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Narrative by
Milford Wayne Donaldson, from Material Dreams, Southern California
Through the 1920s by Kevin Starr and History of Imperial
Irrigation District and the Development of Imperial Valley by M. J.
Dowd.
As a hard
rain the week before swamped everything near El Centro, early in the day
on August 27, 1909 the El Centro Daily Free Lance reported the
following story:
Torn by conflicting demands on his aesthetic
nature by two separate artistic callings Harold Bell Wright, novelist and
painter, chose between the two last week in his home at Tecolote Rancho
east of El Centro. Hoping to put forever behind him the painter part of
his artistic nature, Mr. Wright went to his studio and ruthlessly tore
down and carried out every picture he had painted, every canvas he had
sketched, his easels, frames, studies, all his oils and colors, his palate
and knife, his turpentine, mahl stick, sketch books and water colors and
threw them all in one big heap; then he touched a match to the heap and
$500 worth of materials went up in smoke.
As a
large-scale irrigated desert subculture, the Imperial Valley of 1910
nurtured its distinct version of the Southern California experience. The
inland desert supported cities, towns, urban institutions, farmlands, and
local worthies. The Imperial Valley even had its own inland ocean, 45
miles long, 17 miles across, 83 feet deep, for a total of 410 square miles
and six million acre feet. The Salton Sea was now the largest inland body
of water in the State of California. It was also an exact re-creation of
Lake Cahuilla of ancient times, likewise created by a westering Colorado.
Ironically, had the Salton Sea not been brought into being by the
rampaging Colorado, it would have had to be developed in some form or
other as an inland sump for excess flows and normal irrigation runoff. The
heroic floods of 1905-1907 had accidentally brought the Imperial Valley
into ecological balance. The Salton Sea also reinforced the Biblical
metaphors implicit in the redemption of the Imperial by providing an
analogy to the Dead Sea of the Holy Land. Vast, smooth, saline, beginning
abruptly at the edge of the desert in assertion of water against aridity,
the Salton Sea offered the deepest possible metaphor of the region. In
time, stocked fish would bring life to these waters; but no amount of
stocking, however successful, could fully transform the Salton Sea into a
purely natural body of water. A sump for diverted Colorado River waters
that had finished their course through the head-gates and canals through
the very earth itself and now rested, still, exhausted, saline from soil
leachings, after having given life to the valley, the Salton Sea asserted
on a macro-ecological scale William Ellsworth Smythe's notion that
irrigation offered human beings the opportunity to co-create with divinity
itself.
This, as a
deeply humanistic enterprise with theological overtones, was how Harold
Bell Wright, a Disciples of Christ minister turned novelist, depicted the
creation of the Imperial Valley in his 1911 best-selling novel, The
Winning of Barbara Worth. A combination of ill health and
dissatisfaction with the restrictions of his calling led Wright in 1908 to
settle on the Tecolote Ranch near the City of Holtville in Imperial
Valley, in an effort to regain his strength through an outdoor life which
would also leave him time to write. A year later, Wright produced the
first of his successful novels, The Calling of Dan Matthews, based
on his own search for role and vocation. He then turned his attention to
the epic of reclamation in the Imperial Valley. Appearing in 1911, The
Winning of Barbara Worth sold 175,000 copies in its first two years of publication. Wright's novel tapped that amalgam of progressivism, profit, and religiosity so deeply lodged in the mainstream American identity of this era. The novel also offered a "gloss" on the Imperial Valley experience which Wright, a populist preacher ever in touch with his audience, contrasted with the hand-to-hand struggle to create life in the desert.
Like the best-selling novel
Romona in the previous generation, The Winning of Barbara Worth
functioned as a vehicle of self-identification through an explicit parable
reinforced by underlying cultural and religious metaphors.
The heroine
of Wright's novel, Barbara Worth, is literally born of the desert, having
been rescued from La Palma de la Mano de Dios (the Hollow of God's
Hand) at the age of four by banker Jefferson Worth when her settler
parents lose their way in the desert and die of thirst and exposure.
Barbara is thus raised as the foster daughter of the leading citizen of
the Imperial Valley. Now in her early twenties, she is in every respect
the "Imperial Daughter" of the Imperial Valley: a tall, outdoorsy Girl of
the Golden West who speaks fluent Spanish and spends much of her time
riding the desert on horseback. Barbara, who symbolizes the desert, has
four men in her life, each of them embodying one aspect of Wright's
parable: her foster-father Jefferson Worth, a banker committed to the
work of private capital applied
to reclamation (Wright considered his novel, among other things, a sermon
on "the ministry of capital"); the Seer, a mystical Smythesque reclamation
advocate ever dreaming of desert utopias and new moral order created by
irrigation; Abe Lee, a local surveyor in love with Barbara; and Willard
Holmes, a New York engineer based on the life of Henry T. Cory, scouting
possible reclamation projects for eastern interests. In the course of the
novel, Jefferson Worth manages to keep the financing of the Imperial
Valley under local control. The Seer manages to convince eastern bankers
that reclamation is more than a risky investment; it is the cutting edge
of civilization itself. New York engineer Willard Holmes, after first
coming under the spell of the desert, manages to turn back the flooding
Colorado, assisted by local resident Abe Lee. Barbara, in turn, chooses
the educated New Yorker Holmes over local boy Lee to be her husband and
the father of her children. Wright's parable is obvious. Reclamation needs
eastern money, technology, and brains; but it also needs local control and
commitment. The desert cannot be merely invested in or even watered. The
desert must be lived in imaginatively with a transcendental vision of
place. Reclamation was once a communion and a conquest. "The desert
waited," so ran the inscription over the main entrance to the Barbara
Worth Hotel in El Centro, quoting Wright's novel, "silent, hot, and
fierce--its desolation holding its treasures under the seal of death
against the coming of the strong ones."
One such
strong one was W. F. Holt, the prototype of Jefferson Worth and the friend
to whom Wright dedicated his novel. In making Worth the paragon of
responsible local control, Wright was ignoring the irony that it was the
locally based California Development Company (CDC) that had perpetrated
the disastrous Colorado River, plundered its own assets, and endangered
land titles through falsifications that later came to light. No matter:
the impressive W. F. Holt, the founding entrepreneur of Imperial Valley
other than George Chaffey and the original CDC investment group, was the
logical choice to stand in as Barbara Worth's foster father. Born in
Missouri, Holt had migrated to Colorado and southwestern Arizona. He later went to Redlands, California.
Visiting Imperial Valley out of curiosity in 1901, the young banker saw
his opportunity. Let CDC control the water, Holt decided, he would develop
the infrastructure-- the gas, electricity, the telephones, the banks,
stores, hotels, newspapers, ice machines, and local railroad tracks--all of
which Holt and his brother Leroy proceeded to do. By 1910, when Wright was
writing, the Imperial Valley was Holt country: the Holt Power Company, the
city of Holtville itself, Holt this, Holt that. From this perspective
The Winning of Barbara Worth represented Wright's effort to baptize
and make holy his friend W.F. Holt's overt or silent participation in so
many aspects of the Imperial Valley's economy. Holt, after all, was the
supreme practitioner of what Wright described as the ministry of capital.
Things had
turned out well for W. F. Holt, and for others as well, through all the
perturbations of clogged canals, flooding, and title disputes. During the
go-go years of growth, the Imperial Valley functioned as the truck garden
of Los Angeles, a source for food for the growing city, tended inevitably
towards an equally large-scale, increasingly centralized form of
agriculture later described as agribusiness.
Environmental historian Donald Worster finds in the Imperial Valley clear
proof that in ages past and present irrigation by its very nature produces
not Smythe's localized land-holding yeomanry but bureaucratic centralism
and vast estates. The peculiar financial structure of the Imperial Valley,
moreover, in which water stocks equaled water equaled land, allowed
speculation rapidly to consolidate large holdings through the acquisition
of water stock from settlers unable to go the distance. It did not take
long for the Imperial Valley, eventually subsidized by the
reclamation-built All American Canal as well, to become dominated by the
same landowner class already present in 1900 when Harrison Gray Otis and
his partner Moses H. Sherman purchased a 700,000-acre ranch adjacent to
the Imperial Valley and extending into Mexico.
Below the
Mexican border, Otis and Sherman's California-Mexican Land and Cattle
Company drew its water gratis, no water stock needed, from the Imperial
Canal. Rockwood and other CDC directors likewise availed themselves of
this Mexican privilege. By 1904 land below the Mexican border, much of it
American-owned, was consuming free of charge seven times as much Colorado
River water from the Imperial Canal as was being used in the valley
itself.
The Winning
of Barbara Worth,
written by
Wright in 1911 when he was living in Imperial Valley deals with issues of
irrigation portrayed by W. F. Holt and the conflict between Wright's noble
value as attributed to westerners and the practices of eastern financiers.
Included on this website by permission of the author. |
