The End of Eden: Agrarian Spaces and the Rise of the California Social Novel

By Terry Beers

The story of the Joad family’s journey from their ravaged farm in dustbowl Oklahoma to the storied paradise of California helped inform a nation about the brutality, poverty, and vicious competition among fellow immigrants desperate for work. But Steinbeck is only one successor to a rich and esteemed literary tradition in California. 

Drawing on history and cultural theory, The End of Eden traces the rise of the California social novel, its embrace of the agrarian dream, and its ambivalence about technology and the development it enables. It relies on various cultural conceptions of space, among them, the American Public Land Survey (the source of the “grid” allotments shaping homestead claims), Mexican-era diseños, and Native American traditions that defined a fluid relationship between human beings and the land.
 
This animation of four California social novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries demonstrates how conflicts over space and place signify cultural conflict. It is deeply informed by the author’s understanding of historical land issues. The works include Joaquin Miller’s Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Frank Norris’ The Octopus, and Mary Austin’s The Ford.

Miller’s Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs and Jackson’s Ramona examine the tragic but inevitable consequences for native people of making space—inhabited already by Native American and Hispanic populations—safe for Americans who pursue the agrarian dream without regard to its effects upon those who claim prior tenure on the land. Norris’ The Octopus and Austin’s The Ford examine the murkier story of trying to preserve or to reclaim the agrarian dream when confronted by the unchecked materialist interests of American capitalism.

A wide-reaching interdisciplinary approach to various cultural conceptions of space, The End of Eden provides a crucial understanding of the conflicts depicted in social novels that lament the ways in which land is allocated and developed, the ways in which American agrarianism—and its promise of local, sustainable land use—is undermined, and how it applies to contemporary California. In an era where California confronts, yet again, the complicated patterns of land use: fracking, water use and water rights, coastal regulation and management, and agribusiness, this groundbreaking work provides an ever-relevant context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943859573

Book preview

THE END OF EDEN

AGRARIAN SPACES AND THE RISE OF THE CALIFORNIA SOCIAL NOVEL

TERRY BEERS

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2018 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Cover design by Rebecca Lown

Jacket photographs: (top) Steel engraving by E. P. Brandard after painting by S. S. Gifford, courtesy of the Library of Congress; (background) © Shutterstock; (below) © Shutterstock

Excerpt from The Power of the River from The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, by Richard White. Copyright © 1995 by Richard White. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Beers, Terry, 1955– author.

Title: The end of eden : agrarian spaces and the rise of the California social novel / by Terry Beers.

Description: Reno : University of Nevada Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-943859-56-6 (cloth : alk. paper)| ISBN 978-1-943859-57-3 | (e-book) LCCN 2017036461 (print) | LCCN 2017043992 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—California—History and criticism. | Land use in literature. | Agriculture and state—California. | California—In literature.

Classification: LCC PS283.C2 B44 2017 (print) | LCC PS283.C2 (e-book) DDC 810.9/9794—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036461

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Melissa and the crew

Contents

Introduction: The Agrarian Myth, Technology, and the Social Novel

1. The Indian Republic: Joaquin Miller and Life Amongst the Modocs

2. San Jacinto Peak: Helen Hunt Jackson and Ramona

3. Family Values: Frank Norris and The Octopus

4. Getting In: Mary Austin and The Ford

Afterword: What’s at Stake

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

About the Author

Index

Introduction

The Agrarian Myth, Technology, and the Social Novel

Edwin told Amelie she must imagine boundaries where there were none and draw a square for themselves to enclose a precise section. But Amelie could see no hope of geometry imposed upon this great expanse of dried grasses. And it seemed impudent that upon maps this desolate land was already banded by a checkerboard strip twenty miles wide with alternate section squares divided among two players—even-numbered Government sections to stockmen, odd-numbered to the El Dorado Pacific Railroad Company. Amelie laughed even as Edwin spoke of men’s papers and plans. They could mean nothing in this vast valley forever set apart between barriers only the lost or foolhardy would cross.

—MAY MERRILL MILLER, First the Blade

Mount Diablo and the Story of California

It is midmorning in April at the summit of Mount Diablo, a prominent peak of the Diablo range just northeast of Danville, California. It’s breezy and cool—45 degrees—and the atmosphere holds a light haze, just heavy enough to obscure distant landmarks. Close in, surrounding hillsides are dotted with shrubs typical of chaparral country: manzanita, chamise, rabbit bush. Other areas appear carpeted with the vivid green of the springtime annual grasses that have invaded California, though here and there on the mountain native bunchgrasses still grow. On other parts of Mount Diablo’s slopes and ringing the summit stand wispy gray pines and interior live oaks. The flora here—native and otherwise—competes for attention with artificial features of the setting, including several communication towers, fascinating structures with drum-shaped reflectors and asymmetrical antenna arrays. At the peak, an observation deck and the Mount Diablo State Park Visitor Center invite park guests to learn more about the natural and cultural history here. Today the observation tower is closed, but the visitor center is crowded with high school students, chattering on cell phones even though they’re on a school-sponsored field trip. Across the parking lot, tired bicyclists who have pumped up the steep Summit Road lounge on benches, sipping water. But I find that it’s hard to concentrate for long on these immediate surroundings. Mount Diablo provides views of magnificent distant vistas; after all, that’s why people come here. As iconic western novelist Walter Van Tilburg Clark wrote of the commanding view from another peak, it led the mind out (394).

Though Mount Diablo is relatively puny at 3,849 feet above sea level, no nearby peaks can challenge the stunning view it affords; from its summit there is an almost unobstructed 360-degree view that, depending on atmospheric clarity, stretches well over 100 miles. To the west, I can see the cityscape of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, the orange towers just visible in the haze. To the right of the towers, I make out the familiar slope of Mount Tamalpais, another storied Bay Area peak much beloved by Beat Generation writers like Gary Snyder. Gazing to the north and a shade east, I overlook the city of Pittsburgh on the south side of the Sacramento River. And just across the water, scores of giant wind turbines, slowly rotating, turn energy from the wind rushing inland from the Golden Gate into electricity for a power-hungry state. Far to the east, on the other side of the 70-mile width of the Central Valley, I know the Sierra Nevada range breaks the horizon, but the distant snowcapped peaks are not visible today. Finally, to the south, beneath bunched cumulus clouds that from here appear nearly level with my eye, are green-clad hills tumbling into eastern Alameda County. These panoramas are incomparable, and despite the hazy air, the viewshed in any direction more than justifies a trip to the top to the summit.

Even without considering the views, modest Mount Diablo has had an outsize place in California’s story. A California State Historical Landmark plaque set near the summit gives a quick overview: Mount Diablo, sacred to Native Americans who lived and worshipped there for over 5,000 years, became a critical reference point for Spanish explorers in the 18th century, and American trappers and early California settlers in the 19th. In 1851 Colonel Leander Ransome established the crossing of the Mount Diablo base and meridian lines from which most of California and Nevada are surveyed (California State Department of Parks and Recreation and San Ramon Valley Historical Society). The plaque efficiently compresses thousands of years of history, eliding conflict in favor of California’s optimistic narrative of progress. There’s certainly a lot to recommend that appealing story, including the fact that much of it is true. But when we consider that progress in this context—economic, political, cultural, and otherwise—sometimes means progress for some people at the expense of others, the history outlined by the plaque feels incomplete, even misleading. And, of course, we should realize that however benign their intent, such markers are at least partly authorized by an arm of government that subtly affirms a particular representation of local and state history, one that begs for the uncritical acceptance of a subjective version of America’s story of progress. This critique is probably unfair; after all, the plaque is meant to commemorate historical significance, not fill in the details of counter-narratives to California’s deserved reputation of sunny optimism. And we probably shouldn’t expect more from such monuments. Besides, the counter-narratives are certainly available to anyone who cares to learn about them, since the history of the Golden State has been richly explored by talented and meticulous historians and journalists for generations.

Another source for appreciating the complexities of our history, for resisting the seductive simplicity of the narratives so publicly offered us, is California’s rich tradition of critique through the medium of the social novel. These works are focused on particular historical moments—often the very ones commemorated in historical monuments—and marked by explicit themes of social and cultural conflicts. The most powerful of these novels also signify—sometimes without intending to—how some aspects of these conflicts are perpetuated in subtle cultural assumptions about space and the ownership of place. Many of these conflicts are also rooted one way or another in the Jeffersonian agrarian ethos.

For many of us, the quintessential social novel is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the story of the Joad family’s journey from their ravaged farm in Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the storied agricultural paradise of California, a place almost magical in their imagination. What they actually discover—brutality, poverty, want of dignity, vicious competition among fellow immigrants desperate for work—is, ironically, set amid iconic images of bounty:

They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them, and then—suddenly they saw the great valley below them. Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, Jesus Christ! Look! he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses.

And Pa said, God Almighty! The distant cities, the little towns in the orchard land, and the morning sun, golden on the valley. A car honked behind them. Al pulled to the side of the road and parked.

I want ta look at her. The grain fields golden in the morning, and the willow lines, the eucalyptus trees in rows.

Pa sighed, I never knowed they was anything like her. The peach trees and the walnut groves, and the dark green patches of oranges. And red roofs among the trees, and barns—rich barns. Al got out and stretched his legs.

He called, Ma—come look. We’re there!(227)

As Steinbeck’s novel unfolds against the backdrop of the agrarian bounty of California’s farmland—much of it owned by farmers and corporations hostile to the desperate Dust Bowl fugitives eager for work—a perversion of the American agrarian ideal is revealed, one that seeks through the sheer scale of the modern agricultural industry to maximize profit through tight control of labor and landscapes. The human cost is vividly and memorably depicted, and The Grapes of Wrath helped inform a nation about the cruelties suffered by rural workers seeking their own version of the agrarian dream.¹ However, John Steinbeck, it’s important to remember, is just one heir to a rich and venerable literary tradition in California, one that includes such varied works as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, Frank Norris’s McTeague, Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, and one of the earliest of California novels and the first written in English by a Native American, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit.

Joaquín Murieta is an 1854 work by John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee man who arrived in California in 1850. Working as a journalist, he adopted the pen name Yellow Bird, an English version of his Cherokee name. His novel depicts the story of a legendary hero of Mexican descent who becomes a bandit after American squatters kill his brother and rape his mistress. Though Ridge’s bloody adventure tale rarely rises above melodrama, at its core it depicts the injustices perpetrated by Americans who looked upon Mexicans in California as no better than conquered subjects of the United States, having no rights that could stand before a haughtier and superior race (9). However, drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s concept of topophilia, John Lowe points out that part of the appeal of the book is the hero’s ability to range freely and quickly through the vast spaces of California, a mapping of beloved—and to Joaquín seemingly unbounded—space (106–7). The novel thus pits the peripatetic Joaquín not only against American usurpers but figuratively also against the laws and strictures that are signified by American conceptions of space that define place boundaries in California, including mining claims and the growing American settlements.

Foregrounding how such conflicts over space are signified in our rich tradition of the social novel is the purpose of this study. I am particularly drawn to books that are set somewhere from the time of the American conquest, the close of the Mexican War, into the early Progressive Era, a period when the state population grew rapidly and industrialized so efficiently that the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal—transplanted here but only tenuously realized—gave way to development, speculation, and urbanization, ingredients for a perfect cocktail of social unrest. A fitting focus for such an analysis is a selection of California social novels of the day, books created by men and women at least partly writing out of a concern for justice and using the popular genre of the novel as a vehicle for their arguments. These are books imbued with an overarching social message, books, says Frank Norris, belonging to a category defined as the novel with a purpose, the didactic novel that preaches by telling things and showing things (Novel with a ‘Purpose’ 27). These novels were written in an era when the state—indeed, the nation—was coming to grips with the dark side of Manifest Destiny and continental expansion and, a brief time later, with development and industrialization, twin processes drawing on technological progress. The best of these novels are deeply informed by their authors’ understanding of historical land issues, sometimes as played out among antagonists separated by racial, ethnic, or class differences. This study will analyze four such novels: Joaquin Miller’s Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History (1873), Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), and Mary Austin’s The Ford (1917).

I believe these four books are particularly important because of how faithfully they present the details of their California settings; features of the landscape figure prominently in their fictional representations of particular moments in California’s history. In other words, they use space and place as vehicles for the evocation of an agrarian ideal, the ideological center of these social novels. Miller’s Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History and Jackson’s Ramona examine the tragic but inevitable consequences for native people of making space—inhabited already by Indian and Hispanic populations—safe for Americans who pursue the agrarian dream without regard to its effects upon those who claim prior tenure on the land; Norris’s The Octopus and Austin’s The Ford examine the murkier story of trying to preserve or reclaim the agrarian dream when confronted by the unchecked materialist interests of American capitalism.

As we have seen, there are other candidates that might have been chosen for study. One obvious example is Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, arguably a better-known book than some of those under consideration here and the inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film, There Will Be Blood. But Sinclair’s book, to my mind at least, rarely offers the finely wrought description of landscape—agrarian or otherwise—that the other books do. Consider this passage from the opening chapter, The Ride, in which the narrator describes a car trip through the California desert, his father at the wheel: A barrier of mountains lay across the road. Far off, they had been blue, with a canopy of fog on top; they lay in tumbled masses, one summit behind another, and more summits peeking over, fainter in color, and mysterious. You knew you had to go up there, and it was interesting to guess where a road might break in. As you came nearer, the great masses changed color—green, or grey, or tawny yellow (4). There’s certainly nothing wrong with a description like this, which sets the stage for how Oil! advances its argument against a background of sometimes bleak landscapes and urban materialism, illustrating the despoilment of the land caused by the pursuit of wealth. But these kinds of examples—whatever their merits as argument—do not feel nearly so powerful as concrete, accurate detail set forth in novels that in their sympathy for American agrarian ideology seize on particular historical moments—the Modoc War, the ejection of mission Indians from Temecula, the Mussel Slough tragedy, the theft of water from the Owens Valley—to painstakingly describe the effects that human beings, in their conflicts over space and in their forsaking of an agrarian dream, bring to the landscape. The result, as I have come to appreciate, is that these four books show us not only how we have mistreated California’s landscape but argue more pointedly than many other California social novels how diminished is our spiritual, even magical connection to the natural world, a connection that an agrarian ethos once helped us to cherish.

As in so many other things, it seems California led the nation in this regard. Theodore Roosevelt put it best after reading Norris’s muckraking epic The Octopus: What I am inclined to think is that conditions were worse in California than elsewhere (qtd. in Wister 83). I now turn to some useful history and cultural theory to provide the necessary context for discussing the rise of the California social novel, its embrace of the agrarian myth, and its ambivalence about technology and the development it enables.

California’s Colonial Legacy

Before the 1848 conclusion of the Mexican War, life in California might have reasonably been described as pastoral. Large ranchos devoted to sheep and cattle spread here and there across the landscape. Writing specifically of Southern California, historian Robert Glass Cleland has observed: At the time of the American conquest, these great landholdings remained the controlling factor in much of the state’s settlement and agricultural development for nearly half a century, and their gradual conversion into cities, towns, and farming communities served in large measure to bring into being the Southern California we know today. The ranchos thus constituted one of the few enduring legacies that California inherited from Mexico and Spain (4).

A few small settlements clung to coastal locations, and a handful of missions—with their own crops and livestock—helped link these settlements together via routes that touched the coast and some inland valleys. In certain regions, Indian people, some geographically distant from the encroachment of Spanish and Mexican establishments, still followed traditional hunting and gathering traditions, inhabiting lands that to European eyes might have signaled wilderness but to the native population signified home. But once American authority was established, the pastoral mode would increasingly have to accommodate an import with a vaguely deist ideology and a clearly materialist agenda. This was the American version of the agrarian myth, and the newly open land in California offered fresh opportunities to fulfill it. But California was already well peopled, and the inhabitants of the new territory had their own pastoral customs.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the area we call California was already culturally diverse, astonishingly so. Scholars estimate that at the time of European contact, eighty to one hundred native languages were spoken in California, approximately 20 percent of all the languages articulated in North America, write Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis Parrish.² Most of the major stocks of North American languages are represented. As a consequence, anthropologists have defined and mapped a complex smorgasbord of ethnolinguistic groupings across the state (6–7). Moreover, these groupings tended to be relatively modest in size: What emerges in the study of California Indians is a crowded landscape packed with many modest-sized, semi-autonomous polities, each of which supported its own organization of elites, retainers, religious specialists, craft experts, and commoners. None of this fits neatly into the classic anthropological concepts of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states that have been employed to define other Indian groups across the Americas (7).

Polities could, however, be associated with regional alliances and with exchange systems. Lightfoot and Parrish write that most California Indian communities were located in territories large enough to provide enough habitat diversity to supply necessary resources but these could expand or decline according to population changes, resource fluctuations, and group politics (35). But although there was considerable diversity among California native peoples—distinctive groups arrived in California by land and sea over centuries (49)—very few communities practiced agriculture. With the exception of some Colorado River communities, the native people of California were hunter-gatherers who employed fire to help maintain the health of their environment, using controlled burning to promote new growth and maintain an environment attractive to game species.³

Native people were numerous, but so were the resources that sustained them. Various California habitats offered different combinations of resources that were managed locally. Aside from burning, California Indians may have also used such techniques as pruning, weeding, and irrigating (Lightfoot and Parrish 126). Whatever cultivation techniques they used, and however they managed their environment, since they tended not to become dependent on domesticated crops (128), they were free to move villages as they needed. Decisions about moving were based on several factors, including rotational cycles governing the burning of resource patches and the abundance or scarcity of resources in a particular area. According to Lightfoot and Parrish, Even in cases where villages and hamlets remained tethered to one place throughout the annual cycle, logistical movements of people from villages to outlying areas were frequently undertaken to harvest and process food and other resources en masse (134). The complexity of these movements—and the close monitoring of resources across space—meant that in most cases territorial boundaries were tenuous:

It may be fruitful in the future to consider late prehistoric and early historic California not so much as a series of distinctive inflexible, and rigidly bounded tribal nations, but rather as a more open network of individuals, families, and local groups intertwined across the landscape through various social, kin, political, and religious relationships. Some outlying areas may have been claimed and used by several local groups. Management of resource patches on a one- to 10-year or longer interval may have been jointly shared and the areas used by a larger network of people, while patches of productive oak groves and rich fishing spots may have been owned and regulated by individuals and families. (136)

For early California peoples, then, ownership varied, reflecting, according to Lightfoot and Parrish, the numerous ways, both family-based and communal, that Native Californians procured their resources (213).

The emphasis on space and movement rather than on place and settlement inevitably brought California Indians into conflict with outsiders, not just because these colonizers were interested in claiming territories already richly inhabited but because vastly different ideas about space and place came into play. Although they lived primarily as hunter-gatherers, California Indians had distinct ideas about space and place, as evidenced by their occasional ownership of resources and their seasonal treks gathering resources along well-known paths. But native boundaries and ownership rights were not well understood by outsiders, who sometimes disparaged their way of life. Indeed journalist and novelist John Rollin Ridge, son and grandson of Cherokee chiefs, showed California Indians (he uses the disparaging term Diggers) little respect, even as he lamented their treatment by whites. The Diggers of California, he writes in 1857, "when first discovered by the whites, were so low in the scale of being, that it puzzled the observer to conceive of a condition more nearly illustrating the absolute primitive state of mankind" (qtd. in Parins 132). And for westering white Americans there was an additional issue: Providence intended land to be used to the fullest extent possible, and doing so meant establishing permanent stakes like a family farm, one of the most iconic forms of American stakeholding.

This lack of understanding—some of it certainly willful—contributed to the conflicts between California native people and the outsiders who usurped their land. Along the southern and central coasts, these conflicts would initially be between native people and the Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries; in the north, they would primarily be between native people and American settlers and gold seekers. These conflicts were not just about where people lived but about how they lived and how they used the land, the space and places that California Indians had known for centuries.

When Spanish missionaries and soldiers began to colonize Alta California, they did so for a variety of reasons, including the power politics of imperial ambition among the European powers and the sincere desire of many Catholic missionaries to bring the blessings of the Catholic Church to native people. In this last reason lurks another conflict over cultural notions of space and place: the sacred. For Indian people, California was the site of many sacred places, some of them reminders about the origins of human beings and the creation of the world. To California Indians, the sacred nature of these places was immanent within them. Writing about Indian sacred sites held or controlled by the federal government, Vine Deloria Jr. observes, Native Americans have discerned the various sacred sites which have power; that is to say, manifest the energy and concern of the earth. Sometimes several tribes will have discovered the sacredness of a site and become aware of the proper ceremonies that must be performed there (26). He contrasts this notion of a sacred place with that of Western religions, whose sacred places generally mark the location where historical religious events took place. These religions also have the practice of consecrating a location and establishing a shrine where practitioners can worship (26).

In California, Mount Diablo was a prominent site of Indian ceremonial life and, as we have seen, this fact is commemorated by the historical marker at its summit. Peter Nabokov, writing about the sacred places of American Indians, provides a more robust description of its role in sacred traditions:

For Indian communities between Mount Lassen, about 180 miles to the north, and Monterey, about the same distance down the coast, the mountain figured in genesis narratives. In the misty era before human existence, say the Bay Miwok, the land lay under water. Only Coyote was left alive, viewing the world from the promontory initially named by the Spanish Cerro de los Bolbones, after a local Miwok subgroup they knew as the Volvons. On the mountain’s northern flank, said the Plains Miwok, Condor man once lived, roosting on a rock that was also his wife. After she bore their son, Prairie Falcon man, the boy and his grandfather, Coyote man, created the first people and gave them everything everywhere so they can live. (267)

At Mount Diablo, according to Nabokov, the Wintu talked to their spirits, the Pomo held ceremonies and the Miwok trekked in for multi-tribal, weeklong festivals that were held every fall (268).

For European outsiders, the sacred importance of a place like Mount Diablo would have been difficult to appreciate, since their own sacred sites were half a world away and they had the comfort of rituals whereby they could consecrate holy ground in the New World without regard to the characteristics of the place itself. The difference between Indian and European (and later American) attitudes was that of accepting and managing a landscape and its natural material resources versus remaking it, changing its meaning either through religious ritual or through actual material manipulation. In California, centuries of hunting