Imperial (66 page)

Sometime between 1906 and 1910 (these dates being posterity’s approximation, pencilled on the back of the fading photo), El Centro dispatches King Cotton to pose at the Imperial County Fair, accompanied by the giant simulacrum of a twenty-dollar goldpiece hanging in an arch of cheap wooden beams.

In 1913 men and horses begin to excavate the site of the new Barbara Worth Hotel. In 1915 that establishment opens.
Trade is leading Culture, a beautiful young woman . . .

Imperial is Brawley’s volunteer fire department, whose members look proud as they pose eternally beneath the smoke trees. Imperial is California herself, that feckless growing girl who would rather run than walk. So would I.
Buy Hercules Dynamite and
blast
the holes for that new orchard. Your trees will soon show you that
they like to be planted in blasted holes. They’ll grow better, bear sooner and give better grade fruit than any trees you’ve ever planted in the old-fashioned way. So, sign the coupon and send it in
today.
Your copy of “Progressive Cultivation” is waiting for you.

By 1920, at which time the population of Brawley is actually 5,392, and of El Centro, 5,462, the El Centro National Bank is ready to show off. First and foremost one sees the safe, suitably labeled, and in raised letters EL CENTRO BANK; it is high and mighty and shiny like an immense ingot, with a murky picture on its double doors. After taking in that marvel, the eye begins to notice the line of female tellers behind their opened ledgers, all pretty and darkhaired, all serious except for the one who is smiling as if she knows the photographer; the adding machine glitters like an Imperial town seen from the air; the tellers’ cages achieve a wonderful darkness in mastery of Imperial’s shining glare; then on the right are Mr. Weber and Mr. Adams, whose gender reduces their interest to me.

A history book from this era calls
the winning of the desert wastes of Imperial Valley . . . one of the most striking chapters in the wonderful romance of California history.
That’s patently true, for in 1922, Imperial County becomes America’s number one lettuce producer.

Chapter 64

COACHELLA WAITS (1912-1917)

The citrus belt is largely along the foothills from Los Angeles to Redlands and across the upper part of the valley at Redlands and Riverside. All the rest of the country from this valley east . . . is made of the most broken type of foothills . . .

—G. Harold Powell, 1904

H
ere, in what was once deemed a hopeless desert, around the towns of Coachella, Indio, Mecca and Thermal, the people are demonstrating the peculiar fitness of the soil and climate . . .

So runs a history of Riverside County, published in 1912. Next year, thanks to an army of mules and men,
¹¹⁰
first water will enter the East Highline Canal down in Imperial; meanwhile, first water will travel those two hundred and thirty-three famous miles from the Owens Valley all the way down to San Fernando through Los Angeles’s spanking new aqueduct. (You will be proud to know that Harry Chandler, owner of the
Los Angeles Times
and of most of the Mexicali Valley,
aided the promotion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct to tap the water from Owens Valley.
) Los Angeles can grow and grow. So can Imperial County.

As for Coachella . . .

What if that second line had never been drawn back in 1893? The “Coachella Valley” and the “Imperial Valley” are one, I keep saying, just as much as are the “Imperial Valley” and the “Mexicali Valley.” Geographers disagree; they insist that the Imperial Valley’s soil derives from mixed sedimentary deposits from the Colorado River, whereas Coachella dirt would never be what it is without the particles of granitic rock borne by the Whitewater River. But I know what I know.

The city of Riverside has kept up in the race. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Los Angeles’s population tripled; San Diego’s and Riverside’s each slightly more than doubled. The Southern Pacific Railroad advises us that Magnolia Avenue’s seven lovely miles may now be
traversed by luxurious electric cars . . . The city itself is an orange grove . . .
And the pomologist G. Harold Powell writes his wife:
I don’t expect to have such a time anywhere else in California, as I have had in Riverside. There I met the cream of the orange growers and business men.
What kind of time was that exactly?
There is a grand ball here tonight, a masquerade affair. A lot of the young folks are around with their powder and puffs and big wigs . . . The orchestra is making things lively as it does every night.

But in the southeastern reaches of the county, where the entity called Imperial holds sway, the ballroom is a patch of sand.

Brawley hopes to be 20,000 IN 1920; while Palm Springs, once taken notice of for its ability to ripen grapes early for the Chicago market, is still described as a “little settlement.” The grapes are gone now.
At present the town is known widely as a health resort.
It possesses a store and four hotels. Consumptives live in tents near the
agua caliente
which they pray will cure them.
In a moment the warm liquid sand closes around the body and it feels as if
the
bather were being sucked in and down by the clinging tentacles of some living creature that had the power to hold the body in a most

soothing and satisfactory embrace.
Dr. Murray’s hotel has enlarged itself over the years; palm trees and rose-bushes crown it
(he made a success through his own efforts; he’ll sell out at a fancy price);
across the street, the Indian reservation’s figs achieve the Los Angeles market; but isn’t this as good as life will ever get? Once upon a time, we dug irrigation channels from the Whitewater River, but the milk-white sand which gave that watercourse its name kept clogging our intakes; finally, irrigation proved too expensive.
¹¹¹
Palm Springs seems doomed to remain, now and forever, a
little settlement.
Indeed, what if littleness itself cannot be maintained? Not far away from Palm Springs lie the dead orange groves of Palmdale, which became a ghost town because
water complications arose.

Meanwhile, Imperial, within her eponymous county, at least, drinks in the
agua caliente
of perpetual water and intoxicates herself with visions of moneyplums! Imperial paves herself, improves her arterial system with new canals, rushes new crops to market!
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.

But in the town of Coachella, which belongs much more to Imperial than to Palm Springs,
WATER IS
not quite
HERE
, not entirely. To be sure, ever since 1906 Coachella has overcome the necessity of importing beets, carrots, radishes,lettuce and other vegetables. Local water suffices for that. So Coachella picks up heart. But how could she ever hope to stand beside Queen Riverside or even Duchess Calexico without hanging her head?

Margaret Tyler, born in 1916, grew up on a ranch southwest of Coachella. In 2004 she said to me: I can remember back when we didn’t have an automobile; we just had a horse and wagon. I don’t know; I guess there were roads, sort of. People just drove their wagons across the desert to get to town. I can remember, it must have been in 1920 or so, when they paved the highway, and that seemed pretty upscale! Sometimes I couldn’t get to school because there used to be flooded fields. I don’t think they have rain like that now . . .

We sat around the coffee table in the Tylers’ air-conditioned home in Palm Desert, and the morning promised to be hot.—Coachella was the big town early on, the old lady said.

The big town! I thought. Where paved roads were upscale, and even the Date Festival couldn’t be counted on!—In 1911 there was one in Coachella, another old-timer had told me. They made efforts for volunteers, and the next year you wouldn’t have volunteers.

To be sure, Coachella grows cantaloupes just as does her antagonist. But Brawley’s cantaloupe-packing sheds, not Indio’s and certainly not Palm Springs’s, remain the largest in the world! In 1907, while Imperial County tears herself out of San Diego’s womb, Coachella manages to plant seven or eight hundred acres of cantaloupes. But her artesian wells are already running dry near Indio.
Where three years ago wells flowed several inches over the casing they now have to be pumped . . . This has been the history of all artesian districts . . .

Coachella’s anxious.
A farmer from near Coachella and Mecca last week told us of many wells in that section flowing hundreds of inches, much of the time going to absolute waste. Such action is unfortunate—worse, it is criminal, morally if not legally. It should be made legally criminal . . .

Indio was a railroad center, Mrs. Tyler was saying. By the time I came along there was some green, but there was a lot of desert in between. The town was just about one block. There were some office buildings facing the railroads. The main street was Highway 111, which used to be Cantaloupe Avenue. Oh, yes, there used to be cantaloupes there, probably before my time. When they first started they had an artesian well that would flow at night.

Her husband John interjected: They’d take tractors and build a dike around the area, or a horse and a fresno,
¹¹²
probably, and anyway they’d make this dike and then at night they’d let the artesian well flow.

By the time I came along they had pumps, said Mrs. Tyler.—Reader, we know why they needed pumps. Poor thirsty Coachella!

In 1917, Coachella gets wind of what one of her historians describes as
a plan proposed at an El Centro meeting to build a canal from Palm Springs to the Imperial Valley. It would carry water from the Whitewater River . . . for domestic use in the towns

of the Imperal Valley.
The Whitewater is practically all that Coachella has. Coachella cries:
All the north end of the Salton Sea Valley . . . objects to El Centro and the Imperial Valley taking this water . . .

In Imperial County,
WATER IS HERE
. In Riverside County, Coachella waits.

And that is why the county history, blandly smoothing out its hope, envy and terrible need, lets us know that Riverside Imperial now licks her lips,
waiting only for the application of the water which the great river,
meaning of course the Colorado,
can supply, to duplicate the experience of the Imperial Valley and make of the country tributary to Blythe another rich country for California.

Chapter 65

CITY OF IMPERIAL (1925)

Pavements in time hid the dust of the main thoroughfares, and Imperial, changed in outward form and much in the spirit of the people, had become a modern municipality.

—Edgar F. Howe, 1918

As the Valley’s first and oldest settlement Imperial continues to forge ahead without the aid of booms or other artificial impulse.

—Otis P. Tout, 1931

Imperial is still an important town in the Valley . . . Imperial is still important in Valley affairs.

—Elizabeth Harris, ca. 1958

M
eanwhile, El Centro’s failed competitor, the loser in the war for county seat, remained a few buildings surrounded by fields. At least some trees were starting to come . . .

Imperial is an up-to-date little city, furnished with good telephone and railroad service, electric light and power, and all the modern requirements of an intelligent and progressive community.
These words were published in around 1912. God bless the city of Imperial with her cottonwood-shaded streets!

The Imperial Hotel was still listed in the county directory in 1914. By 1920 it was gone.

According to the Federal census of 1920 Imperial County exceeded in its agricultural production that of eleven states of the Union.
But Imperial City’s population remains only two thousand in 1926.

(Imperial reminds us that she’s
the metropolis of the Imperial Valley.
She’s wide and pretty, with horses and citizens on her white dirt streets.)

In 1926 Imperial City’s ten
business buildings, halls, etc.,
still overshadowed El Centro’s seven; moreover, I am proud to report that the former metropolis possessed both a Methodist Episcopal church and a Methodist Episcopal (colored).

As the decades went on, while Calexico grew in importance thanks to Mexican trade, El Centro continued its growth slowly, inertially, and thanks in part to bureaucratic centralism; while Holtville became, if such a noun is appropriate for a Paradise of irrigation, a backwater, and Imperial simply withered. In my day it is easy to pass through Imperial County without ever noticing, let alone stopping in, those two latter towns. Holtville by virtue of its stagnant isolation just off the freeway does at least remain a shell of itself; whereas Imperial is nothing but a junction of roads in northeastern El Centro, a flatness of whiteness and tanness, an unpainted Rothkoscape upon which was once painted, decades into the empire of the infinite past, fifteen young men in gorgeous-squiggled uniforms, brandishing their brass instruments, gazing straight at us from beneath their caps which said
IMPERIAL
; their drum said
QUEEN CITY INDEPENDENT BAND
; in the center, upon a rich dark heart, the same darkness as their uniforms, was superimposed the word IMPERIAL. Then decade after decade went by with the newspapers saying
BROCCOLI:MARKET ABOUT STEADY.