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 and discouraged agricultural growth, especially in dry lands like California. Later in the decade, the state legislature also legalized the Hispanic water doctrine known as “prior appropriation”—which allowed water to be diverted from its natural channel to areas removed from the source on a first-come, first-served basis. Not surprisingly, bitter disputes resulted in endless litigation that were usually, though not always, won by riparians. In this manner, land and water monopoly often became inseparable in frontier California, as land barons like Miller and Lux snapped up strategic riparian lands that gave them exclusive access to vital streams and freshwater lakes (Pisani 1984, 1996; Miller 1993; Igler 2001).
What, then, drove farmers to persist under these conditions? Early on, cattle-ranching proved profitable for feeding miners their beef (Pulling 1944; Gates 1967; Jordan 1993). But the main attraction was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary episodes in American agricultural history—California’s bonanza wheat era. As in the various other American Wests, wheat became a major crop in the new state in the 1850s. Its cultivation flourished on the virgin soils of the frontier, its culture was well-known and inexpensive, and it required only a limited amount of largely unskilled labor. It was not unusual for a first crop to return a sizable profit. Moreover, because bread was central to the American and European diets, wheat invariably brought the best market prices of any grain. Wheat was also nonperishable and could be transported at minimal costs to distant markets in oceangoing ships (Fite 1966; Paul 1973; Pisani 1984; Rothstein 1987; Gerber 1993; Gillis and Magliari 2003; Vaught 2007).
Then, in the late 1860s, several factors coincided to turn what had been a modest output into a bonanza. By then, many of the land disputes that had plagued the state had been adjudicated or settled. After a devastating 3-year drought broke in 1865, California produced three straight bumper crops at the same time that Great Britain and other European nations suffered dangerously deficient harvests. Enterprising grain merchants in dozens of new railroad towns in the San Francisco Bay region, up the Sacramento Valley, and down the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys exploited the opportunity to the fullest, as did farmers, who followed the newly laid Southern Pacific tracks onto flat valley lands. With wheat acreage soaring, a large-scale, highly structured export industry emerged overnight, with “Wheat King” Isaac Friedlander, from his office in San Francisco, assembling an international network of banks, warehouses, shipping companies, and grain sack factories to link wheat farmers with consumers primarily in the United Kingdom, but also in Australia and China. Farmers took great pride in the knowledge that their wheat moved in greater volume over greater distances than any product ever before in human history, with fully three-fourths of every harvest exported to foreign markets. “You had to be a true believer,” wrote historian Morton Rothstein, “to plunge into growing and exporting a bulky, low-cost commodity such as wheat over immense distances with any hope of making a profit” (Hill 1954; Paul 1958b; Fite 1966; Rothstein 1975, 1987; Orsi 2005).
The scale of wheat farming varied widely. The largest and most well-known (but still understudied) grower in the state was Hugh Glenn, who amassed an empire of 66,000 acres in the northern Sacramento Valley, extending some 20 miles along the west bank of the Sacramento River. Glenn employed nearly 1000 laborers, invested more than $300,000 in machinery and draft animals, and produced a million bushels a year by 1880. With so many laborers required to bring in the crop, there was work for anyone who wanted it, usually at comparatively good wages of up to $2.00 a day, plus board. Roughly
