Imperial (39 page)

Díaz’s method of crumbling up that impediment to Progress, indigenous communal property, approximated Northside’s not only in its procedure but even in its timing. In 1877, the first year of Díaz’s term, the United States set into motion the Dawes Act, which alienated Indian reservation land into individual parcels which could be, and by some unforeseen coincidence did get, sold away from their already impoverished owners. In 1915, our Marines would impose the same improvement upon the benighted communitarians of Dominica.

In Díaz’s Mexico, land concentration continued. Luis Terrazas’s ten million acres in Chihuahua, the million-acre Hearst ranch, these grew increasingly emblematic. Tied as it was to increased property values in the vicinity of the railroads, the expropriation of communal land grew especially marked during the construction of main railroad lines in the 1880s and then again when the secondary lines were built during the first decade of the twentieth century.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Wasserman remarks:
Like so many other Latin American strongmen who preceded and succeeded him, Díaz failed in the end because his genius was only his own.
And another historian completes the point:
By 1910, most rural folk in Mexico . . . no longer possessed enough property to support their families.
That was when the Mexican Revolution began.

Like its French counterpart, it commenced among the elite, then spread unpredictably downward.

Chapter 23

THE LINE ITSELF (1844-1911)

What are the colors of the map without a dream?

—Alberto Blanco, 1998

H
ow did Northside and Southside distinguish each other in those days? After all, it took the Boundary Commission quite a spell even to set up markers, many of which remain today, if graffiti’d and even caged. At the close of the Mexican War, the line evidently resembled the metagalactic center in James Blish’s mid-twentieth-century science-fiction tetralogy
Cities in Flight,
being the
neutral zone,
our side of which hopefully
coincides with
its analogue
in the anti-matter universe,
which is of course Mexico. As usual in Imperial, considerable delineation and subdelineation would be required,
for the metagalactic center was as featureless as the rest of intergalactic space, and only extreme care and the most complex instrumentation would tell the voyagers when they had arrived.
Hence the Boundary Commission.

But a certain American who trekked through much of the Baja four years before Mexican California fell must have trusted the complex instrumentation of his own sensibilities; for he insisted without the least equivocation that the Californians were less “servile” than their counterparts in what would soon be Southside.
The Californian boasts of California; he claims no kindred with Mexico. This strong disgust . . . is principally attributable to the fact that Mexico has been in the habit of sending to this province as soldiers of the Republic, the outcasts and criminals of other departments.

As for the Mexican trekkers, as the nineteeenth century wound down, their vanguard continued to cross the not-quite-delineated blankness into Northside, going where the money was.

Chapter 24

LOS ANGELES (1850)

But I hope as soon as I set forth to reach lands more abundant in pasturage than those traversed up to this point . . .

—de Anza to Bucareli, 1774

T
here were grand balls in Mexican Los Angeles; by definition there must be grander ones in American Los Angeles! On 26 October 1854, two years after the erection of the city’s first brick house and two years before the first legal hanging, Juan Diego Valdez gets shot dead by John Chapman at a ball. My favorite Ranger remembers when
the streets were thronged throughout the entire day with splendidly mounted and richly dressed
caballeros,
most of whom wore suits of clothes that cost all the way from $500 to $1,000, with saddles and horse-trappings that cost even more . . .
One more detail:
All, however, had slung to their rear the never-failing pair of
Colt’s,
generally with the accompaniment of the Bowie knife,
for spilled blood’s as common as red
vicuña
hats used to be in Los Angeles!

In June 1852, an unknown Mexican prisoner winds up
shot by Mr. Lull while trying to escape.
Meanwhile, and this is all on the same page of these vital records, an unknown Indian is found murdered on Lalu Street, an unknown Indian dies on the street of head injuries, an unknown Indian is
found killed,
and for fairness I’d better mention an unknown
butcher shot by Mexicans,
balanced out by the unknown
Mexican shot by Dr. Osburn.
Another dead Indian in the street, another
Sonoran youth killed
and
two Americans found murdered, robbed,
reported the day after
two Mexicans found hung—
thus the 1850s in Los Angeles County, which is
then the greatest cow county in the state.
Our Ranger offers us more than one recollection of
Nigger Alley, which was the most perfect and full grown pandemonium that this writer, who had seen the
elephant
before . . . , has ever beheld . . . Every few minutes a rush would be made, and maybe a pistol shot would be heard . . . You would learn that it was only a knife fight between two Mexicans, or a gambler had caught somebody cheating and had perforated him with a bullet.

On 4 August 1851, the Los Angeles County Recorder took note of the first marriage, in Spanish. He then closed the marriage register until October 1852. Meanwhile, people fell in love, made love and even married without him. What was the result? An adventurer from the British Isles who came to the Mexican War remembers California as a mixture of
the portly Californian, under his ample-brimmed s
ombrero
and gay
serapa,
the dark-skinned and half-clad Indian, and the Yankee, in his close European costume.
However, that mixture was not happy.
I have frequently seen a quiet and respectable party of natives,
meaning Mexican Californians
, intruded upon by drunken soldiers or sailors . . . It is not to be wondered at, that a people so isolated and so naturally courteous should have regarded the Americans and English somewhat in the light of savages.
The Americans and English certainly returned the favor.

In 1859 this pueblo boasted twenty thousand souls,
with brick sidewalks, and blocks of stone or brick houses.
Ever fewer of the inhabitants were Indians.
This general principle has been demonstrated repeatedly with the lower organisms in their parasite-host or predator-prey relationships . . . Since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of
the Indian’s
troublesome presence was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years.

(As for the Chinese, in 1850 only two were listed in the Los Angeles census. Their population would soon increase significantly.)

And the orchestra strikes up another number! Los Angeles calls out the next fandango. On 7 August 1852, a three-year-old child named María Antonio Albitre was
murdered while parents at dance; Dolores Higuera (male) suspected.
In 1855, Colonel W. Martin Keene was sent to his Maker by a grizzly bear at Fort Tejon. On 23 January 1857, Carlos K. Baker got killed in pursuit of outlaws of the Pancho Daniel band. Sheriff Santiago R. Barton, also known as James, Guillermo H. Little and another man likewise died on this excursion. Sheriff Barton’s epitaph reads:
Murdered in line of duty
. (Pancho Daniel was duly lynched on 30 November 1858.) On 23 July 1858, Seth Lunt expired from wounds sustained in an Indian attack upon San Bernardino. Nicho Alepas and Dionisio (Lionisio) Alipaz both got shot by Governor Scholes on 9 January 1859. On 16 October 1859, a man whose last name was Alexis met the following fate:
Shot by Sonoran Manuel Ruiz.
In 1858, Hilliard P. Dorsey got shot by his father-in-law, although then again it might have been suicide. In 1859, Jean Debreuil was accidentally shot in front of a restaurant.

Knife fights, shootouts after arguments, executions, lynchings, murders by the Pancho Daniel band, killings with a hatchet, shootings during a ball, this was Los Angeles.
⁶²
I can’t help believing in people.

Chapter 25

LOST MINES (1849-2005)

But a few miles from us on the east, the land falls off five thousand feet into the Colorado Desert, a sea of fiery sand broiling beneath an almost eternal sun . . . The desert is, of course, uninhabitable . . .

—The City and County of San Diego, 1888

N
ow that California’s ours, what a convenient chance that James Marshall finds gold the very next year! I can’t help believing in people.

Imperial is beehives on the edge of a lavender field, and the dark-blue wedge of the Salton Sea observed from the mouth of Painted Canyon. That is Imperial to me. But in 1849, a hundred thousand gold seekers cross the Imperial Valley, or was it ten thousand? What do they see? Desert milkweed, crucifixion thorn, sage, smoke trees, California fan-palms, desert century palms—if they’re lucky. Mostly, Imperial lies ankle-deep in alkali. One of them, a man named Oliver Wozencraft, sees that
“ Moisture Means Millions.”
His prayers to the Ministry of Capital will go unanswered; he will die disappointed.

What is Imperial to you? What could Imperial ever be, but the ghastliest, most useless stretch of the Colorado Desert, which runs a hundred and fifty miles long by fifty miles wide? The Salton Trough now bears the scratch of an international line, but so what? Our snapshot of California at midcentury calls what we currently refer to as Imperial County
a mere thoroughfare for the adventurers, gold miners, and settlers coming to California . . . There were no ranchos and no towns.
South of the line, Mexicali remains a plain of clay.

Now it’s already 1855! By telegraph from New Orleans, we learn that in that distant place called California,
business of every description is reported as being extremely dull.
But mining and crops are both anticipating better fortune, thanks to all the rain.

In 1864, news comes of
many miners going to work the mines at La Paz on Colorado River.
The hundred-and-seventy-five-mile stretch of San Diego County, spiced up with a little greasewood, will now serve up another chapter in the eternal tale of disappointment. Mexican miners dig for their dreams in American Imperial. They place small crosses throughout their mines, each subdivision of which is named after a saint. On one saint’s day, they erect a large cross on a hill overlooking their mine and bedeck it with flowers. Not long afterward, special Yankee taxes, accompanied as needed by guns, run them out. The way is now clear for Peg-Leg Smith to search vainly all the rest of his life for that hilltop in Imperial’s Cargo Muchacho Mountains where he’d once seen black-encrusted gold nuggets. In due course, “an old Yuma squaw” named Acoyhopuck will inform history that there were two Peg-Legs, one with a wooden left leg, the other with a wooden right leg; one in the Cargo Muchachos in 1830, the other in the Anza-Borrego Badlands in 1871. And so Peg-Leg’s memory grows as blurred and ultimately as lost as his mines.

Imperial’s Tumco Mine receives unimportant mention in 1870.—Do you remember what I saw there? A rusty cyanide vat.—In 1873 we read that the gold quartz mines seventy miles north of the city of San Diego (hence around the present day metropolis of Temecula, fifty miles due west of the northwest corner of the Salton Sea) are
the richest in the State of California.
Where are those mines now? Well, they were never quite within the entity called Imperial; why permit this history of successes and improvements to be marred by their demerits?

On 6 May 1886, E. W. and Harriet E. Alexander are the grantors, and the Ogilby Gold Mining Co. is the grantee. On 13 July 1894, the same couple are the grantors, and the California Picacho Gold Mines Co. is the grantee. Perhaps they had finally learned that Imperial would not be fated to provide overmuch nourishment from her rock-flesh, nor from her desert’s blood-scabbed rock-nipples such as Pilot Knob. After that last sale they might have sold out and moved on. Or had they struck it rich in Picacho? The California Picacho Gold Mines Co. must have seen something there, to buy their claim.

Two hundred thousand ounces and more! Imperial’s mines yielded that much, thanks to a hundred thousand gallons per day of Colorado River water, and oodles of cyanide, whose tailings remain at Tumco.—Then what?—Why, improvement, reclamation, Progress!

I remember Picacho, oh, yes. I remember Ogilby, where in the vandalized cemetery I found a fingernail-sized piece of human bone.

I remember Tumco on a hot July day, the mountains like bloody scabs upon the desert’s skin, bleached ocotillos in the white gravel, a grand palo verde tree and then the black metal of the leaching vats on a bluff in the midst of the old Colorado floodplain. Thus the heartland of Arid America. I remember the American Girl mine: hot sand and steel, a little dead lizard in the sand. Although she must still be operating as late as 1914 (for the United Mines Company will telegraph the Governor on her behalf, asking for fifty soldiers to protect her from
excited Mexicans
), how much longer can she hope to persevere in her dreams of Imperial gold in the bright heat four miles north of Ogilby? Poor American girl! Her prospects are as pale as the ocotillos around Tumco.