The Twin Valleys

It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.

To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land. Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.

One is reduced to the figures of the real estate “booster” for terms of proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left, is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias, nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows; from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River. On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call “evening snow” unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with the thin belts of planted orchard.

Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin. Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange, sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the “tule fogs.” Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.

Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself. He bought—it is more exact to say he acquired—vast acreage of Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the ‘sixties these appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil. The wool in the hand was always worth the next season’s feed to the sheep-herder.

Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the message aright.

After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and the shrivelled acres, the message came clear—not the land, but the water. So they shut up the rivers in the cañons and the day of the orchardist began.

Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide, willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity. The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them, to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world’s largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in the world—and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the valley’s immensity!