Imperial (65 page)

Indeed, ease proffers advantages for civilians, too. The Imperial Valley directory for 1920 informs us that
Imperial Irrigation District comprises 603,841 acres of which 412,000 are under cultivation in the United States and 360,000 are in Imperial Valley, Mexico.
¹⁰⁶
Harry Chandler’s entity, the Colorado River Land Company, wins easy permission from the government of Northside for its livestock to range between Mexican and American Imperial, so long as they have no diseases and stay six months or less. More than a quarter of the way into the century, the
Los Angeles Times
can still headline the latest factory in Mexicali as
A New Kind of Pioneering in Imperial
. And why not conceptualize Imperial in our way? Didn’t we win the war? I accordingly encomiumize the grandeur of
CALEXICO
, shown on Imperial County Assessor’s Map number 17-15, as a big rectangle with a square eaten from its upper righthand corner, the property owner’s name pencilled in and then erased from it. South of the border is Mexicali, not in capital letters; the word indicates merely a railroad.

(On this map, signed
Th
and dated 1911, we do see a yellowing blankness named
MEXICO
, into which the Encino Canal speeds south by southwest from Sharp’s Heading on the Main Canal . . .)

But the authorities deeper in Northside deem these to be perilous conveniencies. And so they make their policies and send out their orders. At the beginning of 1915, the Customs Collector at Andrade, which lies on the line almost at Imperial County’s southeast extremity, reports that he
would strongly recommend, as a preventive measure against smuggling, that the Geological Survey (or whatever department erects International fencing) and the Mexican government, be interested in building a good substantial fence from the Colorado River west along the boundary for about five miles.

By the beginning of Prohibition, the line has begun to enforce itself more stringently. To be sure, some indications of mutability remain. Senator Henry Ashurst proposes to cut the Gordian knot and buy Lower California outright; our dear friend Harry Chandler has already been indicted for and acquitted of seeking to alter the government of Baja California. But no one undoes our ditch. Therefore, we’d better dig it deeper!

After a shootout between two Mexican smugglers and Customs officers
(Inspector Norman G. Ross was killed by an apprehended alien . . . Inspector Frank G. Goddell was shot and wounded by an autoist)
, Los Angeles sends out the following directive to Calexico, Tia Juana, and other Imperial border stations:
You are directed to instruct all officers under your jurisdiction to shoot to kill any known smugglers of this character who are detected in the act of smuggling and who are armed and evidently intending to resist United States officers.
But those officers remain more or less in Mr. Wadham’s situation. In 1923 the Deputy Collector in Charge at Tecate recommends
that authority be secured from the State . . . to place cement blocks on each side of the road at various places, where we inspect traffic,
in order for the officers to
perform our duties in a manner that will not leave us at the mercy of outlaws . . .—
for two years earlier, an Immigration officer in Campo had been run over and killed by whiskey smugglers. Once cement blocks have been stationed, Northside’s guardians hope to close off the entryway with a chain. This notion of the Deputy Collector’s conveys some sense of how open the remainder of the line must be. Compared to Homeland Security officers of my own day, these isolated sentinels appear hapless.

Chapter 61

THE FIRST COYOTE (1895-1926)

On the 28th of last February I informed Your Excellency of the decision that
I had made to try to reach Northern California.

—de Anza to Bucareli, 1774

F
rom the standpoint of Operation Gatekeeper, the very first Entry Without Inspection must have taken place within moments of when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified. If that sounds absurd, it is only because Gatekeeper is absurd. No matter. For decades, people of Mexican, American and various tribal nationalities made their way across the line without deference. Where did it exist, as I said, but on maps and other documents, and in a few white steles convenient to overlook? Even Northside offficialdom overlooked them, at first. When San Diego advised Mr. Wadham,
I have reason to believe that Mexicans or others who are carrying wood across the line into this country, are engaged in smuggling Cigars and Opium . . . ,
it was not the wood-carrying that was problematic. In the era of Gatekeeper, of course, any untracked movement across the border is forbidden. As de Sade remarks, it’s a multitude of laws that creates a multitude of crimes. Once the flow of goods over the line became subject to control, smugglers appeared. Once this control applied to people, the body-smugglers—
polleros,
guides, coyotes—began to flourish. In 2006, the price of a coyote in San Luis Río Colorado was approximately two thousand dollars. A century earlier, it was still easy to be a
solo,
as long as one showed no evidence of Asian descent.

But who was Imperial’s first coyote? He must have appeared quite soon after Chaffey’s headgates opened and maybe even before; since the very first official warning I can find (14 February 1915), duly telegraphed to us from the Mounted Inspector Jacumba, expresses no surprise about the existence of PARTIES WILLIAM WALKER AND JAMES CHILLISON OF CALEXICO, WHO ARE ALLEDGED [
sic
] TO BE IN THE BUSINESS of smuggling opium and Chinese. Los Angeles has just telegraphed to Calexico: Proceed immediately to Thermal; thence Martinez Indian Agency. Gather evidence smuggling Chinese by Seddles and Chillison who escaped. Goldie Evans and H. Bugkley and six Chinese arrested by Stanley. Two automobiles still there . . . If opium in automobiles machines may be confiscated.

In 1924, Border Patrol subdistrict headquarters was founded at El Centro; and that same year, coincident with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which aimed to be a new Chinese Exclusion Act just for Mexicans, the first patrol went out.
They’ll pop their heads up in a minute. They do work most Americans wouldn’t do. We’re in the hills, day in and day out, to try and deter them. I think we all feel sorry for ’em.

Chapter 62

THE FIRST HOBO (1901)

Two men, declared to be the first hoboes to visit the Valley, wandered into
Imperial in December, 1901. They missed fame by failing to leave their
names with the editor of the Press.

—The Imperial Valley Press, 1901

A
nd who was the first hobo? Who was the first have-not to wander through Imperial? Who was the first to die? On page eighty-seven of Book Two at the Imperial County Recorder’s office we find a date of burial of 17 June 1909 for a sixty-year-old male of unknown race, unknown date of birth, unknown date of death; cause of death:
from heat while crossing the desert. Brought in from about 35 miles out in the desert.
Was he a hobo or a
pollo
? He missed fame by failing to leave his name with the editor of the
Press.

Chapter 63

TWENTY THOUSAND IN 1920 (1906-1922)

Bigger crops mean bigger money.

—Advertisement in the California Cultivator, 1920

W
hat is Imperial to you? Imperial is TWELVE BANKS; DEPOSITS
MORE
THAN TWO MILLIONS. Imperial is 10 TONS OF BUTTER SHIPPED DAILY (Largest Output of Any County in Cal.)
.
Imperial is above all

NO WINTER--NO SNOW
NO CROP FAILURES

All these incantations reach you courtesy of the California Land and Water Company, which in its altruistic zeal to continue improving Arid America even maintains a special Imperial Valley exhibition room in its office in Los Angeles, and which has coined the capitalist prayer for Brawley: 20,000 IN 1920.

El Centro, less ambitious by half, boasts the Women’s 10,000 Club, which calls upon the females of that city to take all necessary measures to increase the population to ten thousand and which soon absorbs the Woman’s Club of Imperial. On Thursday, 7 May 1914, our good ladies unanimously vote to purchase the Gary Corner on Seventh and Olive. The house they built still stands.
¹⁰⁷
The club colors are green and white. The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”
¹⁰⁸
—Browning.
El Centro, you see, dreams her Imperial dreams. Why not? Between 1910 and 1920, Imperial will be the third-fastest-growing county in the U.S.A.! The
Imperial Valley Business and Resident Directory
for 1912-13 crows:
YOU MAY FIGURE THAT . . . the Population Is Increasing at the rate of 40 per cent Every 24 Months.
In the same publication we find a proud and complete seventeen-page list of every book in the El Centro Public Library. Two years later there’s even a library at the Colored School!

20,000 IN 1920! Why not?
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
. Why not? In 1911, when Harold Bell Wright publishes
The Winning of Barbara Worth,
a ditch rank with trees runs toward Signal Mountain, from which the god of delineation has set Mexicali just a trifle back, within a No Man’s Land of white flatness belonging largely to the Chandler Syndicate; and Calexico’s first line of houses and yards stand flush against Southside, fronting a white sand street nearly as wide as the properties; then comes a second row, smaller, unlawned, reminiscent to me of those Slab City trailers parked in the sand. By 1920 that ditch is gone; instead, huge letters spell out UNITED STATES against the sky, and the archway’s buildings of the Calexico I know are in place.
Long before the present generation was born it was ordained that Calexico should exist, and that Calexico should become the capital of a great inland empire.

Reader, don’t you believe in great beginnings?
The Imperial valley now leads in the production of early grapes,
whose Sweetwater variety were picked in Brawley on 9 June 1905. At the same time, more than a hundred and fifty loads of grain and melons pour into Brawley every day.

Great beginnings! In the years 1904, 1905, 1906, the Brawley Town Company, like the Calexico Town Company, looms large in county records, selling land to individuals with such surnames as McClermont, Mead, Blinn, Johnson, Bennett, Rupert, and to such fine organizations as the
Southern California Mission Society of Chris. Church
and the
Imperial Investment Co.
There don’t seem to be too many Hispanic or Chinese names; I guess those people are busy digging ditches. Well, the McClermonts and Johnsons come through! Brawley’s main street in 1910 is all dirt and low brick buildings, men and ladies crossing the photo frame side by side in their horse-and-buggy progesses, and Brawley in 1912 is brighter still. Since that 1912 directory is in front of me, let 1912 be the once-upon-a-time seed of magnificent fruit to come. Imperial is
x.
Imperial is
y.
Imperial is this book of heroes and heroines whose greatness will live down the ages (for instance: McClermont, Mead, Blinn, Johnson). White-faded ladies and white-bleached gentlemen at a never-ending party, they’re a happy, weatherbeaten crew in cowboy hats.

In El Centro we find a line item for the law firm of Eshleman & Swing, whose second member sometimes doubles as Imperial County’s District Attorney; he’s the man who will truly make good by bringing home the All-American Canal! Imperial Junction, as the whole valley from Coachella down to
la línea
is still sometimes called in those days, already anticipates a high line canal,
so that there will be room for more towns and settlers as soon as water can be provided.

In the city of Imperial, Judge Farr also lists himself as an attorney. His mammoth
History of Imperial County, California,
to which my book so often refers, will be published in 1918—posthumously, alas, and not quite finished. For awhile I kept a copy of his death certificate to remind myself that any castle I can ever build will be founded on sand. (You don’t think so? You’re correct, of course. I’d forgotten that ever efficacious magic charm,
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
) And Mrs. Robert Vaile is president of the Women’s 10,000 Club, which will after all achieve its aim (not in 1920, alas, but in 1940); Mrs. Laura Waters runs the Hotel Imperial in Imperial, at the corner of Ninth and Imperial; that establishment has come along nicely since Wilber Clark’s time and will undoubtedly improve forever; unfortunately, in 2003 I can’t locate it. Other businesses send down their own taproots. For instance,
the Special Agent’s Office at this place advises that Charles Hayward and Burt Hall, now located at Imperial, Cal., are engaged in the opium business . . . watch their movements carefully . . .

In Holtville, Mr. Franklin Hardison advertises himself as an artesian well driller,
¹⁰⁹
which is a sweet and kindly occupation: sink a hole, and water will gush paradisiacally into the air forever, gracing the family homestead with another of God’s miracles. In my California, water is metered and chlorinated. I cannot believe in Franklin Hardison. He’s a ghost from a better past.