The Right Places (5 page)

From the earliest days of California settlement, men struggled with the problems, and the promises, which this particular climate offered. During the long summers the rivers shrank to a trickle or dried up altogether, and the Valley became a desert. In spring, when the snows in the mountains melted, the rivers overflowed and the Valley became an inland swamp. You can tell which are the oldest of the Valley houses because they are built on high foundations, well above the ground, and are approached by long flights of steps, a reminder of the threat of high water that existed only a few years ago. Obviously, what the Central Valley needed was a way to store the spring floods and to distribute this water during the dry summer growing season, and from the first sandbagged levees along the Sacramento River and the digging of the first canals, ditches, and sloughs, this battle with water has been the Central Valley's major effort. In fact, the story of the Valley, and its economic success, has been written in water.

One of the first to recognize the Valley's potential in a large way was a man called Henry Miller (no kin to the novelist of the same name who also lives in California). Henry Miller remains, in some ways, a figure of mystery. His real name was Heinrich Alfred Kreiser. He was the son of a German (or perhaps Austrian) butcher. He came to the United States in 1847 at the age of nineteen, and when he heard of Sutter's gold he decided to head for California. When he went to pick up his steamer ticket to Panama he noticed that, for some reason, his ticket had been made out in the name of Henry Miller. This, at least, is what he claimed. Did he come upon the ticket dishonestly? In any case, the ticket was stamped “Non-Transferable,” and so the young man, who spoke little English, decided that it was wisest to pretend to be Henry Miller rather than risk losing the ticket. He kept the name until he died.

In California, he worked for a while as a dishwasher and then as a sausage peddler, and it was as a sausage man that he first entered the
Central Valley and was struck with its possibilities. He was a quiet, reclusive young man, and as far as is known had no formal engineering training. Yet he began, in his spare time, to design levees and intricate irrigation systems. He also began to buy land which was considered worthless and which he could therefore buy dirt-cheap. Henry Miller—who, in his later years, developed grandiose ideas about his capacities and took to comparing himself with King Solomon—may have been a genius. He was certainly a clever salesman, and perhaps he was a scoundrel. In the days of feverish railroad-building and the speculation in land that was central to the allure of railroads, Miller was able to persuade various fledgling railroad companies to lay their tracks along certain routes. Then, when tracks were ready to be laid, Miller would discover a “better” route. The first route would then be abandoned, and its roadbed would become—by default—a ready-made levee for Miller's expanding irrigation system. Once, buying a parcel of land from a Spanish owner, Miller agreed to accept “as much land as a boat can circle in a day” in return for the price he offered. He then strapped a canoe to his wagon, set off at a fast clip across the countryside, and, by nightfall, had claimed a considerably larger portion than if his journey had been by water.

At the height of his career, Henry Miller and his partner, Charles Lux, another ex-butcher, owned over half a million acres of Valley land, on which a million head of cattle grazed. Miller and Lux were America's first cattle kings, and it was once claimed that whatever California real estate Henry Miller didn't own the Southern Pacific Railroad did. Miller liked to boast that he could ride from Mexico to the Oregon Border, on horseback, and never be required to sleep on land that was not his own. He was also responsible for the law of riparian rights, which provided that anyone owning land along a river can use the river's water. This gave Miller complete control of all the water in the San Joaquin Valley, a considerable resource. Today, Henry Miller's heirs and others who have inherited shares of the Miller-Lux holdings, are immensely rich. Henry Miller died in 1916, and the beneficiaries, direct and indirect, of his enterprises include such far-flung people as Mrs. William Wallace Mein, Jr., of San Francisco, who is Henry Miller's great-granddaughter, and Mr. Wilmarth S. Lewis
of Farmington, Connecticut, the celebrated Walpole scholar, biographer, and collector of Walpoleiana.

Henry Miller pointed the way toward what could be done with water in terms of Central Valley agriculture. Since then, water has been at the heart of every Valley triumph, and every controversy. Feelings about water can be joyful; several years ago, when a new canal was opened 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 blued 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.

Feelings about water can also run hard, stirring bitterness and resentment. In the southernmost part of the Central Valley, many people are angry about a plan to lift water out of the Delta and carry it, through a mountain tunnel, into Los Angeles, where it is 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 reads, “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 operation, 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 of California 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 the growth of fish. The Center is an operation of mind-boggling proportions, and it is getting bigger all the time. New dams are being built “that make Aswan look like just another PG&E project,” according to one Valley engineer.
The Folsom Dam, west of Sacramento, already dwarfs the Aswan. The drawing boards teem with others.

With all these dams, and all the water they store, there has been a certain nervousness about what might happen in the case of a serious earthquake, and when, several years ago, there was an extended earthquake scare, a number of people hurried to higher ground, because if all the dams in California did break open at once, the entire Valley would certainly become a very damp place in which to live. In the meantime, the irrigation that the big dams provide has turned the Valley floor, in the spring, into a sea of billowing pink, white, blue, and orange blooms. And when they contemplate the wealth of agriculture that the Central Valley water system provides, Valley people are understandably resentful of city folk in San Francisco and Los Angeles who poke fun at Valley farmers. “Where would
they
be if it weren't for us?” one woman asks. That the Governor's wife feels she must go to Beverly Hills to get her hair done strikes Valley people as less an insult than a joke.

One way to grasp the special feeling of the California Central Valley is to begin in the south, in Bakersfield, a city which once belonged almost entirely to Henry Miller. Bakersfield is to the Valley what the bluff is to Kansas City, but the comparison cannot be stretched too far. Bakersfield is cotton, and Bakersfield is oil. Cotton has given Bakersfield a sense of permanence; cotton money, that is, is older money, rooted in the soil. Oil money gives Bakersfield a sense of transience, of come-and-go, because oil money is new money, based on a black substance that is always puddling up from beneath the substrata of the earth, and oil brings with it drillers and refiners and promoters and speculators, all of whom seem to have flown into Bakersfield from somewhere else. Today, virtually every oil company of any size has an office in Bakersfield, and it is hard to spend more than an hour in Bakersfield without a sense of the throbbing of pumps, refineries, and compressor plants that make gasoline out of natural gas, and of course a concurrent sense of oil-smelling money.

Money is a favorite topic of conversation in Bakersfield—who made how much, and when, and why, and who, because of failure to be in the right place at the right time, failed to make money. The Tevises and the Millers, for example, represent a long-standing money feud.
Like Henry Miller, the Tevis family were also big landowners in these parts (though on a somewhat lesser scale) and, in the 1930s, the Tevises found themselves land-poor. Miller, at that point, had succeeded in diversifying his interests. In order to recoup their fortunes, the Tevis family interests formed something called the Kern County Land Company, and shares were sold to the public—thereby departing from Tevis family control. Lo and behold, not long afterward, a bonanza in oil was discovered beneath Kern County Land Company acreage. Kern County Land Company shareholders found themselves rich overnight, and at least one man—Mr. C. Ray Robinson, the lawyer who had handled the Land Company's affairs—made himself a million dollars in legal fees alone, not counting what the jump in value of his stock netted him. Tevises moaned and gnashed their teeth but, alas, there was really nothing they could do; a fortune had slipped through their fingers. At one point, the Tevis mansion in Bakersfield had a private golf course, and the Tevises had actually entertained foreign royalty in their home. The big house had to be sold, and for a while it was used as the clubhouse for the Stockdale Country Club. Today, the site belongs to a San Franciscan named George Nickel, a Henry Miller heir—and a cousin of Mrs. William Wallace Mein—and none of the Miller-Lux heirs today feels the slightest guilt about gloating over the fact that Millers
still
outweigh the Tevises.

Moving north up the wide Valley, the next important town is Fresno. To many people, Fresno is more typically a Valley town than Bakersfield because it is solidly agricultural—vigorous, masculine, where cowboys wear their hats in the fanciest bars, yet a town with an elegant downtown shopping mall, reclaimed from a former slum, that has become a model for city planners everywhere, and a number of sleek new high-rise buildings. Fresno is at the geographic center of the state, and Fresno County is the richest agricultural county in the United States—as very few Fresnoisans will forget to remind you. The irrigated land around Fresno produces a great variety of crops, and it is here that the psychology of the California farmer is seen at its best. He is tough, pessimistic, politically conservative, fiercely independent. If there is one thing a Valley rancher resents it is “folks from outside trying to tell us what to do.” The folks from outside are usually from the federal government, and at the heart of the continuous grumbling
about the Central Valley irrigation project, and what kind of water will go where from which dam, is the fact that it is a U.S. Department of the Interior project—representing damned outsiders from Washington.

Stewart Udall—though long departed from his post as Secretary of the Interior—is still a dirty name in these parts, and a kind word for ex-Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz not long ago landed a man in a Valley rancher's heated pool—where he was discovered floating face down. Wirtz did away with the
bracero
program, which ranchers—now that it is no more—speak of in retrospect as though it once provided something like a second Eden. The
braceros
were Mexicans brought into California during peak-picking seasons to perform “stoop labor,” the gathering of low-growing fruits and vegetables. “Why, the
braceros
were the greatest boost to the Mexican economy there ever was!” one rancher insisted not long ago. “The Mexicans who came up here loved the work, and they were wonderful workers. A good picker could make anywhere from sixty-five hundred dollars to ten thousand dollars a season! They came out here and said we should put heaters in the bunkhouses—
heaters!
A Mexican's not used to a heater! They said, ‘Why aren't you feeding them meat? Why aren't you feeding them eggs?' My Lord, don't those damn fools in Washington know that a Mexican eats tortillas and beans?”

Valley ranchers admit that they may have used the wrong public relations tactic when Secretary Wirtz came out to California several years ago to look over the conditions in which the Mexican laborers worked and lived. The ranchers, hoping to woo Mr. Wirtz to their point of view, put on a big party for him, and that turned out to be a mistake. Wirtz was a teetotaler, or at least he rather frostily refused the many stiff drinks urged upon him, and Valley ranchers pride themselves on their capacity for alcohol. Wirtz also made a point of not eating a bite of the elaborate barbecue that was spread before him. He went back to Washington and canceled the
bracero
program.

Another Valley rancher said not long ago: “The national farm program has been conducted as a relief program for the South. Farm legislation on a national scale has been controlled by the South and the Midwest. California keeps getting the short end of the stick. The chairmen of both the House and the Senate agricultural committees are
Southerners. Meanwhile, we're caught here in a cost-price squeeze. Our taxes go higher, labor costs go up, but our customers have concentrated their buying power. There used to be, for example, hundreds of canneries for the cling-peach people to go to. Now there are nineteen or twenty. Those of us who sell direct to markets—well, there used to be thousands of little ones to shop from. Now there are just a few big super-chains. So it's harder for the farmer to fight for his price.”