Imperial (52 page)

And they dwell near the amenities! Seeley was a concatenation of sand dunes in 1912. Five years later, three hundred and fifty pioneers live there, patronizing its meat market, doctor, hardware store and billiard parlor.
⁸²
My word, I can’t help believing in people!

As for their actual residence,
Dixieland was planned when an effort was made in 1909 to bring a high line canal west of the present canal on the western boundary of the irrigated area.
In other words, that West Side Main Canal is as fictitious as the railroad line from San Diego to Yuma, not to mention those FRUIT LANDS. Otis P. Tout continues by naming two promoters, neither of whom appeared in the Seeley Townsite Company’s advertisement; they must be modest.
A brick building or two bear mute witness to the fact that Dixieland still awaits the coming of water on a higher level. With the construction of the All-American Canal the old plans for a town at this point will no doubt be revived;
oh, no doubt.

Opening the map I bought in Calexico last year, I learn from its margins that the Imperial Valley Dental Group is committed to my health, that the Calipatria Inn and Suites has wisely placed in quotation marks its self-assigned encomium,
“The Beautiful,”
and that the Evan Hewes Highway, more realistically known as S80, proceeds due west out of El Centro, reaches an indeterminate portion of the Salton Sea-to-Mexicali street grid, meets the label Seeley and swerves southwest right at the y to underline the town at a respectful distance, resumes its westward trajectory, crosses the New River, which in the map is a laughably pristine blue—by the way, Seeley seems to have moved across the river since 1911—and reaches Dixieland, which in obedience to the syndicate’s vision does now indeed straddle the Westside Main Canal! Moreover, this road parallels the Southern Pacific Railroad all the way. I’m ashamed now, that I saw duplicity in the direct gaze of the confident man!

By now, everyone who’s anyone has heard of Dixieland. In 1914, Customs Service headquarters in Los Angeles informs the Deputy Collector in Charge, Calexico, Cal.:
The latest shipment of opium by this crowd which we now have under arrest is supposed to have come through Jacumba and gone to Dixieland.
In 1916, D. Steffano, proprietor of the San Diego Bar in Mexicali, gets denounced by his confederate as an opium smuggler.
For some time Steffano has been suspected and officers from this office have, on two separate occasions, inspected his auto at Dixieland.
⁸³
Unfortunately, Wilber Clark remains less renowned than these heroes. He is not the director of the Chamber of Commerce for Seeley or Dixieland in 1913. His name appears on no more resolutions or petitions. Did he drown himself happily in domestic obscurity with Elizabeth F., or has he become a struggling nobody?

I went to Seeley and asked around, but not even the most grizzled Imperialites had heard of Mobile. The clerk at the County Assessor’s office lived near Seeley, despised me for an outsider, played with her hair and denied that Mobile ever existed.

Fortunately, the 1914 directory gave me a new clue to the Clarks’ location:

Clark, Wilber R
(Elizabeth F) o 175-a, 40 cotton, 120 alfalfa, dairy
Elder Ditch
6 mi w El Centro, P O Seeley

Their date orchard failed, it would seem. Much of the alfalfa goes to feed their cows; and cotton has become their speculative cash crop. Well, why should it be otherwise? Mr. Holt’s syndicate likewise went in for cotton; by 1917 Seeley is so cotton-rich that it boasts two gins already and a third will be built in 1918 to process the even hundred acres of
Egyptian varieties.

In 1920, their adddress is 2 mi e Seeley at the same post office. Wilber Clark is now fifty-eight—better than sixty-nine. Elizabeth is forty-six. According to the census, Elizabeth’s mother Maria still lives with them. It is no surprise to learn of the pioneer automobilist that he and his wife may now be reached by telephone.

TRACT 281

The records in the County Assessor’s office went back only to 1960. However, the nice lady at the desk brought out one of the immense leather-covered books I’d read about in the California Board of Equalization county report of 1949, whose author complained about having to carry them into the field; indeed, the Imperial County Assessor had yearned for sufficient money to do away with those books, and it seemed as if that wish had been granted. The lady at the desk said to me: Please be very careful with this. I think it’s even older than I am.

That was in 2002. When I returned in 2005 I was told there were not and never had been any such books. However, by then I had hired a private detective, and so I learned the parcel number.

In County Assessor’s Mapbook 51, page 51-13, there’s a tract along Elder Canal in the townsite of Seeley; it’s euphoniously named 182A, and the parcel number, indicated by a circle, is seven.—Oh, excuse me; it’s actually in Book 52-48; and it’s Tract 281, lying not quite on Elder Canal as I thought, but two east-west horizontals northward of there.—To be more specific, the former property of Wilber and Elizabeth Clark consists of a rectangle bordered on the north by the Evan Hewes Highway, on the west by Elder Lateral Ten, on the south by Elm Lateral Two just up from Ross Road, and on the east by Low Road.

Tract 281 in 2005 (Sgnal Mountain in background)

On a hundred-and-four-degree day, I meet brown stagnant water in the lateral and I find various smells of mud. The Clarks’ field remains green, but it is just blind greenness now, lacking spoor of a house, although it does offer a fine view of Mount Signal to the southwest. The few haywalls warped against the sun could not have been stacked by Wilber Clark. The Wilfrieda Ranch has vanished like Imperial’s grapescapes near Holtville.

On Evan Hewes Highway, I gaze into a pale, cracked dry lateral on the edge of the property. I look northwest across it at the mountains of Anza-Borrego, then east to a low and broken line of blue-grey trees, and west where in the distance an open-framed train sleeps. Hay bales are baking in the sun like cookies. From there it is walking distance to the brown-green New River, which is clotted, foamy and stinking, with bush-lined wriggles deep in its desert ditch. As the crow flies I am less than nineteen miles from where Ray Garnett first eased his motorboat into this river at Lack Road; our farthest upstream, where the wrecked bridge defeated us, can be no more than fifteen or sixteen miles.

A huge peeling eucalyptus shades the northwest corner, a tree whose many white trunks rise up and spread in the sky.

About this property, the eloquent farmer across the street informs me through the almost-closed door: Don’t know. Haven’t been here that long.

“JOYOUS AWAKENING”

Did the ranch fail before the dairy did? Did they live out their years here or did they sell out? What befell Wilber Clark’s books, grapes and dates?

Wilber and Elizabeth Clark must not have done as well as expected, since the pioneer hagiographies cease mentioning them. One tribute to a rancher near Imperial townsite enthuses:
A home, good friends, a fair day’s labor, a pipe and a night’s sleep are luxuries to him.
Do the Clarks likewise live simply but well? Shouldn’t they now own nearly as many refined objects as the Pooles and the Wilsies? In 1925, when almost every American housewife still possesses both a sewing machine and a washtub, a Maytag washer advertisement lets us in on
The Secret of Happy Wives,
namely:
Joyous awakening . . . unhurried breakfast . . . wash day . . . movie or club or Farm Bureau . . . perhaps Reading or Study . . . refreshed and rested for Friend Husband’s Home Coming at night.
Could this ever have been true? Would it be pleasing if the Clarks had had such a relationship? I can’t help believing in people.

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE REVISITED

What happened next is what always happens. To discover when it happened, I opened the heavy death indexes in the Imperial County office. They were big volumes on tarnished brass rollers instead of shelves, the rollers’ colors variously changing with time.
Nathan W. Clark Jan 28 52 66/1
was not my man, but should that make him less worthwhile to me? Judge Farr, which is to say Finis Calvert Farr Apr. 8 1918, now resided in certificate 30, book 6A; out of gratitude to him for introducing me to Wilber Clark, I purchased a copy of his death certificate.

In the California State Library in Sacramento, on page 1964 of volume 2 of the
California Death Index
for 1905-29, I found a W. Clarke and a Wilbur Clarke, both of whom I provisionally parted from due to spelling mismatches, especially since on page 1957 there proved to be

This would seem to be our man, since both the name and the wife’s initials match up. The age is also correct (the unit code of one means that at death his age was sixty-seven years, not sixty-seven days, minutes or hours). What unnerves me is that although this Wilber Clark died in 1928, the Wilber Clark whose biography I am now trying to write disappeared from the
Imperial Valley Directory
prior to 1924.

Could anyone else be our Wilber Clark? Two other dead candidates offer themselves on this page: Wilbur Clark, middle initial G., and Wilbar Clark, middle initial L., the latter lacking a spouse. Wilbar died in 1916, which is much too early; Wilbur, whose wife’s initial was H., died in 1923 in County No. 60, which is Alameda. By far the best match is the one whose name is actually Wilber Clark.

Presumably either Wilber or Elizabeth Clark, or both of them, got worn out—I would guess Wilber, since he was the elder—and so they moved to County No. 70, which is Imperial’s enemy, Los Angeles County, and died.

The 1930 census shows us a fifty-six-year-old head of household named Elizabeth Clark, widow. She owns her domicile, which happens to be a farm in Pasadena Township. She has not attended school in the previous year. She can read and write. She belongs to the white race. She was born in Homburg, Germany, and both her parents were also born in Germany. Her native tongue was German, but she can speak English. Her occupation is
poultryman.
She worked the day before the census taker came to her door.

Wilber Clark’s sister Margaret, now definitely Mrs. W. H. Dickinson, lived until 1942 and died in San Diego at about age seventy-seven.

One wonders whether when they sold out and departed the Imperial Valley it was with the emotions expressed in the song of that period:

Oh, Harvest Land—Sweet Burning Sand!
—As on the sun-kissed field I stand
I look away across the plain
And wonder if it’s going to rain—
I vow, by all the Brands of Cain,
That I will not be here again.

Chapter 42

MEXICALI (1904-1905)

Mexican lands are entitled to half the water that enters the Imperial Valley . . .
They have never taken it and probably never will take it.

—The Los Angeles Times, 1925

A
horse and buggy far away, and a shaded profiled horse hitched to a wriggly palisade; a man standing in a doorway beneath a sign which, although bold, remains too small for me to make out despite my brand-new reading glasses—why didn’t I bring a photographic loupe to the archives?—a few edifices intermediate in character between huts and houses, facing off in two rows, with a wide wet street of dirt between them (wet because
WATER IS HERE
; Baja California has just now entered a forty-seven-year rainy spell, meaning that precipitation will be slightly above zero), a street which keeps coming toward me until it fills up the world; this is Mexicali in 1905, and the caption reads, of course, “Main Street.” The foreground of the street is in sharpest focus. The street displays its naked wagon-ruts which waver like a stripper’s hips; the street presents its sand, its silt and its little heaps of Imperial dirt. That’s all. Well, I forgot that one house is adorned by a dead tree whose top was snapped off by unknown agents.