from northern Europe. Unemployed common laborers from Sacramento and San Francisco made up most of both groups. Work on Glenn’s mammoth wheat ranch was exhausting, unpleasant, and very dangerous, especially for those laboring near the thresher, where it was not uncommon to lose a finger, a hand, or even an arm in one of the revolving cylinders (Rothstein 1987; Street 1998; Scheuring 2010).
Many things about late nineteenth century California seem larger than life, but Glenn was hardly representative of all wheat growers. Indeed, small ranches and large estates, the federal manuscript census of agriculture reveals, developed side by side up and down the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Those who operated on a smaller scale often became prominent and respected community leaders in the new railroad towns such as Davisville, Vacaville, Santa Clara, and Napa. George W. Pierce of Yolo County, for example, operated his 1200-acre wheat ranch much more like a midwestern farmer—precisely because he was a midwestern farmer—a migrant from Wisconsin, to be precise. Wheat was his cash crop, and it absorbed much of his time and resources, but he did not rely on it exclusively. He also raised alfalfa, barley, grapes, peaches, strawberries, hogs, turkeys, and chickens, and his wife produced butter and eggs—all in substantial quantities for local markets. Pierce knew that his wheat income was subject not only to disastrous droughts and floods, but also world market vagaries. In off years, his family’s other activities had to carry the farm through. He also demonstrated a keen environmental consciousness by fallowing, rotating his crops, and fertilizing on a regular basis. For 10 years, Pierce served as justice of the peace, the township’s most important local official. Though state law limited his jurisdiction to claims of $200 or less, his neighbors invariably turned to him first to settle just about any dispute (Fite 1966; Prescott 1977/1978; Magliari 1992; Vaught 2007).
Virtually all farmers, large or small, made significant contributions to agricultural technology in the age of wheat in California. They were among the first to replace the old walking plow with the gang plow, which had several shares attached to a beam, moved on wheels, and was pulled by a team of horses. At the Glenn ranch, plowing often proceeded with as many as 100 gang plows in echelon formation, each drawn by an eight-horse team. California farmers also used new machines for planting, harrowing, and seeding, many of them developed and manufactured in nearby Stockton. And it was California farmers who ultimately perfected the steam-powered harvesting-threshing combine—machines so large and heavy that they required as many as two dozen horses to move them—and made it popular for the rest of the country. The need for mechanical motive power led directly to the invention of the tractor, first used in the San Joaquin Valley with steam power in 1886. Later, California entrepreneurs would adapt the tractor to the internal combustion engine and develop the “caterpillar” track (Wik 1953, 1975; Olmstead and Rhode 1988).
For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, wheat was California’s largest and most profitable agricultural commodity. But just as California had earned a reputation as the “granary of the world,” with production reaching a peak of 41 million bushels in 1890, the bonanza wheat era ended abruptly. In the late 1880s, other farmers on the Great Plains and in Europe, Asia, and Australia began planting wheat of their own—often using techniques and technology that Californians had perfected earlier. Overproduction, along with 4 years of severe depression in the mid-1890s, glutted world markets and sent wheat prices plummeting. By 1910, California imported most of its wheat from the Midwest (Rothstein 1987; Paul 1988; Rhode 1995; Vaught 2007).
Already underway in California’s farm economy was what economist Paul Rhode has called “one of the most rapid and complete transformations ever witnessed in American agricultural history”—that from wheat to specialty crops. Improved irrigation facilities and rail connections to the east encouraged many farmers—or, more often, their sons, such as George W. Pierce Jr.—to subdivide their fields for more profitable uses—deciduous and citrus fruits; wine, table, and raisin grapes; nuts; winter vegetables; and a host of other specialty crops. Many of these crops were fragile, perishable, and unfamiliar to the state’s farmers. To advance their knowledge, they formed a variety of organizations, some of them state-funded, to establish standards, sponsor innovation, combat disease and pests, and disseminate information in print and in papers delivered at annual fruit growers’ conventions. Indeed, to a much greater degree than their counterparts in the Midwest and the South, Californians were book farmers (Rhode 1995; Vaught 1999; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).
Much of the new production came not from old wheat farms but from planned communities or organized “colonies”—among the most important of which were in San Bernardino, Anaheim, Riverside, and Ontario in southern California, and a number of others near Sacramento. Here, settlers pooled their capital, water rights, labor, expertise, and machinery. Cooperatively, they bought and improved land, developed irrigation, introduced new crops, and provided social and cultural amenities to reduce the isolation of the farm frontier (Starr 1985; Sackman 2009; Sandul 2014).
Similar colonies were established in Fresno—though not by the settlers themselves but by land speculators, two of whom were none other than the notorious William Chapman and Isaac Friedlander. The first to comprehend the obstacles to successful reclamation and settlement in the dry, barren central San Joaquin Valley, Chapman and Friedlander organized a syndicate of San Francisco capitalists to purchase 125 sections (80,000 acres), secure the water rights from the nearby Kings River, and then subdivide it into small irrigation farms. The great irony was that because riparian water rights prevailed, land in the San Joaquin Valley could only be watered by monopolizing it (Clough and Secrest 1984; Pisani 1984; Miller 1993; Vaught 1999).
From this huge block of land, Chapman, in 1875, carved out the first successful settlement, the Central California Colony, 3 miles southwest of the Fresno railroad depot. He started by dividing six sections into 192 lots of 20 acres each and building an intricate system of canals and laterals to supply Kings River water to each tract. The developers laid out 23 miles of roads between the lots, lining them with varieties of fruit trees and naming each avenue after its particular fruit. Lots, water rights included, were priced to sell at $1000 ($100 down, $12.50 per month, and no interest). Buyers were encouraged to cultivate high-value crops—in particular raisin grapes, which thrived in Fresno’s natural environment of hot, dry summer days and cool, moisture-free nights, and the valley’s sandy loams. With crucial assistance from the Southern Pacific Railroad, Chapman promoted the colony in newspapers, pamphlets, and posters throughout the country. The standard pitch began: “Why will you go on year after year planting grain, trusting to the uncertain rainfall, and invariably losing in a dry season the hard-earned savings of several favorable years, when in the Central California Colony, you may secure land and an abundance of water to irrigate it at a moderate price and easy terms of payment?” (Clough and Secrest 1984; Vaught 1999; Orsi 2005).
The colony, an enormous success, served as a blueprint for subsequent endeavors. By 1890, thirty-four similar settlements surrounded Fresno within a 20-mile radius. They varied in area from one to fourteen sections and covered over 50,000 acres. The colonies encouraged the development of small towns—Oleander, Malaga, Fowler, and Selma, for example—with schools, churches, stores, dairies, and social clubs. By the turn of the century, the boundaries between the colonies had become blurred, creating a vast, unbroken region of small farmers—3000 vineyards of 10–40 acres sustained by 5000 miles of irrigation canals and ditches. Their community, the settlers firmly believed, was a virtuous place somewhere between the isolated self-sufficient Jeffersonian rural order and the market-dominated, impersonal industrial city. It was a place where landowning families lived on small, orderly, and prosperous vineyards in close proximity to one another. It thus fostered neighborliness, strong local social and cultural institutions, and economic progress, all in an environment that was aesthetically pleasing as well (Clough and Secrest 1984; Vaught 1999; Woeste 1998).
Not all aspects of the raisin community proved ideal, however. Indeed, labor relations became the Achilles’ heel to the farmers’ dream of a viticultural paradise. Even in the smallest vineyard, they could not harvest their labor-intensive crop without a force of seasonal workers. The scale and scope of the raisin harvest was overwhelming. Typically, a 20-acre vineyard required ten workers for the three-week harvest
