lived in a world that still had much in common with an earlier time. His very language and attitudes reflected those of his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather, who purchased the family’s Selma farm in 1878 at the start of the raisin boom. Hanson unabashedly compared his triumphs and struggles to those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He described raisin and fruit cultivation with considerable passion and in minute detail, as though he was delivering a paper at a late-nineteenth-century fruit growers’ convention. His anger toward the “company brokerage men” during the “raisin holocaust” of the early 1980s recalled his ancestors’ disdain for the “dreaded middlemen” of the 1890s. Similarly, his disdain of “university tinkerers” knew no bounds, even though Hanson himself taught Greek and Latin at the nearby state college when raisins fell below their living price. When the subject turned to labor, Hanson became defensive and blamed “the union, the government, and the immigration explosion in Mexico” for compounding the problem (Hanson 1996).
Above all, Hanson asserted—with no hint of sentimentality—that fruit growers such as he were “different, vastly different, from almost all other types of citizens,” and indeed embodied the very essence of Western culture. That moral responsibility, he concluded, compelled him to keep farming, though sheer economics often dictated otherwise (Hanson 1996). The Jeffersonian ideal, it would seem, is still very much alive in California agriculture—or, at the very least, continues to provide plenty of food for thought.
Bibliographical Essay
The richness and complexity of the history of agriculture confound attempts at generalization. While this chapter highlights a vast body of secondary literature, its aim is to be suggestive and informative rather than comprehensive.
Despite the crop’s prominence, there is only a fragmented history of wheat farming in California in the secondary literature. Historians have examined in considerable detail the development of the wheat belt on the western edge of the Midwest, from the Dakotas down to Kansas and into northern Texas, particularly in the 1880s. But for much of that decade, no state produced more wheat than California. Nearly all the state’s famous valleys—not only Sacramento and San Joaquin, but also Napa, Sonoma, Santa Clara (now Silicon), Salinas, San Fernando—were planted in wall-to-wall wheat at the time. Moreover, California began establishing its reputation as the “granary of the world” as early as the late 1850s, a full generation before wheat gained prominence on the Great Plains. Yet, two of the best books covering California’s wheat era—Michael J. Gillis and Michael F. Magliari, John Bidwell and California (2003) and Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (1984)—address the subject in considerable depth, but only as a secondary issue.
Much of the literature draws from the traditional themes of agricultural history—production, distribution, technology, and government policy. In this regard, there is no shortage of secondary sources. The three classic articles published by Rodman Paul (1958a, 1958b, 1973) and the three less well-known but equally valuable by Morton Rothstein (1963, 1969, 1975) provide an abundance of sources, information, and interpretations. Rothstein’s short study, The California Wheat Kings (1987) and Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier (1966), chapter 9, should be consulted as well—along with a number of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from the 1950s and 1960, all of which are frequently cited in these sources. Rarely cited but very informative is Forest G. Hill, “Place of the Grain Trade in California Economic Development” (1954). On technology, see Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “An Overview of California Agricultural Mechanization” (1988), Reynold M. Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm (1953), and Wik, “Some Interpretations of the Mechanization of Agriculture in the Far West” (1975). And on labor in the wheat fields, see Richard Steven Street, “Tattered Shirts and Ragged Pants” (1998) and Mark Wyman, Hoboes, Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps (2011). See also the innovative work on bound Indian labor in the early statehood period in the two articles by Magliari (2004 and 2012) and especially Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier (2013).
Land policy in particular has drawn considerable scholarly attention. No one has understood California’s highly complex land system better than Paul Wallace Gates, whose many penetrating essays on the subject have been collected in one volume, Land and Law in California (1991). Gates’s California Ranchos and Farms (1967) is also very useful. Pisani has deepened our understanding of several of Gates’s main themes in two pathbreaking articles of his own: “Squatter Law in California, 1850–1858” and “Land Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century California,” both in his Water, Land, and Law in the West (1996). Also valuable are Christian G. Fritz, Federal Justice in California (1991), Ellen Liebman, California Farmland (1983), M. Catherine Miller, Flooding the Courtroom (1993), Richard H. Peterson, “The Failure to Reclaim” (1974), and David Vaught, After the Gold Rush (2007).
For a few others, the primary objective has been to write “new” rural histories—that is, books and articles that examine wheat farmers in their social and cultural contexts. Much of what we know about farm life in California during this period comes from contemporary critics, most notably land-reformer Henry George (of “single tax” fame) and muckraking novelist Frank Norris (The Octopus). That approach has focused scholarly attention on the largest farmers, especially Hugh Glenn and his empire of 66,000 acres in the northern Sacramento Valley. In the process, the state’s thousands of much smaller wheat farmers have all but disappeared from view in the literature. An insightful work, though it is concerned primarily with the tail end of the state’s wheat era is Magliari, “California Populism” (1992), which demonstrates that wheat growers could be modernizing and wealthy yet so steeped in Jeffersonian values that they joined the Farmers’ Alliance. Gerald Prescott also analyzes small grain farmers in their social and cultural contexts in “Farm Gentry vs. the Grangers” (1977/1978). The most recent and comprehensive treatment is Vaught, After the Gold Rush (2007). Other social histories of wheat farming in the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, remain few and far between. For that matter, even Glenn has received minimal attention, the only full-length treatment being Ann Foley Scheuring, Valley Empires (2010), a useful but non-scholarly volume. For an explanation of why rural social history has flourished in the Midwest but not in California, see Vaught, “State of the Art—Rural History, or Why is There No Rural History of California?” (2000).
There was more to California agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century than wheat. On cattle ranching, particularly during the 1850s and 1860s, the essential study is Hazel Adele Pulling, “A History of California’s Range-Cattle Industry” (1944). Four sources that supplement Pulling nicely are Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (1993), David Igler, Industrial Cowboys (2001), Ray August, “Cowboys v. Ranchers” (1993), and Gates, California Ranchos and Farms, chapter 2 (1967). On the transition to specialty crops, Rhode, “Learning, Capital Accumulation, and the Transformation of California Agriculture” (1995), provides the most sophisticated analysis. See also the appropriate chapters in Paul, The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition (1988), and Vaught Cultivating California (1999).
There are a number of fine environmental histories of California’s wheat era. Two pioneer studies by Kenneth Thompson—“Riparian Forests of the Sacramento Valley” (1961) and “Historic Flooding of the Sacramento Valley (1960)—are still immensely helpful, as are several chapters in Elna Bakker, An Island Called California (1971). Robert Kelley, Battling the Inland Sea (1989), was an instant classic on the Sacramento Valley. Steven Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson, The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland (1993), document their observations with beautiful photographs.
Much of our understanding of California specialty-crop agriculture comes from farm labor studies. Most follow the “factories in the field” paradigm established by Carey McWilliams over three-quarters
