Imperial (51 page)

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE

And where might this haven be? By now I longed to see it. I hoped and imagined to find a small family business, ideally a Clark Date Farm or the like, employing Wilber and Elizabeth’s descendants of the fourth and fifth generation.

Well, there’s a Clark ranch, said Edith Karpen, who was ninety-one. He lived out there, he was still alive; he lived on the road from El Centro to Mount Signal. I know this Clark was one of the early pioneers there. There was Imperial Hardware and there was that independent one; Alice, do you remember that one that brought you to us when you wandered away from us on that Saturday night? That man who had the hardware store left his business and brought her along; and then Alice came along so happily with her hand in his.

So I set hopefully out on another expedition across the foxed paper Imperial that lives only in libraries.

In the
Imperial Valley Business and Resident Directory 1912-1913,
we are apprised before anything else that
IMPERIAL COUNTY SHOWS RAPID INCREASE: Is Growing Rapidly Richer, Accepting the Tax Man’s Appraisement as Evidence.
Next come the listings, bordered by multiply replicated advertisements; and on page 77 there dwells a

Clark, Wilber,
dairy and vineyard, Mobile, P O El Centro.

Dairy and vineyard! What a busy place, this Wilfrieda Ranch! I wonder if the Clarks ordered an Empire milking machine from Los Angeles or a De Laval junior milking outfit for small herds from San Francisco? On page 309, we find him listed among the two hundred and fifty-odd dairies of Imperial County.—Imperial is a Swiss dairyman in his white hat, holding his gleaming pails of milk, walled in by his cows’ rumps. I saw that photo at the Pioneers Museum.

Oh, my, dairying is the newest new thing! It might prove more enriching than grapes, dates and hogs together! As early as 1905, Chase Creamery at Imperial was making seven hundred and fifty pounds of butter per day, and shipping his daily five hundred pounds of cream to Riverside. That same year the first meeting of the Imperial Valley Dairymen’s Association took place at Heber; the Cardiff Creamery of San Bernardino was already preparing to relocate to Silsbee.
MILK IS HERE
.

By 1916 the County Development Agent can safely inform me that

IMPERIAL COUNTY is second among the 58 counties of California in butter production.

IMPERIAL COUNTY
makes one-tenth of the butter made in the state.

. . .

IMPERIAL COUNTY
increased its butter 235% and rose from seventh to second place during the last six years.

. . .

“Opportunities for profit in dairying are greater in
IMPERIAL VALLEY
than in any district that I know of in the United States.”
—E. W.
Webster, former
chief of the Dairy division, United States Department of Agriculture . . .

In short, we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

A Hetzel photograph shows a long line of white-clad soldiers of both sexes beneath the banner of their cause:
IMPERIAL VALLEY MILK PRODUCERS ASSOCIATION--CHALLENGE OF BUTTER
. My fellow Americans, how could they not meet their challenge?

Two hundred and fifty dairies in 1912! Eight years later there will be only three. Six years after that there will be eleven. In 1930 there will be six. Dairying is no sinecure, it would seem.
⁸⁰
The yellow pages for 2001 list no dairies at all in Imperial County, although Nudairy One does sell the equipment and supplies of that profession.

Indeed, Wilber and Elizabeth Clark must have experienced the instability of the profession, for the 1914 directory and its successors decline to mention any dairy business at Mobile, P O El Centro.

Now, where is this Mobile? It seems to be near El Centro. Otis P. Tout advises me to
USE THE INDICES
of his
First Thirty Years,
but these, alas, contain no Mobile. Judge Farr omits any indication of the ranch’s location; however, on the back endpapers of the 1912 directory, an offering for the Seeley Townsite Company announces that
a strong syndicate has been organized, with W. F. Holt as president, to help develop the resources of the great west side of the valley.
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
Associated with Mr. Holt are G. G. Chapman, leading orange grower and capitalist of Fullerton; W. T. Bill, president of the El Centro Townsite Co; N. A. Ross, well-known capitalist of Los Angeles; A. R. Ferguson of Seeley; R. R. Crabtree, and others.
I gather that San Diego men are likewise involved. It would seem that Mr. Holt has allied himself with a mixture of locals and outside speculators—ah, the direct gaze of the confident man! The advertisement continues:
This company has purchased the townsites of Seeley and Mobile. The fertile lands around Mobile station, comprising about 240 acres, will all be set to alfalfa in the fall and subdivided into small tracts . . .
And facing these words, well glued down against the coverboards, a crude engraving from a bird’s-eye perspective depicts agrarian checkerboard all the way to the horizon, with the Salton Sea a series of parallel lines above which the tops of Iowa-style cumulus clouds play peekaboo. The legend reads:
DI XIELA ND . . . IMPERIAL VALLEY
. In the foreground, a triangle of trees and cross-hatched field-squares has been labeled FRUIT LANDS. What would it be like to live there? I remember as a child reading a certain strangely alluring potboiler of a desert valley reclaimed by irrigation, of good Western men, aided by a noble Indian, winning out over the corrupt Easterners who’ve dynamited a spring.
⁸¹
(Somehow the Holt Syndicate does not fit in with this tale—unless one believes fervently in the Ministry of Capital.) If only I could have been a good Western man, dreaming my life away in FRUIT LANDS! As it happens, however, this region was enacted only to help frame a heavy square grid of blank plots demarcated by a family of roads whose east-west members have been deliciously lined with shade trees parallel to which the San Diego and Arizona Railroad (they actually won’t be completed for six years more) comes straight through; while south to north, Dixieland gets bisected again by the West Side Main Canal, which then curves northeast into the checkerboard dreams around the Salton Sea. I look due east, and find the New River’s arc swinging up from Calexico to the dots of Silsbee and Seeley, the former known for its cornscapes, the latter, freshly inscribed in 1911, right on the San Diego and Arizona tracks, which continue eastward, first crossing the Southern Pacific Railroad’s perpendicular axis (Imperial-El Centro-Calexico), then soldiering on toward Holtville at the very edge of the world. Right on this line, about one-third of the way from Seeley to El Centro, hence very near to where the Mormon Battalion camped one January night in 1847, roasting confiscated Mexican beef for the furtherance of Northside’s noble war, I discover the dot called Mobile.

So Wilber and Elizabeth Clark live here. (A twenty-first-century backcountry gazetteer calls it
a siding on the San Diego
Arizona Railway.
) Are they pleased that Mr. Holt’s syndicate has purchased the lands around them? Since they have done their own buying and selling, they may well hope to benefit from oncoming assessed valuations. As for me, I can’t help believing in people. Do you want to know why? Well, I’ll tell you! In 1917, Imperial County holds the largest ostrich herd in America!

I hope that he and Elizabeth find joy in each other to the end, that until the boom ends they sell their milk for high prices in Los Angeles, and that they find occasional leisure to take a spin to El Centro, a city now so teeming with automobiles that Wilber Clark’s own machine must be lost:
During trading hours the streets are lined with rows of automobiles . . . at times so numerous as to render traffic difficult.
(Those words date from 1918.) He puts on his best suit, and she her best dress. They don their motoring goggles. Brushing the dust off each other, they pay a call on D. G. Whiting, who brought the first Jersey herd into the Imperial Valley, which is why I imagine a kinship between him and that other dairyman and innovator, Wilber Clark. Do their wives like each other? All that I know of Elizabeth F. is her name.

I like to imagine that the Clarks have just experienced one of several good seasons.
He made a success through his own efforts.
They deposit their cotton earnings in the bank. Then he takes her for dinner at the Barbara Worth Hotel, which has been open for three years now. Surely he is proud of his young wife. Her mother is with them; she adores him. They finish their steaks and ice creams. His sunburned hand touches her knee under the table. Then, knowing that they’ll be up before dawn to milk the cows, she helps her mother back inside the dusty car and sits down beside her husband just before he pulls the starter.

Between El Centro and Mobile one encounters
“the Poole Place,” which is noted for its high state of cultivation, with many fine shade trees and a prosperous looking home.
Poole and his family own two thousand two hundred and twenty acres—a bit more than the statutory hundred and sixty—and they lease three hundred and twenty more. Their fancy house has stood there since 1910. Although Otis P. Tout neglects to mention the Clarks at all, why not suppose the Wilfrieda Ranch to be nearly as nice as this? I quote again from Judge Farr’s account:

Mr. Clark is a book-worm, and possesses a library of several thousand volumes, containing some rare “Americana” and first editions, as well as books relating to the Southwest.

How often does he have moments to read? And does she enjoy reading? I would not expect so, English being her second language and her days so hot and flat, but who am I to guess? Perhaps he reads to her, or at night as she combs out her hair before bed he tells her what he imagines de Anza saw at Yuma; or he shows her an old bullet he’s found; he dates it from the Mormon Battalion. Whenever her mother cleans the house, she tenderly brushes the dust off his first editions. They chat about taking a motoring trip back to Los Angeles, perhaps even next year. He subscribes in advance to Judge Farr’s
History,
I would imagine; and when it arrives, he opens it up and shows her how
he and his wife, Elizabeth F., settled on the now greatly improved Wilfrieda Ranch.
His mother-in-law smiles, puts on her spectacles, holds the book close to assure herself that Elizabeth’s name is truly there. Someday they will visit Los Angeles, to be sure; he will buy more books and some new tools, and she wants a brand new dress; she thinks that the Varney Brothers charge too much for sundries, so it will be a pleasure to bring a lot of things back home at a reasonable price. Her mother is curious to see those new oil wells in Los Angeles. How many millionaires there must be! And now to bed, and now to rise. The labor will be hot today because
some fifty varieties of grapes have been tried out and a profitable express business has been worked out on the same. Of great interest to Mr. Clark is the six-acre date orchard; many of the trees are in full bearing, producing fine tasting dates
in this utopian spot somewhere near Mobile.

Having now found Mobile, I have grown worthy to reread Otis P. Tout! In Chapter XXX, “Unincorporated Towns and Trade Centers,” Seeley receives a page and a half.
A new business is the Valley Cream Company, which handles over 12,000 pounds of milk daily, converting it into ice cream, buttermilk and cheese.
That description was written in 1930. Too bad that Wilber Clark’s dairy fell out of business long before! From Seeley to Mobile can’t be more than three miles. A creamery that huge would certainly have been convenient for him. I wonder where he lives in 1930, or
does
he still live? He must be about sixty-nine now. Elizabeth needs to work a trifle more than her share now, no doubt.—In the Imperial County Assessor’s map books, number 16-112-1 (TR 65) depicts the townsite of Seeley, with U.S. 80 sloping diagonally upwards, licking Fudge Co.’s one and a half acres; and it pleases me to imagine Wilber and Elizabeth Clark treating themselves to store-bought fudge, because I want them to be happy. In the photographs of Hetzel, the ditches are wide, practically canals—well, of course they are!—and there are heads of dark horses on white sand, dark cows on salt-and-silver fields, men bucking bales in horse-drawn wagons. Hugo de Vries remarks on the red purslane flowers along the edges of the canals, but I have never seen them. I see only hot wide wastes. But the Wilfrieda Ranch, walled coolly in by dates and other fruit, must shade the two lovebirds nearly as nicely as does Mrs. Bettner’s stately house in Riverside. Can they fall asleep without employing
submarines
?