Riverman, Desertman

By Camiel Dekens

Blythe, California, is located along the Colorado River in the Palo Verde Valley, a part of the great Sonoran Desert. The town is, in modern times, 100 miles from nowhere, two hours of high-speed freeway travel to anywhere. Riverman Desertman describes the settlement and early work in the Valley, when getting there was a two-day trip north from the stage stop at Glamis, or south from Blythe Junction (now the town of Rice). There was no established road to the west, across nearly 100 miles of open desert to the Coachella Valley. Travelers to the east had to be ferried across the river, where they faced a trek of at least 60 miles to Wickenburg. All of this took place, in 1907, at the pace of a mule team or a fast horse.
Blythe pioneer Camiel Dekens recollections graphically describe the difficulties early settlers faced in their efforts to transform a river-bottom valley to a productive farming community. At the same time, he paints vivid portraits of some of the individuals who shared his time and space, many of whom gave their names to streets and roads that crisscross the Palo Verde Valley.
According to Riverside County Historical Commission Chairman Bill Jennings, in his Forward to the 1990 Edition:
Riverman, Desertman fills a vital niche in the short shelf of Riverside County history books.
In the late 1950's, a veteran newspaper writer, Tom Patter-son, met Camiel Dekens and their chemistry was responsible for creating a rich memoir that chronicles an important time in the desert's long history. Because it concerns a relatively obscure area and represents one man's impact, it might otherwise have been ignored in the sparse recorded history of the Colorado (Western Sonoran) Desert. Tom had no tape recorder, being a newsman of the old school. Instead, he took tons of handwritten notes and went over the data carefully with his source. As a result, Riverman, Desertman is a concise, competent accurate chapter in the rich history of Riverside County.

Co-author Tom Patterson, in his Introduction, says:
This book is primarily the story of Palo Verde Valley in its days of hard struggle, early hope and steady growth from 1907 until 1922. During most of that time Camiel Dekens struggled along with it. Interestingly, the period of his own personal difficulties came when despondency began to overcome the Valley and his sense of mission returned when the Valley could again see its way ahead.
Dekens, who applied himself to a raw place and saw it become the home of commerce and family life felt himself distinctly a part of Palo Verde Valley.

Dekens recollections of characteristics of the Palo Verde Valley in the early years of the twentieth century-- its remote location, desert surroundings and the impact of a mighty and untamed river make this work a unique contribution to the history of a unique and remote area.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465397164

Camiel Dekens

Camiel Dekens was a pioneer in the Palo Verde Valley, living there from 1907 until his death in 1963. He did much of the physical work laying out the town of Blythe, and in constructing many of the original canals and deliveries of what is now the Palo Verde Irrigation District. He was also one of the many who battled the Colorado River when it was still a violent and unruly neighbor—full of floating debris and enormous whirlpools and subject to floods on almost an annual basis.

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Copyright © 2011 by The Press–Enterprise Company.

Cover design by Ron Baker

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4653-9715-7

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-9716-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

First Printing, 1962

Second Printing; 1963

Second Edition, 1980

Third Printing; 1990

Third Edition, 2012

The Historical Commission Press, operated by the Riverside County Historical Commission with the support of. the County Board of Supervisors, is located at the History Division of the Riverside County Parks Department, P.O. Box 3507, Rubidoux, CA 92519.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

FORWARD TO THE 1990 EDITION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

Co-Author’s Note

Postscript,

Author to Co-Author

FORWARD TO THE 1990 EDITION

Riverman, Desertman fills a vital niche in the short shelf of Riverside County history books. It also is a pioneer in a relatively new field of research, the so-called Oral History, or the as told to genre. Camiel Dekens found his perfect Will Fowler in Tom Patterson. The chemistry was real, the results very important to the seldom-told and less-recalled history of this interesting county, and the County Historical Commission is honored, humbled and gratified to have the chance to make it available once again.

As a dabbler in both the railroad and aboriginal history of our region, the writer finds the little book, not so little on second thought, an excellent reference as well as just good reading, and we, the Commissioners, are grateful both to the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the members of the Palo Verde Valley Historical Society for their support in making this new printing possible. It is not a new edition; there are no substantive changes in or additions to the previous (1980) printing edition.

In the late 1950’s, a veteran newspaper writer, Tom Patterson, met Camiel Dekens and their chemistry was responsible for creating a rich memoir that chronicles an important time in the desert’s long history. Because it concerns a relatively obscure area and represents one man’s impact, it might otherwise have been ignored in the sparse recorded history of the Colorado (Western Sonoran) Desert. Tom had no tape recorder, being a newsman of the old school. Instead, he took tons of handwritten notes and went over the data carefully with his source. As a result, Riverman, Desertman is a concise, competent accurate chapter in the rich history of Riverside County.

The Riverside County Historical Commission is pleased to bring this biography back into print, as part of a continuing effort to renew previously printed volumes as well as search out new ones. This little book first appeared as series in editions of the old Riverside Daily Enterprise and we are indebted to the Press-Enterprise Company for permission to reprint it, and we offer thanks to Tom Patterson as well.

Bill Jennings, Chairman,

Riverside County Historical Commission

Diana L. Seider, History Division Director

INTRODUCTION

The Great Expectations of Oliver P. Calloway

By Tom Patterson

The story of the establishment of irrigated agriculture in Palo Verde Valley has been told in technical treatises and in partial ways, but never as the epic that it is.

Today the Valley is one of the most productive areas in the world, although there were times when that outcome seemed remote. The river that deposited the soil has finally been compelled to release its water passively without the rampages and difficult low stages that were common before 1935.

Camiel Dekens was there from 1907, almost from the beginning of the irrigation and colonization project. He had a modest but effective part. Frequently he did the work of a gang and exercised the ingenuity of a master mechanic, but he never sought to be a leader of men.

Here he tells the story of struggles not only to control and use water but to bridge the gap between the Valley and the distant world. His is the story of fighting the river, of rafting, of mule freighting, of truck and tractor freighting and even of frontier style roistering. Blythe and everything within seventy-five miles of it were frontier when Dekens arrived there.

PALO VERDE VALLEY in 1907 was competing for settlers with the much more celebrated Imperial and Coachella Valleys. But for the death of two ambitious and resourceful men, Palo Verde might have been plowed, planted, watered and tamed before them. Or, it might not have been, for the difficulties were great.

Nevertheless, in all the subsequent litigation over division of the flow of the Colorado among thirsty states and agricultural projects, we have come to recognize how important it was that Thomas H. Blythe, resident of California, filed on 190,000 miner’s inches of the Colorado’s flow as long ago as July 17, 1877, and increased his claim to 385,000 inches in subsequent filings of December 15, 1878, and February 15, 1883.

THE MAN who first recognized the potentialities of the Palo Verde Valley was Oliver P. Calloway. Unlike the celebrated Dr. Oliver Wozencraft who spent so many years advocating to deaf ears the reclamation of Imperial Valley, Calloway put matters into motion.

He was a civil engineer who had done some work in developing San Diego harbor and had surveyed a direct road from San Diego to Fort Yuma. Then he joined the U.S. Surveyor General’s force as a contract surveyor, to map township, range and section lines of lands adjoining the Colorado River. In that work he found Palo Verde Valley.

The Colorado itself was well known, for since 1852 steamboats plied it from Port Isabel on the Gulf to a few miles beyond the Virgin River, a location presently under Lake Mead. Hardyville, near the present Davis Dam, was the upper limit for most trips.

BUT STEAMBOAT TRAFFIC was primarily a service to the mines within economical wagon distance of river landings. Ehrenberg served as port for the thriving mining area surrounding Prescott and Wickenburg.

The steamboat days on the Colorado have their interesting points and dramatic incidents, but rails had spanned the country in 1869 and had reached Yuma in 1877 and Topock in 1883. After that, any agricultural community that was to sell products outside its own borders needed a railroad and at best could get along only poorly without it. A broad, deep and peaceful river could have provided auxiliary transportation, but as Dekens testifies, the Colorado was a wilder sort—and there were 80 miles of it to Yuma and 90 upstream miles to Topock.

Palo Verde Valley when Calloway came upon it was a contra costa, a wasteland of sloughs, thickets, sand dunes and sagebrush opposite Ehrenberg.

Chemehuevi Indians planted corn, beans and melons there each year after water receded from the flood plains. They also harvested the beans of the mesquite tree.

Literally, palo verde means green tree; more specifically it is the proper name of a green tree that grows in desert washes in and near Palo Verde Valley. The most plausible explanation of its use as the name of the valley relates to a short-lived Army post near the present town of Palo Verde. A lone palo verde tree at the post led to the informal name of Ranch of the Palo Verde, from which the name was transferred to the valley as a whole.

The valley in its early days had some exotic animals. To the amazement of early settlers whose stock sometimes stampeded in equal amazement, they were camels.

There have been many ghostly apparitions, but presumably these were real camels, survivors or descendants of camels imported in 1857 to carry loads for the Army on Southwestern deserts.

They did carry loads well, but the Army teamsters and pack train engineers could not learn to cuss the camel with the same loving amiability they accorded the mule. The experiment was abandoned.

The Bradshaw Road of 1862 passed through, crossing the river near future Ehrenburg. Wheels and hooves, aided by wind and rain, made the road two feet deep in some places. Stage lines were responsible for what may have been the valley’s first building, abandoned and known as Adobe Station in Dekens’ time.

Alluvial soil held no promise for miners. The Valley was therefore another wasteland one had to cross traveling from one place to another. Civil engineer Oliver Calloway’s eyes, however, had been opened to the possibilities of irrigation. As he laid out the government survey lines he even surmised, without being sure, that the Valley sloped away from the river toward the foot of the mesa to the west. This would simplify gravity flow.

He was right, but unfortunately it was also an indication that a meandering silt-laden river was ready by the laws of its kind to change course with little provocation during a high water period.

The U.S. Surveyor General’s office approved Calloway’s maps in December 1874, but already in September of the same year he had formed a partnership with Thomas H. Blythe to obtain possession of the land under the state’s Swamp and Overflow Act. Blythe himself did not visit the domain until December, 1875.

The United States Congress in 1850 had given the states title to lands that were perennially swamp or subject to regular overflow. In turn, the State of California in 1868 adopted the Swamp and Overflow Act to give such land to anyone who would undertake to fill or drain it and put it to use.

Thomas Henry Blythe at the time was wealthy and actively investing his surplus. He had reached San Francisco in the historic year 1849 at the age of 27, fortune-seeking.

He had loaned money on property bounded by Geary, Dupont (Grant Avenue) and Market Streets and Brooks Alley, much of it destined to become part of San Francisco’s Chinatown. He foreclosed at a time when property was a drug on the market. Values zoomed again. The property was now worth perhaps $1.5 million.

He had also invested in mining property in Arizona, California and Nevada. He was spending uncounted thousands in partnership with the celebrated Gen. Guillermo Andrade in a colonizing project called Colonia Lerdo on the lower Colorado River in Baja California and Sonora. It doesn’t appear that any of his investments, outside of the prime San Francisco property were ultimately successful. In Palo Verde Valley at least, he appears to have exercised caution. At each stage he waited for an engineering report before going in more deeply. If his investment ultimately ran into more difficulty than the reports anticipated it was because the engineering profession wasn’t yet aware of all the Colorado could do.

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THE STATE ACT was drafted with small tracts in mind, but Calloway knew that the job in Palo Verde Valley had to be done on a large scale. The ink was scarcely dry on the Calloway-Blythe agreement before sixty individuals, all living in far-off San Francisco simultaneously filed claims with the state on sections surveyed by Calloway.

Having been granted the land, they promptly, as of one accord, conveyed their interests to Calloway and Blythe at the rate of $10 per square mile. Altogether the partnership acquired nearly 40,000 acres whose western line is that of the present DeFrain Boulevard from the mesa on the north to the westward-bent river at the south end of the Valley.

By no means was all this literally overflow land. It supported sand hills and desert vegetation, but it was also cut by sloughs and riverbottom thickets. The Swamp and Overflow Act has a reputation (deserved but growing more colorful in retrospect) as the basis of skullduggery.

One favorite story is usually told of Henry Miller, the San Joaquin Valley land and cattle baron, but it is also