Imperial (206 page)

Mulholland: “Well, here’s where we get our water.”—Nadeau, p. 192.

The respective merits of Boulder Canyon, Bull’s Head, etc.—California State Archives. Margaret C. Felts papers. Box 1. A. H. Koebig, Charles Kirby Fox, Arthur W. Cory, Nov. 15, 1930, letter to the President and Directors of the Southwest Water League, p. 3. On p. 2 of the same letter we read: “. . . the conservation of all the water resources in Southern California, both from sewage and from flood control, is an absolute necessity . . . We need that water in addition to the entire water from the Owens River and perhaps Mono Basin, in order to provide the necessary water for domestic and irrigation purposes, to assist the growth of Southern California, and to prevent a check being caused by necessary water not being available until we can obtain additional water from outside sources, mostly mentioned at present from the Colorado River.”

Shelly J. Higgins: “With what amounted to secrecy . . .”—San Diego County Water Authority, p. 37.

San Diego gets a hundred and twelve thousand acre-feet per year of Boulder Dam water—Figure from Heilbron et al., p. 328; San Diego County Water Authority, p. 37.

92 . There Is Even Evidence of a Small Fruit Orchard (1931 -20 05)

Epigraph: “It is well known that civilization demands water . . .”—Al-Biruni, p. 23.

Still of Gale Robbins—California State Archives, Olson Photo Collection. Accession #94-06-27 (534-713). Box 4 of 7. Folder 94-06-27 (625-645): Night Clubs. Photo #94-06-27-0635 (captioned “Night Clubs, Gale Robbins”).

L.A. water consumption, November 1935, November 1936—California State Archives. Margaret C. Felts papers. Box 1. Folder: “December 17, 1936. Department of Water and Power.” Department of Water and Power, City of Los Angeles, Bureau of Water Works and Supply, December 17, 1936. Regular monthly report, p. 1. (Exact figures: November 1935, domestic, 201.9 s-f, irrigation, 39.7; November 1936, 220.3 and 64.6, respectively.) (In 1942, the city’s daily average domestic water consumption is 119 gallons per capita. The capacity of the aqueduct is 310 million gallons a day.—Los Angeles City Directory [1942], p. 12.)

Information on Mono Lake, 1941—Carle,
Introduction to Water in California
, p. 76.

L.A. principal products—Los Angeles City Directory (1942), p. 12.

The Owens Valley tourist pamphlet—Published by the Independence Chamber of Commerce.

93 . Coachella’s Share (1918 -1948)

“The Coachella Valley County Water District board spent years . . .”—Laflin,
Coachella Valley
, p. 173.

Tale of Highline Canal—Canal, pp. 4-5.

94 . Subdelineations: Waterscapes (1925-1950)

Epigraph: “Only in our own day . . .”—Hunt, p. 440.

Completion date of El Capitan Dam—Pryde, p. 111.

Major Wyman’s project report—California State Archives. Margaret C. Felts papers. Box 1. Folder: “1898-1965, ‘A History of the L.A. District,’ ” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
A History of the L.A. District
, p. 158.

Next paragraph: previous history of Los Angeles River, channel from San Fernando Valley, Ballona Creek—Ibid., p. 170.

Footnote: “. . . Bureau of Reclamation, ‘The river’s flow can be manipulated in the same fashion as the garden hose . . .’ ”—Regional Director Arleigh B. West, 1968; quoted in Fradkin, p. 245.

“Four-fifths of the local supplies on the Pacific slope . . .” etc.—California State Archives. Margaret C. Felts papers. Box 12: Folder: “1927 POLLUTION.” State of California, Department of Public Works, Division of Engineering and Irrigation. Paul Bailey, State Engineer,
Bulletin No. 12: Summary Report on the Water Resources of California and a Coordinated Plan for Their Development: A Report to the Legislature of 1927
(Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1927), pp. 43, 45.

Imperial County, etc., “where rights have been established by long usage,” and “These technical priorities, however . . .”—Heilbron et al., p. 330.

1944 Colorado River allotment to Mexico—Munguía, p. 7 (Francisco Raúl Venegas Cardoso).

The Colorado’s total discharge at Yuma, April 1926—
Imperial Valley Press
, Tuesday, May 4, 1926, p. 1.

“. . . each acre-foot gained by Mexico will lose us five Angelenos.”—After Nadeau, p. 239.

“Exterior view of Nevada wing of Hoover Dam power plant . . .”—California State Archives. Olson Photo Collection. Accession #94-06-27 (395-533). Box 3 of 7. Folder 94-06-27 (395-409): Industry—Dams. Photo #94- 06-27-0401. [Los Angeles] Department of Water & Power photo #16543.

Decline in aquatic creatures in the Gulf of Mexico—Leigh, p. 315.

“There is something back of the rumors that the Colorado is a changed stream . . .”—Ibid., pp. 292-93.

Prior presence of jaguars in the Colorado Delta—Munguía, p. 13 (Francisco Raúl Venegas Cardoso). Jaguars were seen by Spaniards in the sixteenth century.

“Often we seemed to be going silently down long, lavender aisles . . .”—Ainsworth, p. 16.

Number of wells in Mexicali Valley and annual aquifer draft—Munguía, p. 8 (Francisco Raúl Venegas Cardoso). Two studies from the 1990s are cited. One calculates a draft of 750,640 AFY; the other, 891,771.

Population of Tecate in 1930—Munguía, p. 158 (Ruiz).

Advertisement for “IMPERIAL VALLEY ‘TRIPLE A’ ARTESIAN WATER”—Imperial Valley Directory (1930), p. 19; see also ICHSPM, document cat. #A2000.31.11, pamphlet: “Hostess Reference Book, Signal Chapter, No. 276, Order of the Eastern Star, El Centro, California,” n.d.;
ca.
1936; p. 4.

Footnote: Discovery of Mexicali aquifer, 1923—Kerig, p. 266.

Riverside water events—Patterson, pp. 311, 314-15, 336.

“The imminent danger of infiltration of immense quantities of sea water . . .”—Leigh, p. 309.

95 . The Line Itself (1927 -1950)

Epigraph: “This drift toward a warlike fatality . . .”—Veblen, p. 566
(Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution).

Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes—Interviewed in the Casa Cultura in Mexicali, December 2006. Terrie Petree interpreted.

“Before they had a border there, his family farmed on the Mexican side without knowing it!”—Kay Brockman Bishop, interviewed on her ranch near Calexico, 2006.

“Down its yellow slopes drops a gangling fence . . .”—Griffing Bancroft, p. n8.

The story of Bing Wong—The Great Basin Foundation Center for Anthropological Research, vol. 1, pp. 311-13. Voyaging to China so as to celebrate his arranged marriage with a lady named Ting, he then resumed his life in Gold Mountain. Ting would come to him—after the customary decade-long wait. It was during this interval that he tried to make it as a restaurateur.

Hetzel’s classic photograph of snow on Signal Mountain—
Imperial County: The Big Picture
, p. 96.

The woman who was born near the beginning of the 1940s—Alice Woodside, interviewed in Sacramento, February 2004.

The tale of Juan Soldado—After Griffith, pp. 21-41.

96 . Different from Anything I’d Ever Known (1933 -1950)

Epigraph: “. . . they entered a world where the normal laws of the physical universe . . .”—Ballard,
The Crystal World
, p. 61.

Edith Karpen’s memories—Interview in Sacramento, January 2004. Her daughter Alice Woodside was present.

The Depression in Los Angeles—“Everything stopped in L.A. in ’31,” said Marjorie Sa’adah. “Nothing that wasn’t a government building got built” (interviewed September 2004.)—Next up: the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, when Mexicans and Mexican-Americans will get beaten, some almost to death, by sailors in Chavez Ravine.

Footnote on the Karpen-Donlevy marriage—Karpen obituary.

Footnote on the plank road—Undated newspaper clipping in CA DOT folder “Imperial.”

97. Farm Size (1910 -194 4)

“Epigraph: “Our economy is based on the exchange of goods and services through the medium of money . . .” —Mott and Roemer, p. 16.

Increasing proportions of American farms 500 acres and more—Ibid., p. 23.

Minimum gross farm income for viability in 1939, and number achieving this—Ibid., pp. 17-18.

Caveat about potential losses faced by large farms—USDA (1940),
Farm Size in California
, p. 12.

Excerpts from
For Whom the Bell Tolls—
Hemingway, pp. 207-8.

Decrease in California vacant lands 1900-1918—California Board of Agriculture, 1918, p. 4. The exact figures were 42,467,512 to 20,529,034 acres, respectively.

“We have always been able to look beyond the frontier . . .”—USDA Yearbook (1920), p. 5.

Footnote: Need for diversified family farms—USDA (1940),
Farm Size in California
, p. 8.

Social services and their financial burden on farmers—Hutchinson, p. 402.

Figures on harvest, corn crop, prices and “Altogether, in the spring of 1920 . . .” and values of American harvests 1918-20—Ibid., pp. 9, 10, 17.

Footnote: “The farmer buys a tractor . . .”—UC Berkeley. Bancroft Library. Paul S. Taylor papers. Carton 4. Folder 4:20: “Good-by to the Homestead Farm: The Machines Advance in the Corn Belt,” n.d., print copy (loose note ascribes it to
Harper’s
, May 1941).

“To get his shoestrings . . .”—Thoreau, p. 33.

“If you keep on growing chile peppers, onions, and tomatoes . . .”—Womack, pp. 240-41 (Zapata to Villa de Ayala farmers, 1915).

The advice of D. D. Gage—
California Cultivator
, vol. XXIV, no. 22 (June 2, 1905), p. 515 (“News of Country Life in the Golden West”).

Remarks of Norman Ward—California State Archives. Department of Food and Agriculture. Bureau of Marketing. Marketing-order files, Box 3. State of California, Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Markets hearing on proposed marketing order for winter lettuce. Wednesday, December 17, 1958, beginning ten o’clock, a.m., El Centro, California, pp. 143-44.

Paragraph on farm size in California—Information and citation from USDA (1940),
Farm Size in California
, pp. 2, 27, 17.

The
encomienda
and the colonist with 11.6 million acres—Meyer et al., pp. 124, 166.

Figures on farm ownership and tenancy, 1930—Imperial Valley Directory (1930), p. 12. Exact statistics: 4,769 farms, 2,909 of them operated by tenants, 1,860 of them operated by owners.

The tenant farmer on relief in the Imperial Valley, 1936—Dorothea Lange, p. 130 (“Ex-Tenant Farmer on Relief Grant in the Imperial Valley, California, March 1936”).

Imperial County farm figures, 1910—California Board of Agriculture (1918), pp. 20-21.

Leasing by Imperial Valley farmers of CRLC acres in Mexicali, 1913—Kerig, p. 197.

Citrus parcels of the Chandler Syndicate, 1914—
Los Angeles Times
, January 18, 1914 (“SOUTHERN PACIFIC SELLS BIG TRACT”).

The numbers I possess . . .
seem
to show that between 1928 and 1950, average acreage increased from a hundred and ten to a hundred and eighty-five acres per farm. . .—With the exception of a brief experience as an unskilled ranch hand in California, I have no farming knowledge. Neither am I an economist or a statistician. Tracking farm size over time required several assumptions and approximations. In 1928, Imperial County registered 525,797 irrigated acres and 4,759 farms. In 1950 those numbers were respectively 884,990 and 4,779. I divided the first set by the second. The results are crude because they ignore non-farm irrigated land. For more figures, see the statistical section at the end of this book.

“Between 1928 and 1950, average acreage increased from a hundred and ten to a hundred and eighty-five acres per farm—no more than average California acreage, and probably less.”—If we use the Census Bureau’s 1974 definition of a farm (Census Bureau [1974], p. 1-1), then in 1940 and 1950 the total number and average acreage of California farms were respectively 132,558 farms (note that by the 1940 definition California had about 150,000 farms) of 230 acres each, and 137,168 farms of 267 acres each. This latter figure is obviously substantially more than the 185-acre 1950 Imperial County figure, but I am forced to say “probably,” given the unstable definition of a farm.

Average acreage in Imperial County 1928-50—Calculated from Imperial County Agricultural Commission papers.

Footnote: The tale of Willis F. Beal—Farr, p. 439.

Table: “Average acreages of farms in Imperial County”—Information in California State Board of Equalization (1949), pp. 5, 19; California Blue Book (1950), p. 854; Imperial Valley Directory (1930), p. 12; California Board of Agriculture (1918), pp. 20-21; Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner’s papers (1920), p. 2.

Total acreage in the county approximately doubled—My researcher Paul Foster concludes that “with only a couple of exceptions, the overall acreage farmed” in Imperial “is stable, stabilizing in 1925 at 525,000 acres, growing to 613,000 acres over the next 15 years, then growing suddenly with a 1942 addition of 270,000 acres bringing the total to 883,000 acres of ‘farmable land.’ However, the numbers quoted are misleading due to double-cropping, multiple cuttings of hay (especially alfalfa), and the intensive use of land for nuts, apiary, and feeder cattle” (Paul Foster reports, “Imperial Color Commentary”).

“Sharp Reduction in acreage . . .”—UC Berkeley. Bancroft Library. Farm labor situation 1933-34. Carton #C-R 84. Folder: 6. Dean Hutchinson’s handwritten notes. Sheets 4, 32.

“About 40 percent of the total number of farm owners do not live in the valley . . .”—UC Berkeley. Bancroft Library. Paul S. Taylor papers. Carton 5. Folder 5:17: “National Reclamation in the Imperial Valley: Law vs. Politics, Final Draft, 1981,” p. 5, citing the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

Percentage of Imperial County workforce in agriculture, 1940 (45%)—California State Board of Equalization (1949), p. 15.

“Populated by a small handful of owners and operators . . .”—Munguía, p. 122 (Fernando A. Medina Robles).

“It did not take long for the Imperial Valley, eventually subsidized by the reclamation-built All American Canal . . .”—E Clampus Vitus website (narrative by Milford Wayne Donaldson).