Where I Was From

by Joan Didion

  Such calls to dwell upon the place and its meaning (and, if the meaning proved intractable, to reinvent the place) had been general in California since the first American settlement, the very remoteness of which was sufficiently extreme to raise questions about why one was there, why one had come there, what the voyage would ultimately mean. The overland crossing itself had an aspect of quest: “One was going on a pilgrimage whose every suggestion was of the familiar sacred stories,” Royce wrote. “One sought a romantic and far-off golden land of promise, and one was in the wilderness of this world, often guided only by signs from heaven…. The clear blue was almost perpetually overhead; the pure mountain winds were about one; and again, even in the hot and parched deserts, a mysterious power provided the few precious springs and streams of water.”

  Each arriving traveler had been, by definition, reborn in the wilderness, a new creature in no way the same as the man or woman or even child who had left Independence or St. Joseph however many months before: the very decision to set forth on the journey had been a kind of death, involving the total abandonment of all previous life, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who would never again be seen, all sentiment banished, the most elementary comforts necessarily relinquished. “I had for months anticipated this hour, yet, not till it came, did I realize the blank dreariness of seeing night come on without house or home to shelter us and our baby-girl,” Josiah Royces mother, Sarah, wrote of the day in 1849 on which she set off for Sacramento with her husband and first child.

  The blank dreariness, Sarah Royce wrote.

  Without house or home, Sarah Royce wrote.

  Suffice it to say, we started, my great-great-grandfather William Kilgore wrote.

  This moment of leaving, the death that must precede the rebirth, is a fixed element of the crossing story. Such stories are artlessly told. There survives in their repetition a problematic elision or inflation, a narrative flaw, a problem with point of view: the actual observer, or camera eye, is often hard to locate. This was Josephus Adamson Cornwall’s goodbye to his mother, as related by a son who seems to have heard the story from his mother, Nancy Hardin Cornwall, she of the fixed and settled principles, aims, and motives in life, who had not herself been present: “Just ready to go, he entered his mother’s parlor. She went out with him to his horse to say the last words and to see him depart. She told him that she would never again see him in this world, gave him her blessing, and commended him to God. He then mounted his horse and rode away, while she followed him with a last look, until he vanished from sight.”

  Who witnessed this moment of departure? Was the camera on Josephus Cornwall’s mother, following her son with the last look? Or on the son himself, glancing back as he vanishes from sight? The gravity of the decisive break demands narrative. Conflicting details must be resolved, reworked into a plausible whole. Aging memories will be recorded as gospel. Children recount as the given of their personal and cultural history what neither they nor even their parents could possibly have known, for example the “providential interposition” that was said to have saved Josephus Cornwall’s life when he was an infant in Georgia: “It was a peculiarity of that section of the state that mad dogs were very common. One day when his parents were busy he was left in the house alone in his cradle. A mad dog entered the room, walked around it and went away, but never molested him.” What witness saw the mad dog enter the room? Did the witness take action, or merely observe and report, trusting the “providential interposition” to save the baby?

  Yet it was through generations of just such apparently omniscient narrators that the crossing stories became elevated to a kind of single master odyssey, its stations of veneration fixed. There were the Platte, the Sandy, the Big and Little Sandys. There was the Green River. Fort Hall. Independence Rock. The Sweetwater. There were the Humboldt, the Humboldt Sink, the Hastings cut-off. The names were so deeply embedded in the stories I heard as a child that when I happened at age twenty to see the Green River, through the windows of a train crossing Wyoming, I was astonished by this apparent evidence that it actually existed, a fact on the ground, there to be seen—entirely unearned—by anyone passing by. Just as there were stations of veneration, so there were objects of veneration, relics of those who had made the redeeming journey. “The old potato masher which the Cornwall family brought across the plains in 1846” was not the only family totem given by my grandmother’s cousins to the Pacific University Museum in 1957. “After consulting with certain of the heirs,” Oliver Huston wrote, the cousins had also determined “that it will be advisable to turn over to the Museum at that time the small desk sent Grandfather in 1840 by William Johnson from Hawaii, and also certain mementoes of Grandmother Geiger,” specifically “the blouse which formed part of her wedding costume” and “the old shawl or shoulder wrap she wore in her later years.” So Saxon Brown, the heroine of Jack London’s curious “California” novel The Valley of the Moon, could hold in her hands her mothers red satin corset (“the pioneer finery of a frontier woman who had crossed the plains”) and see pass before her, “from East to West, across a continent, the great hegira of the land-hungry Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her. She had been nursed on its traditions and its facts from the lips of those who had taken part.”

  As repeated, this was an odyssey the most important aspect of which was that it offered moral or spiritual “tests,” or challenges, with fatal consequences for failure. Josiah Royce’s parents, traveling with only their two-year-old daughter, three other emigrants, and a manuscript list of landmarks that stopped at the Humboldt Sink, found themselves lost on the Carson desert, “confused, almost stupefied,” “dazed,” “half-senseless,” suffering for a period “the same fatal horror of desolation and death that had assailed the Donner Party in the Truckee pass.” Children who died of cholera got buried on the trail. Women who believed they could keep some token of their mother’s house (the rosewood chest, the flat silver) learned to jettison memory and keep moving. Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time. A hesitation, a moment spent looking back, and the grail was forfeited. Independence Rock, west of Fort Laramie on the Sweetwater River, was so named because the traveler who had not reached that point by the Fourth of July, Independence Day, would not reach the Sierra Nevada before snow closed the passes.

  The diaries of emigrants refer to the Sierra Nevada as “the most dreaded moment,” “the Great Bugaboo,” the source of “sleepless nights,” “disturbed dreams.” Without house or home: Sarah Royce and her husband and child abandoned their wagon and made it through the Sierra, with the help of a United States Army relief party, only ten days before the passes closed. Even while the passes remained open, there would be snow. There would be the repeated need to ford and again ford the Truckee or the Carson. There would be the repeated need to unload and reload the wagons. There would be recent graves, wrecked wagons, and, at Donner Lake, after the winter of 1846–47, human as well as animal bones, and the trees notched to show the depth of the fatal winters snowpack. This is the entry in William Kilgore’s diary for August 1, 1852:

  Ice and frost this morning. Four miles to Red Lake. This is … the head of Salmon Trout, or Carson River. It is a small lake and is within one mi. of the summit of the Sierra Nevada. From this lake to the summit the ascent is very great, some places being almost perpendicular…. Four mi. from the summit we cross a small creek, a tributary of the Sacramento.… At this creek we stop to noon. Here we help inter a young man who died last night of bilious fever. He was from Michigan. His name was Joseph Ricker. His parents reside in the state of Maine. Here we ascend another ridge of this mt. It is higher than the one we have just passed, being 9,339 ft. above the sea. From the foot to the summit it is five miles, and in ascending and descending we travel over four miles of snow, and it from two to 20 ft. deep…. 21 miles today.

  To read these crossing accounts and diaries is to be struck by the regularity with which a certain apprehension of darkness enters the quest, a shadow of
moral ambiguity that becomes steadily more pervasive until that moment when the traveler realizes that the worst of the Sierra is behind him. “The Summit is crossed!” one such diary reads. “We are in California! Far away in the haze the dim outlines of the Sacramento Valley are discernible! We are on the down grade now and our famished animals may pull us through. We are in the midst of huge pines, so large as to challenge belief. Hutton is dead. Others are worse. I am better.” By this point, in every such journey, there would have been the accidents, the broken bones, the infected and even the amputated hands and feet. There would have been the fevers. Sarah Royce remembered staying awake all night after a man in her party died of cholera, and hearing the wind whip his winding sheet like “some vindictive creature struggling restlessly in bonds.” There would have been the hurried burials, in graves often unmarked and sometimes deliberately obliterated. “Before leaving the Humboldt River there was one death, Miss Mary Campbell,” Nancy Hardin Cornwall’s son Joseph recalled. “She was buried right in our road and the whole train of wagons was driven over her grave to conceal it from the Indians. Miss Campbell died of mountain fever, and Mother by waiting on her caught the fever and for a long time she lingered, apparently between life and death, but at last recovered. Miss Campbell was an orphan, her mother having died at Green River.”

  There would have been, darkest of all, the betrayals, the suggestions that the crossing might not after all be a noble odyssey, might instead be a mean scrambling for survival, a blind flight on the part of Josiah Royce’s “blind and stupid and homeless generation of selfish wanderers.” Not all emigrants, to take just one example, cared for all orphans. It was on the Little Sandy that an emigrant named Bernard J. Reid, who had put down two hundred dollars to secure a place on an 1849 crossing, saw first “an emigrant wagon apparently abandoned by its owners” and then “a rude head-board indicating a new grave,” which turned out to be that of the Reverend Robert Gilmore and his wife Mary, who had died the same day of cholera. This account comes to us from Reid’s diary, which was found by his family in the 1950s, entrusted to Mary McDougall Gordon for editing, and published in 1983 by the Stanford University Press as Overland to California with the Pioneer Line. On turning from the grave to the apparently abandoned wagon, Reid tells us, he was “surprised to see a neatly dressed girl of about 17, sitting on the wagon tongue, her feet resting on the grass, and her eyes apparently directed at vacancy.”

  She seemed like one dazed or in a dream and did not seem to notice me till I spoke to her. I then learned from her in reply to my questions that she was Miss Gilmore, whose parents had died two days before; that her brother, younger than herself, was sick in the wagon, probably with cholera; that their oxen were lost or stolen by the Indians; and that the train they had been traveling with, after waiting for three days on account of the sickness and death of her parents, had gone on that morning, fearful, if they delayed longer, of being caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains…. The people of her train had told her that probably her oxen would yet be found, or at any rate some other train coming along with oxen to spare would take her and her brother and their wagon along.

  “Who could tell the deep sense of bereavement, distress and desolation that weighed on that poor girl’s heart, there in the wilderness with no telling what fate was in store for her and her sick brother?” Reid asks his readers and surely also himself. Such memories might have seemed difficult to reconcile with the conviction that one had successfully met the tests or challenges required to enter the new life. The redemptive power of the crossing was, nonetheless, the fixed idea of the California settlement, and one that raised a further question: for what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed? When you jettison others so as not to be “caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,” do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, do you survive at all?

  5

  I WAS born in Sacramento, and lived in California most of my life. I learned to swim in the Sacramento and the American, before the dams. I learned to drive on the levees up and downriver from Sacramento. Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there. We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country. We make declamatory breaks with it, as Josiah Royce did when he left Berkeley for Harvard. “There is no philosophy in California—from Siskiyou to Ft. Yuma, and from the Golden Gate to the summit of the Sierras,” he had written to William James, who eventually responded to this cri de coeur with the offer from Harvard. We make equally declamatory returns, as Frank Norris did, determined before his thirtieth birthday “to do some great work with the West and California as a background, and which will be at the same time thoroughly American.” The intention, Norris wrote to William Dean Howells, who had reviewed McTeague favorably, was “to write three novels around the one subject of Wheat. First, a story of California (the producer), second, a story of Chicago (the distributor), third, a story of Europe (the consumer) and in each to keep the idea of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from West to East. I think a big Epic trilogy could be made out of such a subject, that at the same time would be modern and thoroughly American. The idea is so big that it frightens me at times but I have about made up my mind to have a try at it.”

  Frank Norris’s experience with his subject appears to have been exclusively literary. He was raised in Chicago and then San Francisco, where he met the young woman he would eventually marry at a debutante dance. He spent a year in Paris, studying art and writing a medieval romance, Yvernelle, A Tale of Feudal France, which his mother arranged to have published. He spent four years at Berkeley without taking the courses necessary for a degree, then a year as a non-degree student at Harvard. He covered the prelude to the Boer War for Collier’s and The San Francisco Chronicle, the Santiago campaign in Cuba for McClure’s. At the time he was seized by the trilogy-of-wheat notion, he was living in New York, at 61 Washington Square South.

  The Octopus, published in 1901 and based on what was at the time quite recent history in the San Joaquin Valley, was, in the best sense, worked up: through well-situated friends, Ernest Peixotto and his wife (the Peixottos were a prominent San Francisco Jewish family, and Ernest Peixottos older sister Jessica, an economist, was one of the first women on the faculty of the University of California), Norris managed an introduction to a couple who ran five thousand acres of wheat in San Benito County, and arranged to spend the summer of 1899 on their ranch near Hollister. San Benito County presented a gentler, more coastal landscape than the San Joaquin, which was where Norris intended to set his novel (“San Juan de Guadalajara,” the mission in The Octopus, was a borrow from Mission San Juan Bautista near Hollister, there being no missions in the San Joaquin), but it was nonetheless a setting in which an attentive reporter could absorb the mechanics of a big wheat operation.

  The Octopus opens on a day in “the last half of September, the very end of the dry season,” a day when “all Tulare County, all the vast reaches of the San Joaquin Valley—in fact all South Central California, was bone dry, parched, and baked and crisped after four months of cloudless weather, when the day seemed always at noon, and the sun blazed white hot over the valley from the Coast Range in the west to the foothills of the Sierras in the east.” The stuff of the novel, the incidents on which the narrative turns, came directly from actual events in what was then Tulare County. In 1893 in Tulare County there had been the killing by a sheriffs posse of John Sontag, an embittered Southern Pacific brakeman who had spent the previous three years dynamiting track and robbing trains, killing and wounding several lawmen. In The Octopus Son-tag would become “Dyke,” who commandeers an engineer to escape his pursuers, foils their attempt to derail him by reversing the engine, abandons it, and is taken by the posse.

  Thirteen years before, in 1880, there had been, at a place then called Mussel Slough but after th
e incident renamed “Lucerne,” the shootout between federal marshals acting for the Southern Pacific, which had become through its federal land grants the largest landowner in California, and a group of local ranchers who were growing wheat on land leased from the railroad. The ranchers, under the rather willful misapprehension that their lease agreements gave them the right to buy the land at $2.50 an acre (the agreements were vaguely worded, but quite clearly stated that the land would be made available “at various figures from $2.50 upward per acre,” “upward” being the word the ranchers preferred to miss), refused to pay the price, $17 to $40 an acre, ultimately set on the land. The railroad obtained eviction orders, the ranchers resisted, and both the ranchers and the federal marshals sent to evict them began firing. Six ranchers ultimately died in this confrontation, which not only provided the climactic incident for The Octopus—the showdown between eleven ranchers and the U.S. marshals sent in to enforce eviction orders—but also influenced the final scenes in Josiah Royce’s only work of fiction, The Feud of Oakfield Creek: A Novel of California Life, based on the Sacramento squatters’ riots of 1850.

  For the San Francisco threads in his narrative, Norris drew on even more recent events: in 1899, there had been the celebrated publication in The San Francisco Examiner of Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” a rhetorical poem that decried the exploitation of labor. An epic poem in the style of “The Man with the Hoe” appears in The Octopus as “The Toilers,” the newspaper poem that makes an instant celebrity of its author, Presley, the irresolute graduate of “an Eastern college” who is the novel’s protagonist. The publication of “The Toilers” enables Presley to dine at the table of “the Railroad King” (Blue Point oysters, purée a la Derby, ortolan patties, grenadins of bass and stuffed salmon, Londonderry pheasants, escalopes of duck, rissolettes á la pompadour, asparagus rushed to the kitchen of the Railroad King by special train within hours of its cutting), even as, outside in the fog, the dispossessed widow of one of the evicted and killed San Joaquin wheat growers is literally starving to death, falling into her terminal coma on a vacant lot at the top of the Clay Street hill, her small daughter at her side, her older daughter already descended into prostitution.