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CALIFORNIA
A Guide to the Golden State
CALIFORNIA
A GUIDE TO THE GOLDEN STATE
Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project
of the Works Progress Administration
for the State of California
AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES
Sponsored by Mabel R. Gillis, California State Librarian HASTINGS HOUSE • Publishers • NEW YORK
MCMXXXIX
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MAY 1939
WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION
F. C. HARRINGTON, Administrator
FLORENCE S. KERR, Assistant Administrator
HENRY G. ALSBERG, Director of the Federal Writers' Project
COPYRIGHT 1939 BY MABEL R. GILLIS, CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARIAN PRINTED IN U. S. A.
All rights are reserved, including the rights to reproduce this book or parts
thereof in any form.
XXX&KZ&Z&XZ^
Preface
California has so great a diversity of places and people and things that the problem of getting it between the covers of a single book seemed almost unsolvable. The final preparation of this guide has involved the difficult task of choosing between what to put in and what to leave out. The staff of the Federal Writers' Project in Cali- fornia knows that its own trials in gathering, checking and rechecking, assembling, and selecting the thousands of items that go into the making of a guide book have been shared by the editors of the forty-seven other State books in the American Guide Series. But in the course of elimi- nating more words than there are in these pages, the California staff has sometimes wished that its State were just a little smaller, so that it might be described in more detail.
And yet there is more in this book than the editors thought it could possibly include; for, although the distance between the borders of Oregon and Mexico is more miles than they like to think about, they have covered every mile. The book, moreover, has been written to be read, not only by those to whom California is still an unseen and fabulous land of sunshine and oranges, but also by those who will look in these pages for something new and little-known about the everyday California in which they live and work. For readers of both kinds, visitors and residents, the editors have tried to make this book a true mirror of the State and its people. Romance has been kept in its place — Joaquin Murrieta does not jump out from behind every tree or boulder in California to hold up travelers, and yet he does pop up often enough that the observant reader will have little trouble finding him.
The editors wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to the work of others who have preceded them in describing California, and especially to California, an Intimate Guide by Aubrey Drury, Rider's California; A Guidebook for Travelers by Fremont Rider, and Historic Spots in California by H. E. and E. G. Rensch and Mildred Brooke Hoover.
The California staff gratefully acknowledges the aid of Federal, State, and local governmental agencies, and of commercial and civic associations and automobile clubs. Particular appreciation is due the staffs of the Bancroft and State Libraries, for their cooperation.
VI PREFACE
Among the many individuals to whom the editors wish to express their gratitude for generous aid in special fields are : Herbert E. Bolton, Will G. Corlett, Richard Down, Alfred Frankenstein, Louis J. Gill, Florence Hagee, Norman E. A. Hinds, Paul Robinson Hunter, Rupert Hughes, Olaf Jenkins, William Templeton Johnson, Idwal Jones, William Knowles, R. B. Koeber, A. L. Kroeber, Grace L. McCann Morely, Richard S. Requa, C. J. Ryland, Carl Sauer, Windsor Soule, W. L. Stephenson, George R. Stewart, Jr., Hilmuth Ulmer, T. K. Whipple, Lloyd Yoder, and finally the sponsor, Mabel R. Gillis, State Librarian, for her interest and gracious advice.
Field supervision from the Washington office of the Federal Writers* Project was done by Clair Laning, Assistant National Director.
JAMES HOPPER, State Director for Northern California LEON DORAIS, State Director for Southern California
Editorial Staff
FOR NORTHERN CALIFORNIA:
PAUL C. JOHNSON, Assistant State Director
WALTER MC£LROY, State Editorial Supervisor
MARGARET WILKINS, State Editorial Supervisor
MIRIAM ALLEN DfiFoRD NAHUM SABSAY
S. S. GREENLEAF AMY SCHECHTER
ROBIN KINKEAD DOROTHY DONN WAGNER
CORA VERNON LEE CARL WILHELMSON
KENNETH REXROTH THEODORE BARON (photographs)
FOR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA:
KENNETH BOLLEY, Editorial Supervisor
ROBERT C. BROWNELL, Editorial Supervisor
HARRY PARTCH FRANCIS WOODWORTH
FOR THE FEDERAL ART PROJECT, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA:
SONYA SlTOMER CHARLES SuRENDORF
Acknowledgments are also due to the many other persons on the Federal Writers' Project who faithfully aided in the gathering and preparation of material for this book.
vii
KK&G&Z^^
Contents
PREFACE v
EDITORIAL STAFF vii
GENERAL INFORMATION xix
CALENDAR OF EVENTS xxiii
A GUIDE TO RECREATION xxv
Part I. California: From Past to Present
EL DORADO UP TO DATE 3
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 8
THE FIRST CALIFORNIANS 33
CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 41
RICHES FROM THE SOIL 66
INDUSTRY AND FINANCE 79
FROM CLIPPER SHIP TO CLIPPER PLANE 87
WORKING MEN 95
PRESS AND RADIO 109
THE MOVIES 120
EDUCATION 131
THE ARTS 139
ARCHITECTURE 167
Part II. Signposts to City Scenes
BERKELEY 179
FRESNO 188
HOLLYWOOD 192
LONG BEACH 201
Los ANGELES 206
MONTEREY 230
OAKLAND 237
ix
X CONTENTS
PASADENA 245
SACRAMENTO 250
SAN DIEGO 258
SAN FRANCISCO 265
SAN JOSE 298
SANTA BARBARA 304
STOCKTON 311
Part III. Up and Down the State
TOUR 1 Westport — San Francisco — Monterey — Las Cruces [State i] 317
Section a. Westport to San Francisco 318
Section b. San Francisco to Monterey ..... 328
Section c. Monterey to Las Cruces 340
TOUR 2 (Brookings, Ore.) — San Francisco — Los Angeles — (Tijuana,
Mexico) [US 101] 348
Section a. Oregon Line to San Francisco .... 348
Section b. San Francisco to San Luis Obispo . . . 368
Section c. San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles. . . . 391
Section d. Los Angeles to Mexican Border .... 398
TOUR 2A Junction with US 101— Lakeport — St. Helena— Napa—Val-
lejo — Junction with US 40 [State 20-29] .... 409
TOUR 2B Junction with US 101 — Long Beach — Doheny Park [US 101
Alt.] 415
TOUR 2C Wilmington— Santa Catalina Island (By Boat) . . . 423
TOUR 3 (Ashland, Ore.) — Sacramento — Los Angeles — (Mexicali,
Mexico) [US 99 and 99W] 4^7
Section a. Oregon Line to Sacramento 4^7
Section b. Sacramento to Bakersfield ..... 44°
Section c. Bakersfield to Los Angeles 45^
Section d. Pomona to Beaumont 455
Section e. Indio to Mexican Border 457
TOUR 3A (Klamath Falls, Ore.)— Weed [US 97] 463
TOUR 3B Red Bluff— Marysville— Roseville [US 99E] .... 464
TOUR 3C Greenfield— Maricopa— Ventura [US 399] 4^9
TOUR 4 Chilcoot— El Dorado— Sonora— Mariposa [State 49] . . 472
Section a. Chilcoot to El Dorado 475
Section b. El Dorado to Mariposa
CONTENTS XI
TOUR 5 Junction with US 99 — Lassen Volcanic National Park — Quincy — Truckee [State 89] .......
Section a. Junction with US 99 to Morgan Springs . . 5OI
Section b. Junction with State 36 to Truckee . . . 506
TOUR 6 (Lakeview, Ore.)— Alturas— (Reno, Nev.)— Bishop— San
Bernardino— San Diego [US 395] ...... 507
Section a. Oregon Line to Nevada Line ..... $08
Section b. Nevada Line to Bishop ...... S1^
Section c. Bishop to Brown ........ 5J7
Section d. Brown to Junction with US 66 . . . . 521
Section e. San Bernardino to San Diego .... $22
TOUR 6A Junction with US 395 — Susanville — Chester — Red Bluff
[State 36] ............ 528
TOUR 6B Junction with US 395 — Portola — Quincy — Oroville — Marys- ville — Knights Landing — Woodland — Sacramento [State
24] ............. 533
TOUR 6C Junction with US 395 — Warner Hot Springs — Julian — Junc-
tion with US 80 [State 79] ....... 539
TOUR 7 (Tonopah, Nev.) — Bishop — Brown — Mojave — Palmdale —
Los Angeles — Long Beach [US 6] ...... 542
Section a. Nevada Line to Bishop ..'.... 543
Section b. Brown to Long Beach ...... 544
TOUR 8 Alturas— Redding— Junction with US 101 [US 299] . . 54$
Section a. Alturas to Redding ....... 54$
Section b. Redding to Junction with US 101 552
TOUR 8A Canby — Lava Beds National Monument — Bartle . . . 558
TOUR 9 (Reno, Nev.)— Sacramento— San Francisco [US 40] . . 5^2
Section a. Nevada Line to Sacramento ..... 5^2
Section b. Sacramento to San Francisco ..... 57O
TOUR 9A Sacramento — Rio Vista — Antioch — Concord — Oakland [State
24] ............. 580
TOUR 10 (Carson City, Nev.)— Sacramento — San Francisco [US 50] 587
Section a. Nevada Line to Sacramento ..... 587
Section b. Stockton to San Francisco ..... 595
TOUR 11 (Las Vegas, Nev.)— Baker— Barstow— Bakersfield— Morro
Bay [US 91-466] .......... 602
Section a. Nevada Line to Barstow ...... 602
Section b. Barstow to Morro Bay ...... 605
Xll CONTENTS
TOUR 12 (Kingman, Ariz.) — Needles — San Bernardino — Santa
Monica [US 66] 608
Section a. Arizona Line to Barstow 609
Section b. Barstow to San Bernardino . . . . . 6l2
Section c. San Bernardino to Santa Monica. . . . 6l8
TOUR 13 (Quartzite, Ariz.) — Blythe — Indio — Beaumont — Riverside —
Los Angeles [US 60-70] 624
Section a. Arizona Line to Indio 625
Section b. Indio to Los Angeles 627
TOUR 14 (Yuma, Ariz.)— El Centro— San Diego [US 80] ... 635
Section a. Arizona Line to El Centro 636
Section b. El Centro to San Diego 640
DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL MONUMENT 645
Park Tour i Western Entrance at Towne's Pass to
Eastern Entrance in Furnace Creek Wash. [State 190] 649
Park Tour 2 Furnace Creek Junction — Badwater —
Saratoga Springs Junction. [East Highway] . . . 653
SEQUOIA AND GENERAL GRANT NATIONAL PARKS .... 655
Sequoia Park Tour 66l
General Grant Park Tour ........ 665
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK 667
Tour i Arch Rock Entrance Station to Old Village [All-
Year Highway, El Capitan Rd.] 671
Tour 2 South Entrance Gate — Mariposa Big Tree Grove
— Junction with Pohono Bridge Rd. 674
Tour 3 Junction with Big Oak Flat Rd. — Aspen Valley Entrance Station — Tuolumne Meadows — Tioga Pass —
Junction with US 395 [State 120] 675
Yosemite Park Trails 678
GOLDEN GATE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION . 680
Part IV. Appendices
CHRONOLOGY 687
A SELECT READING LIST OF CALIFORNIA BOOKS . . . . . 694
INDEX 699
WKG&Q^WK^
Illustrations
AGRICULTURE
Vineyard, Livermore Valley
Orange Grove, Los Angeles County
Date Palms, near Indio
Orchard Scene in Napa County
Figs in the Dry Yard Horace Bristol
Harvesting Tomatoes in Sacra- mento Valley
Migratory Workers Weighing Peas
EDUCATION
University of California, Berkeley Class in Gardening, Los Angeles
Public School
High School Students, Los Angeles Doheny Library, University of Southern California, Los An- geles
Aviation Students, Los Angeles Lick Observatory, near San Jose
CITIES I.
Airview, San Francisco-Oakland
Bay Bridge Golden Gate Bridge San Francisco Skyline In the Harbor, San Francisco Devastated Area — San Francisco Fire and Earthquake (1906) Southern Pacific Historical Col- lection
California Street from Nob Hill (1900) San Francisco Southern Pacific Historical Col- lection
CITIES II.
City Hall, Los Angeles Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles Airview, Long Beach Watson Airfotos
Between 62 and 63 Young Cotton Picker Mural in Post Office, Whitter Wine Stored for Aging, Napa
County
Bed of Ail-American Canal Construction Work on Imperial
Dam Early Spanish Water Wheel,
near Lone Pine Drought Refugees from Texas
encamped near Exeter
Between 124 and 125 Mt. Wilson Observatory Henry E. Huntington Library,
Pasadena Arcades, Stanford University, Palo
Alto Easter Sunrise Service, Hollywood
Bowl
Race Track, Santa Anita Along the Beach, Santa Catalina
Between 186 and 187 Golden Gate International Ex- position
Dr. Sun Yat Sen Memorial, San Francisco
Sculpture by Beniamino Bufano Photograph by Theodore Baron Chinese Quarter, San Francisco Airview, the Capitol, Sacramento Sutler's Fort, Sacramento Residential Section, Fresno Old Whaling Station, Monterey
Between 280 and 281 Old Spanish Lighthouse, San Diego
"Frashers" Court House, Santa Barbara
xiii
XIV ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
CITIES II.— continued Cabrillo Beach, San Pedro Rose Bowl, Pasadena Los Angeles Tennis Club Tournament of Roses, Pasadena Real Estate Office, Los Angeles
Horace Bristol Los Angeles Restaurant
Horace Bristol
HISTORY
Map of California, Drawn in 1666
Bancroft Library
A View of Sutler's Mill and Cul- loma Valley
Behrman Collection Working at Sutter's Mill (1850), twenty-five feet from where gold was discovered Behrman Collection Russian Church, Fort Ross (1812) Hornitos San Francisco in 1849
Bancroft Library U. of C.
INDUSTRY, COMMERCE AND
Mineral Soda Works, Indepen- dence
Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank
China Clipper Passing San Fran- cisco Clyde Sunderland
Planes on Assembly Line, Santa Monica Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc.
Unloading Steel for Bay Bridges, San Francisco
ARCHITECTURE
Public Library, Los Angeles
Bristol
Palace of Fine Arts, San Fran- cisco
Theodore Baron Carson House, Eureka Court Hollyhock, Barnsdall Park,
Los Angeles Healthhouse, Los Angeles
Luckhaus
Interior, Mission San Miguel Arcangel
Angelus Temple, Los Angeles Yacht Race in Alamitos Bay,
Long Beach Grauman's Chinese Theater,
Hollywood Tortilla Maker, Olvera Street,
Los Angeles
Between 374 and 375 Prairie Schooner, brought to Yolo County by John Bemmerly from Ohio in 1849 Mary E. and Agnes H. Bem- merly, and the Woodland C. of C. On to the Gold Fields
Hodson
Lynch Law (1856) Stage Coach and Train, Cisco (1869)
Southern Pacific Railroad Pony Express; Highwaymen in Pursuit Behrman Collection
TRANSPORTATION
Between 468 and 469 Modern Studio Set during Film- ing
Caterpillar Truck with Wheeler Grapes into Wine Inspecting Peaches at Cannery
Bristol
Oil Wells Along Huntington Beach
Bristol
Oil Tanks
Bristol
Between 562 and 563 Mission San Carlos Borromeo,
near Carmel Mission Santa Barbara Los Angeles County Hospital
Bristol
Tower of California Building, Balboa Park, San Diego
C. M. Johnson 450 Sutter, San Francisco
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS XV
THE NATURAL SETTING
Yosemite Falls, Yosemite Na- tional Park Mt. Shasta
Owens Lake from Cerro Gordo Sand Dunes
Bret Weston
Sierras from Owens Valley Pedro Point, Gulf of Farralon Standard Oil Company of Cali- fornia
Mt. Whitney from Whitney Portal
Between 624 and 625 Donner Lake, from Donner Pass Dante's View, Death Valley Indian Pictograph in California
Desert
U. S. Army Air Corps Along the Merced River in the
Yosemite Valley Deer, Sequoia National Park Lumbering — A Redwood i8-feet
in Diameter
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Map.
STATE MAP back pocket
TRANSPORTATION MAP insert on State map
TOUR MAP front end paper
Los ANGELES reverse of State map
DOWNTOWN Los ANGELES reverse of State map
SAN FRANCISCO reverse of State map
PAGE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (BERKELEY) 185
OAKLAND 241
SACRAMENTO 255
SAN DIEGO 262
DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO : 277
DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL MONUMENT 647
SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK 658-659
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK 669
XVll
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General Information
Railroads: Southern Pacific Lines (SP), Western Pacific R.R. (Feather River Route), Northwestern Pacific R.R., Great Northern Ry., Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry. (Santa Fe), Sacramento North- ern Ry., Union Pacific R.R. (overland Route).
Highways: Network of State highways and good country roads cover the State. Highway patrol to safeguard traffic and enforce regulations. Inspection at State Lines.
Bus Lines: Burlington Lines, Greyhound Lines, Santa Fe Trailways, Union Pacific Stages, Inland Stages, and Feather River Stages.
Air Lines: American Airlines, Inc., Pan American Airways Co., Transcontinental & Western Air Inc. (TWA), United Air Lines, Western Air Express. Los Angeles and San Francisco are terminals for transcontinental lines, San Francisco (Alameda Field) for the Pan American Airways service to Hawaii and the Philippines.
Waterways: Scheduled services to Alaska and Mexico, from San Francisco to Oregon and Washington, and from San Francisco to Sacramento.
Trails: The Pacific Crest Trail traverses the main divides of the highest mountain ranges in the three Pacific states. There are five sections of this trail in California: Lava Crest Trail, 330 miles; Tahoe Yosemite Trail, 260 miles; John Muir Trail, 185 miles; Sierra Trail, 1 60 miles; and Desert Crest Trail, 475 miles. All trails are open in July and Aug.; the southern trails from May through November. For information address Clinton C. Clark, President of the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference, 125 S. Grand Ave., Pasadena, Calif.
Traffic Regulations: Speed: 15 miles per hour at grade crossings, road intersections, and curves where the driver's view is obstructed; 15 miles per hour in passing schools where persons are entering or
XX GENERAL INFORMATION
leaving; 20 miles per hour in business districts; 25 miles per hour in residential districts; 45 miles per hour under all other conditions.
Lights: Spotlights allowed. Headlights to be deflected or dimmed when passing other cars on the open road.
Licenses: Nonresidents must have operator's license from their home States and must obtain visitors' permits for their vehicles within 5 days. Licenses issued to adults, no fee; to minors 16 to 21 yrs. of age, with parental liability.
Required: Hand signals must be used. All accidents must be re- ported to some civic authority (police department in cities and towns). On narrow mountain roads the upgrade vehicle has the right-of-way. Prohibited: Coasting in neutral, parking on highways, passing street- cars on left (in cities and towns), passing on curves or at crests of hills.
Trailers: All highways in State suitable for house and camp trailers, except steep and unimproved mountain roads. State and National parks, and trailer parks in some towns, have special facilities for trailers. Trailers are licensed according to weight. (For city ordinance govern- ing trailers see Cities.)
Border Rules (digest) : All persons returning to the United States from Mexico must make a declaration to the customs officers covering all goods and merchandise purchased in Mexico. Articles for personal or household use, up to the value of $100, are exempt from import duty. Exemption is allowed each person not more often than every 30 days. Cigars, cigarettes, tobacco, and foodstuffs may be included in the exemption, but the quantities are limited. American citizens wishing to visit any place farther south than Ensenada, or in the interior of Mexico, must obtain a tourist card (cost $1.01 in U. S. currency) from the nearest Mexican consul, or from the Mexican Immigration Office at the port of entry.
Accommodations: State is well provided with hotels, lodges, motor courts, housekeeping cabins, and campgrounds, both public and private. Recreation areas have large resort hotels, swimming pools, golf courses, tennis courts, and well-equipped campgrounds. State and National park campgrounds are equipped with necessary conveniences.
Regulations in Parks and Monuments: U. S. Forest Service offices in the parks or in cities and towns furnish maps and special information.
GENERAL INFORMATION XXI
Campfires, including fires in wood or oil stoves, are illegal without a permit, which will be issued free by the nearest forest officer. All camping parties in national forests must be equipped with a shovel (over-all length at least 26 in., head weight not less than 2 Ibs.). During fire season (indicated by signposts) smoking is prohibited except in camps, at places of habitation, in special posted areas, and above 7,000 ft. elevation. Be careful to extinguish lighted matches, cigars, cigarettes, and pipe heels. Observe carefully all posted signs, particu- larly the "No Smoking" and the "Closed Area" signs. Build small fires. Clear an area of not less than 10 feet in diameter down to mineral soil, extinguish all fires with plenty of water. If garbage pits or incinerators are not provided, burn or bury all refuse. Do not pollute springs, streams, or lakes by unsanitary acts. Observe the fish and game laws. Drive carefully on mountain roads.
Wild Flower Regulations: No wild flowers may be picked at any time.
Hunting and Fishing: Because of the complexity of the State laws, it is advisable to write for the Abstract of California Sporting Fish and Game Laws. Detailed information may be secured by writing the State Division of Fish and Game.
Climate and Equipment: State has a mild climate with no snow in winter except at high altitudes. Visitors should be prepared for warm weather in summer, but carry sweaters or light coats for cool evenings and sudden changes in temperature. In general there is no rain during the three summer months. Special equipment for winter sports and mountain climbing may be rented in resort areas. Hikers and riders in high mountain regions should have hats with brims at least three inches wide, stout leakproof shoes or boots, woolen hose, denim jeans, warm sweater or jacket, and raincoat or poncho (preferably on U. S. Army pattern).
Poisonous Plants and Reptiles: Poison-oak grows throughout State except in higher altitudes. It has crinkly edged, shiny leaves; is found at the edge of highways, in wooded areas, and in fields. Rattlesnakes exist, but are not numerous, being found in rocky regions below the 3,000 ft. level; will not strike unless disturbed. Black widow spiders are rare.
&S«S!SS!SX^^
Calendar of Events
Note: "nfd" means no fixed dale
Jan.
ist wk 4th wk
nfd
Feb. ist wk 3rd wk nfd
Pasadena Pasadena San Francisco San Diego Yosemite
San Francisco
Big Pines San Bernardino San Francisco and Los Angeles
Tournament of Roses Rose Bowl Football Game East- West Football Classic New Year Regatta Invitational Figure-Skating
Championships California Dog Show
Annual Snow Pageant National Orange Show
Chinese New Year
Mar. ist wk ist wk nfd
nfd
Apr. ist wk 3rd wk 4th wk nfd
May ist wk 2nd wk 3rd Sunday nfd nfd
June ist wk
3rd wk nfd
Pasadena Pasadena place chosen each
year place chosen each
year
Oakland Hemet
San Francisco Santa Clara
Mendocino Coast
Sonora
Mt. Tamalpais
Angels Camp
Los Angeles
Auburn
San Juan Bautista Long Beach
Kennel Club Show Spring Flower Show California Ski Championship
Meet Pacific Coast Championship
Polo Games
Spring Garden Show Ramona Pageant Rowing Regatta Mission Play
Rhododendron Festival Mother Lode Rodeo Mountain Theater Play Jumping Frog Jubilee Festival of Allied Arts
Auburn Fair and Gold Rush
Festival
Mission Pageant Water Sports Carnival
XXIV CALENDAR OF EVENTS
July 4
ist wk
July 4th wk nfd nfd
nfd nfd
Aug. ist wk 2nd wk 3rd wk 4th wk
nfd
Sept. ist wk 2nd wk nfd
nfd
Oct. ist wk
4th wk
Nov. nfd
Dec. 3rd wk 4th wk
Oakland Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara
Carmel
Hollywood
Hollywood Salinas
Carmel Santa Barbara Sutter Creek Newport Beach
place chosen each year
Sacramento San Gabriel Los Angeles
Berkeley
Bakersfield Mare Island, Vallejo, San Diego, San Pedro, San Francisco
Berkeley of Palo Alto
Los Angeles Los Angeles
Motorboat Regatta Semana Nautica (marine events)
National Horse Show
Bach Festival
Hollywood Bowl Symphony
Season
Pilgrimage Play California Rodeo
Serra Pageant
Old Spanish Days
Gold Rush Fete
Race Week and Yachting
Championships California Amateur Golf
Tournament
State Fair
Mission Festival
Pacific and Southwest Tennis Tournament
Pacific Coast Tennis Cham- pionship
Frontier Days
Navy Day
University of California — Stanford University "Big Game"
Great Western Livestock and
Poultry Show Book Fair
&XK&&&<XK^^^^
A Guide to Recreation
PLACES TO GO
Aquariums, Marine Museums, and Submarine Gardens: Submarine gardens, marine museum and aquarium at Avalon, Santa Catalina Island. Aquarium and marine museum, Scripps Institute of Oceanog- raphy at La Jolla. Submarine gardens, Municipal Museum, Hopkins Marine Biological Laboratory at Pacific Grove. Stillwater Cove sub- marine gardens at Pebble Beach. Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park at San Francisco, Cabrillo Beach Marine Museum at San Pedro. Aquarium at Venice.
Art Collections: Carmel Art Association at Carmel. The Artists' Barn at Fillmore. Laguna Beach Art Association at Laguna Beach. Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art, Southwest Museum, and Los Angeles Art Association at Los Angeles. Keith Memorial Gallery in St. Mary's College at Moraga. Oakland Art Gallery and Mills College Art Gallery at Oakland. Museum of Fine Arts and Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery in Stanford University at Palo Alto. Pasadena Art Institute at Pasadena. Mis- sion Inn at Riverside. E. B. Crocker Art Gallery at Sacramento. Fine Arts Gallery in Balboa Park at San Diego. San Francisco Mu- seum of Art, San Francisco Art Association, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and M. H. de Young Memorial Museum at San Francisco. Huntington Library and Art Gallery at San Marino. Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery at Santa Barbara. Museo (museum) in Mission Santa Ynez at Solvang. Louis Terah Haggin Memorial Galleries in Victory Park at Stockton.
Aviaries: Santa Catalina Island Aviaries at Avalon. Roeding Park at Fresno. Griffith Park Bird Sanctuary and Cawston Ostrich Farm at Los Angeles. Bird Shelter at Lake Merritt in Oakland. Balboa Park at San Diego. Golden Gate Park and Fleishhacker Playfield and Zoo at San Francisco.
Museums: Pony Express Museum at Arcadia. Herbarium and Mu- seums of Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, and Vertebrate Zool-
XXVI A GUIDE TO RECREATION
ogy, University of California at Berkeley. Naval Museum at Mare Island. Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, and Southwest Museum at Los Angeles. Municipal Museum and Snow Museum at Oakland. Municipal Museum at Pacific Grove. Leland Stanford Jr. Memorial Museum and Jordan Hall natural history collections, Stanford University, at Palo Alto. Palace of Science, Museum of Anthropology, and Natural History Museum in Balboa Park and Junipero Serra Museum at San Diego. M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and California Academy of Sciences Museum in Golden Gate Park at San Francisco. Museum of Natural History at Santa Barbara. Museum in Victory Park at Stockton. Collec- tions of pioneer relics at Columbia ; Downieville ; Fort Humboldt, Eureka; Independence; Customs House, and First Theater, Mon- terey; William B. Ide Memorial Museum, Red Bluff; Mission Inn, Riverside; State Capitol and Sutter's Fort, Sacramento; Estudillo House, San Diego; Shasta; Mission San Francisco Solano and Vallejo Home, Sonoma; and Ventura. Small natural history collections at Mae Loomis Memorial Museum, Lassen Volcanic National Park; Government Center and Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park. Mineralogical collection at State Division of Mines museum, Ferry Building, San Francisco.
National Parks and Monuments: Death Valley National Monu- ment, Devil Postfile National Monument, General Grant National Park, Joshua Tree National Monument, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Lava Beds National Monument, Muir Woods National Mon- ument, Palm Canyon National Monument, Pinnacles National Monu- ment, Sequoia National Park, Yosemite National Park.
Observatories: Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton near San Jose, Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, Chabot Observatory at Oakland, California Institute of Technology Observatory on Palomar Mountain (under construction). Planetarium at Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
Zoological Gardens: Gay's Lion Farm at El Monte. Deer en- closure, aviary, and duck ponds in Roeding Park at Fresno. Cali- fornia Zoological Society Gardens, Cawston Ostrich Farm, and alli- gator farm near Lincoln Park, and Bird Sanctuary and Zoo in Griffith Park at Los Angeles. Oakland Zoo in Sequoia Park at Oakland. William Land Park Zoo at Sacramento. Zoological Society of San Diego Gardens in Balboa Park at San Diego. Aviary, deer park, and bison and elk paddocks in Golden Gate Park and Fleishhacker Play- field and Zoo at San Francisco.
A GUIDE TO RECREATION XXV11
SPORTS
Athletic Stadiums: California Memorial Stadium, University of California at Berkeley. Marine Stadium at Long Beach. Coliseum in Exposition Park at Los Angeles. Stanford University Stadium at Palo Alto. Rose Bowl at Pasadena. Balboa Park stadium at San Diego. Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park at San Francisco.
Baseball: Played year round throughout the State. Leading pro- fessional circuit, Pacific Coast League, has ball parks in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco.
Football: Played during fall and winter months throughout State by teams from universities, colleges, high schools, and independent clubs. Chief intercollegiate games are New Year's Day East-West games at Rose Bowl in Pasadena and Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.
Golf: Played year round throughout State at more than 200 country club courses and many municipal links, including those in Griffith Park at Los Angeles, Lincoln and Harding Memorial Parks at San Francisco, and Balboa Park at San Diego.
Horse Racing: Continuous from fall until spring, with season di- vided among various tracks. Pari-mutuel betting at Bay Meadows and Tanforan, south of San Francisco ; Santa Anita, near Arcadia ; Holly- wood Racetrack, Inglewood ; and Del Mar, north of San Diego. Other tracks at Los Angeles County Fair Grounds in Pomona, State Fair Grounds in Sacramento, and various county fair grounds, operating during fairs.
Polo: Played chiefly during first four months of year at Coro- nado, Burlingame, Del Monte, Santa Barbara, San Mateo, and Santa Monica.
OUTDOOR RECREATION
Boating: Favorite yachting centers include San Francisco Bay, with yacht harbors at Black Point and San Francisco and clubhouses at Alameda, Alviso, Belvedere, Richmond, and Sausalito; Monterey Bay; Stillwater Cove yacht harbor at Pebble Beach; Santa Barbara yacht harbor in Santa Barbara; Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor; Alamitos Bay at Long Beach; Newport Bay; Coronado and San Diego. Accommodations for pleasure craft of other kinds at these and other seaside cities. Sailing in launches and sloops on lower Sacramento and San Joaquin and other rivers; canoeing, motor-boating, rowing on Rus-
XXV111 A GUIDE TO RECREATION
sian River and other streams and lagoons. Boating of all kinds on Big Bear Lake, Clear Lake, Lake Arrowhead, and Lake Tahoe. Motorboat races on Lake Elsinore, Lake Merritt in Oakland, Alamitos Bay, Newport Bay, and Salton Sea.
Camping: Campgrounds, trailer camps, cabins, auto courts, "motels," and "tent cities" at mountain, forest, desert, lake, river, and seaside resorts' throughout State. Summer homesites in National forests for rent from U. S. Forest Service at $5 per year up. Camping 50^ per car per night in State parks.
Fishing: Trout fishing throughout the Sierra Nevada in Lake Tahoe, glacial lakes and their tributaries, and headwaters of Kern and Kings Rivers; in the north, upper Sacramento River and its tributaries, Klamath River, and streams of the Coast Range ; in southern Cali- fornia, streams of the Sierra Madre and San Bernardino Mountains. Native varieties include rainbow (known as steelhead after going to sea), cutthroat, Dolly Varden, golden, and Tahoe; imported varieties, Loch Leven, Eastern brook, European brown. Lake shallows and riffles stocked with millions of trout fry from fish-hatcheries yearly. Other game fish imported from East include: black bass, found in Clear Lake, northern rivers, and lagoons south of Los Angeles ; striped bass, in Suisun and San Pablo Bays ; sunfish ; and yellow perch. Giant king salmon caught in Monterey Bay in June, July, and August and in San Francisco Bay in August; quinnat and dog salmon caught off northern coast and during spawning season, in Klamath River and rivers of Coast Range. Best ocean fishing in Monterey Bay, where species from both northern and southern waters are found, and off southern California coast. South of Point Concepcion, most common ocean fish are albacore, barracuda, black sea bass, bonito, leaping tuna, sheepshead, swordfish, yellow-fin tuna; peculiar to southern California waters are corbina, croaker, flatfish, roncador and yellowfin. Piers for surf fishing at Long Beach, Ocean Park, Redondo, and Santa Mon- ica. Best deep-sea fishing off Portuguese Bend, Redondo, and Coro- nado, Santa Catalina, San Clemente, and Santa Barbara Islands. Santa Catalina Island waters especially noted for sport with albacore, broad- bill swordfish, dolphin, giant bass, leaping tuna, marlin swordfish, white sea bass, and yellowtail. Shellfish, especially abalone, clams, and mussels, are dug at many points along coast.
Hiking: Well-marked trails lead through national parks and for- ests and radiate from resorts in Sierra Nevada, Coast Range, and southern California ranges. Horses, pack animals, and guides avail- able at mountain resorts throughout State. Camps and lodges make
A GUIDE TO RECREATION XXIX
wilder mountainous regions accessible to skilled mountaineers. All trails open in July and August ; southern trails from May to Novem- ber. Easy trails lead into Sierra Madre Mountains from Big Pines, Camp Baldy, Crystal Lake, and Mount Wilson; into San Bernardino Mountains from Big Bear Lake and Lake Arrowhead; San Jacinto Mountains from Idyllwild and Kenn Camp; Santa Ynez Mountains from Santa Barbara; Mount Hamilton Range from Alum Rock Park near San Jose ; Santa Cruz Mountains from California Redwoods State Park ; Berkeley Hills from Berkeley ; Mount Diablo Range from Dan- ville or Walnut Creek; Mount Tamalpais region from Mill Valley; Bear Valley forest and Tomales Ridge from Inverness, Olema, or Point Reyes; Castle Crags State Park from Castella; and into red- wood groves from resorts along Redwood Highway. Short trails to points of interest in General Grant, Lassen Volcanic, Sequoia, and Yosemite National Parks are well marked. Among peaks easily climbed by amateur hikers are Mount San Antonio, Mount Wilson, Mount Lowe, Mount Diablo, Mount Tamalpais, and Lassen Peak. Mount Shasta is climbed from late June until early October. Trails into Trinity-Salmon Alps lead from Cecilville and Trinity Center, into Marble Mountain primitive area from camps along State 96. For skilled mountaineers, trails radiate into High Sierra from Lake Tahoe, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite Valley, General Grant and Sequoia National Parks, Kings River Camp in Kings River Canyon, Hunting- ton Lake, and Bishop, Lone Pine, and Independence in Owens Valley. Pacific Crest Trail, traversing main divides of highest ranges in Pacific Coast States, has five sections in California: Lava Crest Trail, 330 miles; Tahoe Yosemite Trail, 260 miles; John Muir Trail, 185 miles; Sierra Trail, 160 miles; and Desert Crest Trail, 475 miles. For information address Clinton C. Clark, President Pacific Crest Trail System Conference, 125 S. Grand Ave., Pasadena, California.
Hunting: Deer, most common large game animal, are of three varie- ties: blacktail, mule, and white-tail. Found in Sierra Nevada north of Lake Tahoe, in northeast above Alturas, and in coast Range from Oregon to Mexican border. Open season varies according to region, beginning August I in Coast Range and ending October 15 in Sierra Nevada. Bears hunted with aid of guides and trained dogs in Sierra Nevada, parts of Coast Range, and San Bernardino Mountains. Cougars, fair game at any season (bounty on scalps), hunted with dogs in regions where deer are found. Foxes common, especially in Coast Range; gray wolf and wildcat (red lynx) sometimes hunted. Smaller game animals include badgers, cottontails and jackrabbits, gray and Douglas squirrels, porcupines, raccoons, and woodchucks. Most hunted game fowl are wild ducks, including bluebill, canvasback, gad-
XXX A GUIDE TO RECREATION
wall, mallard, ruddy, spoonbill, sprig (pintail), teal, and widgeon. Open season usually October 15 to January 31. Chief duck hunting grounds are Suisun marshes to north and Alviso marshes to south of San Francisco Bay; "tule lands" along Sacramento, San Joaquin, and other rivers of Central Valley; marshlands back of beaches at Alamitos Bay, Newport Bay, and lagoons in southern California; and scattered regions in Imperial Valley, around Monterey Bay, and in Klamath River country. Characteristic method is shooting in marshes from "tule splitter" boats, but bay blinds and baited ponds are also em- ployed. Wild geese and brant are fair game in duck season. Also hunted in autumn and winter are mountain quail, chiefly in higher Sierra and counties north of San Francisco Bay, and valley quail, in lowlands and foothills. Blue grouse, sage-fowl, and Wilson snipe are hunted frequently; also avocet, band-tailed pigeon, golden and upland plover, ruffed grouse, sandhill crane, and wild dove.
Motoringr: Among favorite scenic drives for automobilists are Red- wood Highway through redwood groves of Humboldt County (see Tour la), Victory Highway over Donner Pass and down Yuba Bottoms (see Tour 9a), Feather River Highway through gorge of Feather River (see Tour 6B), Skyline Boulevard along crest of the Sierra Moreno south of San Francisco (see Tour Ib), Seventeen- Mile Drive around Monterey Peninsula (see Tour Ic), Carmel- San Simeon Highway along coast (see Tour Ic), and Rim-of-the- World Drive through San Bernardino Mountains (see Tour 12b). Good highways scale Sierra Nevada, Coast Range, and southern Cali- fornia Mountains. Among peaks climbed to summit by highways are Mount Wilson, from Pasadena; Mount Hamilton, from San Jose; Mount Diablo, from Danville ; Mount Tamalpais, from Mill Valley.
Ocean Bathing: Sheltered bathing beaches along coast from Trinidad to San Diego and at Avalon, Santa Catalina Island. Among favored beaches in north are Neptune Beach at Alameda, Ocean Beach at San Francisco, and the beach at Santa Cruz; in south, beaches at Malibu, Santa Monica, Ocean Park, Venice, Redondo Beach, San Pedro, Long Beach, Seal Beach, Newport, and San Diego. Favorite season for bathing extends from June to September, but hardy swimmers take dips the year around. Amusement zones at Neptune Beach, Ocean Beach, Santa Cruz, Ocean Park, Venice, Redondo, Long Beach, and Seal Beach.
Riding: Scenic equestrian trails in foothill, mountain, and desert regions throughout State, especially in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, and Golden Gate Park, San Francisco; Del Monte Forest; and foothills
A GUIDE TO RECREATION XXXI
back of Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills, and Pasadena. Horses trained for mountain trails available at most resorts in Sierra Nevada.
Winter Sports: Favorite spots for tobogganing, snowshoeing, ski- running, sleighing, and ice-skating include national parks; Mount Shasta; Quincy and Portola in Feather River Country; Downieville, Grass Valley and Nevada City, Placerville, and Longbarn above Sonora in Mother Lode country; Alta, Cisco, Emigrant Gap, Norden, Tahoe City, and Truckee in central Sierra; Huntington Lake and Shaver Lake Heights in southern Sierra; Big Pines, Camp Baldy, Mount Wilson, and Wrightwood in Sierra Madre Mountains; Big Bear Lake and Lake Arrowhead in San Bernardino Mountains; and resorts in San Jacinto Mountains.
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PART I California: From Past to Present
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El Dorado Up to Date
THE FIRST to come were explorers by sea, venturing uneasily northward along the shores in pygmy galleons on the lookout for fabled El Dorado, a vaguely imagined treasure trove of gold and spices somewhere near the Indies. Finding no riches, they returned disappointed. But the legend of El Dorado lingered, even when men driving their cattle in the dusty march from the south searched in vain for hidden wealth. At least the new country was a land of rich soil and gentle climate, and the newcomers stayed to grow rich from the herds they pastured, the fields and orchards they planted. Who could foresee that the legend would prove to be true almost as soon as the province had passed into the hands of the next comers from the East? Once more the old fable illumined California, more reful- gent than before, as gold-seekers thronged westward by land and sea, risking hardship in the hope of ease. After a few years it faded. And yet people still came, tempted by the picture of rich acres, unbelievably fertile. California became that legendary land of perpetual summer, of orange groves in sight of snowy peaks, of oil wells spouting wealth, of real estate promising fortunes, of cinema stars and bathing beauties. It seemed to promise a new start, a kinder providence, a rebirth of soul and body. The aura faded again, slowly. And yet people came — in rickety automobiles piled high with all their belongings, people asking nothing but a chance to work in a country where the weather might be gentle enough to let them live.
"All the passengers . . . thronged with shining eyes upon the plat- form," exulted Robert Louis Stevenson as the train that had carried
4 CALIFORNIA
him across the continent headed down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. "At every turn we could look further into the land of our happy future. At every turn the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this indeed was our destination — this was 'the good country' we have been going to so long."
It required little literary artifice to spin legends of an earthly Utopia so real that men would risk toil, hunger, and even death to seek it in the West. The diarists of the early expeditions, the newly settled immigrants who wrote back home, the enthusiastic globe- trotters who recorded their travels — all extolled the virtues of El Dorado, and after them a growing throng of professional boosters — newspaper lyricists, real-estate promoters, chamber-of-commerce press agents — swelled the chorus.
"I love you, California, you're the greatest State of all," begins the semiofficial State song; it closes with the solemn declaration:
"And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh For my sunny California."
When the first white men came by foot into California in 1769, they failed to recognize the Bay of Monterey, so overenthusiastically described by the chronicler of Sebastian Vizcaino's expedition, and passed by. Since their time, similar panegyrics have misled others, for California is both more and less than its eulogists have claimed it to be. There is something more to it than sunshine and vineyards and orange orchards, bathing beaches and redwood trees and movie studios — more than the hurried visitor to a few chosen showplaces may glimpse. For California, in more than one sense, is all things to all men. The ballyhooers have called it a sun-kissed garden spot cooled by gentle zephyrs from the sea. The description is appropriate enough for the sloping valley plains along the coast. They might also call it a sun- scorched waste of boulder-scarred mountains and desert plains, or a rain-drenched highland of timbered gorges and snow-capped granite peaks. Or they might describe the vast spreading plains of its Central Valley, or the smooth-worn brown slopes of its undulating oak-dotted foothills, or the lava crags and juniper forests of its volcanic plateaus. Its seashore has stretches of smoothly curving sandy beach and of saw- toothed, rock-strewn coast; its plains are checkered with fertile fields and pastures, and desolate with crags and alkali; its rivers brim with water between fringes of greenery and lose their flow underground in sandy washes. California's contrasts are extreme. It has fierce heat and bitter cold, some of the country's wettest regions and some of its driest, the continent's lowest point and the country's second highest. Its landscape is so variegated that when the Californian goes traveling,
EL DORADO UP TO DATE 5
he is apt to say to himself as he looks at parts of the rest of the coun- try: "I have seen all this before."
The people are as diverse as their environment. The tide of new- comers who arrived on foot, in prairie schooners, on clipper ships when California became American territory were from every corner of the land: New England farm boys, Irish-Americans from the streets of New York, younger sons of southern slave-owning families, and mid- westerners imitating their fathers' trek from still farther east. Before this onrush of men with the "California fever," the leisure-loving pas- toral civilization of the Spanish-Californians was swept into oblivion. It disappeared as fast as the way of life of the short, dark aborigines had disappeared three-quarters of a century before. The Yankee con- querors, all citizens of the same Nation, were still "of every possible variety," as traveler Bayard Taylor wrote in 1849. They differed individually from each other almost as much as they differed collectively from their predecessors.
People from nearly every nation of the earth still mingle in a poly- glot conglomeration. In the dark and grotesque alleyways of China- towns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller cities live the Chinese, descendants of pioneers who came in the Gold Rush. The Japanese are found in Los Angeles' "Little Tokyo," and in small towns and farms in southern California. In Imperial Valley, in Los Angeles and its suburbs thousands of Mexican field workers live in rude shacks. The short brown men of the Philippine Islands gather in employment agencies and shabby roominghouses of the big cities. The vineyards around Santa Rosa and Napa, the fishing fleets of the seaports, the shops of San Francisco's North Beach give employment to the Italians. On the dairy farms of Alameda County live the Portuguese; in the lumber towns of the northern coast, the Scandinavians. In the big cities are colonies of Russians, Germans, French, and people of every other nation in Europe. Negroes live in the Central Avenue District of Los Angeles and the West End of Oakland — railroad porters and waiters, domestics and bootblacks, entertainers, and businessmen.
The people differ in more than their place of origin. Their lives have been shaped by the parts of the State in which they have settled. The sawmill workers of the bleak mountain shack towns of Weed and Westwood are a world removed from the orange growers of garden- surrounded Whittier and Pomona. It is a far cry from the tough- skinned, wizened old-timers of the Mother Lode ghost towns to the comfortable, retired midwestern farmers and storekeepers of Long Beach and San Diego, and a farther cry from the cowboys and sheep- herders of Susanville and Alturas to the cameramen and movie extras of Hollywood. The vineyardgrowers of the sun-warmed Napa and Sonoma valleys, the grease-stained oil workers of the torrid Kettleman
O CALIFORNIA
Hills, the wandering pea-and-cotton-pickers of the San Joaquin Valley's river-bottom camps — all are strangers to each other.
The Union's second largest State in area might well have been christened by its discoverers Las California*, for there are several Californias. Of all the many rivalries that make the life of the State an exciting clash of opposites, the chief has always been the rivalry between San Francisco and its neighbor cities and Los Angeles and its neighbor cities. Northern California was peopled with Americans during the Gold Rush, four decades before real estate booms brought settlers to southern California. Los Angeles remained a lazy village long after San Francisco had grown into a thriving city. San Fran- cisco, with its more deeply rooted population, has the charm and con- servatism of an older town, holding still to some of the traditions of gold rush days. In the interior towns of the north, more character- istically rural than those of the south, are the old-fashioned houses and quiet, tree-lined streets of a country village "back East" — especially in the towns of the mining country, where descendants of forty-niners live in almost clannish isolation from the State's more up-and-coming sections. In rural southern California, on the other hand, the inhabit- ants are more likely to be recent immigrants from the Middle West, and their towns have the neon lights, the stucco "Spanish" bungalows, and the chromium-trimmed cocktail bars of their big-city neighbors. The southlanders, for the most part, have had only a short time to get used to what is still a strange wondrous land — which accounts, per- haps, for their famed susceptibility to unorthodox religions, architec- tures, and political movements frowned upon by northerners. The inter-sectional rivalry has often prompted demands for the division of the State; yet despite the geographical, temperamental and commercial differences, the sentiment for divorce has never grown very strong.
No matter how fervent his local patriotism, the Californian will stop arguing the claims of rival regions when faced with the challenge of an out-of-State visitor. At once he becomes a citizen of "the greatest State of all," just as the caballeros of pre-American days haughtily set themselves up as California*, a race apart. Whether northerner or southerner, native son or transplanted lowan, the true Californian de- velops a proprietary interest that prompts him to tell the world about his State. So fond is he of bragging about it that he is always ready to "sell" California to whoever will lend an ear. Few joys in life so please him as an opportunity to declare with pride — and perhaps even on occasion with justification — that it has the tallest trees, the highest mountains, the biggest bridges, the fastest-growing population — in fact, the best, the most, or the greatest of whatever is being dis- cussed at the moment.
The Californian may possibly be pardoned his pride in the exten-
EL DORADO UP TO DATE 7
sion, by three or four generations of human effort, of the bounties of nature. The aggressive energy of the Yankees, against which the leisure-loving ways of the easy-going Calif omios could not prevail (with some few exceptions in the south) still moves a people who have built aqueducts from faraway mountains to reclaim whole deserts, strung power lines from mighty dams across inaccessible wilderness to distant cities, dredged one of the Nation's great harbors from mud flats and flung the world's biggest bridges across a bay. The wild wastes of a century ago are dotted now with lumber mills, mine shafts and smelters, power plants and factories. The valleys are squared off in grain field and pasture, vegetable patch, vineyard and fruit orchard, watered with a labyrinth of irrigation ditches and criss-crossed with highways and railroads. Mountain streams have been dammed for electric power; plains and slopes drilled for oil. Under the earth extends a network of pipelines for oil and natural gas and above it, a network of high- tension wires for electric current. The canneries and packing houses, oil refineries, aircraft factories and movie studios ship their products to every corner of the Nation and beyond. The Californian of today feels a personal pride in the State's gargantuan public works: high- ways, bridges, dams, and aqueducts. And most of all, of course, he exults in the region's "happy future."
The days when the American people finally reached land's end on the Pacific are almost within the memory of living men. If Californi- ans seem to display the brash boastfulness of adolescents, perhaps they deserve charitable forgiveness; for after all, they are citizens of a young State. And boastfulness is not the only telltale sign of its youth. The restlessness of the men who made the westward trek persists in the unquenchable wanderlust with which their descendants have taken to the automobile, thronging the highways with never-ending streams of traffic bound for seashore, deserts, forests and mountains. And the sturdy instinct for independence that inspired the rough-and-ready de- mocracy of the mining camps and towns has lasted too; quiescent at intervals, it has always revived in time to save Californians from unpro- testing resignation to hardship. They hope, perhaps, that the stubborn search for a better land that brought their grandfathers here to the shores of the Pacific has not spent itself. They hope, in fact, that they can yet make of El Dorado the promised land that has fired men's imaginations for four hundred years.
Natural Setting and Conservation
IF CALIFORNIA lies beyond those mountains we shall never be able to reach it," wrote John Bidwell, leader of the first overland emigrant train, in his journal on October 29, 1841. But on the next day he set down: "We had gone about three miles this morning, when lo! to our great delight we beheld a wide valley. . . . Rivers evidently meandered through it, for timber was seen in long extended lines as far as the eye could reach." The day after he continued: "Joyful sight to us poor, famished wretches! Hundreds of antelope in view ! Elk tracks, thousands ! The valley of the river was very fertile, and the young, tender grass covered it like a field of wheat in May."
Thousands of later emigrants who struggled to the crest of the Sierra Nevada, towering like a massive wall along the State's eastern border, were equally overjoyed at their first glimpse of El Dorado. As they stood at the summit, the dry wilderness of the Great Basin lay behind them. To north and south rose the rock-ribbed flanks of the huge Sierra Nevada, about 385 miles long and with an average width of about 80 miles. Westward they looked toward the Great Valley of California, a vast elliptical bowl averaging 50 miles in width and more than 400 miles long, larger in area than Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Beyond the valley stood the dim blue peaks of the Coast Range, skirting the ocean and parallel to the Sierra in chains from 20 to 40 miles wide and 500 miles long. Far to the north, beyond their vision, the rugged Cascade Range and Klamath Mountains closed in on the valley's northern rim; and far to the south,
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 9
the Tehachapi Mountains thrust their barrier from east to west across its southern end.
California, with a total area of 158,297 square miles, is the Union's second largest State. In the language of the geographer, its latitude extends from 32° 30' to 42° N., and its longitude from 114° to 124° 29' W. Its medial line, from Oregon to the Mexican border, is 780 miles long. Its width varies from 150 to 350 miles. Its coast- line is approximately 1,200 miles — somewhat less than one-tenth of the total coastline of the United States. So pronounced is the eastward curve of the State's southern coast that San Diego lies farther east than Reno in Nevada, although Eureka, a northern port, is the most westward city in the United States. On the east the State is bordered by Nevada and by the Colorado River, which separates its southeastern corner from Arizona.
Beyond each end of the mountain-walled Great Valley, which is California's most distinctive topographic feature, the terrain is broken and rugged. Northward lie the Siskiyou Mountains, a natural barrier between California and Oregon. In the northwest, wild timbered slopes reach to the Pacific; in the northeast, mountain spurs hem in barren lava-bed plateaus. South of the Tehachapis' dividing line lies southern California comprising one-third of the State's area. Here the complex network of the Sierra Madre, the San Bernardino, and other ranges separates the so-called Valley of Southern California, a broad strip of broken country near the coast, from the arid wastes of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts in the hinterland. From Point Concepcion, where the Coast Range breaks into numerous ridges and the coast swings in sharply to the east, the Valley of Southern Cali- fornia, which includes the V-shaped coastal plain of the Los Angeles Basin, stretches southward to the Mexican border.
These chief geographical districts — the Sierra and Coast Range regions and the Central (Sacramento-San Joaquin) Valley in the north, the coastal lowlands, the mountains, and the desert country in the south — present startling physiographic contrasts and extremes, from active volcano to glacier, from arctic flora on mountain tops to cotton plantations below sea level. From the peak of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the United States, it is but 60 miles to Death Valley, the continent's lowest area. Human activities range from fur-trapping in the snows of the Klamath region to prospecting for minerals in the furnace-like heat of the southeastern deserts.
California's contour is marked by lofty mountain peaks towering above precipitous gorges and canyons. Of the 41 peaks that exceed 10,000 feet in height, the tallest is Mount Whitney (14,496 alt.) in the southern Sierra. The Sierra's abrupt eastern slope has one of the steepest general gradients on the North American continent. Over a
IO CALIFORNIA
i6omile stretch the lowest pass is at an altitude of 9,000 feet, while Kearsage, the most frequently used pack horse pass on this stretch, is 12,050 feet; in this area the peaks range from 13,000 to 14,000 feet in height. Although there is a gradual decline in altitude to the north, other isolated peaks of the Sierra rise above 14,000 feet. Northward the western slopes are gashed by river canyons sometimes half a mile deep.
The Sierra's sculptured splendor is in part the work of glaciers which carved deep valleys, expanses of polished rock, and towering granite walls over which roar great waterfalls, glacial lakes and meadows. Most beautiful of the valleys is Yosemite, in the midsection of the Sierra; loveliest of the lakes is Tahoe (6,225 alt.), cupped be- tween the main Sierra and the basin ranges at the angle of the Nevada- California boundary. A few glaciers even now survive on the highest summits, the finest of them being a group of five supported by Mount Shasta (14,161 alt.).
Dominating the northern end of the Sacramento Valley is Mount Shasta, the most striking of the many extinct or dormant volcanoes in the northern California mountains. Lassen Peak (10,435 alt.), 85 miles southeast of Mount Shasta, is a mildly active volcano — the only one in the United States that has had a generally observed eruption. Although traces of volcanic action are most abundant in the State's northeastern sector, where lava beds spread over vast tracts, there are also extinct or dormant volcanoes in Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert, and numerous hot springs in the Coast Range.
The Coast Range, more complex than the Sierra, includes numer- ous indistinct chains from 2,000 to 7,000 feet high. Each chain is broken down into forested spurs and ridges enclosing small pleasant valleys and plains drained by rapid streams.
The Santa Ynez, San Barnardino, and San Gabriel Mountains bound the lowland of southern California on the north and northeast, and subdivide it into more or less distinct valleys or basins. Farther south the coastal lowland is bounded by the Santa Ana and San Jacinto Ranges, an elevation that extends into Mexico. The southern Cali- fornia ranges are marked by the lofty peaks (more than 10,000 feet high) of San Bernardino, San Jacinto, and San Antonio and by the well-defined passes of Soledad, Cajon, and San Gorgonio.
Among the mountain-walled valleys between the southern end of the Sierra and the border of Nevada is the long and narrow Owens Valley, bordered by granite walls. About 40 miles east of dry Owens Lake, along the California-Nevada border, lies Death Valley, its lowest point 276 feet below sea level. It stretches between the sheer rocky walls of the Panamint Range on the east and the Amargosa Range on the west — 130 miles long and from 6 to 14 miles wide — a region of stark simplicity, majestic silence, and spectacular desolation. South
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION II
of Death Valley spread the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. The Mo- jave is an expanse of ancient dried lake bottoms, short rugged ranges, and immense sandy valleys. Parts of the Colorado Desert lie below sea level — 250 feet below at its lowest point. In its southern end is the fertile Imperial Valley, largely reclaimed from the desert for agricultural use by irrigation, where the Salton Sea, formed when the Colorado River broke its banks in 1905, floods an ancient lake bottom.
In addition to the Great Valley in the north and the coastal dis- trict (including the rich Los Angeles Basin and Santa Clara and San Fernando Valleys) in the south, cultivated lowlands occur elsewhere in the State. Below San Francisco Bay stretches another Santa Clara Valley; and southeast of Monterey Bay, between the Santa Lucia and Gabilan Ranges, lies the long Salinas Valley. North of San Fran- cisco in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Humboldt Counties are similar areas. The northeast corner of the State, hemmed in by steep ranges, is suitable for cattle raising and restricted agriculture despite its lava beds and sagebrush.
In the whole 4OO-mile length of the Great Valley there is only one break in the mountain walls through which the waters of the interior can escape to the sea. Behind the Golden Gate at San Fran- cisco, cutting across the full width of the Coast Range, is a great gap through which passes almost the entire drainage of the Great Valley. Into Suisun Bay pour the waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers; they empty through Carquinez Strait into San Pablo and San Francisco Bays, and through the Golden Gate into the Pacific Ocean.
The scantily forested eastern flanks of the Coast Range contribute no stream lasting enough to reach either the Sacramento or the San Joaquin in the dry season; but down the western slopes of the Sierra, tributaries pour through precipitous canyons to the great rivers at each end of the valley. Fed by Mount Shasta's melting snows, the Sacra- mento, California's largest river, is joined by the Pit, McCloud, Feather, Indian, Yuba, and American Rivers as it flows southward 350 miles to its confluence with the San Joaquin in the Delta region. The Sacramento's lower course is through a marshy plain partly inun- dated yearly. The San Joaquin, whose valley comprises more than three-fifths of the central basin, flows northward from its headwaters in the mountains of Fresno County. Into it drain the waters of the Fresno, Merced, Tuolumne, Stanislaus, Calaveras, Mokelumne, and Consumnes Rivers, together with many smaller streams.
The seaward slopes of the Coast Range are drained by the Klamath (joined by the Scott and Trinity), Mad, Eel, and Russian Rivers north of San Francisco, and south of it by the Salinas, Santa Maria, Santa Ynez, Santa Clara and other secondary rivers, many of them inter- mittently dry. Southern California's so-called rivers — the Ventura, Los
12 CALIFORNIA
Angeles, San Gabriel, Santa Ana, San Luis Rey, Santa Margarita, and San Diego — are for the most part dry creek beds except during spring floods.
A peculiarity of the State's drainage system is its many river "sinks" where the waters either dry up from evaporation or, like the Amargosa River in Death Valley, disappear beneath the surface. Through Modoc and Lassen Counties, in the far northeast, stretches a chain of alkaline "lakes" — Goose, Upper and Middle, and Honey Lakes. They are all without drainage to the sea, and the spring run-off rapidly evaporates. In the Central Valley, south of the area drained by the San Joaquin, the Kings, Kaweah, and Kern Rivers, fed by the melting snows of the high Sierra, formerly emptied into shallow marsh-girt lakes. But with the impounding of water for irrigation these lakes have dried up, and the old lake beds have become farm lands. The Mojave Desert, in whose sandy wastes the Mojave River is swallowed up, is dotted with glistening alkaline-incrusted dry lake beds. In Riverside, San Diego, and Imperial Counties, many creeks (so-called rivers whose beds are normally dry) run toward the desert sink of the Salton Sea region.
California has two magnificent natural harbors, San Francisco and San Diego Bays, both landlocked; and one great artificially built har- bor, the port of Los Angeles. San Francisco Bay, entered through the Golden Gate, is among the world's finest; here, besides the port of San Francisco itself, are those of Oakland, Alameda, and Richmond. San Diego Bay, safe at all seasons, is sheltered from ocean winds by Point Loma, a promontory seven miles in length. The Los Angeles harbor, fronting on open San Pedro Bay, 20 miles from the city, is protected by a breakwater. California's best minor harbors are those of Monterey and Santa Cruz, on Monterey Bay, and Eureka, on Hum- boldt Bay, some 280 miles north of San Francisco.
There are two groups of islands off the California coast. The Santa Barbara Islands, nine in number, lie between Point Concepcion and San Diego, 20 to 60 miles from the mainland. From San Miguel Island in the north to San Clemente Island in the south they are scat- tered over a distance of 155 miles. The best known island of the group is rugged Santa Catalina, 25 miles long with an average width of four miles, which stands 20 miles south of San Pedro. The Faral- lones, a group of six small rocky islands, lie about 28 miles west of the entrance to San Francisco Bay.
CLIMATE
The first American writer to describe California's natural features refrained from the rhapsody which has characterized most of the sub- sequent discussion of the State's far-famed weather. "The climate of
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 13
California," wrote Captain William Shaler, "generally is dry and tem- perate, and remarkably healthy ; on the western coast the sky is generally obscured by fogs and haze, but on the opposite side it is constantly clear; not a cloud is to be seen, night or day. The northwest winds blow very strong eight months in the year, on the western coast, with very little interruption; the land breezes at that time are hardly per- ceptible; but in the winter months they are stronger and regular. In the months of January, February, and March there are at times very high gales from the southeast, which render most of the bays and harbours on the coast unsafe at that season."
California's climate is characterized by certain peculiar features: the temperature of the entire Pacific Coast is milder and more uni- form than that of regions in corresponding latitudes east of the moun- tains; the year divides, in general, into two seasons — wet and dry — instead of into the usual four seasons; and where extreme summer heat occurs, its discomfort is lessened by the dryness of the air.
Despite these general characteristics the State is a place of many climates, due to distance from the ocean, situation in reference to mountains, and, above all, altitude. Thus there are sharp climatic contrasts within a single limited area. One may go sleighing within sight of blossoming orchards, or view snow-clad peaks while bathing in the sea. A winter traveler in the high Sierra will be reminded of the Alps, while anyone venturing into the scorching inland valleys in midsummer will conclude that whoever labeled California "semitropi- cal" was a master of understatement.
The term, however, is applied with good reason to the strip of land between the coastal mountains and the ocean. For those who have never visited this area the most restrained account of its climate is likely to seem hyperbole. The year-round weather is more equable than that of any other part of the United States; and from San Fran- cisco southward to Monterey, the difference between the average sum- mer and winter temperatures is seldom more than 10 degrees. In this coastal region frost heavy enough to halt the greening of the hills under winter rains is as rare as thunder and lightning; and always some flowers are in bloom. Sea breezes and fogs tend to stabilize the tem- perature without extremes of heat or cold.
The annual mean temperature of San Francisco is 56° ; the summer mean is less than 60°, the winter 51°, and the lowest recorded tem- perature 27°. In San Diego the winter mean temperature is 54°, the summer 68°. In Monterey the difference between January and August mean temperatures is from 10° to 14°; in Los Angeles 14° to 16°. Because of the California current and the marine air from the Pacific anticyclone, summer in San Francisco is actually cooler than fall. These same factors induce fogs, night and morning, in that region and all
14 CALIFORNIA
along the California coast during the greater part ^of the summer. So dense and persistent are these coastal fogs that great areas south of San Francisco devoted to truck gardening require no other moisture during the summer months. The Coast redwood, as well as the plants which grow beneath it, is watered by the fog that condenses on its foliage.
In the southern part of the Central Valley, temperatures are often very high. Although the annual mean temperature of the inland is 64°, in Fresno and Bakersfield the mercury occasionally soars above 110°. The desert temperatures are still higher, the summer mean in Fort Yuma being 92°. In Death Valley, the average daily minimum for July, the hottest month, is 87.6°. But on July 10, 1913, it reached 134°, only slightly less than the highest natural air temperature hitherto accurately measured. In the mountain regions, on the other hand, sum- mer temperatures are much lower and the winters are very severe. At the top of Mount Lassen, in the winter of 1932-33, the mercury reg- istered 56° below zero.
Annual rainfall in the State varies from about 80 inches at Crescent City in the extreme north to about 10 inches at San Diego in the extreme south. At San Francisco the annual average is about 22 inches ; at Los Angeles, 16 inches. The northern half of the Sierra and the northwest counties are covered by a heavy rain belt. In the high mountains precipitation, almost entirely in the form of snow, provides most of the run-off which supplies water for the cities and for irri- gation. In the high Sierra the average annual snowfall is from 300 to 400 inches. At Tamarack in Alpine County the snowfall during the winter of 1906-7 was 844 inches, the greatest ever recorded for a single season anywhere in the United States. The belt of heavy rain shades off to a region of lighter rainfall which covers all the rest of the State except Inyo, Kern, San Bernardino, and Imperial Counties, and the eastern portion of Riverside County. The limits of this third region may, in dry years, include all of the State below Fresno and the entire Central Valley.
In general, rains occur in California only in the months from Octo- ber to May. Even during this rainy season, the valley districts usually have no more than from 25 to 35 rainy days. Throughout the rest of the year excursions may be planned everywhere, except in some parts of the mountains, with considerable confidence that no rain will dampen the occasion.
GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
Every major division of geologic time is represented in California by marine sediments, and many of them by continental deposits as well.
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 15
As the Pacific Ocean on the west and the ancient Great Basin Sea on the east alternately encroached on the California region, each supplied that part of the record which the other omitted. In formations of the last two periods, the Tertiary and the Quaternary, California is par- ticularly rich.
Structurally the Sierra Nevada is a single colossal block of earth's crust lifted along its eastern edge to a height of more than 1 1 ,000 feet above the adjoining blocks, and gently tilted westward. The oldest known rocks making up these mountains are intrusions of molten rock (magma) and limestones, cherts, shales, and sandstones, all sedimentary, and nearly all changed into their metamorphic equivalents in the proc- ess of mountain building. These older sedimentary rocks were de- posited in ancient seas of shifting extent and depth, which during the second half of the Paleozoic and the first two periods of the Mesozoic era, covered now one part, now another, of the Pacific Coast. Toward the close of the Jurassic period, the lands that were eventually to be- come the ancestral Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Klamath Mountains began to emerge from the sea.
During the Cretaceous period the Sierra's whole block tilted west- ward. This process of tilting and folding wrenched open leaves of slates, once shales; heated mineral-bearing solutions escaped from the magma that was cooling and solidifying below and filled the slate openings with gold-bearing quartz. The Eocene epoch of the Tertiary period was comparatively quiet. The Sierra slowly underwent addi- tional elevations and subsidences accompanied by active erosion of the surface rocks. Meanwhile the rivers were cutting their channels down the western slope and carrying the products of erosion to the inland sea. There was further release of gold from the bedrock, and the formation of rich placers. In the Oligocene epoch following, there was volcanic activity, and the Sierra gold-bearing stream channels were dammed and filled with rhyolite ash.
Volcanic activity continued during the Miocene age, and in addi- tion to lava there were extensive mud flows and tuffs. In the Pliocene epoch the volcanoes were far less active, and in the Pleistocene the volcanic cover was removed in part by erosion. The veins and buried stream channels were cut into, and gold-bearing gravels were washed from their ancient channels and redistributed along new streams. This is the origin of so-called free gold. The Sierra had been greatly worn down in late Tertiary times, but the Pleistocene epoch of the Quat- ernary period was an era of re-elevation. There was much faulting, and a new period of volcanic activity began which is not quite ended today.
In the early Tertiary period the Sierra slopes were luxuriant with vegetation, but toward the end of that period the climate became much
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cooler. The slopes and summits were encased in thick ice and snow, which kept them captive. The glacial periods of the Pleistocene were relieved by intervals during which the ice fields retreated toward the crests, yielding to climates even milder than that of California today. But when the ice of the last glacial age had finally retreated (traces of this epoch still linger in various glaciers such as those on Shasta), the Sierra crest stood stripped of vegetation and soil, exposing those bare expanses of whitish granites and schists that now give it its daz- zling beauty. Yosemite and other extraordinary Sierra valleys and canyons are also glacial legacies, as are the numerous lakes in the high Sierra. Tahoe, lovely lake and the deepest in the United States, was made partially by glaciation and partly by faulting, erosion, and vol- canic damming.
The volcanic activity of Miocene times was especially great in the Cascade Range, where a number of volcanic peaks rose in a compara- tively short time. Mount Shasta was one ; the still active Mount Las- sen was another, and the volcanic range extends north into Oregon and Washington. Eastward from the range extends one of the largest lava fields in the world, covering 200,000 square miles to depths of from 200 to 2,ooo feet. This lava plateau, generally decomposed on the surface, which stretches beyond California into Oregon and across into Idaho and Wyoming, did not for the most part erupt through typical volcanic vents, but flooded up through great cracks or fissures. The Pit River, flowing through the Cascades, has cut deep into the series of volcanic rocks (andesites) some 7,500 feet in thickness, and the thin but widespread basalts. Because of the depth of this cover- ing, the pre-Miocene history of the region is uncertain.
The oldest of the accessible formations of the Klamath Mountains are pre-Cambrian metamorphic rocks including schists, quartzites, and crystalline limestones — the last named consisting partly of sedimentary, partly of igneous rocks, both metamorphosed. The first two periods of the Mesozoic are represented by smaller proportions of sedimentary rocks which are covered by remnants of once extensive beds of sand- stones, shales, and conglomerates of the Cretaceous period. There were also periods when volcanoes were active, especially the early Devonian period and the greater part of the Mesozoic era. The mass had been uplifted during the Jurassic period, but erosion and subsidence brought the ancestral Klamath mountains to below sea level in the Cretaceous period. This oscillation continued more or less quietly, except for an outburst of great volcanic activity in the middle of the Miocene. The most recent re-elevation, like that of the Sierra, was at the beginning of the Quaternary period. At approximately the same time, gold- bearing gravels were carried down along the sides of many canyons by erosion.
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 1 7
There are no Paleozoic (old life) rocks in the northern Coast Range, but crystalline limestone and schist, probably of this age, are found in the Santa Cruz, Gabilan, and Santa Lucia Ranges. Of the next era, the Mesozoic, Triassic period remains are lacking, but from the Jurassic come most of that complex series of Coast Range rocks known as the Franciscan. These are sedimentary rocks of several types: conglomerate, sandstone, shale, variegated chert, and (rarely) limestone. With them is embedded a great series of volcanic and plu- tonic rocks of the same age.
Cretaceous rocks in the Coast Range are abundant. They make up considerable parts of the Santa Lucia, the Temblor, and Diablo Ranges, and they become even more widespread north of San Fran- cisco. The rocks consist chiefly of shale, siltstone and sandstone, with some small streaks of coal, and — near Coalinga — shale, which is the source of the oil in overlying Tertiary beds. The Cretaceous sea cov- ered considerable parts of what is now the north Coast Range, but the region that now comprises the Santa Lucia Range and the Salinas Valley was relatively higher than at present, and formed Salinia, a long narrow peninsula running out to the northwest. The Eocene strata are relatively uncommon except in the eastern foothills near Coalinga and in the Mount Diablo region. The rocks are similar to those of the Cretaceous. There are considerable beds of coal, but the latter is of poor quality. Salinia had become an island, and there was a similar island whose axis ran along what are now the Gabilan and Mount Hamilton Ranges northwest to Marin County.
The Oligocene formations in the Coast Range are chiefly of red sandstone; there are also certain organic shales, which seem to be the source rocks for the oil of Kettleman Hills. The seas had become less widespread. Salinia extended farther north and west, but the San Joaquin Valley still formed an arm of the sea into which drained the rivers of Mohavia — a name given to the region now covered by the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, and the Owens River Valley. In the early Miocene there was much volcanic activity in the Coast Range, and this ultimately cut off the sedimentary deposits from Mohavia and prevented their reaching the sea. There followed in the late Miocene another period of widespread shallow seas and many coastal islands. Much organic siliceous shale was laid down, and this is the source )f the oil in the Santa Barbara and Ventura coast region as well as elsewhere. Of Pliocene origin are calcareous and feldspathic sand- tones and thick beds of brown and blue sandy clay. As elsewhere in California, the climate became cooler. There was still a series of slands and peninsulas along the entire coast.
In the Pleistocene epoch most of the old interior seas and bays dis- ippeared. This was a period of violent deformation of structure, with
l8 CALIFORNIA
foldings and bendings of the strata and a series of faults. Of these latter, the San Andreas fault, which was responsible for the earth- quake of 1906, extends from Tomales Bay, 40 miles north of San Francisco, to the Mojave Desert, 600 miles southeast. In contrast to the more common type of vertical movement, it has a horizontal drift. The extent of its movement during Tertiary times was at least 700 feet, and according to some estimates as much as 10 or 20 miles. The Hayward fault, which runs sub-parallel to the San Andreas across San Francisco Bay and through Berkeley, is also important; and the Coast Range is cut by several smaller faults.
The Great Valley is an immense trough formed late in the Jurassic period when the mountain ranges inclosing it began to rise from the water. Unlike most valleys in the United States, which were cut by streams, it came into being through the sinking of the earth's crust. From that time on it remained an inland basin. For long periods it was flooded with salt water, as the sea flowed in through gaps in its intermittently rising barriers. The upward thrust of the Coast Range in the middle of the Tertiary period made it a nearly landlocked and shallow inland sea. Finally, in early Pleistocene times, the streams of the Sierra and the Coast Range, steadily carrying down their loads of sediment, caused a recession of the sea and laid down the flat valley floor. Although the valley is probably still sinking, it has filled with alluvium as fast as it has sunk. In some places drillings to depths of more than 3,000 feet fail to reveal bedrock.
The Transverse Ranges, comprising the San Bernardino, San Ga- briel, Santa Monica, Santa Inez, and Santa Susana Mountains, have a general east-west trend, but differ only slightly in their geology from the chains of the Coast Range. Some of their Tertiary sedimentary rocks are more than 30,000 feet thick, exceeding in thickness any other such rocks in North America. They are remarkably rich in fossils.
Extending southeast of the Los Angeles Basin to a point beyond the Mexican border, the Peninsular Ranges include the San Jacinto, Santa Ana, Santa Rosa, and Coyote Mountains, with plateaus and valleys in between. Their geology has been but little studied, but they seem to belong to the fault-block type of mountains. While the faults are branches of the San Andreas, their general geology is rather like that of the Sierra, the dominating rocks being granitic.
The Great Basin comprises all that part of California lying south- east of the Sierra and east of the Peninsular Ranges, including the Colorado Desert, the Mojave Desert, and the Basin Ranges. Except for the Imperial Valley and some smaller areas under irrigation, the section is today a complete desert. The Colorado Desert, in part 245 feet below sea level, is a depressed block between active branches of the alluvium covered San Andreas fault in the Peninsular Ranges
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 1Q
and the Mojave Desert to the north and east. The Mojave Desert region has isolated mountain ranges rising abruptly from desert plains. Farther north the Basin Ranges, of typical fault-block structure, run roughly parallel from north to south and are separated by deep basins or troughs. Death Valley, the most famous of the basins, is the bed of a lake of Pleistocene times and shows distinct sets of shore lines. The Great Basin had a number of such lakes in recent geologic time, although the region as a whole has been a land area since Cretaceous times. In the Panamint and Amargosa Ranges, which fence in Death Valley on the east and west, are formations from as far back as the Paleozoic era, but- the valley, as such, is recent. The Mojave Desert's many short mountain ranges of various trends are largely of ancient volcanic and metamorphosed Tertiary rocks. The rest of the Mojave is an expanse of great sandy valleys and of dry lakes holding deposits of dead seas — salt, gypsum, soda, and borax. The last named was formed when the red-hot lava streams flowed into the saline lakes. The Colorado Desert is underlaid with Tertiary volcanic flows and coarse conglomerates, above which lie Quaternary fresh-water silts and sandstones.
With the rise of the mountains to the north and west in the early Miocene epoch, the sea that covered them was cut off and inland drainage systems were created. Rainfall decreased and the region slowly dried up. However, lakes of considerable extent have existed in the basin of the Colorado River within the period of the occupation of the country by the Indians, whose old camps may still be found on the margins of what are now salt flats.
A number of regions in California, particularly in the Coast Range and the Los Angeles Basin, are rich in fossils. Numerous fossil radio- laria found in the Franciscan cherts show their marine origin, and the north Coast Ranges have yielded fossil ferns, cyads, and conifers, as well as several kinds of mollusks and smaller marine organisms of the Cretaceous period. The types of marine organism found in the Eocene rocks indicate a much warmer surface water than exists on the California coast at present, and consequently a warmer climate.
From the Sespe beds between Los Angeles and Ventura have come bones of a variety of mammals of Oligocene times : the rhinoceros, the oreodont, the miohippus, the camelid, primitive carnivores, rodents, and insectivores. At a number of places the remains of primitive horses, peccaries, and camels have been found in Miocene formations. In the Pliocene strata there are primitive horses close in form to the modern horse.
The best-known paleontological area in California, and one of the richest in the world, is La Brea Pits in Los Angeles County. Since Tertiary times the quaking and sticky area of the La Brea asphalt
2O CALIFORNIA
beds has been a death trap for unwary animals. Beneath it have been preserved the skeletons of a prehistoric menagerie, including the im- perial elephants, largest of all land mammals, whose domain extended from eastern Nebraska to Mexico City, hideous great ground sloths and little ground sloths, sabre-tooth tigers, giant wolves, camels and horses, llamas, wide-front bison, and numerous smaller species such as turtles, snakes, beetles, and birds. Well-preserved forms of vege- tation, which show the evolution of plant life, have also been un- earthed here. Noteworthy among these is a complete eight-foot cypress of the McNab species, which was discovered standing upright, but- tressed by bones. This species is now found only rarely on the dry hills and flats of the Coast Range in northern California.
The Mojave and Death Valley Deserts of southern California have yielded fossils of the Oligocene and Miocene epochs, deposited as long as 25,000,000 years ago. In a narrow canyon near Barstow, where layers of breccia in dazzling colors were thrust up by an ancient vol- canic upheaval, scientists have discovered during the past twenty years the remains of three-toed horses, several varieties of camels, antelope, and smaller animals, and an animal almost identical with the desert coyote of today. The complete skeleton of an Ice Age elephant (ter- rabeladon), similar to fossils discovered in the Gobi Desert, was found in 1938 near Saltdale, Kern County, in the northern part of the Mojave Desert. Death Valley's Tertiary beds have yielded the re- mains— including a skull three feet long — of a titanotherium, a large mammal that somewhat resembled the rhinoceros, found in red sand- stone formations of the Oligocene epoch near Leadfield.
The fossils of Inyo County's "oldest muds in the world" are so abundant that, in geologist G. D. Bailey's words, they "are hauled away by carloads to fill the museums of the East." In Fresno County, less rich paleontologically, submammalian fossils have been found near Coalinga, a Pliocene mastodon skull at the north end of the Kettleman Hills, and fossil mastodon bones near Fresno. A rare find, uncovered in the Coast Range west of Fresno in 1937, was a fossil of eight vertebrae of a mesasaurus, huge sea lizard of the upper Cretaceous epoch. Kern County has yielded fossil animal bones of Tertiary and earlier ages and exceptionally rich marine fossils of the mollusca phylum, among them some highly ornamented forms showing a considerable degree of advancement in racial development.
The first dinosaur remains ever uncovered on the west coast of America were found in 1936 in the hills west of Patterson, Stanislaus County, by a high school student. The remains consisted of the tail and one hind foot. In other mountain counties of northern California, ancient caves — including Hawver's Cave on the North Fork of the American River in Eldorado County, and Potter and Samwell Caves
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 21
on the McCloud River in Shasta County — have proved to be veritable storehouses of the bones of mammals swept in by river floods in the remote past. Remains of the giant ground sloth (megalonyx) have turned up in the earth fan at the entrance to Mercer's, or Murphy's Cave in Calaveras County.
The State's most unexpected paleontological discovery was dredged from the mud of San Francisco Bay during construction of the island site of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. From sand- stone strata 45 feet below the bay level, a tooth and a section of the ivory tusk of a Columbian mammoth (elephas Columbia) of the middle Pleistocene epoch were scooped up and pumped through 17,000 feet of pipe line. On the Peninsula, near Menlo Park Station, San Mateo County, remains of a mastodon skeleton were found in June 1927, buried in the plain formed by the coalescent fans that fringe the Bay. The discovery included a molar tooth, preserved without even discoloration of the enamel, three sections of a tusk, and frag- ments of ribs and other bones.
The most complete quarry in California for specimens of the Ter- tiary period was discovered in 1926 near Moraga, Contra Costa County, on the site "of an ancient fresh-water lake. The fossils so far re- covered are not so well preserved as those of the La Brea Pits, but they are believed to be more complete and to predate the La Brea remains by about 9,000,000 years. A three-toed giant horse and a three-footed antelope, a camel much larger than any known today, and the most primitive dog of its type yet found are among the species. Other discoveries include fossils of mastodons, hyenalike dogs, sabre- tooth cats, oreodons, peccaries, and a host of smaller creatures. At Irvington, in Alameda County, remnants of a prehistoric horse, an antelope, a mammoth, and a horned toad — all more than 500,000 years old — were found in 1936 and turned over to the University of Cali- fornia department of paleontology, which discovered the beds.
PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE
California's plant and animal life is as diverse as its environment. Since its climate ranges from subtropical to Arctic, its terrain from arid, below sea level deserts in the south to moist, forested mountains in the north and from icy Sierra ridges on the east to foggy coastal slopes on the west, the State embraces a wide variety of flora and fauna. All the life zones of North America, except the tropical, are represented, their distribution depending not so much on latitude, as in most regions, as on altitude. California's plant and animal life, virtually isolated from the rest of the continent, is frequently distinc- tive and sometimes unique. While some species have migrated into
22 CALIFORNIA
the mountain slopes and coastal fog belt of the north from Oregon, and into the semiarid deserts, plains, and mountains of the south from Mexico, only a few eastern species have had the hardihood to cross the inhospitable deserts of the Great Basin and scale the barrier of the Sierra. These have undergone striking transformation in their migra- tion.
Botanically, California is notable in particular for the unusual num- ber of its annuals, both species and individuals, and for its numerous rare species of the lily family. More evergreens, especially the conifers, and fewer deciduous trees are found here than in most other States. Notable also are the many species of trees surviving only in limited localities from past ages, of which the best known are the Monterey pine and Monterey cypress and the two Sequoias (the coast redwood and the "big tree"), representing a family extinct elsewhere since the Ice Age. Still another distinctive feature is the chaparral — extensive pigmy forests of shrubs, stunted trees, and associated herbaceous plants — which covers the hillsides of the Upper Sonoran zone in dense thickets. It remains dormant throughout the hot dry summer, but becomes active with the rains of late winter and early spring.
The eucalyptus and acacia of Australia, the pepper tree of Peru, and the palm tree of the tropics flourish in both rural and urban areas; the eucalyptus (eucalyptus globulus) especially has been so widely planted in groves and roadside lanes both along the coast and in the Great Valley as to seem like a native. The wild yellow mustard, that covers orchard lands and hillsides in season with a yellow-green tide, was planted by the earliest Spanish settlers, as was the wild radish. The geranium and fuchsia both grow to extraordinary size in all the coast counties, where there are no extremes of heat and cold. In a number of places in the Sierra foothills, Scotch broom (cystisus sco- parius) more than holds its own as an "escape" in the chaparral; and a species of filarese (erodium macrophyllum) , a valuable forage crop, has become widely distributed.
The animals of the State are also distinctive, though less conspicu- ously so than the vegetation. The birds as a whole tend to be grayer, paler, and of slighter build than their eastern relatives. There are fewer species of snakes and more of lizards. Except for several species of trout, few fresh-water fish are native to the State, although some interesting indigenous species are found among the fauna of the 'tidal strip.
The streams were once abundantly supplied with sturgeon, but this magnificent fish has practically disappeared save in the least acces- sible rivers of the State's northwest coast. The icy lakes and streams of the Sierra favor many species of native and introduced trout. The former include the rainbow trout, or steel head, the Tahoe trout, the
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 23
golden, the cutthroat, and Dolly Varden. Salmon, migrating from the ocean to their upstream spawning beds, are found in the northern coastal rivers in the spring. Dog salmon and quinnat salmon fre- quent coastal waters and the great king salmon enters the Bay of Monterey during the summer months. Other deep-sea fishes are the black and white sea bass, the yellowtail, the sheepshead, the "tonno," the albacore, the leaping and the yellowfin tuna, the bonito (the Sardo chilensis of the Pacific), the voracious barracuda (Sphyraena barra- cuda}, and the battling swordfish.
Marine life of every kind is prolific and variegated. The Cali- fornia lobster, though large, lacks the huge pinchers of his eastern cousin. The pilchard or sardine (Sardinia caerulea) is found in such numbers during its run as to comprise 2O percent of the annual value of the State's fisheries. Herds of sea lions roar from the rocks off San Francisco, and elsewhere the leopard seal is occasionally seen. The abalone, most noted of California's shellfish, is a table delicacy and its shell is of use in manufacture. Oysters are plentiful but smaller than eastern varieties.
California is divided by biologists into six life zones, in each of which the altitude and climatic conditions are roughly uniform through- out the zone (see accompanying map). These are designated the Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, and Arctic zones. The first is the lowest in altitude, and the warmest; the last is the highest and coldest. The Lower Sonoran zone includes the larger part of the Great Valley from Red Bluff to Bakersfield, all of the great arid and desert regions southeast of the Sierra to the Nevada and Arizona lines, and several long narrow strips extending from the Salinas Valley south. The Upper Sonoran takes in all the foothill country of the Sierra Nevada, the lava plateaus of Modoc and Lassen Counties, the western slopes of the Sacramento Valley, the inner chains of the Coast Range and Valleys from Mendocino County to San Francisco Bay, and all of the coastal region south of San Fran- cisco except the Santa Cruz Mountains and the higher elevations of the Santa Lucias. These latter belong to the Transition zone, which also includes all of the coast country north of San Francisco, the heavily watered northeastern counties and a long belt, between 2500 and 5000 feet high in the Sierra. The Canadian, Hudsonian, and Arctic zones lie in the higher elevations of the Siskiyous, the Trinity Mountains, the Sierra, .the San Bernardino and San Jacinto ranges.
It is possible to mention here only a few of the commoner or more characteristic inhabitants of these biologic zones, as a brief indication of the extraordinary range and variety of California's plant and ani- mal life.
24 CALIFORNIA
In the Colorado Desert section of the Lower Sonoran zone are found the California fan palm; the cylindrical cacti, echinocactus, and bigelovia; the mesquite, screwbean, and palo verde; and in the rainy season, among other flowers, the dwarf desert poppy and several dimin- utive asters. The most famous of plants peculiar to the Mojave Desert is the Joshua tree (Yucca arborescens) . Along the river bot- toms of the Great Valley grow Fremont cottonwoods and valley oaks. The mammalian life, mostly nocturnal in its habits, includes jack rab- bits, kit foxes, kangaroo rats, pocket mice, and white-footed mice. Few animals besides the various species of chipmunks and ground squirrels appear in the daytime. In recent years the San Joaquin and Tulare basins have been overrun by Texas opossum, all originating from imported animals which either escaped or were liberated. The birds of the Lower Sonoran include Texas nighthawks, mocking-birds, blue grosbeaks, road runners, phainopeplas, cactus wrens, hooded orioles, verdins, and LeConte thrashers. Because of the large number of rodents, hawks and owls are unusually common. The tule elk once roamed over the marshes and sloughs of the Tulare Basin and San Joaquin River; today the last herd can be seen at the State park west of Bakersfield. The reptiles include the sidewinder (a small rattle- snake), the desert tortoise, and the horned toad.
The Upper Sonoran zone includes the State's great chaparral belt. This was the home of the now extinct California grizzly; it is still the haunt of the rapidly disappearing California condor, largest flying bird of the northern hemisphere. Here are found Digger pines, blue and scrub oaks, California buckeyes, many species of manzanita and ceanothus, certain kinds of yucca, and a host of other shrubs. Some of its distinctive species of birds are the California jay, stellar jay, California thrasher, bush tit, Anna hummingbird, bell sparrow, house finch, dusky poorwill, valley quail, mourning dove, and yellow-billed magpie. Among the animals are the brown-footed woodrat, brush rabbit, antelope, and ring-tailed cat (a relative of the raccoon).
This is a region rich in flowers. Early travelers in the State were eloquent in their descriptions of the continuous garden that once blanketed the plains and lower slopes. At a later time John Muir wrote, "For a distance of four hundred miles, your foot crushed a hundred flowers at every step." Most of this land is under cultiva- tion now, and much of the rest is heavily grazed ; but on fallow lands, in spite of the ravages of careless tourists in well-traveled regions, wild flowers still flourish in surprising abundance and soon recapture aban- doned fields and ranges. Among the most common genera are gilia, nemophila, mint, mimulus, godetia, phacelia, lupine, orthocarpus, cas- tilleia, dodecathon, viola, and calochortus. The State flower, the Cali- fornia poppy, or eschscholtzia, is most abundant in this zone. In the
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 25
spring it colors hills and fields and roadsides with great masses of brilliant orange. It acquired its generic name from Adelbert von Chamisso, a German poet and naturalist, who saw it in bloom at San Francisco in 1816 and named it for a college friend who accompanied him — the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Eschscholtz. Though the eschscholtzia is widely distributed, it is not found in the densely wooded regions or at high elevations. A plant that is common to all parts of California and that occurs in a greater number of species here than anywhere else in the world is the lupine. As herb or shrub it varies from dwarf kinds in the high Sierra to the arborescent varieties growing close to the ocean. The pea-shaped flowers are of many colors, ranging from white through pale yellow, pink, and lavender to deep blue and purple.
In the Transition zone, which includes most of the State's great forests and therefore supplies most of its commercially valuable timber, are the redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests of the Coast Range, extending from the Oregon border on the north to the coastal canyons below Monterey on the south and as far as the inner limit of the summer fogs on the east. The redwood is one of the tallest trees in the world, commonly growing more than 2OO feet high, and sometimes more than 300 feet. Trunks are often 15 to 20 feet in diameter, and occasionally from 20 to 25 feet. One of the peculiarities of the red- wood is its shallow root system, though the trunks are strongly but- tressed at the base. Because of the spongy, fire-resistant bark, these trees survived the annual fires set by the Indians of the region to clear out the underbrush and make hunting easier. The gently tapering shafts are almost bare of branches for a hundred feet or more above the ground. The bark is a deep purplish red, massively fluted ; the foliage is delicate and feathery. A virgin redwood forest, with the light filtering through the treetops and falling in diagonal beams be- tween the great columns, is one of the most beautiful sights in the world.
Beneath the trees, watered by the fog which they have trapped and precipitated, is an extraordinarily luxuriant growth. Swordferns, woodwardia ferns, alumroot, fringecups, barrenwort, fetid adders- tongue, erythronium and violas, trillium and fritillaria carpet the floor. In almost impenetrable thickets grow the huckleberry, Oregon grape, rhododendron, azalea, California buckthorn, salmonberry, elder, and wild currant. The trees most commonly found in association with the redwood are the broad-leaved maple, madrona, tanbark oak, California laurel, and (usually in separate stands) the somber Douglas fir. Of these Coast Range trees the most picturesque is the madrona, a species of arbutus, which moved Bret Harte to write:
I
26 CALIFORNIA
Captain of the western wood Thou that apest Robin Hood! Green above thy scarlet hose, How thy velvet mantle shows! Never tree like thee arrayed, O thou gallant of the glade!
The Transition zone is particularly rich in animal life. It is the home of the Columbian black-tailed deer, black bear, Pacific coon, marten, mink weasel, skunk, fox, packrat, and mountain beaver. The California ring-tailed cat, common in both the Upper Sonoran and the Transition zones, is one of the handsomest animals peculiar to the West; it is often tamed and kept as a pet. Cougars and bobcats are fairly common. A few small herds of Roosevelt elk survive in the ex- treme northwest. Of the few reptiles, gopher snakes, garter snakes, and the rattlers are commonest. Amphibia are numerous, as is to be expected in so moist a region. The streams abound in water-puppies, and the woods in big mottled redwood salamanders which thrive on the abundant yellow groundslugs. In the depths of the Transition zone forests the birds are neither very numerous nor very conspicuous. Kingfishers, chickadees, various warblers, towhees, varied and hermit thrushes, robins, juncos, mountain quail, and hummingbirds are the most common.
East of the redwood belt, on the slopes of the Klamaths, the Cas- cades, and the northern Sierra, is a mixed forest of coniferous and deciduous trees, with the former predominating. Yellow pine, Douglas fir, sugar pine, white fir, incense cedar, western yew, mountain birch, and white oak are the important trees of this region. The herbaceous flora resembles that of the southern Sierra and the drier portions of the redwood belt. This is the home of the white Washington lily, the orange Lilium pardalinum, the erythronium, western azaleas of white or pink, several lupines, and the curious darlingtonia, which traps un- wary insects in its hoodlike leaves. The Klamath Mountains, mark- ing the border line between the Oregonian and Californian floras, are of great interest to botanists. With the exception of the antelope of the Modoc lava beds, the mule deer, the eastern kingbird, and an occasional eastern bobolink, the fauna of this area is much like that of the coastal region.
South of Lake Tahoe lies the characteristic Sierran forest. Here at an average elevation of about 3,500 feet is found the "big tree" (Sequoia gigantea). Unlike the redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) , it does not form great belts of continuous forest but stands in about 35 isolated groves, scattered from the American River to the Tule. These trees are probably the oldest living things in the world — some of them have been shown by ring counts to be not less than 4,000 years old. In diameter they average from 15 to 20 feet; their average height is
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 27
about 250 feet. The "big tree" is bulkier than the redwood, with cinnamon-colored bark and foliage similar to that of its coast cousin. The two Sequoias, with the ginkgo tree and the marestail, are sur- vivals from a flora that was nearly destroyed in the glacial period. In Miocene times, Sequoias of various species were common over much of the northern hemisphere. In spite of their great age, both indi- vidually and as a species, the "big trees" are not dying out, but rather are increasing with the aid of the reforestation work of the United States Forest Service and office of National Parks. The "big tree" is found on the edge of the Transition and Canadian zones, usually close to stands of fir. Below it, in the Transition zone, stretch extensive forests of yellow and sugar pine, incense cedar, golden and black oak, California laurel, and broadleaved maple. In this Sierran forest, the most common wild flowers are pentstemons, gilias, mariposa tulips, pussypaws, mimulus, lappulas (wild forget-me-nots), collinsias, tiger and leopard lilies, buttercups, and the omnipresent lupines.
As one enters the Canadian zone, a change is immediately notice- able. The yellow pine gives way to the related Jeffrey pine. As one ascends, mountain pines and red firs and (higher still) lodgepole pines dominate the forest. Brushy areas are covered with dwarf manzanita and ceanothus. Under the firs grows some herbaceous vegetation, mostly living on the decayed wood common in fir forests. Notable in this vegetation are the brilliant snowplant, several species of corallor- rhiza, and the cancerroot. This is also the home of the unique Sierra puffball. Some of the more conspicuous birds are the blue-fronted jay, Sierra junco, western chipping sparrow, Sierra hermit thrush, water ouzel, evening grosbeak, Sierra grouse, and Townsend solitaire. Among the animals are the mountain weasel, yellow-haired porcupine, snowshoe rabbit, golden-mantled ground squirrel, Sierra chickaree, and certain species of chipmunks.
The Hudsonian zone is the belt of forest immediately below timber line. With the Canadian zone it shares the lodgepole pine, which is here the dominant cover. Usually associated with, or above the level of, the lodgepole are the white bark, foxtail, and silver pines. These latter trees, with the mountain hemlock, form the stunted and twisted growth of the timber line. Birds become scarcer in this zone, though mammals remain plentiful; some of the species extend up from the zones below. The California pine grosbeak, mountain bluebird, white- crowned sparrow, alpine chipmunk, Sierra marmot, Sierra cony, pine marten, Sierra least weasel, and wolverine are typical of the region.
The Arctic-Alpine zone, the highest of all, is a treeless area stretch- ing from an elevation of about 10,500 feet to the summits of the loftiest peaks. Here are found the Sierra primrose, the blue and fragrant polemonium, the yellow columbine, the alpine buttercup, the steershead,
28 CALIFORNIA
and the alpine shootingstar. Only one species of bird is native to the zone, the Sierra rosy finch; but many others visit it, notably flocks of migrating hummingbirds and, in the summer, gray and white Clark nutcrackers. The principal mammals are visitants from lower eleva- tions; however, the Sierra cony is often found in these heights and the Sierra white-tailed jackrabbit makes its home here. The Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep are seen occasionally in the White Mountains east of Owens Valley and in some of the southeastern ranges. A small band remains in the Mount Whitney region, survivors of those described by John Muir, which in his day ranged along the Sierran crest to the vicinity of Sonora Pass.
Certain animals range through several zones, particularly the mule deer, the coyote, and the cougar or mountain lion ; as do a number of birds notably the blue-fronted jay, the Sierra junco, the redshafted flicker, certain hawks, and some of the sparrows. The flowers and trees are generally confined within the limits of their native zones, although various similar forms, distinguishable only by botanists, occur at several elevations. Thus, the Jeffrey and western yellow pines can be differentiated with certainty only by a chemical analysis of their sap; while the Compositae generally, and particularly the asters, are the despair of all but highly trained specialists.
Gone now from most sections of the country is Nature's intricately organized population of bear, marten, beaver, otter, elk, deer, and badger. Tilled fields have replaced the natural haunts of fox, lynx, bobcat, and fisher. But in California these animals still possess the sunny chaparral and the green shade of forests. The United States Forest Service estimates that in the 18 national forests of California, covering nearly one-fifth of the State's area, there are 1 1 1 ,000 bkcktail deer, 148,000 mule deer, 7,000 bear, 2,800 antelope, 24,000 foxes, and 1,230 mountain lions. Man's encroachments have not yet driven out all the mountain sheep, weasels, badgers, raccoons, muskrat, beaver, and otter. Over vast areas of the California wilderness, human footprints seldom obliterate the tracks of paw and hoof.
NATURAL RESOURCES AND THEIR CONSERVATION
Gold was the first natural resource — scarcely noticed by the Indians and Spanish-Calif ornians — to be discovered in the land fronting the Pacific. Its discovery spelled the destruction of the simple economy of pre- Yankee California, attracted tens of thousands of fortune seek- ers, and radically affected the history of the State.
California's minerals, forests, soils, and water power, its scenery and climate, and its two great natural harbors, place it among the regions most richly endowed by nature. But its natural resources,
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 29
originally so great as to seem inexhaustible, were thrown open to private exploitation without restriction. Gold miners, taking little thought of the future, despoiled forests, denuded land of its surface soil, and clogged rivers with debris. Cattlemen deliberately set fire to forests to increase their acreage of grazing lands ; ranchers exhausted the soil by growing wheat year after year on the same areas. The inevitable consequences were floods, erosion, and soil depletion.
The land surface of the State comprises about 100,000,000 acres, of which approximately 30,000,000 acres are tillable. Since cultiva- tion in many areas is dependent on irrigation, it is impossible to esti- mate the amount of tillable land with accuracy. About 500 variations in soil types have been listed by the U. S. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils; taken as a whole, they are uncommonly productive.
Ever since pioneer days, the State's forest lands have yielded vast quantities of lumber. Some 7,700,000 acres have been logged over, and 500,000 have been reclaimed for agricultural use. The commercial forests, mainly in the mountain sections, consist chiefly of coniferous trees : Ponderosa pine, sugar pine, and white and red fir in the Sierra ; Douglas fir and the towering redwood in the northern coast counties of Del Norte, Humboldt, and Mendocino. Many stands in both regions are very heavy, capable of yielding as much as 100,000 board feet to the acre. The total bulk of old-growth timber in California is estimated at 213,500,000,000 board feet. The forest lands are divided almost equally between public and private ownership, but the heavier and more accessible stands are privately owned.
Legislative attempts early in the present century to conserve forest resources were mostly unsuccessful because of the opposition of cor- porate interests. In recent years the division of forestry of the State department of natural resources has done useful work, especially in fire and insect control.
Since 1892 the Federal Government has set apart as national forests 1 8 tracts along the headwaters of California streams, with a combined area of 19,216,332 acres — about one-fifth of the State's total acreage. These tracts have been "set aside to protect and maintain in a per- manently productive and useful condition lands unsuited to agriculture but capable of yielding timber and other forest benefits, such as forage for livestock and water for irrigation, domestic use, and power." They are controlled and supervised by the Forest Service of the U. S. De- partment of Agriculture. Extensive forest tracts are also reserved as State parks. Artificial reforestation is done mostly in the redwood region, where the climate fosters the growth of seedlings. In the pine region, with its hot dry summers and cold winters, natural reforestation is usually more successful. Artificial reforestation is carried on by
3O CALIFORNIA
the U. S. Forest Service and a few county organizations, some 4,000 acres being planted annually.
Of the 58 counties, each has some of the State's mineral substances. The six most important products of 1936 (latest available figures), listed in order of financial value, are petroleum, gold, natural gas, stone, soda, and cement. California is rich in petroleum, which has replaced gold as its most important mineral. Its oil, which is in general dis- tinguished by an asphaltum base, is found, along with great quantities of natural gas, on the coastal plain of southern California, in the San Joaquin Valley, and in scattered smaller areas elsewhere. California continues to outrank the rest of the United States, including Alaska, in the production of gold; its 1936 production topped any previous year in the history of the State. Quicksilver, copper, silver, lead, and zinc are found in substantial amounts, as are cement, clay products, stone, sand, and gravel. Most of the world's supply of borax comes from California. Platinum, tungsten, magnesite, chromite, pyrites, sil- ica, diatomaceous earth, potash, sodium salts, and talc are also mined.
In the early iSyo's, Sacramento Valley farmers organized anti- debris associations as a defense against the strongly intrenched mining interests, and in 1893 an act was passed by the State legislature to control hydraulic mining. Shortly after 1900, steps were taken for co-operative work between owners of land and the State and Federal governments to reclaim valuable swamp and overflow lands along the rivers. Not until 1911, however, did the State legislature create a conservation commission.
Since petroleum and natural gas are classed as minerals, their pro- duction is controlled by Federal laws; but under the California laws of 1911 and 1915 the State may regulate oil-drilling methods and prevent the waste of natural gas. Under the act of 1915, "to protect the natural resources of water, petroleum, and gas from damage, waste, and destruction," oil operators must use every effort to prevent con- tamination of fresh water suitable for irrigation or domestic use, to avoid the waste of natural gas, and to make regular reports of produc- tion to the State gas and oil supervisor. In 1919 several previously existing agricultural commissions were combined in a State department of agriculture, under the charge of a director of agriculture. The department is organized in several divisions, such as plant industry, animal industry, and agricultural chemistry. Its work is supplemented by that of the College of Agriculture of the University of California, with its central establishments at Berkeley and Davis. State conserva- tion activities include restoration of soil fertility, control and exclusion of pests, and study of plant diseases.
The task of protecting wild life is divided between State and Fed- eral agencies. The State maintains an effective patrol organization to
NATURAL SETTING AND CONSERVATION 31
enforce its regulations in this field. U. S. Forest Service officers help the State to enforce the fish and game laws, and aid in the restocking of streams and lakes with trout. Throughout the national forests, many areas have been set aside as State game refuges. California's lakes and streams are stocked annually writh millions of fingerlings, under State and Federal conservation programs. The work of breeding the numer- ous game fishes is carried on at twenty State and two U. S. fish hatch- eries, and distribution to the lakes and streams at higher elevations is effected through co-operation with the anglers' associations and the Sierra Club.
The future of California is closely linked with the future of its water supply. From the earliest days of the State, a popular movement for public ownership and distribution of irrigation water has struggled for domination over private ownership and sale. Californians have undertaken many comprehensive investigations of the problems of water control, pollution abatement, watershed protection, and beach erosion. In 1931 a complete water utilization plan, reported by the State division of water resources, outlined specific projects for the great agricultural districts. The reports of the California Basin Committees, drafted for the National Resources Committee (1937), recommended projects in flood control, irrigation, soil and wildlife conservation in the northern California-Klamath, Central Valley, central California coast, and south- ern California coastal drainage basins.
The project of making the desert blossom as a rose, or (more pro- saically) of turning desert areas into productive farmland, has held the imagination of western settlers for more than half a century. The possibility of irrigating the Imperial Valley area through the diversion of the waters of the Colorado River was first considered in 1876. The Colorado Irrigation Company was formed in 1892 and constructed a canal in the vicinity of the Mexican border. The plan almost ended in disaster when the powerful Colorado River changed its course during
I a flood in 1905-6 and hurled its waters through Imperial Valley into the big inland sink since known as Salton Sea, threatening to make a clean sweep of the valley ranches and settlements. After the damage had finally been repaired at great cost, the problem of effectively regu- lating the Colorado River was repeatedly brought before Congress. The completion in 1936 of Boulder Dam, second in size only to Grand Coulee in the Northwest, finally solved the problem, assuring the future of Imperial Valley as one of the most important agricultural regions in the country. Boulder Dam will control the waterflow of the All- American Canal, opened in 1938, which will distribute irrigation water throughout the reclaimed desert region in the southeastern corner of the State.
Despite the extremely high productivity of Central Valley's alluvial
32 CALIFORNIA
soils, large parts of the valley have been threatened for years with reversion to desert through drought and salinity, largely caused by prodigal and unplanned use of water resources over a long period. In order to conserve and regulate the water resources of the valley, and to prevent the acute water shortage threatening over a million acres in the Sacramento and San Joaquin basins, the Bureau of Reclama- tion of the U. S. Department of the Interior has now under construc- tion another great irrigation, flood control, and power project, known as the Central Valley Water Project. Its key unit, the Shasta Dam, above Redding, which will be the second largest concrete dam in the world, will back up the Sacramento, Pit, and McCloud Rivers for a distance of 35 miles, to create a storage reservoir with a capacity of nearly a billion gallons. The Central Valley project also includes the construction of the Friant Dam on the upper San Joaquin River east of Fresno, with a reservoir capacity of 147,00x5,000 gallons. Developed water power in the State is more than 2,000,000 horse-power, with large potential reserves still undeveloped.
The California Conservation Council, representing a number of national and State organizations, stresses the necessity for local initiative in conservation work and urges not only wise utilization of natural wealth but also cooperation with Federal, State, and county agencies, enforcement of protective laws, and nonpolitical administration of natural resources. Since 1935, the Council has annually sponsored a "Conservation Week."
One of the most forward-looking phases of Califorina's conservation program is that which has preserved and developed the beaches all along the coast as State parks. Numerous historic sites are protected as State monuments. The national conservation program in the State embraces three national parks — Lassen, Yosemite, and Sequoia — and the two great national monuments, Death Valley National Monument and Joshua Tree National Monument.
The First Californians
WHEN on June 17, 1579 "it pleased God" to send Francis Drake's Golden Hind into the "faire and good bay" north of the Golden Gate, he encountered "the people of the coun- try, having their houses close by the water's edge." Overawed, they supposed the bearded, white-skinned sailors who bestowed on them "necessary things to cover their nakedness" to be gods and "would not be persuaded to the contrarj^." The men, their faces painted in all colors, left their bows behind on a hill and came down to the shore bearing presents of feathers and tobacco. The women remained on the hill, "tormenting themselves" in some sacrificial frenzy and "tearing the flesh from their cheeks." Their king, "clad with conie skins and other skins," arrived with a retinue of "tall and warlike men," bearing a sceptre. After much singing, dancing, and speech making, they begged Drake to "take their province and kingdom into his hand and become their king."
In the interior Drake's men found other villages. Up and down California, if they had traveled farther, they would have discovered others, for the Indians of California were widely but unevenly scattered over the State's fertile regions. The estimated native population of almost one inhabitant to each square mile was comparatively large; the Central Valley was probably more densely populated than any other part of North America at that time.
For an unknown age before the white man first stumbled upon them in the sixteenth century, the Indians of California had dwelt in their scattered bands, walled off from the rest of the aboriginal world
33
34 CALIFORNIA
by mountains and deserts. On the shores of San Francisco Bay, along the southern California and Humboldt Bay seacoasts and in the San Joaquin Valley, evidence has been unearthed from their shell mounds — huge kitchen middens of shell, ash, and earth, piled up layer by layer from, the refuse of daily living over the centuries — indicating a culture which remained almost unchanged over a period of perhaps three or four thousand years. It was probably the simplest culture in all abo- riginal North America.
The scattered bands dwelt in isolation one from another, each fishing in its own creek, catching game in its own preserves, gathering nuts, seeds, and berries in its own forests. The village, composed of groups of kin and relatives by marriage, was the unit of society, its members holding rights in common to a specific tract of land; seldom was it united with other villages by tribal ties. Even among the semi-organ- ized tribes of northern central California, the village was the real social unit. The Maidu of central California, although united in language and customs, distinguished their local groups into Hill Maidu, Valley Maidu, and Mountain Maidu. The only exceptions were the Mojave and Yuma in the far southeast, who displayed aggressive tribal unity against outsiders.
In customs and in culture the isolated villages varied widely, but in nothing so widely as in language. Over most of the State a villager needed to travel little more than 50 miles to encounter other Indians whose language he could not speak ; in a 5O-mile journey through many regions he might pass the boundaries of three or four distinct language groups. More than 100 dialects of 21 distinct language stocks were spoken. Of all the many language groups, only three larger language families from outside the State were represented in California: the Hupa and their neighbors in the far northwest belonged to the Atha- bascan; many groups in the south to the Shoshonean, and the Mojave and Yuma along the Colorado to the Yuman linguistic stock.
Drake's men discovered tribes living in conical, dome-shaped, or round huts. In the northwest part of the State they were covered with light planks or poles ; towards the south with bark, brush, or thatch ; in the Sacramento Valley, with sod. The ceremonial center for most villages was the temescal (sweat house), round and earth-covered, almost airtight. Confinement in its steam-vapored interior, followed by a plunge into icy water, was considered an effective remedy for illness and a pleasant cleanly habit.
California's great stands of oak provided the Indians with their staple food in most parts of the State. Acorns were dried, ground with pestles in stone or wooden mortars, and leached with repeated soakings in hot water to remove their tannic acid. This acorn meal, seasoned with salt or wood ashes, was eaten as it was, baked in unleavened cakes,
THE FIRST CALIFORNIANS 35
or boiled in a gruel. In the southwestern desert country the Indians gathered mesquite beans and on the eastern Sierra slopes, pinon nuts; only near the Colorado River did they cultivate plants for food. Often they ground or roasted grass seeds, berries, roots, and nuts, and stored them in baskets. Lacking pottery, which only the Indians in the extreme southeast near the Colorado River knew how to make, most of the California natives boiled their food in close-woven baskets, into which they dropped hot stones. They hunted small game with snares, sticks and nets, or bows and arrows; larger game with the aid of pits and traps, and, in the north, dogs. Deer-hunters often donned deer- skins and stuffed deer's heads to approach their game. Grasshoppers and caterpillars were also eaten. Everywhere fish were caught with hook, net, or spear; by the seashore clams and mussels were gathered, and along the rivers of the north, salmon were speared during the spawning season.
The California Indians perfected basketry and thus supplied them- selves with utensils for gathering and winnowing grain, cooking and storing water. Into their weaving went sedge, bulrush, redbud, wil- low, diggerpine, juniper, bracken, grape, or tule. With strands stained with vegetable dyes in clear blues, deep reds, warm yellows, and luminous pinks, the weavers worked fine geometric patterns. The Pomo families of Lake, Sonoma, and Mendocino Counties sometimes wove into their baskets the downy, many-colored feathers of birds.
The California Indian's other possessions were few and crude. Out of bone, shell, or stone he carved his arrowheads, awls, pestles and mortars, pots, charm stones, beads, and pendants. For money he used dentalium or clamshell disk beads, ground, bored, and strung, and valued according to size, thickness, and polish. His musical instruments were varied; most widespread was the rattle, made of split clap-sticks, gravel-filled cocoon bunches, bundles of deer hoofs, or turtle shells and gourds; in addition there were bone whistles, flutes, musical bows, and drums.
He built two kinds of vessels for navigation: the balsa, a raft or float made of tule rushes for use in quiet waters, sometimes replaced by huge woven baskets in which goods or human beings were ferried across streams; and the wooden canoe, hollowed out of a log, for use on the ocean. The Canalino Indians living along the Santa Barbara Channel made boats of lashed planks, craft found nowhere else in North America.
Most village groups were headed by a chief, who held the office more often by virtue of wealth than heredity; he was privileged only to advise, not to command. Within the village group, scarcely any dis- tinctions, either of social status or vocation, were drawn, except in the northwest, where social classes based on the possession of wealth tended
36 CALIFORNIA
to form. In the absence of any coherent tribal organization warfare as practised in eastern North America was unknown, although sporadic feuds broke out between kin or local groups.
The only other tribal functionaries besides the chief were the shamans. The shaman might be either a man or a woman, who acquired supposedly supernatural powers through consultation with spirits in a dream. Sometimes he cured illness by "sucking the pain object" from the patient's body, sometimes by bringing back his wander- ing soul, sometimes by blowing tobacco smoke on the affected part, by chanting incantations, or by inducing a trance. Supposedly he could kill, as well as cure. Among these shamans were specialists, the rain, rattlesnake, and grizzly bear doctors. Most feared of all in northern California were the grizzly bear shamans, who either dressed in bear- skin robes, or were credited with the power of turning themselves into ferocious grizzlies in order to destroy their enemies.
Birth, puberty, marriage, and death called for religious observances. In most localities the husband kept to his house for several days (usu- ally four) after the birth of a child, abstaining with his wife from meat and salt. Among the Achomawi and Shasta in the northeast, boys at the age of puberty were initiated into the life of the group with simple ceremonies by fasting, whipping with a bowstring, and the piercing of their ears. The initiation of girls was more elaborate : hidden away, sometimes in a separate hut, they were instructed in womanly duties, meanwhile eating no meat, bathing frequently, and scratching themselves with special carved sticks (since scratching with the hands was taboo). Marriage was a somewhat loosely defined institution ex- cept in the northwest, where the bridegroom presented gifts in propor- tion to the social standing of his bride's family. In most parts of the State the dead were forgotten as soon as their bodies had been buried or cremated; to speak their names was commonly taboo. Among the southern California group, however, the chief public demonstrations were mourning ceremonies, celebrated at annual or semi-annual me- morials by burning the piled-up effigies of all the recent deceased, to the accompaniment of sad wailing.
The only organized religious cults which gained a foothold in California were the kuksu (big-head) and toloache (Jimsonweed) cults. The kuksu rites, practised in the southern Sacramento Valley, were celebrated, almost always in winter, by dancers representing gods. Their faces painted and disguised by curtains of feathers, grass, or shredded rushes, they danced in earth-covered, dome-roofed dance houses to the accompaniment of stamping on a hollow-slab foot drum. The cult trained the adolescent boys and girls (initiating the boys with puberty rites), organized the male members of the community, and focused the activities of the shaman. The toloache cult, practised in
THE FIRST CALIFORNIANS 37
the San Joaquin Valley and in southern California, centered about the taking of the narcotic Jimsonweed plant to induce hallucinations. Its practitioners used sand paintings to picture the cosmos. The toloache, like the kuksu cult, conducted puberty rites, some groups extending them to girls as well as boys, with the intention of making the initiate strong, fortunate, and successful. Some groups celebrated with ceremonial rites such events as the first fire-making or acorn-gathering of the new year or the first catch of salmon in the spawning season. In the north- west, the exhibition of prized possessions like prepared deerskins was celebrated by dancers decked out in all their valuable goods. The groups of the southeast and desert performed ritual dances to accompany song cycles in celebration of mythical events.
In 1769, nearly two centuries after Drake's brief visit, Franciscan friars trudged into the country to convert the "heathen." Cross or sword, the Indians had to choose. On several occasions bloody struggles broke out, in which the Indians were usually defeated. Only the groups in the mountains escaped missionary efforts: those who submitted were baptized. Almost all the natives in the coastal regions were brought to live in and around the 21 Franciscan missions, established from San Diego to Sonoma between 1769 and 1823. From 4,000 in 1783, the Mission Indian population was increased to 7,500 by 1790, to 13,500 by 1800, and to 20,355 by 1805. The monotonous round of work and prayer, the rigid moral regulations, the cramped and prisonlike housing made life unbearable for many. They ran away, although they faced whipping if caught, or they died.
The resentment against the missions flared several times into open rebellion. On November 4, 1775, some 800 rebels swept down from the hills and set fire to San Diego Mission. The year after, San Luis Obispo was burned. The Yumas in 1781 destroyed their mission and freed themselves, arousing the spirit of revolt among the Indians of San Diego and San Juan Capistrano. During the last two decades of the century there were conflicts at Santa Barbara, at most of the south- ern missions, and at San Juan Bautista. In February 1824 the neo- phytes at Purisima Concepcion, Santa Ines, and Santa Barbara revolted simultaneously, killing several people and burning the buildings at Santa Ines. In 1829 secular authorities waged a campaign against the forces of Chief Estanislao (for whom Stanislaus River and County are named). A fugitive from Mision San Jose, Estanislao led a band of other escaped neophytes and wild Indians of the San Joaquin Valley in an uprising that was crushed only by a force of 100 Spaniards with muskets and cannon.
When the Mexican Government broke the mission system's land monopoly with its secularization decrees of 1833-34, tne Indians were suddenly freed. Well-meaning in their despotism as the mission fathers
38 CALIFORNIA
may have been, they had degraded their converts into dependent slaves, unable to shift for themselves. In theory, secularization was to grant rights of citizenship to the Indians and restore to them one-half of all mission land, livestock, and farm tools. In practice, the neophytes re- lapsed into helpless vagrancy, too demoralized to work their own lands, if indeed they had not been dispossessed of them by crooked adminis- trators. The mission population fell off rapidly, decreasing from 24,634 in 1830 to 6,000 in 1840. The Indians took up their old life in the wilds, if luck was with them; if not, they fell into wretched peonage on the vast private ranches.
On the ranchos the Indians were never paid, and in the small industrial establishments of the later Mexican period they were paid only with glass beads, parched corn, or homemade brandy. The raw, poisonous liquor, drunk with greediness, killed many of them; scarlet fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis killed many more.
From an estimated total of 133,000 in 1770 the Indian population had already fallen by 1852 to 85,000, and continued to decline at an accelerated rate under the American regime. The drop in Indian popu- lation between 1849 and 1856 has been estimated at 50,000. One of John C. Fremont's men reported in 1847: "We killed plenty of game and an occasional Indian. We made it a rule to spare none of the bucks." As Americans acquired the Mexican grants, they drove the ranch Indians off; the squatters who staked off so-called Government lands pushed the aboriginal inhabitants back into the mountains and deserts. Their salmon waters muddied by mining operations, acorn groves cut down for firewood, hunting lands confiscated, the Indians were left to starve. In the towns and cities, where they were paid only half the wages of whites, they were cut down by disease and drink.
When the less submissive of the Indians resisted starvation by depre- dations on American property or livestock or retaliated for outrages by killing white men, they were massacred without mercy. For nearly three decades after American occupation of California, "Indian wars" continued — the Klamath War of 1851-52, Kern River War of 1856, Pit River massacres of 1867, and the Modoc War of 1873. During the campaign of 1855-59 m the north, soldiers killed more than 100 Indians, while settlers of the Mad and Eel River regions put at least 200 to death in a series of massacres. Up to December 1854 the State had spent $1,030,530 on Indian campaigns; during the next six years it spent twice that amount. The cattle raids and attacks on emigrant trains of the Yumas and Mojaves were answered in the Owens Lake incident of 1865, when the settlers drove 100 Indians to a terrible death in the corroding waters of an alkaline lake. The Pit River Valley massacre of 10 or 15 white men in 1867 was followed by the destruc- tion of a whole village. During the troubles in the far north which
THE FIRST CALIF ORNIANS 39
eventually culminated in the last and bloodiest of the Indian "wars," the Modoc War of 1873, a company under Captain Ben Wright fell upon the Indians when they laid down their arms to make a treaty and murdered so many that Wright could boast of making a "permanent" treaty with at least 1,000 Indians.
The Indian, his affairs entrusted to special agents who seldom inter- fered in his behalf, had no spokesman before the Government of a people who wanted only to steal his land. The white man found it easy to sup- port almost any charges against him. According to Helen Hunt Jack- son, early champion of the Indian, " 'Papers from Washington' seemed to give the white man the right to deprive any Indian of the land of his forefathers — so the Indian gradually disappeared, 'hunted down, driven out.' The United States Government took over all the Indian holdings, and grants to white people could be obtained on application without any consideration for the right of occupancy by the Indian. To betray sympathy with the Indian was more than any man's 'political' head was worth."
As early as 1849 the Federal Government had commissioned agents to collect data on Indian rights and land titles. In the following year it appointed a commission of three which eventually succeeded in signing 1 8 treaties with chiefs of more than 100 groups, representing most of the State's Indian population. In return for their promise to recognize United States sovereignty, keep the peace, settle on reservations — 18 in number, aggregating 7,500,000 acres — and cede their land rights to the Government; they were to receive farm implements and goods, in- structors in blacksmithing, woodwork, and farming, and maintenance of permanent reservations. The treaties were transmitted to the Senate but never ratified ; for over half a century they remained hidden in Senate archives. Meanwhile the Indians of California, having ful- filled their part of the bargain, remained uncompensated for their losses, seeing their promised 7,500,000 acres dwindle to 500,000.
Beginning in 1853, the Indians were gradually gathered together on reservations. The first one was established at Tejon; others were established later on the Klamath River south of Crescent City, at the mouth of the Noyo River on the Mendocino coast, and at Nome Lake in the Sacramento foothills. The results at first were far from happy, since bands of diverse origin and speech were lumped together indis- criminately. Under a system of education which forced the white man's ways upon the Indian, aboriginal culture disintegrated rapidly. As the natives ran away faster than they died, one reservation after another was abandoned. Little by little the reservations were robbed of their more valuable lands. The 32 which exist today, as well as the land allotments made to individuals, are located chiefly in unpro- ductive hill country. Here the Indians, housed and clothed much like
4O CALIFORNIA
their white neighbors, practice farming, stockraising, and handicrafts, on some reservations under the guidance of Indian Bureau agents. The children attend either Indian schools, such as the Sherman Institute near Arlington, Riverside County, or public schools to which the Indian Bureau makes tuition payments.
For every seven or eight Indians living in California before the white man came to stay, only one remained 14 decades later. The Indian population, including half and mixed bloods (nearly 30 percent of the total), had fallen by 1910 to 16,371 — a decline of about 90 per- cent. Since then the Indian population has increased to an estimated 24,000 in 1938.
There are Indians in every county in the State, but in only four — Humboldt, Mendocino, Riverside, and San Diego — are there more than 1,000. About three-fifths of the Indian population live on reserva- tions; many of the remainder live on land allotments or homesteads. Indian ranch hands work at hop-picking, fruit gathering, sheep-shearing, and general ranching. In the larger urban centers, where they have doubled in number during the last three decades and total about 1,100 today, the women find employment as domestics, the men as mechanics, factory hands, or railroad wrorkers.
Under the Indian Bureau's influence, native arts are now fostered, particularly at the Sherman Institute. The Luiseno and other groups are encouraged to stage their picturesque ceremonies at summer fiestas, ceremonies whose primitive origin is plainly apparent despite Christian transformations. Unfortunately, this policy of encouragement has suc- ceeded that of persecution too late to save more than a tiny remnant of Indian culture.
Calif ornicfs Last Four Centuries
WITHIN the half century after Christopher Columbus discov- ered the new world, Europeans discovered and named Cali- fornia. In 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa reached the Pacific coast at Panama; twenty-two years later another Spaniard, Hernando Cortes, discovered a land he named California; and in 1542 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator, rode at anchor in San Diego Bay, the first white man to see any part of the region now known as California.
The chain of events that led to California started with the search by Columbus in the Caribbean in 1493 for the island Mantinino, which he had been told "was peopled merely by women." Columbus thought this might be Marco Polo's Amazonian island "near the coast of Asia." He failed in his search, but the fabulous isle fascinated other navigators during the next decade. After Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo published his romance Las Sergas de Esplandidn in 1510, Spanish navigators were familiar with both the legend and with the name California. A passage reads: "Know that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very near to the Terrestrial Paradise, which was peopled with black women. . . . Their arms were all of gold."
Spain's dominion in the new world was extended to the western coast of Mexico by Cortes' conquest of the empire of Montezuma. In an attempt to push it farther west and north Cortes sent two ships com- manded by his kinsman Diego Hurtado de Mendoza on a "voyage of discovery" in 1532. Mendoza got as far north into the Gulf of Cali-
41
42 CALIFORNIA
fornia as 27° N. before a mutinous crew compelled him to send back one of the ships; of his own vessel, nothing but vague rumor was ever heard again. Fortune Ximenes, pilot of an expedition sent to search for Mendoza, anchored in a small bay "near the 23rd degree of lati- tude," landed, and was killed by natives, along with 20 of his men. The survivors reported the discovery of an island, said to "abound in the finest pearls." On May 5, 1535, Cortes entered the little bay Ximenes had found (possibly the present La Paz) called it Santa Cruz, landed and named the supposed island California. He was convinced that it lay "on the right side of the Indies," if not "near to the Terres- trial Paradise."
For more than a year Cortes stayed in the new land, a desolate sandy waste, while the mutinous soldiers cursed him, "his island, bay, and his discovery." Clinging tenaciously to his search for the "seven cities of Cibola" in the north, he sent three ships, under command of Fran- cisco de Ulloa, to begin a thorough survey of the coast line in 1539. Ulloa examined both shores of what he called "The Sea of Cortes," now known as the Gulf of California, discovered that Cortes' island was really a peninsula. Later in the same year, it is said, he sailed around Cape San Lucas and surveyed the Pacific coast line of the penin- sula, getting as far as the 28th degree — some say as far as "Cape Engano, near the 3Oth degree." By this time, however, Cortes had gone back to Spain, never to return.
The new viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza sent Cabrillo, in com- mand of the ships San Salvador and La Victoria "to examine the west- ern side of California as far northward as possible, seeking particularly for rich countries and for passages leading towards the Atlantic." Cabrillo sailed from Navidad, a small port in Xalisco, on June 27, 1542. Slowed by adverse winds, he finally entered "a very good closed port" on September 28, which he named San Miguel — the bay of San Diego. He discovered Santa Monica Bay and the three large islands of the Santa Barbara group, rounded Cabo Galera (Point Concepcion) and Cabo de los Reyes (Point Reyes). The ships passed the Golden Gate without seeing it. On the way back they found the harbor in the island of the Santa Barbara group which they named La Posesion. There Cabrillo, who had been suffering from a broken arm, died on January 3, 1543, and the command passed to his pilot, Bartolome Ferrelo. Sailing north again, the ships reached a promontory on February 26, probably Cape Mendocino, which Ferrelo named Cabo de Fortunas (Cape of Perils or Stormy Cape). Turning back, they eventually came into their home port, Navidad.
Disappointed by the reports of the expedition, Spanish officials be- came more and more convinced that north of Mexico the New World contained "neither wealthy nations, nor navigable passage . . . between
CALIFORNIA S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 43
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans." Later, when the treasures of the Orient began to come into the port of Acapulco from the Philippines and from China, Spain found in the long continental mainland the best protection of its inland sea — the Pacific. England's sea rovers had no way into the Pacific except by rounding Cape Horn. This Francis Drake did in his looton schooner, the Golden Hinde; he anchored on June 17, 1579, in what became Drake's Bay and named the region New Albion.
Drake's visit seems to have aroused Spain's dormant interest in California. In 1584 Francisco Gali made a much more thorough exam- ination of the California coast than Cabrillo had done 42 years before, and 1 1 years later Sebastian Cermeno was directed, while returning from Manila to Acapulco, to examine the California coast, "in search of harbors in which galleons might take refuge." Losing his own ship, somewhere "near San Francisco Bay south of Cape Mendocino," he sailed southward along the coast in a small boat and sighted the Bay of Monterey, which he named "San Pedro Bay."
With three ships "well officered," Sebastian Vizcaino made a second attempt in 1602 to explore the coast, sailing as far as Cape Mendocino, naming the first harbor he reached, "the best in all the South Sea," San Diego. On November 12, Carmelite friars of his party celebrated Holy Mass ashore — the first time in Upper California. Vizcaino spent almost a year in the survey, but like Cabrillo he missed the Golden Gate. He renamed many places named in 1542 by Cabrillo, among them San Diego, Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara, Point Concepcion, the Carmel River, Point Reges, and Monterey Bay — in honor of the vice- roy, Gasper de Zunigay Acebedo, who was the Count of Monterey.
After Vizcaino's visit Spain's efforts were largely spent in attempts to colonize New Mexico rather than Upper California, though recur- rent attempts were made to keep alive the pearl-fishing industry on the eastern coast of the Gulf of California. The most pretentious of these was in 1683, when Don Isidro de Atondo, placing settlers, soldiers and Jesuits at different points, planned a steady penetration of California. But the project lagged, and not until 1697 did Jesuits receive royal warrants to enter upon the reduction of California at their own expense. In that year the first permanent colony was planted in Baja California — at Loreto by Father Juan Maria Salvatierra. Father Kino, in 1701, crossed the Colorado near Yuma and entered Alta California, working among the Indians of "Pimeria Alta."
By 1734 Vitus Bering was pushing his exploration of Alaska, and Spain began to fear the colonizing activities of Russia along the Pacific coast. Twenty years later a new peril arose, when France was swept from sovereignty in America by Britain. Spain could put off no longer the settlement of Alta California.
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A high officer of the Spanish "Council of the Indies," Jose de Galvez, was sent to Mexico as visitador-general and arrived in Mexico City in 1766. Early in the following year Carlos III of Spain issued a decree banishing all Jesuits from Spanish territories. Franciscans were to take over the mission at Loreto, which was to be the base of the operations, both military and pastoral.
Captain Caspar de Portola was appointed Governor of Baja Cali- fornia and ordered to proceed to Loreto to superintend the transfer of mission property. He reached Loreto with an escort of fifty soldiers, accompanied by fifteen Franciscan monks, and was joined by Father Junipero Serra, who was made president of the missions in California, and Galvez. The king had ordered Galvez "to send an expedition by sea to rediscover and people the bays of San Diego and Monterey." Galvez thought it would be well to send a land expedition also and Father Serra concurred with this plan. Three missions in Alta Cali- fornia— at San Diego, Monterey and at an intermediate point — were to be established, also two presidios or military posts.
On January 9, 1769, one of the ships, the San Carlos, left La Paz; two days later the San Antonio sailed from San Lucas, and the Senor San Jose, from Loreto soon after. The vessels were loaded with orna- ments, sacred vases, church vestments, household utensils, field imple- ments, seeds, and other settlement needs. The San Antonio, under Captain Juan Perez, reached its destination, San Diego Bay, on April 1 1 ; the San Carlos on April 29. Scurvy had swept both vessels, but its ravages on the San Carlos had so prostrated the crew that not even a boat could be lowered. The San Antonio's boats carried the sick ashore, where they convalesced behind a temporary stockade.
The march by land was no less long and painful. The forces divided into two columns, one under an army captain, Fernando de Rivera, and the other under Portola. With the latter went Father Serra. The columns took different routes, each driving a herd of cattle. Rivera's party reached San Diego on May 1 5 ; Portola's route was more difficult and his party did not arrive until July I.
The expedition lost no time in putting its plans into action. Mision San Diego de Alcala was dedicated on July 16, two days after Portola had led sixty-four members of the expedition away to the north to find the Bay of Monterey. Through country described by Portola as "rocks, brushwood and rugged mountains" wound these newcomers — Spanish officers in brilliant uniforms, monks in gray-brown cowls, leather-clad soldiers, Indians on foot. On October 2 they reached Monterey, failed to recognize it, and pushed on. In Father Crespi's words: "The expe- dition strove to reach the Punta de los Reyes, but some immense arms of the sea which penetrate into the mainland in an extraordinary fashion would have made it necessary to take a long, circuitous detour." Those
CALIFORNIAS LAST FOUR CENTURIES 45
arms of the sea, first seen by Sergeant Ortega and his band of scouts, were the reaches of San Francisco Bay. Curiously inept at foraging for food, the company would have starved except for their pack animals. They ate twelve in as many days.
At last, on January 24, 1770, they returned to San Diego, "smelling frightfully of mules." At San Diego there was so much suffering from illness and hunger that Portola decided to abandon the expedition and return to Baja California if help did not come from Galvez by March 20. But at dusk on March 19 they sighted a sail on the horizon — and less than a month later were on their way back to Monterey.
This time they recognized the Bay, and on June 3, 1770, dedicated the sites of the mission and the presidio. Serra felt that they were dedicating themselves to the task of civilizing the natives and winning them for God. To Portola, the planting of royal standards and crosses in the name of King Carlos III of Spain, signified the assertion of Spain's rights in California. During the next half century nineteen more missions were established, and near some of them presidios and pueblos. The last mission — San Francisco Solano — was founded north of San Francisco Bay on July 4, 1823.
The missions formed a chain of civilized outposts along the coast, spaced a day's journey apart. Each had its herd of cattle, its fields and vegetable gardens, tended by the Indian neophytes. The Indians were taught by the padres to build irrigation systems and they became weavers, masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Thus the missions could be nearly self-sustaining, though they did receive clothing, furniture, implements, and tools from New Spain, in exchange for their surplus of meal, wine, oil, hemp, hides, and tallow.
The work of the padres, measured by the number of Indians re- claimed from their free life in the wilderness and put to tilling fields, was for a time successful. But even in 1786 — at a time when the future of the missions was most promising — a discerning French sci- entist, Jean Frangois Galaup de la Perouse, visited California and wrote that he was not impressed with what the padres were accomplishing. He doubted whether the mission system would ever develop self- reliance in the aborigines.
The presidios, with their small military staffs, were established to protect the missions from hostile natives and possible invaders. Their military equipment was meager and antiquated, but fortunately the sol- diers had little use for it. They occupied themselves with explorations, bear hunts, capture of run-away neophytes, carrying of the mails, and providing their own food supply. Like the padres, the soldiers were supposed to receive regular wages from New Spain, but more often than not the money failed to come, and they were forced to become more self-reliant than most subjects of the paternal Spanish Government.
46 CALIFORNIA
Gradually small towns began to grow. Some of them, like San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Monterey, spread around the edges of the presidios, and were at first under military rule. Others sprang up near the missions; among these were Sonoma, San Juan Bautista, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Obispo. Los Angeles and San Jose began as independent towns, with civic governments, and San Francisco, although an adjunct to the Presidio, was definitely planned by the Spanish authorities as a civic enterprise. Its first settlers were 240 immigrants brought from Sonoma, and Tubac, Mexico, by Juan Bautista de Anza. Leaving Tubac in October 1775, he led them over the present Arizona desert and the snows of the high Sierra, and arrived with his company, almost intact ; only one person, a woman, died on the way, and eight children were born. (The Spanish Government had supplied every anticipated need.) On March 28, 1776, Anza located a presidio along the Golden Gate. The settlers, who had stopped in Monterey, arrived on June 27.
Although Portola had hoped to establish the authority of Spain in California, his successors could not even repel the small company of Russian fur traders who landed in 1812 and boldly built a stockade, Fort Ross, in the Spanish province. The Spaniards made polite pro- tests but the intruders stayed as long as was convenient to them. Because of their military weakness, the presidio commanders were also forced to receive respectfully the visits of British, French, South Amer- ican, and Yanqui ships — all of which were technically forbidden to enter the California harbors. The captains of these vessels carried home eloquent reports of life in California . . . and it was inevitable that one or another covetous nation would snap the weakening Spanish rule.
After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 and Cali- fornia settlers had their first taste of self-government, their dissatisfac- tion with the patriarchal mission authority crystallized. The Indians were virtual slaves — who could not be sold, but could be pursued if they left the mission grounds, brought back, whipped, and locked up, and when penitent allowed to go to work again. Though unhappy enough to plan two or three revolts — the worst occurring in 1824 — the Indians were not very articulate about their plight, but the "y°ung Californians" — a party of progressive Castilians — took up the Indians' cause. Their efforts, added to the republican sentiment in Mexico, resulted in a decree issued by the Mexican Congress in 1833 removing the missions from Franciscan management. California's Mexican Gov- ernor, Jose Figueroa, had made a careful plan for the secularization of the missions, but he died before it could be carried out and the im- patient Calif ornios made the change unwisely and with too much haste.
One-half of the mission land and livestock was to have been given to the Indian neophytes who had developed it and to whom it had be-
CALIFORNIA S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 47
longed before the coming of the Spaniards. Since they had never been taught self-discipline, they were to be forbidden to sell or mortgage their holdings. But when the missions were finally dismembered colon- ists helped themselves to mission lands and the cattle. The Indians received little cash for what they were able to sell, and that little they quickly squandered.
The Good Life: A few years after Portola's earnest little company struggled up from Baja California, there rode into the new province a new kind of Spanish immigrants. Travelers returning to New Spain had told how the mission herds were thriving on the virgin pastures of Alta California. Castilian colonists, attempting to raise their cattle on the stonier soil of Mexican ranches, were tempted to move on up the coast. The viceroy encouraged them with generous land grants. Although mission authorities opposed such colonizing by individuals, in 1786 Lieutenant Colonel Pages, Governor of Alta California, was empowered to make private grants and to outfit each ranchero with a storehouse and at least 2,000 head of cattle. By 1824 the colonist was also guaranteed security of person and property and freedom from taxes for five years.
The ranch houses, built of sun-dried adobe brick were plain but comfortable. Fields, worked by Indian labor, surrounded the house and beyond these were the vast pasture lands for the family's herds. The rancheros and their wives worked from dawn to sunset as indus- triously as the people who labored for them. The individual ranches had to be self-sustaining, for the arrival of the supply ship was uncer- tain. All visitors praised their hospitality. "If I must be cast in sick- ness or destitution on the care of the stranger," wrote Walter Colton, "let it be in California; but let it be before American avarice has hardened the heart and made a God of gold."
It was the younger sons of these families who led the progressive factions when the Californios were forced into politics. As long as Spain's American colonies remained loyal, even California, the remotest of them, looked to Madrid for guidance and assistance. The Californios took no part in the struggle to sever Spanish dominance in the New World but, when they learned early in 1822 that an independent gov- ernment had been set up in Mexico City, they suddenly became con- scious of their republican rights. On April 9, 1822, Governor Pablo Vicente de Sola and ten delegates — eight presidio comandantes and military officers and two priests — met at Monterey, recognized Cali- fornia "from this time ... as a dependent alone of ... the Empire of Mexico and independent of the dominion of Spain." On November 9, 1822, California set up her own legislative body, the Diputadon, composed of six vocales, or representatives, one from each presidio and pueblo district. During this first brief period of independence, the
48 CALIFORNIA
province acted decisively. It declared the Indians free citizens, opened the ports to trade, levied import and export duties, and taxes on crops and cattle, and established a military force and militia, and a judiciary.
California in March 1825 formally became a Territory of the Re- public of Mexico. Under the Republic, California government con- sisted of : a governor, appointed by the national government ; a secretary ; a territorial legislature ; a superior court ; a prefect and sub-prefect (sheriffs); district judges; alcaldes (minor judges); justices of the peace; and ayuntamientos, or town councils. The Territory of Cali- fornia could send one diputado to represent it in the Mexican Congress but had no vote.
In November 1825 Luis Antonio Arguello's provisional governor- ship (1822-25) was ended by the arrival of a Mexican governor, Jose Maria de Echeandia. Echeandia's troubles began at once. The soldiers struck and marched against some of his Mexican troops, when he was not immediately able to pay their wages. But as generally happened in the local rebellions of this period, no blood was spilled. Although Echeandia rescinded some of the measures put into effect during Ar- guello's term, on the whole he was liberal and just. But in March 1830 he was replaced by a dictatorial governor, Manuel Victoria, who did not, however, take office until February 1831. Victoria opposed secularization of the missions, ordered the death penalty for small mis- demeanors, and refused to convoke the Diputadon or to give the Cali- fornios more voice in their affairs, although urged to do so by prominent diputados. The Calif or nios, led by Pio Pico, Juan Bandini, and Jose Carrillo, seized the presidio at San Diego and advanced towards Los Angeles. On December 5, 1831, they clashed with Government troops near Cahuenga Pass. The fight was not severe, for there was only one fatality, but Victoria was convinced that he probably could never sub- due the independent spirit of these provincials, and he returned to Mexico.
Into the rancheros' lives of gentlemanly leisure had come a new sense of political responsibility. Although they had no heritage of democratic ideals, as a class the caballeros acquired quite suddenly a natural desire to take their own government into their own hands. This they did in 1836, revolting against Mexico to proclaim the "Free and Sovereign State of Alta California." But the Republic of Mexico made con- cessions which brought California back into the Union.
During this transitional period, 1830 to 1846, a number of "battles" were fought which usually settled the current controversy. But the Calif ornios had such an aversion to shedding blood that the opposing forces generally were careful not to shoot if the enemy was within range of their guns. Most of the decisions were won by oratory and pronunciamentos. Some of the California*' controversies were with the
LAST FOUR CENTURIES 49
Mexicans, some with each other. When they had an unpopular Mexi- can governor to oust, they united fervently, but between times they indulged in just as violent local disputes. Jealous from the beginning were Los Angeles and Monterey, each wanting to be the capital. The balance of power between customhouse and legislature was never settled. One of the most bitter of the many individual rivalries involved two of California's respected citizens — Juan Bautista Alvarado, a spell- binding young leader who became civil governor at 27, and his uncle, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Alvarado's co-ruler as military chief. Their disagreement brought down upon them Mexican authority, in the person of General Manuel Micheltorena who arrived with an army of convict soldiers in August 1842. Micheltorena, the last of the Mexi- can governors, stayed in the province for three years. He was driven out by the Calif ornios under Castro and Alvarado in March 1845, 15 months before the Americans took command at Monterey.
Yankee Bargain : The tide of American pioneer families that flooded California in the i84o's was preceded a generation earlier by a smaller migration of skippers, traders, and trappers who came on brief com- mercial missions. True to their reputation for driving a good bargain, they secured wives, estates, and finally control of the province and its gracious people. The visitors were welcomed by the Calif ornios, but not by their rulers in Mexico City or Madrid. Even before 1800 the Spanish Court had instructed the colonists that no foreigners were to land at California's ports or cross its borders.
Since the Court had neglected, however, to send regular supply ships to the colonists, the Californios seldom turned away the Yanqui skippers when they arrived with shiploads of such essentials as skillets, needles, cotton cloth, and plows. The captain of an American vessel wrote in 1817: "We served to clothe the naked soldiers of the king, when for lack of raiment they could not attend mass, and when the most reverend fathers had neither vestments nor vessels fit for the church, nor implements wherewith to till the soil." The first United States ship, the Otter of Boston, docked at Monterey in 1796. In 1799 the Eliza stopped at San Francisco, and in 1800 the Betsy at San Diego. In addition to the regular traders, storm-battered whalers bound home from the North Pacific stopped at California harbors for repairs and supplies, paying for them with household goods brought from New England. Gradually, in spite of Spain's embargo, Cali- fornia hides and tallow began to find their way to Atlantic coast markets.
While Yankee skippers were breaking into the California ports, Yankee trappers climbed the barrier of the Sierra and descended the canyons into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. They explored many parts of California the Spaniards had never reached and took
5O CALIFORNIA
away a fortune in furs. On the whole, since they offered the Spaniards little and threatened much, they were not received as well as were the sea-faring traders. But one trapper, James Ohio Pattie, assured him- self a welcome by bringing smallpox vaccine.
Before foreigners settled among the Calif or nios there had been little commercial enterprise in the province, but the newcomers immediately started to organize its business life. One ambitious firm, McCullough & Hartnell — called "Macala and Arnell" by the soft-spoken Spaniards —contracted to dispose of the entire mission output of hides for a yearly shipload of supplies. While the foreigners aided California financially in this period, they held it back politically; in most cases they supported the despotic Mexican governors against the rebellious California* be- cause they feared that revolution would endanger their commercial interests.
The influence of the Americans after the arrival of the first United States immigrant train, the Bidwell-Bartleson company, in 1841 rose steadily. They had not yet declared any intention of raising the United States flag over the presidios, pueblos, and ranches, but that purpose was stirring in their minds, as the Calif ornios must have realized after October 19, 1842. On that day two American vessels sailed into Monterey Bay and their commander, Commodore Thomas Ap Catesby Jones, ordered the port to surrender to the United States. Stationed at Peru, the Commodore had heard a rumor that the United States and Mexico were at war and had hurried north to annex California. When he learned that no war had been declared, he retired from Monterey on October 20 with elaborate apologies . . . leaving the Calif ornios something to think about.
Quieter but more significant was the arrival of Captain John C. Fremont, the U. S. topographical engineer later honored as "The Pathfinder," who came to California in 1844 on a scientific expedition. The next year he came again, this time visiting Monterey for several weeks as the guest of the United States Consul, Thomas O. Larkin. Jose Castro, the prefect, met Fremont and entertained him — but in January 1846 Castro learned that Fremont, en route to Monterey, had left two detachments of soldiers behind him in the back country. Upon Fremont's assurance that his party were interested only in scientific data, Castro gave them permission to spend the winter in California, with the express provision that they remain away from the coast settlements. Fremont left Monterey to rejoin his soldiers. Six weeks later the prefect learned that Fremont's band were camped at his back door, in the Salinas Valley, and demanded that they leave Cali- fornia at once. Then Fremont, acting perhaps under secret orders from Washington (the whole question of Fremont's official instructions re- mains a controversy), fortified a little hill, Gabilan (Hawk's Peak),
LAST FOUR CENTURIES 51
and raised the American flag. His force was so small that it seems fantastic to regard this gesture as the first maneuver in the annexation of a great territory — but so it was. It came to nothing. When Gen- eral Jose Castro made some not very effective military advances, Fre- mont withdrew up the Sacramento Valley, and after spending a week at the fort of Johann August Sutter, the Swiss immigrant who wel- comed overland caravans at his colony of New Helvetia on the Sacra- mento River, retreated northward toward Oregon.
The retreat was made without haste, however. On the shores of Klamath Lake, Fremont was overtaken by two men from Sutter's Fort with the message that Lieut. A. N. Gillespie was following his trail with dispatches for him from the United States Government. Fremont and his company broke camp and retraced their steps. When he had read Gillespie's dispatches, he knew, as he wrote later, "that at last the time had come when England must not get a foothold; that we must be first. I was to act, discreetly but positively." Soon after- wards all the American ranchers north of San Francisco Bay were informed by an anonymous paper that a band of Californians were on their way north to destroy the crops, cattle, and houses of the Americans. What followed remains largely conjecture, since Fremont withheld most of the story. Probably the Americans, when they re- ported to Fremont for aid, were advised to provoke the Californians into an act of overt hostility. At any rate, they struck first when a small band headed by Ezekiel Merritt captured 250 horses which a group of vaqueros were driving southward to Castro's camp in the Santa Clara Valley.
As dawn was breaking on June 14, 1846, in the pueblo of Sonoma, the northern frontier, a little band of Yankees who had surrounded the house of the comandante of the presidio, General Mariano G. Vallejo, seized him and the other officers. The presidio, ungarrisoned, was taken without a shot. The rebels, led by farmer William B. Ide, hauled down the Mexican flag and raised a new one of their own, fashioned of homespun with a strip of red flannel and decorated in brown paint with a star, the figure of a grizzly bear, and the words "California Republic." Although war had begun between the United States and Mexico on May 13, neither the rebels nor Fremont knew it. Despite the provocation of the Americans, the California* remained strangely reluctant to make reprisals, even when the force at Sonoma grew to 130 and Fremont marched to join them at the head of 72 mounted riflemen.
Although the intentions of the Americans must have been thoroughly revealed to the Calif ornios, by July I, their two ranking officials, Gov- ernor Pio Pico in Los Angeles and General Jose Castro in Monterey, were so absorbed in a private dispute that they made no preparations
52 CALIFORNIA
to defend the province. While they were arguing with each other in Los Angeles, Commodore John D. Sloat sailed into Monterey Bay and on July 7, raised the American flag on the custom-house, and claimed California for the United States. Two days later the flag was flying^ over San Francisco and Sonoma.
In alarm, Castro and Pico combined at last to resist the invasion. Mustering a hundred men, they were ready when the American forces — 350 strong — landed in San Pedro under Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who had arrived in Monterey on July 15 to succeed Com- modore Sloat. But before a shot was fired, both Castro and Pico had fled to Mexico, and on August 13 Stockton entered Los Angeles. Leav- ing Capt. Archibald Gillespie in charge, he returned northward. On September 23 the California* attacked the small garrison. John Brown (California's Paul Revere) carried an appeal for help to San Francisco on horseback, covering more than 500 miles in less than five days. But, by the time Captain Mervine had reached Los Angeles with reinforce- ments on the Savannah, Los Angeles had been recaptured. On October 6 the California* met and defeated Mervine and his sailors in a battle at the Domingues Rancho and drove them back to their ship in San Pedro Bay. At Santa Barbara and at San Diego the American flags so recently raised were hauled down again.
Meanwhile the California*, skirmishing with the Americans led by Fremont and Thomas O. Larkin in the Salinas Valley, seemed to be getting the better of it, until late in the fall assistance arrived for the Americans. An expeditionary force sent overland from Santa Fe by the War Department, under command of Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, arrived on December 5 and engaged with General Pico's forces the day following in an indecisive skirmish. Kearny's men, when combined with Stockton's and the resident Americans, now made an army of 600, equal to the California*' forces. The two "armies" met in the battle of San Gabriel and of La Mesa on January 8 and 9, 1847. So decisive were the American victories, that the California* surrendered. On January 10 General Kearny and Commander Stockton once more raised the American flag over Los Angeles, and on the I3th hostilities finally ended with the signing of articles of capitulation by General Andres Pico and Fremont at a ranch house near Cahuenga Pass. The incident was like the patching up of a quarrel by old friends, for the Americans required of the Californios only that they give up their artillery and pledge to obey the laws of the United States. On Feb- ruary 2, 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, California was formally relinquished by Mexico.
California's adopted sons had one more job to do. Although the United States now owned California, Congress made no satisfactory provision for its civil government because the Congressional slavery and
CALIFORNIA S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 53
anti-slavery factions could not come to an agreement on these questions. After a confused period in which military law, Spanish law, and American law were simultaneously administered in California, Briga- dier-General Bennet Riley, U.S.A., military Governor, took official action on June 3, 1849, when he issued a proclamation "recommending the formation of a State constitution, or a plan for a Territorial gov- ernment." When the convention met in Colton Hall, Monterey, on September I, 48 delegates were admitted to seats. On October 10 they adopted a constitution, which was ratified by people on November 13, 1849. It remained in force until 1879.
On the day of ratification (as provided by the constitution) the people elected a Governor, Lieutenant Governor, 16 State senators, and 36 assemblymen. On December 15, 1849, the State legislature convened and on the 2Oth inaugurated Peter H. Burnett as Governor, and John McDougal as Lieutenant Governor. On the same day the legislature elected two United States Senators, John C. Fremont and William M. Gwin, and on December 22 most of the State officials and the supreme court judges.
On December 20, 1849, the military Governor, General Riley, issued a remarkable proclamation: "A new executive having been elected and installed into office in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the State, the undersigned hereby resigns his powers as Governor of California." The proclamation constituted a recog- nition by the highest United States agent in California that California had declared itself to be a State, although legally, of course, it had no right to do so without Federal permission. Its action precipitated an eight months' argument in Congress, prolonged by pro-slavery Con- gressmen who fought to prevent the admission of a new non-slavery State. Finally on September 9, 1850, California was admitted to the Union as a free State.
Flood Tide: Hundreds of reports describing California as "a per- fect paradise, a perpetual spring" had started eastern families building prairie schooners several years before California became American terri- tory. The first pioneer train, organized largely by John Bidwell, left Independence, Missouri, May 19, 1841 and reached the San Joaquin Valley on November 4. The first to travel in wagons, the Chiles- Walker Party, came in 1843. By 1846 thousands, including the tragic Donner party, almost half of whom died of exposure and starvation en route, were on the westward trails. It was in that year that immi- grants also started to come around the Horn, one group of 2OO Mormons arriving at San Francisco on the ship Brooklyn on July 31.
A member of one of the overland trains in 1845 was a young New Jersey wagon builder, James Wilson Marshall, who went to work for Sutter, building a saw mill on the south fork of the American River
54 CALIFORNIA
near the site of Coloma. While inspecting the tail race there, one morning late in January 1848, Marshall picked out of the water a piece of shining metal half the size of a pea. At first he thought it was iron pyrites, but when he pounded it between stones and found it soft, he knew that what he held in his hand was gold. Alone in the upland forest Marshall "sat down and began to think right hard," as he wrote in his diary. It is doubtful whether he guessed that his discovery would start the greatest mass movement of people since the Crusades.
Less than six months later Walter Colton, alcalde of Monterey, wrote: "The blacksmith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the farmer his sickle, the baker his loaf, and the tapster his bottle. All were off for the mines, some on horses, some on carts, and some on crutches, and one went in a litter." By June 1848 scarcely a male remained in Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose, or Santa Cruz. Soldiers deserted, and so did the detachments sent to capture them. Hundreds of ships lay at anchor in San Fran- cisco Bay, their crews gone to the foothills. Fields of wheat went unharvested, homes and shops were abandoned, newspapers suspended publication, and city officials closed their desks.
The gold fever spread almost as quickly throughout the Nation and the world. At one time westbound wagon trains passed between Missouri and Fort Laramie in an unbroken stream for two months. By March 1849, 17,000 had embarked for California from eastern ports. Within its first 10 years as one of the United States, California became generously populated — not only with Americans, but with the adventurous of all nations. Between 1847 and 1850 the population of California increased from 15,000 to 92,497 and a decade later the Federal Census enumerated 379,994 persons in the State. Substantial pioneer families were among the Argonauts who danced and played games on the crowded little ships, while gales, scurvy, and starvation threatened them. Others trudged courageously over trails so bordered with the wreckage of previous parties that one immigrant, James Abbey, counted in 15 miles 362 abandoned wagons and the bleaching bones of 350 horses, 280 oxen, and 120 mules.
Oh! Californy!
That's the land for me!
I'm bound for Sacramento
With the washbowl on my knee.
In the boisterous shanty-towns of gold rush days — Git-up-and-git, Bogus Thunder, Angel's Camp, You Bet, Shinbone Creek, Red Dog, Lazy Man's Canyon — the average return was up to $50 a day, though many made much more. From one panful of dirt $1,500 was washed, and a trench 100 feet long yielded its two owners $17,000 in 7 days.
CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 55
Sometimes gold was picked out of the rock "as fast as one can pick kernels out of a lot of well-cracked shell barks." Fully as much was made by those who served the miners. Many a tent-store took in $1,000 a day. Owners of river steamers and stage coaches, conveyors of water, innkeepers, entertainers gathered in copious wealth. They supplied the elementary needs; amenities were nonexistent. One of the "best hotels," described by Hinton R. Helper, was a canvas struc- ture, floored with dirt. It consisted of an undivided room were guests ate, drank, and slept in tiered bunks. "When we creep into one of these nests it is optional with us whether we unboot or uncoat our- selves; but it would be looked upon as an act of ill-breeding to go to bed with one's hat on."
The colorful ruffians of the times have been so immortalized as to create the impression that the camps were lawless. As a matter of fact, the mining camps, in distinction to the cities, stand as one of the world's best examples of men's spontaneous ability to govern them- selves. With no formal legal setup, the miners, extremely diverse in background and nationality, established a society with a high degree of justice and democracy — particularly in the early years. Later, when "loose fish" and "bad whites" came to California in increasing num- bers, crime became more difficult to control, both in the camps and in the feeder-town, San Francisco.
Gold seekers, disembarked after a nine-month trip around the Horn or down from the camps with bags of gold, wanted the lustiest enter- tainment imagination could provide. They got it. Visitors gambled around the roulette tables — residents gambled in real estate, nails, cork, calico, rice, whatever commodities could be cornered — all gambled with their lives, for it is said that during the years from 1849 to 1856 more than a thousand murders were committed in San Francisco, with but a single execution. Of city government there was practically none. An alarmed official addressed his fellow citizens in 1849: "We are without a dollar in the public treasury. . . . You have neither an office for your magistrate, nor any other public edifice. You are without a single police officer or watchman, and have not the means of confining a prisoner for an hour." To remedy the situation the citizens formed the vigilance committees of 1851 and 1856. The former drove out the "Hounds," a gang that attacked various racial minorities, and the latter dispersed more "reputable" crooks in league with bankers and politicians. Both groups sprang from a widespread desire for demo- cratic control, representing the community as a whole. Less clearly characterized by a sense of responsibility for its actions was the similar sort of spontaneous government that arose in Los Angeles, where volun- tary citizens' committees broke up the bandit organizations of Salomon Pico, Juan Flores, and Pancho Daniel.
56 CALIFORNIA
In 1854 the Great Bonanza suddenly slackened. Fortunes large and small collapsed. Disillusioned miners drifted up and down the State. Added to their numbers were the wagon trains and boatloads of immigrants arriving, now, to homestead on Uncle Sam's new fertile acres. They came not realizing that most of this vast land had been apportioned long before to the Calif or nios, who had been guaranteed their property rights at the end of the Mexican war. The Americans simply moved onto the ranches and dared the owners to put them off. What to do with these squatters became the question of the hour. Unfortunately the boundaries of the ranches had never been fixed exactly. "Professional squatters" were hired by land-grabbing corpora- tions. Unscrupulous legislators defended the squatters in order to court their votes. When at last riots and bloodshed forced the Federal Government to take action, a survey of the State was ordered and a land commission formed to adjust disputes. In the end many of the Spanish families were reduced to comparative poverty. They were re- markably patient. General Vallejo, one of them, wrote, "The inhabi- tants of California have no reason to complain of the change of govern- ment, for if the rich have lost thousands of horses and cattle, the poor have been bettered in condition."
The admission of California into the Union had not satisfied all Californians. In 1850 Walter Colton had predicted that an inde- pendent nation would spring up on the Pacific unless Congress built a railroad to the Coast, for without it, California would easily have become self-sufficient. The cry for independence was soon taken up by southern sympathizers, the followers of pro-slavery Senator William S. Gwin, who overran southern California, especially San Bernardino County. The Democratic Party, which controlled the State legislature in every session but one from 1851 to 1860, was torn by the struggle between the Gwin faction and the anti-slavery faction headed by David C. Broderick, who was elected to the Senate in 1857. When Brod- erick was slain in a duel by Gwin's henchman, David S. Terry, in September 1859, his successor in the Senate, Milton S. Latham, joined Gwin in the demand for a republic on the Pacific. He declared in 1860 that if civil war should break out, California would declare its independence. In 1860 the pro-slavery Democrats had gained over- whelming strength in both houses of the legislature, but in the year following they split, and Abraham Lincoln carried the State — by less than a thousand votes. In the nick of time a plot to seize Federal strongholds in California and raise Confederate forces was frustrated. When news of the fall of Fort Sumter came on May 17, California pledged its loyalty to the Union, and in the next session of the legis- lature Republicans controlled the assembly. Gold from California's mines began traveling eastward to help win the war for the North.
CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 57
Steel Rails to Sunny Shores: When the first transcontinental rail- road was completed in May 1869, new multitudes of pioneers traveled westward. Although two decades had passed since the first Argonauts set out across the plains, California had still not absorbed its surplus population. The new pioneers found their promised land in a state of poverty and strife — wages low and unemployment widespread, capital scarce and interest rates prohibitive, land titles uncertain, freight rates exorbitant, and water rights held by monopolies. They found the labor movement restless, anti-Chinese agitation rampant, and the whole people in an uproar against a government corrupted by railroad control.
Following collapse of a wild frenzy of speculation in wildcat mining and oil company stocks in the i86o's had come an even wilder boom in Nevada silver mining stocks, set off by exploitation of the Comstock Lode's Bonanza mines in 1872. The California Stock Exchange Board, organized in that year, became the scene of such violent excitement that the flush days of forty-nine paled in comparison. Throughout the State people invested in stocks every cent they could borrow, beg, or steal. A few made millions; most lost all they had. For on August 27> J875, the Bank of California crashed — and California was shaken to its foundations.
The hard times that followed the bank panic bore down on people in town and country alike. The farmers of the interior valleys, already oppressed by inequable mortgage and taxation laws, the railroad's high freight rates, monopoly of land and water rights by the railroad and land companies, and finally by the ravages of a severe drought in 1876, took with ill grace the added burdens of an economic depression. In the cities wages fell and breadlines grew as thousands were thrown out of work — and hungry men walking the streets began to resent the Bonanza kings' ostentatious display of their newly found wealth.
Meanwhile the long-smouldering hostility against the Chinese, who had been thronging in since 1848 as miners, truck gardeners, laundry- men, fishermen, and workers on the railroad, had begun to break out in flames. It was incited by politicians, among them Governor Henry Haight, who had said in December 1869: "The Chinese are a stream of filth and prostitution pouring in from Asia, whose servile competition tends to cheapen and degrade labor." As workingmen, under artful urging, began to blame the Chinese for all their wrongs, the anti- Chinese feeling spread throughout the State. In 1871 a lawless gang looted and pillaged Los Angeles' Chinatown and lynched nineteen Chinese. The labor movement took up the cry: "The Chinese must go!" On July 23-24, 1877, several thousand rioters burned and sacked Chinese laundries in San Francisco and fired the Pacific Mail Steam- ship docks where Chinese immigrants landed. Elsewhere there were sporadic outbreaks of violence.
58 CALIFORNIA
Despairing of redress for their difficulties from the railroad con- trolled State government, city and farm workers, and even some small businessmen and small landholders organized the Workingmen's Party of California, promptly nicknamed the Sand-Lot Party for its Sunday afternoon meetings on San Francisco's vacant sand lots harangued by the Irish spellbinder, Dennis Kearney. The party vowed "to wrest the government from the hands of the rich and place it in those of the people, where it properly belongs; to rid the country of cheap Chinese labor as soon as possible ; to destroy the great money power of the rich ... to destroy land monopoly in our state by a system of taxation that will make great wealth impossible in the future."
For a solution to their problems, the people looked to the legislature. The authors of California's first constitution, framed in the idealistic days of the Gold Rush, had given the legislators sweeping powers — to levy taxes, make appropriations, grant franchises, and give away public lands — of which the legislators of the seventies took full advantage. By 1878 the Workingmen's Party had grown so strong that it forced the legislature to adopt an act calling a constitutional convention. Of the 152 members of the convention who came together on September 28, 1878, 51 were members of the Workingmen's Party and 78 were nonpartisan ; they included mechanics, miners, farmers, and even a cook, as well as lawyers, doctors, journalists, and teachers.
The constitution which they adopted was ratified by the voters May 7, 1879. It was termed reactionary by some, radical by others. It remodeled the judiciary department, improved prison regulations and prohibited convict labor, and passed a law instituting the eight-hour working day. In general, it differed little from the organic law com- mon in most States of the Union, but when compared with the consti- tution of 1849, it marked a distinct advance toward popular control. The power of the legislature was everywhere curtailed. "Lobbying" was made a felony. Provisions to tax and control common carriers and corporations, and to regulate public utilities and services were inserted. A two-thirds vote in both houses and ratification by the people were required to pass a constitutional amendment. Suffrage was extended to "every male citizen," 21 years or more old who had lived in Cali- fornia for a year, "provided no native of China'1 and no idiot, lunatic, convicted criminal, or illiterate "shall ever exercise the privileges of an elector." The legislature was to consist of 40 senators and 80 assem- blymen, meeting biennially. The Governor, Lieutenant Governor, secretary of state, controller, treasurer, attorney general and surveyor general were to be elected by the people for four-year terms. A two-thirds vote of each house could overcome the Governor's veto. Judicial powers were confined to a supreme court (a chief justice and
CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 59
six associate justices), three district courts of appeal, a superior court for each county, and also minor courts (as amended Nov. 8, 1904).
The Workingmen's Party was driven out of existence in 1880 by a fusion of Democrats and Republicans — but not before its anti-Chinese agitation had led to a vote by the people of the State (154,638 to 883) against further immigration from China. On March 20, 1879, the national Congress passed an exclusion bill, killed by the veto of Presi- dent Rutherford B. Hayes. Two years later a treaty with China giving the United States the power to "regulate, limit, or suspend" Chinese immigration was ratified by the Senate.
Although the State's population had increased 54 percent during the iSyo's, its professional boosters — fast becoming a familiar type — discovered soon after 1880 that promotion would bring still more new settlers. For the first time California went afield to bid for immigrants with advertisements, books, magazine and newspaper articles telling about the extraordinary climate and resources of "the Coast.'' Typical was this from B. F. Taylor's Between the Gates: "Whoever asks where Los Angeles is, to him I shall say: across a desert without wearying, beyond a mountain without climbing . . . where the flowers catch fire with beauty . . . where the pomegranates wear calyx crowns . . . where the bananas of Honolulu are blossoming; where the chest- nuts of Italy are dropping; where Sicilian lemons are ripening; where the almond trees are shining ... in the midst of a garden of thirty- six square miles — there is Los Angeles." The inducements were so convincing that by 1884 the Southern Pacific was doing a rushing passenger business at fajes of $125 from the Midwest to Los Angeles. When the Santa Fe was completed the following year, the two roads entered on a rate war that reduced fares to $5 and even, at one time, to $i. Multitudes climbed on the trains and started West, savings in their pockets, bound as they thought for a sort of South Sea paradise.
A real estate boom began, legitimate enough in that it originated in a sudden influx of buyers. But the shrewd encouragement of swindlers led most of the citizens to believe that the 1885 boom was only the prelude to another that was to "outclass the present activity as thunder to the crack of a hickory-nut." Prices of Los Angeles lots rose from $500 to $5,000 within a year. Truck gardens and out- lying vineyards worth $350 an acre were squared off into lots and sold for $10,000 an acre. Networks of sidewalks ran mile after mile out into the sagebrush. Elaborate hotels were built on desert tracts — and never occupied except on the opening day.
The newcomers, many of them unsophisticated farmers and small tradespeople from the Middle West, grew hysterical when the boom got really under way. The wealthier among them paid $20,000 to $50,000 for waterfront lots on a lonely stretch of shore, "Redondo-
60 CALIFORNIA
by-the-Sea," because "engineers" had declared that a submarine oil well off Redondo kept the water smooth and made an ideal harbor. Smaller savings were invested in Widneyville-by-the-Desert, a wasteland covered with Joshua trees, spiny and tortuous. Since the grotesque trees failed to give the site a homelike atmosphere, the promoters stuck oranges on the spines — and sold a citrus grove! To Widneyville, as to the other boom towns, prospective buyers were carried in tallyhoes and stages, accompanied with bands, to be greeted on the grounds by the smoothest of high-pressure salesmen and plied with free chicken dinners and all the liquor they could drink. "Millionaires of a day," to quote Theodore C. Van Dyke, "went about sunning their teeth with checkbooks in their outside pockets."
In 1887 many of those millionaires were suicides, as syndicates collapsed, banks closed, individuals and business firms went bankrupt, and the bands, the tallyhoes, and the oratory disappeared from the sunny scene. Once more the bubble had burst. The hard times of the early iSgo's lay ahead, breadlines once more lengthened, unemployed men mustered to join Coxey's Army in a hunger march on Washington, and the cities put their jobless thousands to work on public works projects. The influx of new settlers dwindled.
Twentieth Century: But the tide of immigration once more rose and new multitudes flocked in, swelling the population by 60 percent in the decade from 1900 to 1910. "A new century — a new order" became the slogan. The new century began with prosperity, marked by rising wages and industrial expansion, the development of the petro- leum and hydroelectric industries, and of intensive fruit growing on a big scale. But the newcomers, mostly people from the Midwest who brought with them a long tradition of active participation in community affairs, found much in California to challenge — corruption in municipal politics, machine control of government by corporations, industrial strife, and anti-Oriental agitation.
For once more the outcry against the "yellow peril" had broken out. The Japanese, imported in increasing numbers by large agricul- turists to take the place of the Chinese as farm workers, had begun to settle as farmers and tradesmen, managing their small holdings so thriftily that soon they were displacing white workers and farmers. Although they numbered but 14,243 in 1906 — and for many years had been excluded along with other Orientals from the privilege of natural- ization— military and patriotic groups, merchants' associations, and labor organizations combined to raise the cry: "California shall not become the Caucasian graveyard." In 1906 the San Francisco Board of Education passed an order segregating the 93 Japanese pupils in the city schools in an Oriental public school. When Japan protested that the action was a violation of her treaty with the United States, the
CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 61
Federal Government persuaded the board to rescind its order. The result of the diplomatic controversy was the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907, by which the United States agreed to admit Japanese chil- dren below the age of 16 to the regular public schools, while Japan contracted to prevent the emigration of laborers to the United States. But anti- Japanese feeling persisted and grew in California.
One of the first evils that challenged the attention of California's civic-minded newcomers in the early years of the century was corrup- tion in city politics. The prosecution of San Francisco's "City Hall graft ring" led the way in a series of exposures of municipal scandals that introduced the muckraking era in California. From 1906 to 1908 the whole State followed with eager interest the prosecutions of political boss Abraham Ruef, Mayor Eugene Schmitz, and Patrick Calhoun, United Railroads head, pushed by Fremont Older, Rudolph Spreckels, and James D. Phelan; attorneys Francis J. Heney and Hiram Johnson ; and detective William Burns. In Los Angeles the reform movement was taken up in 1909 when the editor of the Herald, T. R. Gibbon, accused Mayor A. C. Harper and his associates of enriching themselves through forcing owners of vice dens to buy stock in fictitious sugar companies by promising police protection. The municipal clean-up campaign, soon joined by the editors of the Evening Express and various citizens' committees, succeeded in defeating Harper in the next election.
In State politics the battle against control by corporation lobbyists, fought so ardently in the 1870*3, was still to be won. As early as 1905-06, resolutions demanding Government ownership of railroads were passed at Bakersfield and Fresno, aimed against the Southern Pacific. The demand for public ownership was linked with demands for other reforms. The Independence League, a group of liberal Demo- crats meeting in Oakland in September 1906, came out for equal suffrage, the eight-hour working day, and State arbitration of indus- trial disputes, as well as for public ownership. At the same time a demand for direct primary legislation to reform the election laws was arising out of charges of fraud at the State party conventions. When a new economic depression shook the whole financial and business structure of the State in 1907, the reform movement gathered sudden strength.
The outcome was a political revolt which took form in a coalition of liberal Republicans, organized in Oakland in August 1907 as the Lincoln-Roosevelt League. It proposed to give the people of the State a direct voice in government by freeing the Republican Party from domination by "Vested Interests." Its platform included such planks as the direct primary, popular election of Senators, and institution of the initiative, referendum, and recall. It promised to elect "a free,
62 CALIFORNIA
honest, and capable legislature, truly representative of the common interests of the people of California." As leading newspapers through- out the State swung to the support of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, it rallied enough votes in 1908 to elect a legislature which passed a direct primary law, soon ratified by the people. When it gained control of the Republican Party in 1910 by electing its candidates to nearly every State and Congressional office, the State was shaken by a political upheaval.
The Lincoln-Roosevelt League's candidate for Governor, Hiram Johnson, took office in 1911. The new legislature which convened at the same time fulfilled its platform promises by approving a long series of legislative reforms. The 22 amendments to the Constitution of 1879, which it adopted and the people ratified, included provisions for woman suffrage, a new railroad commission, the initiative, referendum, and recall, and workingmen's compensation for industrial accidents. Theodore Roosevelt called its enactments "the most comprehensive programme of constructive legislation ever passed at a single session of an American legislature." When the Roosevelt Republicans bolted the Republican National Convention of 1912, they nominated Hiram Johnson as Theodore Roosevelt's running mate on the progressive "Bull Moose" ticket, which carried the State in the national elections.
A concession to anti-Japanese agitation was the 1911 legislature's alien land law. It was supplemented in 1913 by the Webb Act, for- bidding aliens ineligible to citizenship to own agricultural land in the State, which the legislature passed over President Woodrow Wilson's protests. The Japanese evaded its operation by forming land corpora- tions or by transferring ownership to their American-born children, but the hue and cry forced enactment in 1920 of the Asiatic Land Law, forbidding such evasions. Despite Japan's protests, the United States Supreme Court upheld in 1923 the constitutionality of the Webb Act. And in 1924 Congress revised the immigration law to exclude Japanese.
The reform wave continued into the early years of the World War. In December 1913 the Republican State Central Committee, announc- ing that it foresaw no hope of progress within the Republican Party, recommended the formation of the Progressive Party. The new party, formally launched on December 6 of that year, attracted a mass of former Republican voters. In the elections of November 1914, when Hiram Johnson was returned to office, the Progressives won more decisively than in any previous election. But in 1916, the year in which Johnson was elected to the Senate, the bitter feud between Republicans and Progressives gave California to Woodrow Wilson by the narrow — and history-making — margin of 3,773 votes.
Already California had embarked on the feverish expansionist period of the World War boom years, as wages, industrial output, and
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CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 63
the number of wage earners and industrial plants soared dizzily. Between 1910 and 1920 the assessed value of real and personal prop- erty doubled. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, celebrated the following year by the Panama-California Exposition at San Diego and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, seemed to promise unlimited growth of California's maritime trade. The reform movement was soon forgotten. In southern California the unexpected plea of guilty by J. B. and J. J. McNamara, on trial in 1911 for the dynamiting of the Times building, had crushed the labor movement and turned the tide of a municipal election against the socialist candidate. When the bombing of San Francisco's Pre- paredness Day parade July 22, 1916, was followed by the swift arrest of labor organizers Thomas Mooney and Warren K. Billings, the voices raised in protest were drowned out by the clamor of war-era patriots. The period of repression continued into early post-war years, when the newly passed criminal syndicalism law was invoked against members of the I. W. W. and other nonconformists.
The westward moving hordes of forty-nine were as nothing to the new influx of settlers whom California welcomed in the 1920*5, as prosperity, unrestrained, reached giddy heights. The high-pressure efforts of boosters and promoters were devoted to making prosperity and California synonymous in the public mind. Its harbors, its oil wells and factories, its movie studios, its orange groves and irrigation projects, its booming real estate subdivisions all helped to renew its association in people's thoughts with the El Dorado of the Argonauts. The cities around San Francisco Bay advanced as maritime and manufacturing centers and the new metropolis of the south, Los Angeles, surrounded by fast expanding suburbs, as a manufacturing, oil-refining, fruit- shipping, and movie-making center. By 1930 the population of Cali- fornia had grown to 5,677,251 — an increase of 65 per cent in 10 years, greater than in any other State in the Union during the same period. The increase gave it sixth place among the States in population.
And again the bubble burst. The newcomers who had thronged in by the hundreds of thousands — the wage earners and farmers, the small investors and businessmen, the elderly retired people — found themselves in the same situation as those who had come before them : jobless, their savings exhausted, their businesses bankrupt, their farms foreclosed, or their investments wiped out.
As they had done in the 1900*5 and earlier still in the 1870*5, the people turned to politics. Of the State-wide political movements that began to follow close on one another throughout the I93o's, the first was the EPIC movement, which rallied around the "End Poverty in California" (EPIC) plan presented by Upton Sinclair when he con- sented in August 1933 to run for the gubernatorial nomination on the
64 CALIFORNIA
Democratic ticket. Sinclair's plan called for the establishment of self- sustaining State land colonies and the opening of idle factories, both to be operated on "production for use" principles for the benefit of the unemployed and to be financed by State-issued scrip. The plan called also for repeal of the State sales tax, exemption of small homes and ranches from taxation, and for levying of graduated taxes on incomes, inheritances, corporations, and unused lands and buildings. Another plank in the EPIC platform was pensions for the aged, the physically incapacitated, and widows with dependent children. After the hottest election campaign hitherto waged in the State, Sinclair was defeated for the governorship by a narrow margin, although EPIC candidates were elected to city and Congressional offices.
The people turned to other movements which seemed to promise a way out, some of which, like the EPIC movement, spread into other States. A short-lived one that swept southern California was the Utopian Society, which employed semi-dramatic rites to educate its members in social and economic affairs. The Townsend Plan, devised by an elderly Long Beach physician, Dr. Francis E. Townsend, enlisted the support of large numbers of the State's more elderly citizens with its proposal to promote business recovery by paying $200 per month to each person over 60 years of age. In 1938 another project for economic recovery, the so-called "Thirty Dollars Every Thursday" or "Ham- and-Eggs" plan, rose to prominence, promising to pay aged persons $30 weekly in State warrants, financed by a 2^ tax on all sales.
California Bound — IQ3Q: On the highways leading into California there appeared in the late I93o's, among the long lines of streamlined automobiles, more antiquated vehicles. Like the covered wagons of earlier days they carried all their owners' worldly goods: those elemental necessities that change but little in 80 years — pots, pans, bed- ding, basins, washtubs. These latter-day prairie schooners, like their predecessors, stopped for the night at wayside camps, where the in- formality of hardships loosened tongues. Once again campfires burned along western trails — but the stories told around them resembled not at all the stories of the earlier pioneers. "The dust was drifted high as the window sills." "The cattle died a-lookin' at you." "Wouldn't a blade of grass grow anywhere in the valley."
Over the spirits of the starving migrants the desolation they had seen lay heavy — until they remembered that they were going to Cali- fornia. That horizon was a bright one, for they were sure that in a State which supplies nearly half the Nation's fresh fruit and a third of its truck crops there would be a place for them among the pickers. What few of them had learned was that earlier immigrants — Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos — had swarmed so thickly over the fertile acres that wages never rose above the standard accepted by coolie and peon
CALIFORNIA'S LAST FOUR CENTURIES 65
labor. Or that they would have to make their homes in districts like the one where in 1934 the National Labor Relations Board found "filth, squalor, an entire absence of sanitation, and a crowding of human beings into totally inadequate tents or crude structures built of boards, weeds, and anything that was found at hand to give a pitiful semblance of a home at its worst." For these workers the workmen's compensation law failed to operate, the State's minimum wage law for women and minors was ignored, medical aid was denied unless death was imminent, and labor contractors took an exorbitant percentage of wages — wages which averaged, in 1935, but $289 per family, in- cluding the income of all its members. Such were the conditions that awaited 97,642 Dust Bowl migrants in 1936 and 104,976 in the following year. In 1938 they were arriving at the rate of 10,000 a month. Their coming served to bring to people's consciousness the long unsolved problem of how to feed, clothe, and shelter the hundreds of thousands of homeless farm workers who follow the crops over the State.
When the people of California went to the polls in November 1938, the surge of protest and demands for reform that had swept the State throughout the I93o's came to a climax. They elected a new Governor, Culbert L. Olson — the first Democrat to hold the office since the Republican Party had captured it 43 years before. During those four decades, California's period of expansion had run its course. At the end of the 1930'$, Calif ornians could look forward neither to the opening up of new lands nor, probably, to the discovery of new resources. The dramatic influx of fortune seekers, following in suc- cessive waves as boom succeeded boom, has subsided. What lies ahead is an intensive struggle to solve the social and economic problems which are the inevitable heritage of California's four centuries of development.
Riches From the Soil
WITHIN the rock wall formed by California's two great moun- tain ranges lies the long level stretch of the Sacramento-San Joaquin or Central Valley — the "Long Valley," as John Steinbeck has named it — called the world's most fertile growing region, which contains about two-thirds of the State's 30,000,000 acres of agricultural lands. Other major growing areas are the coastal valleys, the intensely developed farm area south of the Tehachapis, center of the citrus industry, and the arid but potentially highly productive desert region in the southeastern corner of the State, which includes Imperial Valley.
The wide range of topography, soil, and climate makes it possible to produce every species of temperate zone and subtropical fruit, vege- table, and field crop within the limits of the State. Pears grow on the cool mountain slopes to the north ; asparagus, celery, beans, onions, and rice in the black soil of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta area; lettuce in Salinas Valley, called "the Valley of Green Gold" ; grapes for dry wines on the sunny foothills of Napa and Sonoma Counties ; prunes — most of America's supply — in the sheltered orchards of Santa Clara Valley; table, wine and raisin grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, olives, and a fabulous yield of cotton in the brown silted loam of San Joaquin Valley; oranges, lemons, limes, pomegranates, figs, avocados, loquats, guavas, almonds, and walnuts to the south ; dates far out in the desert to the southeast beyond Indio.
The State is ideally adapted to the modern, industrialized, mass- production type of specialized intensive farming. The dominant unit
66
RICHES FROM THE SOIL 67
in the agricultural pattern is the large-scale, mechanized, irrigated "ranch," operated with the precision of a Ford factory, employing hun- dreds of workers and turning out specialized crops for eastern and foreign markets or for California's $174,000,000 fruit and vegetable canning and preserving industry.
A typical large-scale fruit ranch in the extreme southern end of San Joaquin Valley — 6,000 acres devoted exclusively to the production of "green" or fresh fruit — ships more than two dozen carloads of peaches, plums, and grapes daily at the peak season and employs 2,500 men and women in orchards, vineyards, and packing sheds. Hidden by the gentle, scarcely perceptible swell of the plain is the heart of the ranch : the cluster of administrative buildings, the white staff bungalows on a miniature Main Street with gay little gardens and tennis courts, the packing-sheds and refrigeration plant and railroad siding, the school- house and store. Beyond lie the separate labor camps for American, Mexican, Filipino and Japanese workers.
The elaborate irrigation system is equipped with 18 pumps, run by 125- to 25O-horsepower deepwell turbines. They draw the ranch's water supply from subterranean springs, fed by melting snow in the mountains. Farm machinery includes 15 caterpillar tractors, 43 trucks and trailers, over 50 company-owned automobiles, and 22 mules — appar- ently still indispensable to farming even in this ultra-modern form. The carpenter shop puts together a reserve supply of 300,000 crates before the season opens ; 60,000 crates can be stored in the refrigerating plant when they are packed with fruit.
Ranch personnel includes the ranch manager, his assistants and office stafr, a physician, an electrician, a blacksmith and five assistants, a cook and 1 1 assistants for the single men's cook houses. The labor force of men and women engaged in irrigating, tractor driving, and picking, packing, and shipping fruit ranges from 700 at the lowest point in December to 2,500 at the highest in the summer, averaging 2,200 from April through December. At peak season, in the packing sheds alone, 450 workers pack plums and about 325 pack grapes. The con- veyor system is used from the time the crated fruit is brought in on trucks for sorting and packing until the finished, boxed, scientifically pre-cooled product glides out on the belt to the refrigerator cars, wait- ing on the siding of the ranch's special branch line.
Agriculture is the basic industry of the State, occupying a key posi- tion in its economic structure. Its income far outstrips the combined income of oil and mining, and its production cost more than triples that of the motion picture industry. In addition, more than a fourth of the total value of products from manufacturing industries is in industries directly allied to agriculture, such as milling, canning, packing, and preserving. In 1937, California was second only to Texas in gross
68 CALIFORNIA
farm income. It produces nearly one-half of the country's fresh fruit output, about 95 percent of its dried fruit, a