Imperial (88 page)

Chapter 79

THE MEXICAN USER IS A CUSTOMER, NOT AN OWNER (1904-1918)

Anything can be removed from water except salt and politics.

—Leon B. Reynolds, Professor of Sanitary Engineering, 1930

F
ortunately,
WATER IS HERE
. In 1904, the Secretary of the Interior authorizes the Reclamation Service to commence Laguna Dam. It will be forty-seven hundred and eighty feet long and two hundred and fifty feet wide.
Now that modern irrigation methods are conducted on a large scale, the dam of Assouan is matched by that of Laguna.

You’re saying that Laguna isn’t good enough? In 1918 Judge Farr’s history of Imperial County assures us that
the construction of a series of huge reservoirs
sucked from the Colorado
is now under contemplation,
a deed which
would be sufficient to irrigate all the irrigable land below the Grand Canyon in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California and New Mexico, leaving a vast surplus for Mexico.
¹⁵²

In 1925, the Imperial Irrigation District’s Calexico director repeats:
I believe that if the river is controlled and conserved, that there will be sufficient water for both sides,
meaning Northside and Southside. But regarding Southside, a member of the Colorado River Control Club elaborates:
The Mexican user is a customer; he is not an owner.

Chapter 80

MARKET PRICES (1925)

My country is abundant in wheat, maize, beans, cotton, tobacco, watermelons, calabashes, and cantaloupes . . .

—Palma, Chief of the Yumas, to Bucareli, 1776

C
oachella green beans were going for twelve to fourteen cents a pound, while Kentucky wonder beans were going from eighteen to twenty cents.
Local Imp[erial] cucumbers 2.25 to 2.50 per lug.
Tamerlane’s warriors come galloping into the square, but who says they’re the enemy? We’re going to sell them lettuce!
Lettuce: Local: Best, 79@90; poorer, 60 per field crate. Imperial Valley: all sizes. [email protected]; few, 2.50 crate.
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life. You could buy tomatoes from Mexico, and Mexican peppers, too, of course, especially chili peppers. Now for cattle.
Steer prices advanced generally 25@40 over a week ago. The week’s top on steers was 9.50, for five cars of good 1,181 pound Imperial Valley fed bullocks, establishing a new high mark for the current year. The price spread of [email protected] took in the bulk of steer offerings, mostly 885 to 1,250 pound Imperial Valley, Utah and Texas fed, although a few lots of more desirable kinds cleared from [email protected]
.

These price quotations on the Los Angeles market, what do they say about Imperial? Well, we certainly need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

These are the actual prices obtained between 7 and 8 o’clock, March 30, 1925 . . . Terms: Cash on the walk.

Chapter 81

SAN DIEGO (1925)

. . . and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world . . .

—J. G. Ballard, 1966

W
e hurled off her yoke back in 1907 and became our own county. All the same, throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century San Diego still shares with Imperial a single agricultural empire. In 1910, Los Angeles and San Diego are among the top six counties for corn production, while Imperial has achieved that same exalted rank for both kaffir corn and milo maize. (Meanwhile, Los Angeles and Riverside are up there for hay and forage; Los Angeles alone, for potatoes and sweet potatoes.)

How could this not continue forever? What could San Diego’s progress ever entail but richer fields? In 1925 Escondido has already shipped out two hundred and fifty tons of tomatoes by April. A new fifty-thousand-dollar citrus packing house announces itself; a twenty-acre apricot orchard goes on sale in Oceanside. In 1936,
San Diego supports extensive ranches and groves of oranges, lemons and various agricultural products.
San Diego is nearly Imperial.
I doubt as to whether anyone should be accused of negligence or carelessness in failing to foresee that which had never happened before.

Chapter 82

THE LONG DEATH OF ALBERT HENRY LARSON (1903-1926)

This is the spirit of the Imperial Valley. There is ability coupled with willingness, abounding health, mental, moral and physical, faith in the district leading inevitably to faith in oneself, and a cheerful optimism that makes life worth something.

—Edgar F. Howe and Wilbur Jay Hall, 1910

WHY MY DATES ARE UNIMPEACHABLE

The death certificate of Albert Henry Larson, filed in the city and county of Imperial, tells us that he was a sixty-year-old farmer whose date of birth even the listed informant, his wife Elizabeth, didn’t exactly know (or perhaps the coroner desired not to trouble her at this bad time; he had not learned her date of birth, either), that like the majority of the county’s farmers he was white, that the names and birth-places of his parents were also, as you might have guessed, unknown, that the address of the home he and Elizabeth had shared was
7 Miles No. West,
that he died on the thirtieth of March, 1926, and that the cause of death was as follows:
Jury Verdict: Suicide by shooting and slashing wrist with a razor.

He had lived on that farm, or near it, for twenty-three years, and in California for twenty-six. Accordingly I will suppose that he arrived in Imperial in 1903, some two years after Wilber Clark. Miss Margaret Clark would then have been completing her tenure as postmistress, so I’d imagine she would have been acquainted with him just as functionaries of communication know everybody in little pioneer towns—unless, of course, the Larsons lived gloomily alone. Was Albert Henry Larson even married in 1903? Did a man whose parents remained
unknown
ever receive mail? Unlike, for instance, W. F. Holt, he is not listed in the Imperial County Recorder’s index of grantors, 1851-1907, nor in the corresponding index of grantees. If he bought or sold land before Imperial became its own county, that transaction must not have been legally registered. And so I begin to wonder whether Paul S. Taylor’s contention that from the very beginning Imperial County was meant to be an exploitative empire of vast acreages tended by migrant workers—call it a factory farm, or Chandlerscape—was a touch propagandistic. How many Mexicans, Japanese or Filipinos worked for Wilber Clark? We have no idea; very possibly none; the last we saw of her, his widow was a laborer. And what about Albert Henry Larson? Could he have become a capitalist bigshot without buying and selling land?

(On 13 August 1904, a Gustav Larson appears as the grantee in a real estate transaction with Charles W. Fernald; on 15 April 1907, a Gus Larson, who may or may not be Gustav, buys land from Nathan D. Nichols. What does this have to do with Albert Henry Larson? I wish I could take out my ouijah board and ask Judge Farr. Larson does not even show up in Farr’s biographical index of 1918. Perhaps he failed to represent
the spirit of the Imperial Valley
in its most boosterish light.)

My hired genealogists hesitantly disinterred an Albert Henry Larson who was naturalized in Anoka County, Minnesota, between 1917 and 1918. Should we believe them? The birthplace is a three-letter masterpiece of illegibility on the death certificate.—Turning to Otis P. Tout, I discover only an Olaf Larson, who seems to have been a clerk. Howe and Hall inform me that a certain John Larson,
four and one-half miles northwest of Imperial, is the most contented man I ever met. He came to the Valley in 1902 with his friend Joseph Hanson . . .
The date is almost the same; likewise the address; it would seem that he threshes his barley crop within two and a half miles of Albert Henry Larson. Does this Larson have a wife named Elizabeth? (As I implied, Albert Henry Larson remains obstinately absent from the county index of marriages from 1903 to 1923.)
A bachelor, with the passion for neatness of a man-of-warsman
—this is John Larson—
he has a home place scrupulously clean; so that one instinctively looks about for the woman who keeps it so.
It hardly sounds like our man. Certainly I wouldn’t suppose Albert Henry Larson to have been the most contented pioneer in all Imperial.

Imperial is a hot flat diorama of this world, most of whose inhabitants live and die without a name. Imperial Hazel Deed, we’ll never learn who she was. Wilber and Elizabeth Clark, did they consider themselves deserving of the Imperial encomium
he made a success through his own efforts
? And Albert Henry Larson, about him I can tell you scarcely more than I could about an illegal Chinese laborer who lived and died in a tunnel under Mexicali. What is
the spirit of the Imperial Valley
? What is the spirit of this world?

In the photographs of Hetzel, who arrived in the Valley a decade after Larson, the canals are wide and there are herds of dark horses on white sand, not to mention dark cows on salt-and-silver fields. Men in brimmed hats buck hay bales on the beds of horsedrawn wagons, and one horseman, who for all I know could be Larson himself, clasps his hands together with the reins between them, the gesture strangely combining utility with worshipfulness. Faded cowboys lead their fading herds across bleached desert prints. It would be too easy to say that they are all gone; even now Imperial County beef brings in the silver dimes of American success.

A man in boots and waders stands in muck. He reflects himself in irrigation rivulets. Oh, yes, Imperial’s all parallel lines; Imperial is water-furrowed all the way to the horizon. What if this uncaptioned old photograph were of Albert Henry Larson? Since what made his story begin for me was his end (I was flicking randomly through ancient death certificates in El Centro, and caught him), I imagine him as the antithesis of Judge Farr’s Wilber Clark; a failure, a tired man without books or a date orchard, a man whose life must have for whatever reason become a long death. And I want to know why.

Bearded men stand raptly admiring their own huge sugar beets. (There is something masturbatory about this image.) A satisfied pioneer stands stalwart between stalks of his own sugarcane-forest. Did Larson experience seasons like this, when he could have believed in unlimited improvements?

The
Imperial Valley Business and Resident Directory 1912-1913
does inform us of the existence of a

Larson, Albert H,
rancher, R F D No 2 bx 77, Imperial, r 6 mi NW.

Six miles or seven miles, who cares? The death certificate shows signs of haste. Or did Larson change farms? In that case, why can I not find him in the list of grantees?

Two years later, the directory has consolidated and improved Wilber Clark’s address from a vague place in Mobile to Elder Ditch in Seeley; but Albert Larson’s address remains unchanged; it’s “northwest of” but not anywhere in its own right. Perhaps land speculators have scarcened in that vicinity now that El Centro won the contest for county seat. I have been out there, staring down into a stock farm from Larsen Road, vainly guessing at the suicide’s former whereabouts (for on that day the County Recorder’s office was closed), and the land seems fertile enough, thanks in part to proximity to the New River flood, whose gorge is even wider and deeper here than in Mexicali. Rancher, R F D No 2, and
suicide by shooting and slashing wrist with a razor;
what else is sure? I’ve found a Larson’s Road in County Assessor’s Mapbook 43; but which Larson was that named for?

Come 1920, Larson’s address finally gains the spurious exactitude of Wilber Clark’s:

Larson, Albt H
r Wideawake Sch Dist nr New River PO bx 635 Imperial

Wideawake appears on Thurston’s map (page xv), west of and equidistant between Imperial and El Centro. Larson would have almost been Wilber Clark’s neighbor. Perhaps the two men met at Roth and Marshall’s Feed Store in El Centro; perhaps their Elizabeths once sat side by side at a Fourth of July barbeque in Holtville. P. C. Johnson, who bought up much of Larson’s land after his death, is described by the County Recorder as a dairyman;
he
certainly knew the dairyman Wilber Clark; that zone of American Imperial was a small flat world.

Elizabeth Larson, formerly and later known as Elizabeth Black, must have lived in the neighborhood for years, since on 26 November 1923 we find the County Recorder announcing an action in California Superior Court filed by Eleanor Clark, plaintiff, against seventeen defendants, four of whom are John Does, two of which are banks (there is also a mill and lumber company) and one of whom is Elizabeth Larson. Their mortgage—two adjacent lots in Imperial Townsite—had gone into foreclosure back in December 1917. Perhaps these entities and individuals had speculated together on the commercial prosperity of Imperial. Elizabeth Larson must have gambled in a very small way, which implies no grand capital on her part; and as we’ve just read, she lost the gamble. In any event, a year before Eleanor Clark sued her, she had already made her mark on the other side of a bad mortgage, in a noticeably peculiar transaction: Albert Henry Larson somehow received the appointment of California Superior Court Commissioner, for the purpose of selling to his own wife, for $3,121.85, lawful money, sixty foreclosed acres regarding which Elizabeth had been plaintiff against three Donleys.

On the eighteenth of April, 1924, an Albert H Larson pays cash for a parcel in Imperial township. See the direct gaze of the confident man! In June of that year, T. A. Brumbelow and Albert H. Larson,
by occupation Ranchers,
appear in a sad document whereby
the said mortgagers mortgages
[
sic
] to Farmers and Merchants Bank for ten percent per year
all that certain personal property situate and described as follows, to-wit: