Imperial (42 page)

Sixty miles east of San Diego, Warner’s Ranch still embraces two Mexican land grants of San José del Valle and Valle de San José, 26,600 acres in toto. But just now as I write
Imperial,
in this forward-looking year of ours 1887 (by special permission of the Pope, our Virgin of Guadalupe’s image has just been crowned in Mexico; meanwhile, the Wright Act has authorized the formation of local irrigation districts here in California), news comes to me that Warner has retired to Los Angeles. What will happen to Warner’s Ranch? My prediction: Subdivision.

Truth to tell, we cannot all be Colonel Couts. How many Mexican land grants and rich Spanish wives are left? Nor does it seem profitable to follow William Walker’s example. But that’s not saying we can’t center ourselves in petty empires of one kind or another. East of Los Angeles, where there were never multitudes of Indians, Chinese can do our laundry and waterworks will do the rest. So ring down the curtain on those vast
rancherías
! It’s time for agrarian democracy!

Example of subdivision: The city of Jurupa, almost instantaneously renamed Riverside, sprouts upon the ranch of Luis Rubidoux and his Spanish wife. We may note that their sixty-seven hundred acres equal less than a quarter of Juan Bandini’s original Jurupa Ranch; subdivision has already begun. And why do the Rubidouxes sell out? They’re tired of paying property taxes on land they consider to be “utterly worthless,” and indeed refuse to pay them. The great drought of 1862-64 renders cattle ranching unattractive. In 1869, the capitalists of the California Silk Center Association pay Mr. Rubidoux two and a half dollars per acre. In 1893, after several vicissitudes, that land will be worth between one and two thousand dollars an acre, and while the Riverside Directory assures us that
the Rubidoux family . . . were blessed with plenty and were then, as now, highly respected,
the five inhabitants of Riverside with that surname will be laborers, a hostler and a teamster, and the Rubidoux Cafe will belong to a fellow named Wentworth. That’s life.

“A STRICTLY NEIGHBORHOOD AFFAIR”

Our epigraph, namely, Judge North’s statement of intention, did not predate the actual foundation of Riverside by even so much as a year. The first house went up, and the first canal was gouged, in 1870. On the first of March in the following year, the first orange tree was planted in Riverside. And why not? Southern California had just succumbed to the condition called “orange fever.”
Nothing contributes more to set off the appearance of a festive table than the orange.
I’ve read that for awhile the settlers employed orange seeds from Tahiti, but at some unremembered date, two navel orange seedlings were obtained from the Department of Agriculture in Washington by Mrs. L. C. Tibbetts, whose husband incidentally happened to be pathetically litigious. It’s said that during dry spells she kept her seedlings alive on dishwater. Everyone adored the fruit she raised; navel oranges became the craze. Her first tree was replanted by Teddy Roosevelt and monumentalized behind a fence; you can see it on the label of Parent Tree Brand oranges, packed by G. R. Hand & Company; with two adobe edifices sharing a wide empty ivory-colored boulevard in the picture. (As of 1989 the tree was still alive.) In 1872, when some colonists experimented with planting pretty red opium poppies, came Riverside’s first wedding; the bride was sweet sixteen; perhaps it took place in a shower of orange blossoms, for by the following year a promotional guide for home buyers in Los Angeles County and environs was already informing us that Riverside was irrigating itself nicely and that
here may be seen large nurseries of orange, lime, and lemon trees growing luxuriously.
Two years after that, the Evans-Sayward Syndicate bought the Southern California Colony Association’s lands in Riverside and things really took off!—By the way, grapes fell behind oranges early in the course of Riverside’s Darwinian profit-struggle. In the San Joaquin Valley they grew faster. Well, to hell with grapes; let’s tell a tale of happy oranges.—Here came more canals, not to mention the first Citrus Fair.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
In 1883, Riverside incorporated.

Now, you might think that since Riverside was owned by a syndicate, it no longer conformed to the dictates of Judge North’s prospectus:
Each one’s industry will help to promote his neighbor’s interest as well as his own.
I can’t help believing in people. Indeed, I see Chinese workers before vast wooden islands and spillways of citrus in the Frank B. Devine Packing House,
circa
1888. Their pale, wary, still faces, mostly in caps or hats, discourage me from watching the museum’s CITRUS FILM, which anyhow is OUT OF ORDER .

In 1893 the Riverside Fruit Exchange, later to grow into the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, came into being, and you’ll be reassured to know that
the foundation of the organization is the local association, a strictly neighborhood affair.

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE

What is Riverside? This capital of the Inland Empire should be emblematized not only by its capitalists, but also by its homesteads—for instance, the mansion of Mrs. James Bettner, a “citrus pioneer’s” widow. Her departed husband must have had better things to do than plant lemon seedlings, for he not only helped organize the Riverside exhibits at two New Orleans World’s Fairs, but also became first President of the Southern California Lawn Tennis Association. I hope and suspect that the widow found herself well taken care of. In the 1893-94 city directory she appears as

Bettner, Mrs. Catherine,
horticulturist, res Magnolia ave.

Sitting in the gazebo, whose shadow-outlined diamonds of sunlight are sometimes more or less glaring on the cloven hexagon of bench which runs around the inside perimeter, Mrs. Bettner centers herself in a universe of oranges. The gazebo floor is a sort of spiderweb; quadrilateral boards fixed in concentric parallels, painted grey.

Now that she is dead, and the orange groves almost gone, I, transit passenger through the Inland Empire, stop at her home, which is now called the Heritage House, and I note that her two storeys of indented porches are lovingly, ornately shaded. I see shutters on the windows, domes, seashell-like ledges under the windows, everything shuttered against heat and light because we are almost on the edge of Imperial.

Through the open crisscross around the arched doorway and through the doorway itself I see a gracious palm tree, widening as it ascends, ringed round with ferns on its island; and hoses sparkle silver on the lawns as the gardener rakes and trundles. Green, green trees cast the Heritage House in a spell of shade. It smells as fresh here as do Imperial’s hayfields in the cool of a summer evening.

Did Mrs. Bettner plant this Japanese gingko? Surely she remains present in the smell of honey and of sun on old wood. The old white carriage house is almost blinding in the September afternoon sun.

I stand beneath a magnolialike tree which bears red petaled blossoms like labia wthin pine cones. I see, as she must have seen, palm trees reflected in her house’s dark windows.

“SUCH A MAGNIFICENT SCENE”

Well, what happened next? Success, of course! I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life. In 1895, Riverside was rated the richest city per capita in America. In 1904, an expert from the United States Department of Agriculture can’t resist writing home about
the magnificent hills and valleys with their seas of orange groves . . . You look down the valley to Riverside six or eight miles away, and the groves are in one solid mass. . . . It is a miracle, the transformation of a desert country into such a magnificent scene, in about twenty years.
It’s small-scale democracy at its finest: For instance, eight miles south of Riverside, I spy the Arlington Heights Trust Co. property: fifteen hundred acres of oranges, five hundred of lemons; it’s
the largest orange and lemon ranch in California.

In 1906, the Riverside Fire Department reports:
Riverside is essentially a city of homes.
Hence the air is clear.
And Riverside is clean morally as well as physically,
thank God.

In 1907, the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange starts advertising, first in Iowa. (Nobody can see the day coming when our orange juice will come from Brazil.) And the Inland Empire keeps getting bigger and better, which must be why in 1930 I find an ad for the Inland Empire Gas Company in El Centro.

IMPERIAL PRELUDE

Forty-eight miles east of Los Angeles, Etiwanda subdelineates itself in blocks from A to T, each block containing sixteen lots. This colony lies at a sufficient remove from the coast for her embryonic orange groves to remain untouched by the common scale and the black fungus. Land goes for a hundred dollars an acre. In 1882, the year of her incorporation, Etiwanda installs the first electric lights in southern California. No one can call George Chaffey anything but progessive. Besides, he’s partnered up with that arch-boomer L. M. Holt! (George’s brother William also signs on, but keeps himself largely irrelevant to the entity I call Imperial.) Holt now owns the
Riverside Press and Horticulturist.
He publishes advertisements and editorials about Etiwanda. (A sample headline: Promises Fulfilled.) By the second year, there’s already a Congregational church. Next comes Ontario, subdelineated out of Rancho Cucamonga. A mutual company of water shares (one parcel of land, one share) keeps irritgation democratic. Before we know it, rows of orange trees already stretch all the way to their convergence point in the dust beneath the mountains—hurrah for Euclid Avenue! In 1904, our USDA man will visit this city, which is now called Ontario, and name it
one of the great orange centres.
By then, the Chaffeys’ name will already be associated with Imperial. Praise the Inland Empire!

REALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE REALTOR

By the way, what is the Inland Empire? The pictorial on my lap opines that it must have been
a term . . . conjured up by real estate developers probably during the first decade of the 20th century,
in which case it would have been an attempt to copycat Imperial herself. Once upon a time, the Inland Empire was Riverside County. By 1920 the
San Bernardino Sun
had counted in its own readers and advertisers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, most of Riverside and San Bernardino counties and some of eastern Lost Angeles County (for instance, Claremont and Pomona) have enrolled. Call it twenty-eight thousand square miles, and confess (as is the case with the entity that I call Imperial) that nobody knows precisely where it ends.

THE VALE OF DEATH

And the Inland Empire keeps annexing whatever it can, but whatever it can goes only so far, to San Gorgonio Pass, which is the gateway to the entity which I call Imperial. A county history gives the lie of that land:
On the other side,
which of course is the Imperial side, the dark side of the moon,
is a low range of sandhills. Beyond is a sandy waste devoid of vegetation . . . called Whitewater Valley.

Chapter 30

SUBDELINEATIONS: WATERSCAPES (1850-1900)

Nearly all of California that slopes toward the Colorado, and drains into it . . . is an absolute desert, within whose limits is included nearly three fourths of the entire area of San Diego county.

—William Hall, State Engineer, 1888

Down here, behind the Coast Mountains, is a vast, strange, hot land that used to have no water . . . This Desert Region we shall mark now with the red chalk. Later on you will hear a wonderful story about this land . . .

—Irmagarde Richards, 1933

SUMMER FAILURES

On the other side lies a low range of sandhills, but so what? Who needs Imperial? On our side, in our Inland Empire, the earth literally swells with water. Do you want any? Drill a hole, and water will spurt out! In San Bernardino Valley, artesian wells ejaculate sixteen million gallons of pure water into the sky
every day!
Judge Willis over in Old San Bernardino has a well four hundred and ten feet deep which vomits up small sucker-fish. (How many artesian wells in San Bernardino in 2007? I telephoned a bureaucrat and she didn’t know.)

In Imperial, the intermittently existing New River,
formed by the surplus waters of the Colorado,
is accompanied by an honor guard of giant sunflowers on its descent to Dry Lake. A geologist named William Blake trekked through here in 1853. Spotting the ancient shoreline of Lake Cahuilla, Blake understood Imperial’s possibilities, and won the visionary’s customary reward: nothing.

But more practical men, which is to say men with their eyes on today’s dollar instead of tomorrow’s, poise armies of shovelers upon neighboring waterscapes.—
In the southwest,
explains
Scribner’s
magazine,
this labor must be largely Mexican, now that public opinion prevents the employment of Chinese. If not Mexican, then it must be the scarce, highly paid, independent white labor of the West.
Therefore, reservoirs are expensive. We need our real estate boomers to lure homesteaders out here; then they’ll invest in waterworks, because I can’t help believing in people. Once they buy ranches and put down their taproots, how much should I charge them per miner’s inch? Evidence that
“ Moisture Means Millions”
is provided by the fact that between 1880 and 1902, no fewer than fifty-seven irrigation companies see fit to gamble in the foothills east of Los Angeles alone.

In short, to pay for our reservoirs we’ll increase our population, who will then need more water. Never mind that;
WATER IS HERE.
An inventory follows: