Imperial (56 page)

Chapter 48

FUTURES (1883-2007)

In compiling the present report, we have found the area to be characterized by little systematic knowledge of either its prehistory or its archaeological inventory.

—Bureau of Land Management, 1974

I
n 1883, Wallace W. Elliott announces in his county history that
the future of San Bernardino Valley is fruit culture.
How might that future look? Helen Hunt Jackson’s famous tearjerker
Ramona,
published in 1884, describes
one of those midsummer days of which Southern California has so many in spring. The almonds had bloomed and the blossoms fallen; the apricots also, and the peaches and pears; on all the orchards of these fruits had come a filmy tint of green, and the orange groves dark and glossy like laurel.

Of course the future of San Bernardino Valley, and of Ramonaland, too, not to mention Los Angeles and suchlike fruitpatches, is actually subdivisions.

“NO PARTICULAR COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE”

But why couldn’t the future of southern California have been, for instance, barley?

In 1884, wheat production in California begins to recede; in 1880 it was fifty-four million bushels; in 1906, it will be twenty-seven thousand.
There has been a general parallelism between the amount of rain and the amount of wheat produced; but as yet irrigation is little used for this crop.
In any event, wheat declines (in the Imperial Valley, a rust infection kills much of it off); barley goes up.

Mr. Paul Foster, who analyzed Imperial County agriculture statistics for me and is himself a grainland farmboy, describes wheat as
a classic swing commodity, with farmers moving in and out of wheat (see acreages planted) based on commodity prices. The same holds true to a lesser extent for barley and milo. Imperial has no particular comparative advantage in wheat production over other regions, so production of wheat and other grains shifted generally with beef prices (another opportunistic commodity) and away from commodities that might produce more stable profits over the long run. Isn’t everyone tempted to double down at blackjack when the opportunity arises?

NEW YORK’S BARLEY YEARS

But why wasn’t southern California’s future barley?

In
Appletons’ Annual Cyclopaedia,
1892, the entry for California informs us:
Two States in the Union produce half of the entire barley crop of the country, and of those two California takes the lead, New York being second . . . The bay counties and those adjacent to the ocean are the largest barley producers.

Judge Farr writes that the history of Imperial County began with grain and alfalfa.
Barley and wheat were the winter crops and grain sorghums were the summer crops. Alfalfa was usually planted as soon as the land was properly leveled.
Both wheat and barley acreages were already dwindling in the pioneer years.

APRICOT HOPES

What would replace them? Fruit trees would come once the pioneers could pay for them. Someday Imperial’s orange groves would be laurel-glossy and her future might also contain wide acres of pearscapes
(one orchard consists of sixty acres and is reported as successful);
and since
it is almost unbelievable how fast apricot trees grow in this Valley,
why shouldn’t the future of Imperial be fruit culture? Unfortunately, in 2005 the gross value of Imperial County’s fruits and tree nuts was $37,061,000 out of $1,236,066,000 for all commodities, or less than three percent of the total.

What then were the top five crops of 2005? Number one was cattle, as in the old days of Mexican California; Judge Farr knew of Imperial cattle ranches both north and south of the international line; and by the time his history was published in 1918, livestock was
an important part of the Valley’s industries;
in 2005, cattle made up almost twenty-three percent of gross revenues! Number two was alfalfa, another constant from Judge Farr’s time. Then came leaf lettuce, carrots and just plain lettuce.

To an agronomist, what is Imperial? Imperial is cantaloupes and watermelons; Imperial is lettuce, asparagus and, sporadically, cotton.

In 2005, cantaloupes did respectably, being ranked number ten (watermelons were number thirty); asparagus was a mediocre number thirty-one; cotton lint was number twenty-five. Poor sad citrus was number forty. Perhaps even in Judge Farr’s time that outcome was suspected, as I infer by reading between the lines of faint praise:
During the past years nearly every kind of fruit and nuts grown have been planted here, and it is possible to raise at least enough of them for family use, with the exception of the cherry and the walnut.

THE CRYSTAL BALL

What might California’s wheat blackjack players have been thinking at the beginning of their American game? How many moves ahead did they scheme? Did they expect to move in and out of it as commodity prices dictated, or were they set for life? Did they possess what we pompously call a “vision”? And was that vision subverted or fulfilled when wheatscapes became first citrusscapes, then houses, factories, freeways?

As for Imperial’s fruit gamblers, can they be said to have gone wrong? Citrus continues to thrive in the Bard Subdistrict; I always buy a sack of blood oranges when I pass through there.

Setting citrus aside, and a few other flashes in the pan such as dairy, Imperial County’s agricultural productions have remained remarkably constant over her century of autonomous life (she remains officially a hundred years old as I write this, in 2007). As for southern California, she has changed into a thirsty city lady. And Imperial owns the water. That is why she and Imperial are enemies.

But Imperial is also at cross purposes with herself.

There is in America a nomadic race of beings, always pressing toward the frontier and carving empires to endure for the ages.
Call them blackjack players. Some of them played for homesteads, like Wilber Clark. After all, there was a hundred-and-sixty-acre limitation on the books. Taxpayers’ money, spent by the millions on reclamation dams, was meant to keep the frontier open a trifle longer for the sake of pioneering families. On the other hand, what is any limitation to a true empire seeker, but a challenge? I can’t help believing in people.

It is but a few pages since we buried Wilber Clark, and said goodbye to his widow. Before he sinks out of our memories, let us now make the acquaintance of his antithesis, the Chandler Syndicate.

Another still more striking opposition must be laid out in this section, in order for us to appreciate the strange nuances of Imperial’s history north and south: Mexican and American Imperial dream very different agrarian dreams. Now that settlement has begun in earnest in both of those zones, it is high time to introduce you to those two reifications of happiness, the self-sufficient American homestead and the Mexican
ejido.

Chapter 49

HARRY CHANDLER’S HOMESTEAD (1898-1938)

The model ranch of the Valley, owned by a stock company of Los Angeles
businessmen, comprises 1,100 acres of highly developed ranch land in
California and 876,000 acres just across the line in Mexican territory.

—Edgar F. Howe and Wilbur Jay Hall, 1910

W
hen I think of him, I remember the old sunken lobby of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, with its echoing fountain, whose sound is surprisingly loud given the slenderness of the white streams; I see the vaulted ceiling’s gilded ribs and Moorish stars. Some of the chandeliers resemble immense yellow-glowing quartz crystals, and others are more like glass beetles.

I think of his cotton sampling room in Mexicali,
with a north exposure, the entire length of the room from floor to ceiling being of glass. The soft, subdued tint, light blue, on walls and ceiling,
not to mention the various window shades,
combine to make it possible to have at any time of day an ideal light.
Outside, a fountain plays, and there is a garden of appropriately giant cacti.

In a blurry old photograph we see him standing beside and slightly behind the President of Mexico, who gazes away. Mr. Chandler wears a black stovepipe hat which shadows his eyes. A benign fringe of white beard (or is it simply Mexicali sunlight?) clings like moss below his mouth, and he seems to be smiling in his black and white suit. The year is about 1925. If so, the President, who seems out of focus, must have been Calles. Chandler’s wife and daughter sat beside him at the inauguration.

Here is Harry Chandler in 1922, receiving a previous President of Mexico’s invitation to raise with him personally all issues of the development of Baja California. In return, Chandler promises that the
Los Angeles Times
will publish nothing but nice things about Mexico and her President. In practically the same breath, the President signs decrees undoing the titles on which Chandler’s property rights were based, and nationalizing one of Chandler’s holdings: Volcano Lake, the source of the Río Nuevo. But since this is Mexico, the President can cancel the undoing at any time, should the Chandler Syndicate give satisfaction. The so-called Volcano Lake Compromise rings like a deal between statesmen, and indeed it is: Who could be more literally Imperial than Harry Chandler himself, eighty-five-percent owner of the Colorado Land River Company, Emperor of Mexicali, San Fernando, Holly-woodland, Tejon and God knows how many other domains?

But who is more
typically and fundamentally
Imperial—Wilber Clark or Harry Chandler? Whose career says most about the American dream?

ALL HAIL NORTHSIDE

The following portion of Mr. Chandler’s American dream (for of course he possessed many, many other portions) took place on the other side of the line, where everything was blanker, and all means and ends lay readier to hand. Why not invoke the American dream just the same? After all, in its service, we’d taken half of Mexico and drawn Imperial’s first line. Moreover, his obituary assures us that he
took a prominent part in the organization of the company which built the irrigation canals which transfomed Imperial Valley from a desert into the most productive farming region on the continent.

POSTERITY’S OPTIONS

In the Imperial Valley, Wilber Clark has been forgotten. In the Mexicali Valley, Harry Chandler is remembered and hated. They blame him for locking up the land for decades, for creating their “Chinese problem,” for making them his peons, for being the rich gringo whose shadow they could not escape. Even the Salton Sea accident is sometimes called
Chandler’s mistake.

CAPITAL OR LAND?

Up in Northside, we (supposedly) encounter what has been described as “the agrarian mind,” one of whose preeminent qualities is
a longing for independence—that is, for an appropriate degree of personal and local self-sufficiency. Agrarians wish to earn and deserve what they have.
I would call that a fair if faintly sentimentalized description of Wilber Clark as I imagine him.

How might we characterize the divide between Wilber Clark and his opposite? I continue to quote the same source, the literary eco-farmer Wendell Berry:
The fundamental difference between agrarianism and industrialism
⁸⁶
is this: whereas industrialism is a way of thought based on monetary capital and technology, agrarianism is a way of thought based on land. Agrarianism, furthermore, is a culture at the same time that it is an economy. Industrialism is an economy before it is a culture.

In sum, the difference between Clark and Chandler was as the difference between the low earth-hills at the beginning of Painted Canyon and the high blue-grey mountains on the west side of the Salton Sea, which is to say, the difference between mere sweat and capital itself.

A MAP OF THE MEXICALI VALLEY

Wilber Clark was born in about 1861; Harry Chandler in about 1864. Harry Chandler lived longer and was richer—definitely richer.

In spite of his thousands of volumes of Americana and first editions, Wilber Clark has, as I have intimated, left fewer fossil traces in the shale of history than Judge Farr’s biographical entry caused me to expect. Perhaps that is because he was a typical member of his class.

Harry Chandler was most certainly typical of his. After all, E. T. Earl, who owned the
Los Angeles Express,
possessed three million corporate acres in Sinaloa; and William Randolph Hearst, who expressed himself through the
Los Angeles Examiner,
had his private Mexican concessions. Chandler’s homestead was comparable to theirs, and I will detail it as follows:

On an undated map of the Mexicali Valley, faded and stained, made probably before 1940 since in the margin a different hand has pencilled within Mesa de Sonora:
Inundated since 1940,
we see Mexicali in the form of a faint pencil grid the length and half the width of the first joint of my forefinger; it rests near the westward apex of an inverted triangle stretching from my shoulder just past my fully outstretched hand, and I am a tall man; this figure comprises the Mexicali Valley itself, suitably subdivided into the following properties:
A
, just below Mexicali, is the property of a certain C.R.L. Co. S.A., and consists of 906 steaming hectares (2,238 hot acres, or if you please 474,456 square feet of heaven) running all the way down to Canal Packard, which is a tiny, tiny piece of the valley; as it chances,
B
’s 203 hectares slightly north of the east-west-running Canal Corona belong to this same C.R.L. Co. S.A.;
C
, separated from
B
by
colonias
numbers one through ten, is the merest 36 hectares, and happens to belong to the C.R.L. Co. S.A.
D
, which the map informs us is the legal possession of the C.R.L. Co. S.A., consists of 4,603 hectares.
E
, which coincidentally belongs to the C.R.L. Co. S.A., is a 184- hectare triangle near the east vertex of the great triangle, next to three deep wells.
F
is 862 hectares;
G
is 604 hectares; both are in keeping of the same entity.
H
is 5,607 hectares;
I
, 12,384 hectares;
J
, 4,806 hectares;
K
, 7,985 hectares;
L
is 7,616 hectares; and at first I thought that nobody owned them, until I saw, printed leisurely-wise across their areas and subdelineations,
COLORADO RIVER LAND COMPANY, S.A.
Strange to say,
M
, 1,437 hectares in extent, really does remain unlabeled. Just west of that lie the substantial two
colonias
Nuevo León and Coahuilla, 6,321.1301 hectares in total; the Colorado River Land Company lacks those. But
N
, 210 hectares, belongs to the C.R.L. Co. S.A.
O
, at 12,161 hectares, a bit northwest of El Mayor, is included in the same super-zone (walled in by the Sierra El Mayor on the left; the Colorado River runs down the middle; on the right I see the Mesa de Andrade, the Rancho Caterpillar, and other makers) as
P
at 9,275 hectares,
Q
at 12,765 hectares,
R
at 10,172 hectares,
S
at 4,145 hectares,
T
at 4,868 hectares,
U West
at 7,883 hectares, and
U East
at 8,305 hectares; the Colorado River Land Company controls them all. On the top left of the great triangle and eating into it from the side, is an unowned blankness of about twenty percent . . . and there goes most of the Colorado River delta.