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Chapter 8 THREE ERAS OF CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE: WHEAT, SPECIALTY CROPS, COTTON

       David Vaught

      There have been many “Wests” in American history. Colonists considered the Appalachians the West; for Jeffersonians, it was the Ohio Valley; for Jacksonians, the Mississippi Valley. The land beyond the Mississippi Valley—the Great Plains—serves as the subject of another chapter in this volume by Thomas Isern (Chapter 6). Heading further westward over the Rockies, past the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Humboldt Sink, we come to the region that remains, the Pacific slope, especially California, where three great eras—wheat, specialty crops, and cotton—have defined much of the state’s agricultural history.

      For much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Americans held two competing conceptions of the West. According to the Jeffersonian intellectual tradition, each farm family settling in America’s new heartland was to be an island unto itself—producing for its own needs on a modest piece of land and practicing bucolic virtues, free of the corrupting influences of the marketplace and the rude intrusions of industrialization. The second idea, normally associated with Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, envisioned an aggressive, expanding commercialized agriculture, in which farmers produced not only for themselves, but for the nation and indeed the world.

      For farmers themselves, however, the two conceptions have not necessarily been mutually exclusive. Early in the nineteenth century, many who streamed across the Appalachians to new settlements saw themselves as chosen people carving out an agrarian paradise in the wilderness—as did many others much later in the century in new orchards and vineyards in California. Despite what they may have thought, both groups of farmers very quickly found themselves locked into the advancing market economy. In essence, they had one foot in the Jeffersonian past and the other in Hamilton’s modern economic order, some leaning more one way than the other. In California, where settlement coincided with America’s industrial revolution, farmers retained their predecessors’ agrarian values even as they entered an economic world increasingly dominated by railroads, giant corporations, and, eventually, the government. They were producing for national, even international, markets but still often thinking like family farmers (Rothstein 1969; Vaught 2007).

Farming of any sort—Jeffersonian and/or Hamiltonian—proved difficult in frontier California. Despite an abundance of arable soil, huge masses of land quickly fell into the grasp of powerful landlords who monopolized the countryside at the expense of aspiring settlers. This troublesome issue had its origins in California’s Hispanic past. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, just 813 rancho grantees gained possession of roughly 15 million acres that included much of the prime agricultural lands near the coast and along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. The rancheros’ individual holdings were huge. Mexican laws authorized grants of up to eleven square leagues (about 50,000 acres), much larger, needless to say, than the 160-acre homesteads promoted by the United States elsewhere in the West. The American settlers who poured into California following US annexation and the discovery of gold in 1848 greatly resented the presence of these baronial estates. Inflaming their resentment all the more were vague boundary descriptions and imprecise diseños (land-grant maps) that frequently made it impossible to distinguish rancho properties from the public domain. As a result, continuous disputes erupted between rancheros and encroaching settlers who claimed that they were not illegal trespassers but squatters exercising their rights, under the 1841 Prescription Act, to occupy unsurveyed federal land (Gates 1967, 1991; Fritz 1991; Pisani 1996).

      As rancheros and squatters disputed claims throughout much of California, the underlying problem of land monopoly only grew worse. Largely because of poor supervision and corrupt administration, federal and state land disposals in California created more empires than homesteads. Nowhere was this more apparent than with the vast landholdings carved out of the public domain by San Francisco speculator William S. Chapman, who amassed 350,000 acres by 1871, and the cattlemen Henry Miller and Charles Lux, whose acquisitions eventually enclosed more than one million acres. Most controversial of all were the immense holdings of the Southern Pacific Company, whose sprawling domain covered well over 11 million acres by 1880 (Bloom 1983; Gates 1991; Pisani 1996; Igler 2001; Orsi 2005; Shelton 2013).

      Then, too, was the related and equally complex matter of water monopoly. Despite California’s semiarid Mediterranean climate, the first state legislature adopted the riparian doctrine of water use, an old principle rooted in Anglo-American common law. Landowners with property bordering a river or lake, the doctrine stated, had the sole right to divert the water. Riparian rights, in fact, were seen as part of the title to the land. In the east and other developed regions, it was well-known that the riparian doctrine restricted irrigation

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