California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  By 1875 the Great Gold Rush was over and the greatest land grabs were completed. In their wake came another psychological reason why the lure of California seemed to fade in the minds of Americans, why California seemed to lose its appeal as a goal for the ambitious immigrant, and why the Southern Pacific had begun to worry that it might become a railroad with nowhere to go and nothing to carry. As Bailey Millard, a reporter who had investigated the California land frauds extensively, wrote in Everybody’s Magazine in 1905: “This grabbing of large tracts has discouraged immigration to California more than any other single factor. A family living on a small holding in a vast plain, with hardly a house in sight, will in time become a very lonely family indeed, and will in a few years be glad to sell out to the land king whose domain is adjacent. Thousands of small farms have in this way been acquired by the large holders at nominal prices.”

  Still, despite these wistful observations, there was no mass exodus from California during the 1880s and 1890s. The allure of California as Shangri La was still powerful, and the state’s population grew at a steady clip—the rural population growing at a somewhat faster rate than the urban. Small farmers had seen what a man like Henry Miller could do with irrigation, how the desolation of the Central Valley could with the addition of a summer water supply be turned into extraordinarily rich farmland, and they arrived in droves. In time this land would yield more than two hundred varieties of produce—which would become 10 percent of what America ate—as well as year-round grazing pasture for all manner of livestock. But the disproportionate share of land that the big landholders owned did have one profound effect. Many of the new settlers were forced to become tenant farmers. In 1890, 28 percent of the farms in California were tenant-operated. By 1910 the figure had jumped to 37 percent, an increase of 32 percent in twenty years’ time. By 1925, tenant farmers accounted for almost half the agricultural operations in the state.

  Obviously this was a situation that did not displease either the large individual owners such as Miller and Lux or the railroad giants such as Southern Pacific and Union Pacific. Their holdings had become so unwieldy that they were happy to rent or lease their land for income. And an odd economic fact was that tenant farming increased steadily throughout both good times and bad. In times of prosperity, tenancy increased, because as property prices went up, it was less expensive to lease land than to buy it. In periods of depression, tenancy again increased, because owners, unable to meet their obligations, lost their ownership status and became tenants. And through good times and bad, California men were making money. Today the average California farm consists of 617 acres and is worth $500,000. The national average is 389 acres, worth only $100,000. And it is all due to the blessing of irrigation.

  Ever since the operations of Henry Miller, water has been at the heart of every Valley triumph and every controversy. Feelings about water can be joyful. Several years ago, at the opening of a canal carrying water from the Shasta Dam in the north into previously unirrigated southern areas, a bright indigo dye was thrown into the water at the source, and as the purple water made its way into each Valley settlement along the course of the new canal the populace turned out and there were civic celebrations, speeches, parades, cheering, and all-night dancing in the streets. Children were let out of school and given seedlings of shade trees to plant in village parks and squares up and down the thoroughfares of little towns that would soon be big towns.

  Feelings about water can also be grim, stirring up bitterness and resentment. In the northern part of the Central Valley many people were angered about a plan to lift water out of the Sacramento Delta and carry it through a mountain tunnel into Los Angeles, where it has long been badly needed because of that city’s rapid growth. What right does Los Angeles have to “our” water? the northerners ask. A bit of graffiti in a Valley men’s room at the height of the controversy read, “Please flush after using. Los Angeles needs this water.”

  In the years since the pioneering Henry Miller, water has been chained behind a series of high dams and directed through hundreds of miles of canals and pumping stations, tunnels, reservoirs, and power systems. The Operations Control Center of this system, in Sacramento, resembles the interior of a futuristic space ship, complete with wall-sized maps, flashing lights, computerized controls, all coordinating the release and flow of water throughout the Central Valley Project. The control center not only regulates the amounts of water that flow out, and where these gallonages go, but also the kinds of water—for drinking, for irrigation, or for industrial use—that are needed in any given part of the state at any given time. From here the levels of rivers are controlled to keep barges afloat, to keep salt water from encroaching on peach orchards, to keep water temperatures at the proper levels to promote the spawning and growth of fish. The center is an operation of stupendous proportions, and it is getting bigger all the time. New dams are being built “that make Aswan look just like another Pacific Gas and Electric project,” according to one Valley engineer. The Folsom Dam, west of Sacramento, already dwarfs the Aswan.

  The drawing boards teem with other plans to harness water, because, after all, California keeps right on growing. So does the importance of the state’s agricultural output. For the most part, too, the quantity of available water in California depends not so much on rainfall as on the amount of winter snow that annually collects in the Sierras, so California farmers still look nervous when the Sierra snow-pack is reported to be less than normal. One of the most ambitious schemes to collect water involves throwing a dam across the Golden Gate. If San Francisco Bay, which is now a tidal basin, were dammed, it would gradually fill with fresh river water and become a huge reservoir. San Franciscans of course are not happy with this idea—not for esthetic reasons but because the destination of much of this water would be Los Angeles.

  The economic rule of the Central Valley is: the cheaper the water, the more valuable the land. This means that in the northern part of the Valley, where water is much more plentiful and therefore cheaper, a farmer can operate quite profitably on a smaller acreage. The northern Valley is blessed with a larger river, the Sacramento, has more rainfall, and has the added boon of a huge underground lake, called Lake Lassen, which makes irrigation possible through the use of wells. In the southern Valley, where water must travel a greater distance and is therefore more expensive, larger acreages are required for a farm to make money. The amount—and cost—of water also determines which crops can be grown most profitably. Bakersfield, in the south, for example, which was once almost entirely owned by Henry Miller, is ideally suited for cotton. Further north, in the irrigated land around Fresno, a great variety of crops is grown, and Fresno County, in the geographical center of the state, has become the richest agricultural county in the United States, a fact of which very few inhabitants of Fresno will neglect to remind the visitor. Modesto concentrates on peach orchards and vineyards. Stockton, Sacramento, and nearby Delta towns concentrate on tomatoes. Still farther north, in Colusa and Chico, there is an emphasis on almonds and walnuts, whose larger and deeper root systems require a larger water supply.

  Entering the Central Valley today, one senses a special smell, which changes with the seasons, from that of loamy earth to the perfume of blossoms and unfolding leaves, to the drying of eucalyptus bark at the end of summer. Each harvest has its smell—sweet and winy grapes, dusty tomatoes. And through it all is the smell of money being made—in Modesto by the Gallo Brothers, largest wine producers in the world, and in Fresno by such hugely wealthy families as the Giffens. From an office furnished with eighteenth-century antiques Russell Giffen directs a ranching operation with acreage in the hundreds of thousands (so many hundreds of thousands that he himself is not sure just how much land he owns), raising cotton, barley, wheat, safflower, alfalfa seed, melons, tomatoes, and a good deal more. Central California farmers today live in air-conditioned houses with heated swimming pools, drive air-conditioned Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces. The men who drive the big harvesters
for one farmer who, among other things, harvests twelve hundred acres of rice outside Colusa, sit in comfort in air-conditioned cabs. Another Valley farmer has a fleet of custom-built Cadillac pickup trucks, also air-conditioned, said to be the only vehicles of their sort in the world. In Stockton the Weber family, founders of the city, own vast ranches of peaches and tomatoes. In Rio Vista, in the Sacramento Delta, Peter Cook is said to be “so rich that he doesn’t lease out his gas wells—he drills them himself.” Nearby there are people such as the Alex Browns, so rich that they found it more practical to open their own private bank than bother with ordinary commercial accounts.

  Of course there is a certain amount of nervousness; farming is always a gamble. And water has wrought such great changes on the face of central California that there are worries about unpleasant side effects. The exact nature of earthquakes, for example, is still far from fully understood. There is fear that adding so much water to a terrain that was once waterless may have some dark, profound effect on what is going on in the bowels of the earth (just as there is concern that pumping so much oil out of California may have some effect on the earth’s substructure and make it more earthquake-prone). The number of dams that have been built along and about the San Andreas Fault has made some people wonder what would become of the Central Valley if there were a serious earthquake and all California’s dams broke at once. (It would become a very wet place.) But such fears are easy to lay aside when one is making so much money.

  The plentitude of water meanwhile has had its effect on matters environmental as well as economic. Californians now in their forties can remember when, as children, they could stand in the center of the Valley and address a horizon peaked with the stern, implacable snowcaps of the Sierras. The mountains once stood out with dazzling clarity, but no more. Today they are blanketed behind a perpetual sunny haze. The internal-combustion engine of course is part of the reason that the Central California Valley has lost its vistas of the mountains, but the Valley haze also consists of water particles in the air evaporating from irrigated fields, canals, and reservoirs. Making the Valley green has also changed its climate. Summer rains, once a rarity, are now much less so—in fact, they are a hazard to some of the crops that water was brought into the Valley to nourish: such tender-skinned fruits as peaches, pears, and nectarines. As short a time as twenty years ago, Valley residents used to remind visitors that despite the scorching summer heat—daytime temperatures rising into the hundreds—theirs was a dry heat; one didn’t notice it so much, and, besides, the nights were cool. One doesn’t hear such boasts so often now; with so much water vapor in the air, summer days are often smotheringly humid, and the humidity doesn’t go away at nightfall. Air-conditioned cars and houses are no longer a luxury but a necessity. By the same token, with so much moisture in the air, winters can be bone-chillingly damp. Still, it is all considered worth it—for the sake of water.

  Henry Miller, one of the first to see what water could do for the Central Valley, died in 1916. No sooner was he buried than, like cormorants descending, claimants to shares of his estate appeared from everywhere, and the court battles began. Both the state and federal governments tried to seize the Miller ranches for inheritance taxes, and it took Miller’s daughter eleven years before she finally prevailed in that legal struggle. Then the trustees of Miller’s estate were charged by the heirs with fraud and conspiracy, and another ten years—and the services of fifty-three lawyers—were consumed before that case was settled. In the process a number of the lawyers involved became millionaires. It was not until 1965—forty-nine years after Henry Miller’s death—that any of his descendants received any of his money, and at that point hardly a member of Miller’s family was speaking to another. A San Francisco judge ruled that the estate be divided equally between two branches of the family, the Nickels and the Bowleses.

  The Nickels were outraged. There were many more of them, they protested, than there were Bowleses, and their branch demanded a proportionately larger share of the money. But the judge, who had studied the crudely written will for a month—Miller was not a master of the English language—ruled that Miller had wanted his heirs to share the inheritance “according to their roots, and not in equal shares.” One disappointed Nickel was Mrs. William Wallace Mein, Jr., the former Sarah Miller Nickel, a Henry Miller granddaughter, who received only $5,000,000 instead of the $6,000,000 her lawyers had been fighting for, less than her cousin Henry Miller Bowles was awarded.

  In the years since the 1965 distribution of his estate the holdings of Henry Miller have been further broken up and subdivided. His far from egalitarian riparian-rights law has been modified beyond recognition; it is no longer possible for one large landholder to control the water in an area, and the division of water among Central Valley farmers is carefully regulated.

  Despite their quarrels, all Henry Miller’s heirs were made comfortably wealthy by their enterprising patriarch. And, removed by a couple of generations from the great land grabs, frauds, and scandals of the past, the Miller heirs went sailing into American high society—on the water of California, as it were. Still, the history of the Miller fortune would seem typical of a great many tales of California riches. Money that was made by pioneers through a combination of muscle and brains, innocence and guile, and no small amount of luck has had a way in California of being passed along to further generations through great thunderheads of acrimony, bitterness, litigation, and even bloodshed.

  The founders of some of the great California fortunes might wonder, if they were around today, whether it was really worth the trouble.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Big Four

  The earliest known mention of California in literature occurred in a romantic Spanish novel called Las Sergas de Esplandian, printed in the year 1510, which portrayed the majestic “Isle of California,” described as being located at the “right hand of the Indies and very near to the Terrestrial Paradise.” The island was ruled, according to this book, by an Amazon woman, Queen Calafia. Early maps of the New World continued to show California as an island, and it was not until the late seventeenth century that it was recognized as part of the continent.

  Even as late as the 1850s—despite the wealth that was pouring out of California during the years preceding the Civil War—Californians suffered from acute feelings of isolation, of insularity, of being cut off from the mainland. Geographically the state was remote—at the farthest rim of the continent—and access to California was difficult. To reach California from the East required a slow, laborious, and dangerous journey by stage or wagon across arid plains and daunting mountains, or by ship around the Horn, or by muleback across the malarial Isthmus of Panama. When President Zachary Taylor died in 1850, California did not learn of it for weeks. By the mid-1850s the most popular topic of conversation on the West Coast involved the dream that one day California might be linked to the rest of the country, and the world, by means of a railroad.

  The principal dreamer had been a young engineer named Theodore Judah. Judah had prepared charts and maps and surveyors’ reports demonstrating how, indeed, a railroad could be constructed through the rocky passes of the Sierras, and had actually laid twenty-one miles of track, which he called the Sacramento Valley Railroad. But Judah had been unable to get any real support for what at the time was considered the most ambitious and difficult railroad project in human history until his notions came to the attention of four men—Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins.

  Huntington, Stanford, Crocker, and Hopkins were a quadrumvirate that would become unusual in railroading by virtue of the odd fact that the men actually seemed to get along with one another, even to like one another, at least in the beginning of their association. In the East the great railroad barons—Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Russell Sage—had all been at one another’s throats, each man cheerfully determined to destroy all the others. Not so the California foursome, who decided to pool their talents. Their talents o
f course had nothing to do with railroading. All four had come to California in the years following the gold rush. Huntington had opened a hardware and mining-supply store in Sacramento and Hopkins had become his partner. Crocker was also a hardware and dry-goods merchant, and Stanford was a lawyer. All four men, however, possessed a common skill as salesmen and promoters. Mark Hopkins, for example, discovered a shipload of heavy blankets on a dock in San Francisco. The city was going through a sultry summer and no one wanted blankets. Hopkins bought the lot and stored them until winter, when the demand for blankets—and the price—skyrocketed.

  Physically they were quite unlike. Hopkins was lean and gaunt, a teetotaler, a vegetarian, and a nonsmoker. Charles Crocker was a huge, burly man with a great fiery red beard. Stanford was also heavy, beetle-browed, and bearded, a picture of lawyerly uprightness. Huntington was handsome, but with a shifty look and a taste for both ladies and whiskey. None of the four was much intrigued by Mr. Judah’s romantic notion of building a railroad through impenetrable mountains to provide an umbilical cord to the eastern seaboard, but all four agreed that the owners of such a railroad, if it were built, could expect to make a goodly sum of money, particularly if someone else could be made to pay for it. In fact, they argued, the only people who might stand to make more money than the owners of such a railroad would be the contractors whom the owners hired to build it.