Imperial (48 page)

So a newcomer such as Wilber Clark would have found a handful of homesteaders at work inscribing visible alterations within the invisible property-squares they’ve bought. He’s in on the ground floor; banking on the fact that
WATER IS HERE
, he’ll work hard and take chances to win his stack of silver dimes, but I’m sure he’s a careful gambler, for, after all, in this Arid America of ours, first is not best. Don’t you remember what Captain Hobbs found here?
There were eight women and children, and nine men. The body of a child had been almost stripped of flesh . . .
And Wilber Clark has his family with him in that automobile: his father John, who’s a former Superior Court judge of Tulare County, and his sister Margaret S., who will in due course become Mrs. W. H. Dickinson of Yuma. These details are courtesy of Judge Farr’s biographical directory. Lacking their marriage certificate (for in the county nuptial index, the only groom of even the vaguest relevance was a Frank Oscar Clark), I believe that Wilber Clark has not at this juncture espoused the mysterious Elizabeth F.; Farr would scarcely have neglected her if she were in that car, which must have been crowded, noisy, buttock-bruising and precarious on that journey down from Los Angeles.

What does it mean to enter into Imperial by automobile in 1901? They certainly didn’t have to come that way. There was a stagecoach from Old Beach right to Imperial, pulled by three pairs of horses. There was a train to Old Beach.

I suppose that they must have proceeded by way of Indio, since the way along Imperial’s western tail remained the rockiest of roads. Four years later, the newspaper reports that two married couples
tried to drive to the mountains by way of Calexico, got lost on the desert and almost died. They made their way back to the Valley just in time.
That is why I am willing to call Wilber Clark a gambler.

In Campo, California, which lies a few miles northeast of Tecate, Mexico, there is a Motor Transport Museum, one of whose ancient mechanic-restorers advised me on this question.

If it was 1901 he would have had to go through Palm Springs and Banning, said Mr. Calvert. Are you sure it was 1901? Maybe it would have been closer to 1905.

No, I’m pretty sure it was 1901.

There was very, very few cars in Los Angeles in that year. Maybe ten cars then. Anybody that had a car, there was notoriety about that. Only the wealthy could afford it. You were looking at a thousand dollars, or maybe seven hundred and fifty . . . Do you know what kind of car he had?

No, Judge Farr only says an automobile, or implies it. Would he have had a license plate I could track down?

Before 1910 they issued you a number, and you made it yourself, out of leather or wood. Starting in 1914, they started issuing porcelain plates every year; actually it was porcelain on steel . . .

I called the California Department of Motor Vehicles, whose robotized switchboard connected me to a lady who referred me to a woman at Information Services who passed me on to Customer Relations where the phone rang and rang eternally. So we will have to imagine the Clarks’ journey.

We know from Judge Farr that the Paradise he will eventually build holds experiments with
some fifty varieties of grapes . . . A profitable express business has been worked out on the same.
Undoubtedly he has inspected the vineyards of Los Angeles. And as he motors east of Ontario, he spies Secondo Guasti’s new young realm of grapevines, the first of which was planted just last year; in due time they will take up thousands of acres. The Inland Empire’s orchards tempt him all around.

It pleases me to imagine that he rested here, perhaps even in Riverside, whose citrusscapes would have been glowing along quite nicely by now, for it had already been thirty years since the planting of Mrs. Tibbetts’s first orange seedling. From his earliness and civic-mindedness (proofs of which will appear), I believe Wilber Clark to have been a well informed man. Resolved to homestead in Semi-Tropic California, he knew that Riverside navel oranges usually took first prize in the Citrus Fair—all the more reason to imagine him taking his family for a cool stroll along Magnolia Avenue! Besides, the townsite of Imperial was so far and lonely a distance away from Riverside (it now takes about two and half hours in light traffic) that they might never be back there. Although 1901 was not a great year for oranges and lemons in Riverside, the heart of the Inland Empire must have been pretty nonetheless. Mrs. Bettner’s mansion had been in place for a decade now; and I like to imagine Wilber imagining being married to someone like Elizabeth F. and dwelling happily and forever with her in a home like this, hidden away from the sun and illuminated by oranges. His father and sister dream equally glorious dreams, because they’re Imperial bound!

Then they get back into their car and smoke and shudder down the road toward Indio. It’s getting hotter with every mile. Horses shy out of their way.

One photograph in the Imperial County Historical Society Pioneers Museum is captioned
Mr.
[
and
]
Mrs. Virgil Patterson Dec. 2, 1907 Holding 13th marriage liscense
[
sic
]
of Imperial County in one of first three cars in the Valley.
Wilber Clark’s auto must have been quite a conversation piece.

VESEY’S MAXIM

In my mind I have this idea about Imperialites: They’re sparsely settled agriculturalists, which implies that throughout much of the twentieth century they resemble pioneers, which in turn means that they can make something out of nothing. Assemblyman Victor V. Vesey, lifelong Republican in a Democratic county, which says something for him right there, arrived in Brawley in 1949 (he would have been about thirty-four) to take over his dead father’s ranch: six hundred and forty acres of cattle, which he, a neophyte, decided to transform into sugar beets, cotton, grain, alfalfa! Here is what a neighbor advised him to do: Drive around the road until you find a crop that looks good. Go and see that farmer and talk to him about it. Find out what he did and didn’t do.—Victor Vesey made that maxim his own. And he succeeded. I respect his success.

Wilber Clark is Victor Vesey; he’s quite Imperial. He motors cautiously toward the unknown, determined to buy a piece of desert and flourish on it. He’ll build his Wilfrieda Ranch amidst the creosote bushes of Imperial.

A TRAVELLER IN TROPICAL CALIFORNIA

So that is who he is. But who
was
he, really, this person whose voice we will never hear?

The
California 1890 Great Register of Voters Index
lists a Wilber Clark, aged twenty-nine, of 128 North Johnston Street, Los Angeles. He is the only person of that name in all the entries for Los Angeles. In that year, Hollywood has grown into a handful of houses in empty grey desert.

Out of the many John Clarks in the 1870 census, there’s exactly one in Tulare County, a John L., aged thirty-one years, who hails from Ohio. The Mormon genealogists I hired in Utah assured me that in fact this John Clark was born in Tennessee in about 1827. As for his son Wilber, they believed that his birthplace was Iowa and that his life began in about 1861. In 1880 he left traces in Kaweah and Mineral King, Tulare, where the census taker recorded his occupation as farmhand.

In September of 1874, we find a John Clark elected county judge in Tulare County; I also spy a Mrs. Mary A. Clark,
née
Graves, who happens to be a survivor of the Donner Party. One of the cannibals, George Foster, had proposed her for eating, she being neither wife nor mother; another man had defended her. Could Wilber Clark be her son? Mary Ann Graves, who was twenty years old, got married in 1847, only one month after her rescue; for (so another survivor giggled):
Tell the girls that this is the best place for marrying they ever saw.

Since Wilber Clark was twenty-nine in 1890, then, just as the genealogists claimed, he would have been born in about 1861, fourteen years after the marriage of this Mary Ann Graves, who would have reached the age of thirty-four. Why not? In the novel that I plotted, a historical fiction entitled
Imperial,
Wilber Clark’s childhood was a trifle dark-tinted by his mother’s ordeal. When rats are experimentally starved, they can learn to hoard food, a behavior which persists even after plenitude has been restored by their laboratory god. A likely result of Mary Ann Clark’s maiden days might have been prudent stewardship, if not outright acquisitiveness. Wouldn’t her son, especially given that he also knew quite well enough the exhaustion of farm labor, have become a careful, cautious man?

Why then would he have trusted himself to the desert? Perhaps he possessed what a certain Indian Commissioner assures that the red man lacks, namely, a sense of
the divine angel of discontent . . . The desire for property of his own may become an intense educating force.

Well, my geneaologists bestowed on him a mother named Laura or Matilda Robinson.—So much for Mary Ann Graves!

Our subsequent Mrs. Clark was born in Ohio in around 1820, a date with which my hired private detective concurred. She would therefore have been forty-one at Wilber’s birth, hence quite elderly had she lingered on to 1901; since we do not see her riding to Imperial in that hypothetical automobile, she must have been in her grave.

What about her son? How long did
he
remain on this planet? My friend Paul Foster, pitying me because I had learned scarcely anything concerning another of this book’s subjects, a young girl named Imperial Hazel Deed, grazed various electronic fields on my behalf and rapidly plucked up the death date of a certain Wilber Clark: Pasadena, August 1967. But I had already established that
our
Wilber Clark’s spouse Elizabeth F. would enter widowhood in the 1920s. Moreover, Paul’s Wilber Clark was eighty-five when he passed on, his birth date being 1 March 1882, or approximately two decades later than his namesake’s. Wishing this unknown ghost well, I then disqualifed him.

Having circumvented my hero’s double, and his mother’s, I scarcely knew what to suppose about him. Well, what did he have in the way of what is now called
occupational experience
? When he arrived in Imperial, he commenced a hardware business. So perhaps he owned a hardware store in Los Angeles.

Why had he removed from Tulare in the first place? Much of the southern California land boom of the 1880s took place in Los Angeles. In 1887, a price war between the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe railroads reduced the price of a ticket from Kansas City to the City of the Angels from a hundred and twenty-five dollars to one dollar. Although fares soon rose to twenty-five dollars, the boom was on. Between 1886 and 1888, seventeen hundred and seventy subdivisions, replats and tract maps got filed in Los Angeles County.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

But in 1890 the Census Department made it official: The American frontier was now closed. What was a pioneer to do next?

That railroad price war occurred exactly when the Wright Act permitted the formation of irrigation districts. By 1890, nine percent of Los Angeles County and one percent of San Diego County possessed irrigated farmland. Possibilities for future irrigation smelled delicious.
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.

Wilber Clark might well have heard of the failure of Barrett’s Boring Outfit to find oil in the Imperial Valley. Surely he read of the birth and almost immediate bankruptcy of the California Irrigation Company, whose aim was to do intentionally what the great Colorado flood would soon do by accident. For Wilber Clark was scarcely the only California gambler!

Perhaps he attended that year’s Irrigation Congress, which assembled in Los Angeles. If so, he surely heard the following: (1)
I can’t help believing in people.
(2)
The essence of the industrial life which springs from irrigation is its democracy.

John Wesley Powell’s voyage down the Colorado made the newspapers in 1895. That river contained an infinite amount of water, didn’t it? Meanwhile, L. M. Holt
^{kept us all abreast of “Semi-Tropical California,” now also known as TROPICAL}
CALIFORNIA, in this case Palm Springs, which is to say
The Land of Early Fruits and Vegetables
. (Thirty-eight years later, in the same book that features a glowing biography of Wilber Clark, Judge Farr will make identical claims about the Imperial Valley.)
There is no known valley in the State that can compare with Palm Valley for its early fruits and vegetables.

And here came the cantaloupe price boom of 1898-99! These exotic melons originated in Mecca, a space colony in the soon-to-be-named Coachella Valley. The first Imperial Valley cantaloupes of 1919 would retail in Los Angeles for no less than fifteen dollars apiece.

The Chaffey brothers kept selling lots in Etiwanda. In 1900, George Chaffey became President of the California Development Company and coined the name “Imperial Valley.”

Why did Wilber Clark decline to become a citizen of the Inland Empire? I’d imagine because
there is plenty of good land to be had but all Government land worth taking is about gone,
which means that land prices in that dominion now began at the extortionate figure of ten dollars an acre.

But If I were Wilber Clark and possessed an automobile, I would certainly pay a visit to Etiwanda. (Why did that place fail to suit? Perhaps he arrived between trains, which meant that George Chaffey’s civic fountain was off.) I would also send away to George Chaffey’s new entity, the Imperial Land Company, for a map, and study the layout of the Imperial townsite, which for your information lies in the district of Imperial Water Company No. 1, whose area is in turn bounded by the sweet-smelling New River, the Mexican border, the Alamo River, and the edge of Imperial Water Company No. 4. I would wait until the headgates of the Imperial Canal were opened. Then, after filling my water jugs and my spare petrol can, I would join the next wave.