Signal,
says the very first historian of the Pioneers Society, a certain Mrs. John Kavanaugh, who then goes on to list a few of his good works in the Imperial Valley: the first telephone line, printing press, church, power plant, gas plant, cotton gin!
He founded Holtville and El Centro, giving each a park and school grounds. He built the Alamo Hotel in Holtville and the Barbara Worth Hotel in El Centro; also the Holt Theatre and 30 brick business buildings in El Centro.

The County Recorder’s Index is a more appropriate monument. Here are a very few of Mr. Holt’s real estate transactions in the years 1902 to 1905:

On December 23, 1902, A. F. and Nell K. Cornell are the grantors; W. F. Holt is the grantee. On August 20, 1903, the California Development Company is the grantor; W. F. Holt is the grantee. On October 14, 1903, W. F. Holt and his wife Fannie sell real estate to Elliott B. Mabel, Marinus O. Klitten, the Imperial Valley Bank of Brawley, and the Holton Power Company, whose name (as Mrs. John Kavanaugh hinted in her tribute) bears more than a coincidental resemblance to Mr. Holt’s.

On April 16, 1904, Mr. and Mrs. Holt sell lots to N. A. Ross and Delphia E. Red-man. On June 20, 1904, Grace Chaplin is the grantor; the Holton Power Company is the grantee. On July 6, 1904, the Brawley Town Company is one grantor and the Heber Town Company is another; W. F. Holt is the grantee. On October 1, 1904, the Calexico Town Company is the grantor; W. F. Holt is the grantee.

I omit several pages whose every item records the Holton Town Company as grantor; but this one’s circularity pleases me: On March 15, 1905, the Holtville Town Company sells land to the Holton Power Company.

He is said to have owned nearly eighteen thousand acres of the Imperial Valley. A historian bluntly concludes:
By 1910, when Wright was writing
The Winning of Barbara Worth,
the Imperial Valley was Holt country . . .

Born in Merced City, Missouri, when Maximilian was still Emperor of Mexico, he had at age nineteen married his childhood sweetheart, the former Fannie Jones, who never stopped trusting in him no matter how many business failures he suffered
(I can’t help believing in people).
The children were named Catharine, who sometimes appears in census records as Catherine, and Esther Chloe, who occasionally becomes Estel Chloe. They would never marry.

One of Mr. Holt’s first moves
in the Imperial Valley
was to acquire for himself and his wife six hundred and forty acres of desert land.
Another was to acquire the
Imperial Valley Press and Farmer.

He built Canal No. 7’s entire fifty or so miles, and sold the water stock without down payments.
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life . . . I’ve found that the way to get your money is to give a man a chance to pay you.

(On June 3, 1903, we find a letter from W. F. Holt on his personalized stationery, with an address on West Olive Avenue in Redlands. He writes with the spelling of a self-made man:
Dear sir: Herewith find Cirtifficate for 320 shares of water Stock all paid up . . .
He is also a frugal man. The address on the stationery has been changed by hand from 406 to 113.)

Ignoring nay-saying engineers, Mr. Holt’s four-hundred-horsepower Holton Power Company established itself in the drop at the Alamo, generating enough power for the entire valley!

He built the first telephone line in those parts, and the first church, of course; he began the first railroad. He financed the first gas company, and donated Holt Park, complete with twelve hundred pepper trees and twelve hundred palm trees. (In my day, not all of those have been kept up.) Appropriately, and I am sure without considerations of vanity, he
built or financed the Barbara Worth Hotel.
By 1905 he’d already finished electrifying the valley! In 1906 he founded the Valley State Bank at El Centro and the Citizens Bank at Holtville.

“The Little Giant” is a modern Moses who led people not out of, but into a desert, which he has transformed into an electric-lighted, power run, fertile garden, and the warm little twenty thousand dollars he took into the valley ten years ago has been converted into a cool million.

How Imperial! He enriched himself by doing good!
Mr. Holt’s wife and daughters live in Redlands in a fine home . . .
Better yet, he has
associates, Redlands capitalists.

Three-quarters of a century after Imperial’s first announcement that
WATER IS HERE
, a new generation of boomers will be busy selling Salton City. (Every time I go there, the stench stings my nose.) About these knights of commerce it has been written:
The fog of this particular kind of war is the fog of believing that you can prey upon suckers and do them a favor at the same time.

Did Holt think of the people to whom he sold land and loaned money as suckers? I suspect not. In 1907 he is Chairman of the Board of a certain church in Redlands. One member of the flock is Harold Bell Wright, whom he induces to visit the Imperial Valley. Wright stays awhile, writes
The Winning of Barbara Worth,
and dedicates the book to Holt, who thus became Jefferson Worth, Minister of Capital. Frances A. Groff, reporter for the
Redlands Federal Standard,
sees in Holt
a look of quiet power combined with the naiveté and sweetness of a child.
Were I Jefferson Worth, how could I not wish to believe in my own goodness?

He works too hard to have time to sit around the corner store stove and whittle with the rest of the fellows, so when they get out to work they find the Holt fields are all plowed . . . Lots of people don’t like Holt; lots do.

Reader, what about you? Are you on board? Are you ready to work as hard as Mr. Holt, or are you a mere stoveside whittler? Don’t you believe in Progress?

My next door neighbor moved to Sacramento in about 1960. He sold his house for more than he paid for it, and bought another. Housing prices kept going up. Year after year, he’d say: The market has to level off sometime.—It kept going up.—Finally in 2006 there was a
correction,
but all my realtor friends, even the ones who can’t pay their own mortgages, know that Progress will return to save us all, just as surely as diamond cholla marks dry ground. They worship at California’s number one church, the Ministry of Capital.

By his business sagacity, remarkable resourcefulness, and exalted Christian principles, he became a builder of banks and railroads, a founder of cities . . .

In line with his genius for development and expansion,
rhapsodizes
American Biography and Genealogy, he has even spread his enterprises over the international boundary into Mexico. For one man to be virtually the source of supply for the power and light, and the means of transportation and communication, enjoyed by the people of a truly Imperial Valley, is honor enough—but Mr. Holt is even a greater source of benefits . . .

On 14 April 1912, a certain W. F. Holt was listed among the
Titanic
’s perished. But from the census of 1920 we learn that he had actually done what ever so many Imperialites do when it is time to go to heaven: He had moved the family to Los Angeles.

In 1923, Mr. Holt invested nearly three hundred thousand dollars in the Utah “dry farming” settlement of Widtsoe, named after a Mormon Apostle. It was going to have irrigation, phone lines and lettuce just like Imperial. The
Salt Lake Tribune
reports:
Drought, erosion and rodents doomed the project, and Widtsoe was soon infamous as the most destitute area in the state . . .

BELIEVERS IN THE FUTURE

Reader, may I introduce you to another boomer or two? They’re very jolly fellows to be around, because they’re always optimistic.

Capsule sketch of a boomer in Redlands, 1904:
I took lunch at the University Club yesterday noon with a Mr. Morrison, President of the First National Bank. He is a hustling young man, an orange grower of the finest type, as well as a good financier.

George Chaffey was a boomer, too, of course; in Etiwanda he had a fountain that gushed only whenever a train of land-seekers came in.

And do you remember L. M. Holt, whose editorials helped run the Chinese out of central Riverside? This cripple, popularly known as “Limpy” (his Christian name was Luther), is said to have named Mexicali and Calexico, if you don’t believe that George Chaffey did it; and if you don’t ask Mexicans, who will tell you that Colonel Augustín Sangínez accomplished that acrostic feat. Holt had a soft pale schoolteacher’s face, with round glasses and a firm but rather meager-lipped mouth, and fine hair parted on one side. We can thank him above others for bringing about the statewide Irrigation Convention of 1885. Just as George Chaffey would rename the Valley of Death
the Imperial Valley,
so Southern California got christened “Semi-Tropic California” thanks to our hero, L. M. Holt. Why not set a tone?
Mr. Holt was a boomer by temperament and training. He believed in the future of horticulture in Southern California . . .

Chapter 38

CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1 (2003)

To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight . . . but the great sales-manager . . . whose title of nobility was “Go-getter,” and who had devoted himself and all his young nobility to the cosmic purpose of Selling . . .

—Sinclair Lewis, 1922

IMPERIAL

CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1

Boosters see
opportunity with
each new mall

Chapter 39

LOS ANGELES (1900)

As you grow bolder you explore your world outward from the firepit (which is the center of each universe) . . .

—Gary Snyder, 1990

TÍPICO AMERICANO

In 1900 the population of the United States is already forty percent urban. Los Angeles waxes. To be sure, it’s not quite the Los Angeles of 2000.
Every house had its inclosure of vineyard, which resembled a miniature orchard.
The Los Angeles of 1900 still resembles the Los Angeles of 1845 in this respect. On the other hand, we don’t pay in Mexican ounces anymore.

A visitor from the East thinks Los Angeles to be one of the prettiest metropolises he has ever encountered, thanks to the large lawns and yards around every house, these being planted with eucalyptus, orange, pepper, and English walnut trees. At the same time, Los Angeles is busy, progressive, with all the amenities! The visitor writes:
I have not seen a city so honeycombed by trolleycar lines as this.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.