Where I Was From by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Such extensive holdings, typically acquired on very little equity, were not, at the time of their acquisition, entirely unusual, nor did William Welles Hollister and the Dibblee brothers even count among the largest private owners. In 1882, Richard O’Neill and James Flood together bought more than two hundred thousand acres straddling the line between Orange and San Diego Counties, a holding undivided until 1940, when the Flood heirs took the San Diego acreage and the O’Neill heirs took the Orange. Further north in Orange County, the heirs of James Irvine held the ninety-three thousand acres he had acquired in the 1870s by combining acreage originally granted to the Sepulveda and Yorba families, a property that stretched from the mountains to the sea and covered one-fifth of the county. By the time James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis consolidated their properties in 1890 as the Kern County Land Company, they had acquired, throughout the Southwest, almost a million and a half acres, roughly a third of them in the San Joaquin Valley. Henry Miller, another big holder, who once said that he could drive his cattle from Oregon to the Mexican border and sleep them every night on his own land, had arrived in San Francisco in 1850 with six dollars in his pocket and gone to work as a butcher. Within twenty years, he and his partner, Charles Lux, also a butcher in San Francisco, had gained control of ten to twelve million acres in California, a million and a half owned outright and grazing rights on the rest, vast tracts largely acquired through imaginative interpretation of the small print in federal legislation.
    Miller, for example, made deals with cash-hungry veterans, buying up, at a discount, the land options to which they were entitled as a service benefit. He also made deft use of the federal Reclamation Act of 1850, which had granted California’s “swamp and overflowed” land to the state, which in turn sold it (the “virtual gift” noted by Charles Nordhoff in 1874) for $1.15 to $1.25 an acre, an amount returned to any buyer who could demonstrate use of the land. Henry Miller was instrumental in getting large parts of California classified as swamp, in one favored telling by hooking up a team of horses to tow a rowboat over the land in question. Nor, at the time, was this even an obscure angle: Power and Land in California , the 1971 report prepared by the Ralph Nader Task Force and later published as Politics of Land , noted that two of the state surveyors responsible for classifying land as “swamp and overflowed” each left office with three hundred thousand acres.
    S uch landowners tended to have not much interest in presenting themselves as the proprietors of farms or estates on the eastern, which was to say the English, model. William Henry Brewer, when he came out from Pennsylvania in 1860 to assist Josiah Dwight Whitney in the first geological survey of California, complained that the owner of eighty thousand acres between Gaviota Pass and San Luis Obispo lived “about half as well as a man would at home who owned a hundred-acre farm paid for.” Almost a century later, Carey McWilliams, in California: The Great Exception , remarked on the almost total absence of conventional “rural” life in California, which would have been, were it a country, the world’s seventh-largest agricultural producer: “The large shipper-growers ‘farm by phone’ from headquarters in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Many of them travel, nowadays, exclusively by plane in visiting their various ‘operations.’ … Their relationship to the land is as casual as that of the migratory workers they employ.” To live as farmers would have been, for the acquisitors of these operations, a bewilderingly alien concept, since their holdings were about something else altogether: they were temporary chips in the greater game of capital formation.
    This is well known, yet remains an elusive point for many Californians,