Imperial (62 page)

Chapter 54

SAN DIEGO (1769-1925)

San Diego is wedded to her lethergy [
sic
] and will do nothing. Let the sleeper
sleep. In the meantime, Imperial will continue to do business with Los
Angeles.

—The Calexico Chronicle, ca. 1907

I
mperially speaking, San Diego, first occupied by the Spaniards in 1769, remains an irrelevance. Captain Gaspar de Portolá won’t even get a footnote in my book. The feeling’s mutual: San Diego couldn’t care less about Imperial until Imperial breaks away. Out of San Diego County’s eight million five hundred thousand acres, two million two hundred thousand are
adapted to grazing and farm culture.
As for the rest, namely
the area covered by the Colorado River Desert, and mountains and canyons,
who esteems it in 1873?

Helen Hunt Jackson’s melodramatic novel
Ramona
is likewise of small use to us, for it scarcely looks east of San Jacinto Mountain. All the same, it does describe the Pacific coast just north of San Diego, with many oak-clad canyons, or
cañons
as Mrs. Jackson obligingly orthographizes them. They have long since been urbanized.

As for the urbanizers themselves, in 1777, Governor de Neve found the troops of that pueblo
deplorable, . . . first because they were seen not to conform to uniformity . . .
[
the clothes of
]
many have so greatly deteriorated that they are almost indecent.
In 1796, Acting Governor Arrillaga had nothing to say about the Presidio itself, where he rested for four days after a grueling expedition through the area which I call Imperial; but he noted
small houses of gentiles,
meaning unchristened Indians,
as one enters the arroyo. This arroyo is lush, with lots of poplar, alder, and willow trees. It has water for some distance.
WATER IS HERE
. And so early in the following century, the Franciscan Fathers build the first reservoir, no doubt with the help of Indian labor.

In 1833 a certain Yankee merchant visits San Diego and advises his colleague
: Hides are plenty in the Pueblo, and no goods in the market, if you get there before any vessel, you can sell your cargo off immediately. Calicoes and cottons will bring any price asked.

(Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the author of the famous
Two Years Before the Mast,
passed a significant proportion of those two years in flensing hides at various California ports; then he got to carry them on his head, going barefoot through rocks and surf. In San Diego he counted
about forty dark brown looking huts, or houses, and three or four larger ones, whitewashed, which belonged to the “gente de razon.”
)

In 1839, William Hartnell, who’s followed the requisite path to success in Mexican California—marriage to a wealthy Don’s daughter and conversion to the True Faith—sets out to fulfill the thankless duty of Visitador General of the Missions of Alta California. Never mind his vicissitudes; I grant him entry into our kingdom only for the purposes of quantifying San Diego’s attributes, which he does as follows:
There is a vineyard in San Diego with 5000 stocks, and 350 olive trees and another with 3600 stocks and 167 olive trees,
not to mention pomegranates, a cornfield and a beanfield.
There are also about three or four barrels of spoiled white wine and other than that, nothing worth the trouble to note.
Most of the Mission’s Indians have fled to Los Angeles in search of food and clothing.

In 1851 a British adventurer describes San Diego as
a number of small
adobè
houses . . . situated at the north side of the bay.
Two decades later, the population is estimated at three thousand.
It has a large park containing several hundred acres, which, when improved, will not only prove an ornament but a source of comfort.

Eight years after that, the aforesaid Richard Henry Dana, Jr., now an ageing celebrity, visits San Diego as a passenger and finds
no change whatever that I can see. It has certainly not grown. It is still . . . a Mexican town.

Here’s an old ranch near Mission San Diego. By the standards of my century it’s not much more than a pale cottage half lost in palm trees. The corrals are nearly as empty as the semidesert horizon behind them, part of which is shrub-dotted mountains, everything grey on grey in this photograph from about 1880.

The first transcontinental train pulls into San Diego in 1885. The Sweetwater Dam goes up in 1888. A realtor enthuses:
We may say that San Diego has a population of 150,000, only they are not all here yet.

Here come half a dozen large dams in 1887-97; between 1918 and 1924 five more dams appear, so that San Diego’s thirst is solved for all time.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
In 1925, county reservoirs stand ready to hold nearly half a million acre-feet!

By the way, rest assured that Los Angeles suffers no apprehensions on the score of San Diego.
Where do the fine fruits come from that are now piled on the fruit stands of San Diego? . . . from the great groves of Los Angeles City.
May poor San Diego grow and prosper! There’s not water enough for true commercial accomplishment down there. Therefore,
as it could offer little by way of barter or exchange, our products would necessarily sell for gold.
Imperial County feels the same.

Chapter 55

IN MEMORIAM, IMPERIAL HAZEL DEED (1905-2002)

. . . we realize that California at its worst would be beyond the aspirations of people anywhere, and that California at its best, as we see it now, is beyond even their dreams.

—The Fresno Morning Republican, 1920

R
uth Reed, daughter of the
Imperial Valley Press and Farmer
’s first editor, was actually the first child born in Imperial. Her life might have made a sweet footnote to the triumphalist saga of the Ministry of Capital which you are now reading. But what eponym could be superior to
Imperial Hazel Deed
?

She was born on 14 August 1905, to Mrs. Mary Deed. Wilber Clark had been in Imperial for four years. Who knew when Mrs. Deed got there? Imperial’s green fields were a small huddle in those days, and the baby girl named Imperial might well have opened her eyes in some hot tent buzzing with flies; soon she must have obtained a view of greyish-black mountains in rows upon yellow sand so far away. Her mother must have stood holding her, looking down the swells and bulges of gravel mountains to the blue and yellow horizon, past a salt lake as smooth and hazy as a dream.

Otis P. Tout, who customarily names both parents in these announcements
(the birth of a daughter to Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Rehkopf . . .)
omits any mention of her father. Indeed, his two-sentence account specifically singles out the mother, who must therefore have been alone:
She named the child Imperial Hazel Deed.

Any one of three motives could explain such a name: pride, hope or calculation. If I had to guess, I would choose the first, given that almost everybody in the Imperial Valley in those days must have been either a boomer or a believer.
WATER IS HERE
.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Don’t you think the neighbors loved that name?

Had she been less conspicuously named, I never would have tried to learn about her life. Then I devoted years and dollars to find out almost nothing.

The absence of the father, Oren Deed (all I know of him is that he was born in Kansas of Danish parents and that he wedded Mary in about 1903) is a trifle ominous, but didn’t Barbara Worth herself, happiest and most accomplished of girls, begin life as an orphan? I looked up Imperial Hazel Deed in the death index volumes for Imperial County all the way up to 1980 and missed her, which meant she had married and therefore yielded up her maiden name, or sold out and moved like Wilber and Elizabeth Clark, or was still alive; I could almost imagine meeting some happy, sun-weathered crone sitting in a porch swing near Meloland, lovingly cared for by a clan of children and grandchildren. That was what I wanted.

But in that case, why did the Deeds not appear in the newspapers, the histories?

My hired genealogists believed Mary Deed to be identical with Mary Kunkel, who was a dressmaker in 1910 and a clerk in 1915. She might or might not have married Albert Benjamin Webster in 1915.

This lady was born in 1880 in Bell Creek, Craig, Nebraska, which I suppose from acquaintance with that state to be another hot, dry place. (Nebraska, you will be happy to know, possesses a town called Imperial.) Her mother was from Virginia, her father from Pennsylvania. They seem to have been farmers, and therefore the perfect ancestors of an Imperial pioneer. On the census for that year, she was listed as
baby daughter,
and her mother’s profession was
keeping house.
Her sister Birdie was a year older than she. Her brothers George and Luther became chicken farmers. In 1900, they shared a home with Birdie.
⁹⁸
Mary, who would have been twenty, must have already gone ahead to California by then, for she is not listed on their page of the census schedule. The Chocolate Mountains would have been dusty blue, although there would not yet have been any Salvation Mountain ahead like a bunch of melted candles. Surely Mary would not have been in the Imperial Valley. George Chaffey had not opened his headgates.

Who came to Imperial first, Mary or her younger brother George? The latter owned a farm in El Centro in 1910, but like Mary he was invisible; neither Judge Farr nor Otis P. Tout mentions him. At that time he was twenty-seven and single. The genealogists determined him to have possessed
black hair, brown eyes, short build.
By 1920 he had married and removed to Tulare County with his wife Virginia; they were sufficiently well off to board a hired maid.

Here are Mary Deed’s children: the one we care about, whom my genealogists could find listed only as Hazel G. Deed,
in California in about 1906,
an error of only a few months, but all the same a reminder not to trust overmuch in apodictic fact; Mildred M. Deed, born in Nebraska in about 1908, so evidently Mary Deed had returned to her birthplace by then; and Clarence Deed, born in Sacramento in 1911. The family’s continued absence from the territory of this book is further implied by the fact that no one named Deed is listed in the
Imperial Valley Business and Resident Directory 1912-1913.
There are no Deeds in the county indices of grantors and grantees up to 1919, no Deeds in the marriage index, either. The closest I could find was the registered marriage in Holtville of a certain Samuel Deed, or more probably (the handwriting is difficult) Dees, who was twenty-three and a scion of Arkansas, to an Uloa Harlan of Texas, aged eighteen, on 9 October 1911, six years after Imperial Hazel Deed was born. So now you know that I have exercised due diligence.

The fact that Imperial was now known as Hazel I take to be evidence of her mother’s disillusionment with the subject area of this book. They had left Imperial County, and did not want to remember it.

Who was she? What sort of person was she? What did she look like? Perhaps she had
black hair, brown eyes, short build.

In the archives of Mexicali there is a photograph of a bleached and bygone señorita in a short skirt as blindingly white as her thighs; she holds a grey parasol, smiling with awkward grace.—This is not enough, but it is something. As for Imperial Hazel Deed, all I know of her is her name.

Mary was thirty in 1910, and may well have kept enough of her youth to allure Albert Benjamin Webster five years later. In the federal census record she was listed as head of household.

In 1920, Imperial Hazel Deed was fourteen, according to the census. Once again, her estimated birth year was
about 1906.
She could read and write. She was living in Selma, Fresno, California. What do we know about her?
White, female, single, daughter, able to read, able to write.
Her mother, now on the verge of forty, was a widow, and therefore still head of household. She could not have been in dire circumstances, for she owned her own home. Like her daughter, she was literate. Her former father-in-law, Frank Deed, was living in that home, which makes me think that Imperial Hazel’s father must have died instead of abandoning the family. If Mary had indeed married Albert Benjamin Webster in 1915, then she was twice widowed in short order. Frank Deed was sixty-three by then. The young girl’s brother Clarence would have been about nine years old. In 1942 he was going to join the Navy. He died in 1984 and is buried in the Inland Empire—in Riverside National Cemetery, to be exact. What about Mildred?
White, female, single, daughter.

What was the story of Imperial Hazel Deed? I tried birth and death certificates for San Diego County. There were no matches. The county clerk was nice enough not to charge me. Another county clerk named Alejandra found a girl named Bernstein Deed, born in 1992.—It’s the only one that pops up, she said. The father was born in California in 1965.

Then in the State Library I finally tried the
California Death Index 1905-1929,
where I found: DEED HAZEL. AGE 14. COUNTY 10 (which was Fresno). MONTH 3, DAY 20, YEAR 20, DATE REGISTERED 20, STATE FILE #11526.

So I went to the Office of Vital Statistics for a death certificate and it was certainly hers.

She died at nine-thirty in the morning on Saturday, the twentieth of March, 1920, of peritonitis brought on by a ruptured appendix. An operation had been attempted the previous day. She died in the hospital. There was no autopsy.