California in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the Golden State

Introduction

The only 1939 features not replicated as part of this reissued WPA guide to California are the original cover photograph and a full-size fold-out map tucked into a pocket in the back. The first edition’s jacket carried a black and white picture of two or three immense redwoods towering well out of frame, dwarfing the couple of figures—hikers? rangers? lumbermen?—standing around beneath them. It’s a good but not a great image, capturing only one of many themes that run through the book: California’s ambivalent response, usually either rapturous or rapacious, to nature.

This is the perennial design problem of all books about California. How do you map and crop the incommensurable variety of our fraught state into a rectangle of about five by eight inches? Plus leave room for a legible title? And, if it’s not too much trouble, spare a few picas for the author’s (or editor’s) name? If you make use of the Hollywood sign, you omit Northern California. Use the Golden Gate Bridge and you make the opposite mistake. Resort to a rocky coastal view and you bypass the cultural glories of urban California. Preferring not to play favorites, some designers just throw up their hands and collage several images together, in the process creating a semiotic trainwreck. To represent California adequately in one image would require a book cover the approximate size of a barn door.

Behind that cover, any book purporting to describe all of California is in for a similar challenge. How do you squeeze 160,000 square miles into a volume that readers can actually lift? During a Depression, you hire a lot of people—or, in contemporary parlance, create a lot of jobs. Then you sort out the gifted writers and editors from the hacks, give them their heads, and see what you get. If you’re very lucky, you get something like California: A Guide to the Golden State, which, under a gently updated new title, now re-emerges like a rested, refreshed bear after 70 years of hibernation.

The story begins on July 27, 1935, in the depths of the Depression, when President Roosevelt signed legislation authorizing the Federal Writers Project (FWP). The project recognized that scribblers, no less than stonemasons, muralists, and bridge builders, needed work. For any reader or writer, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be this and the other American Guides, a series of travel books to 48 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders, books that were expressly created to hold up a mirror to America. John Steinbeck navigated by these guides to write Travels With Charley, where he called them the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.

The American Guide Series, in turn, was but one endeavor of the FWP, which also turned out a raft of invaluable studies, including oral histories of freed slaves. The FWP itself, meanwhile, was but a single arm of Federal One, which also included the music, art, and theater projects that gave Orson Welles, among other artists, their biggest sandbox to date. And Federal One—stay with me here—was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which belonged to a whole Scrabble rack of acronyms that came out of the New Deal. The New Deal was shorthand for all the programs devised to fight the Depression under the leadership of the most effective monogram of them all: FDR. No writer or editor, however talented, was as instrumental in creating these guides as he was.

FDR liked California although sometimes he feared it. On a 1915 visit to San Diego as assistant secretary of the Navy, according to historian David Reid, Roosevelt was enchanted by the city and delighted by a royal reception arranged by the Chamber of Commerce. Yet as president, in 1934 he recognized Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial End Poverty in California campaign as a political menace to his own less hysterical brand of wealth redistribution, and kept his distance. More often than not, FDR was only too happy to leave California to the Californians. The leash was a long one, and the state’s twin FWP offices would use it to advantage. The California WPA guide ultimately weighed in at 713 pages—a mere five fewer than the Texas guide that, suspiciously, came out a year later.

I. A GUIDE TO THE WPA GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA

California is bigger than its WPA guidebook, but not by much. The avalanche of facts begins well before page one, back amid the Roman numerals. It’s still going strong more than 700 pages later, with appendices devoted to a blood-spattered timeline of California history and an irresistible bibliography sure to set bibliophile completists’ fingers itching. One sentence may not seem like much to describe the town of Buckhorn, near the Trinity River, but if we reflect that Buckhorn circa 1939 apparently had a population of three, the guide starts to feel a good deal more thorough.

The information set forth in California: A Guide to the Golden State is anecdotal, opinionated, uneven, and altogether habit-forming. The guide’s authors traffic unapologetically in old-fangled narrative history, since who in 1939 knew that robust, non-ideological, linear storytelling was anything to apologize for? When mighty historical forces conflict here, the perspective dollies back to give us the march of years. When men and women have the infrequent chance to shape their own destinies, the narrative zooms in tightly enough to show us the kerchief around Joaquin Murrieta’s neck.

A good example of this gift for close-up comes in a brief, deadpan tour through Salinas, circa the lettuce strike of 1936: Highlight of this strike was the mobilization which followed a report to the Highway Patrol that a Communist advance on Salinas was under way. Red flags proving the statement were taken from the highway and rushed to Sacramento . . . [A]n indignant highway commission requested that the flags placed as markers on roadsides by its workmen be returned to serve their purpose of warning motorists. (386)

Piquant historical information abounds in all three of the California guide’s main sections. The first, unexcitingly titled California: From Past to Present, comprises a dozen or so thematic essays. These range from the purely historical, such as California’s Last Four Centuries, to a series of articles on topics such as agriculture, journalism, and moviemaking. Some of the stories in them feel as fresh as that Salinas anecdote. Others have been told and retold since before statehood, both in books and around campfires—though rarely so well.

The second section goes by the name of Signposts to City Scenes, and consists of chapters devoted to each of the state’s fourteen largest or most significant cities and towns. Several of these burgs would eventually get guides of their own. The WPA guide to San Diego even beat this one into print, and so gets only a hasty once-over here. Hollywood’s chapter isn’t actually about a city at all, as the guide readily admits, since Los Angeles had long since annexed it. But the editors designed this guide for readers, not sticklers. As they knew full well, their readership expected a thorough Hollywood chapter and didn’t care to flip through an index to find it. It may be unexpected to read a taxpayer-funded book that includes a street address for Greta Garbo—A five-foot white brick wall insures [sic] privacy, we’re told, a bit defensively—but it’s far from unpleasant.

The third and final section is called Up and Down the State, but Down and Across the State comes nearer the mark. Almost all twenty or so of the road trips here proceed southward. This is surely a consequence of the project’s San Francisco home base, but Southern Californians need not feel slighted. Seemingly every town in the entire state with at least one living resident at press time made the cut, and several ghost towns are grandfathered in.

The profusion of information available in the guide isn’t just verbal but visual. Unforgettably composed, regrettably uncredited photographic interludes punctuate the text at regular intervals. One or two admirable woodcuts, possibly by Coit Tower muralist Harold Mallette Dean, mark the beginning and end of most chapters. To crib a line from the playwright Joe Orton, the WPA guide to California is an experience for the retina and no mistake.

II. CALIFORNIA: WHAT CAN YOU DO BUT LAUGH?

One doesn’t often think of a travel guidebook as funny, or not intentionally. Yet it’s impossible to spend much time with the WPA guide to California without noticing that—leaving aside our inevitable superior smirks at the book’s dated locutions—recurrent bouts of palpable readerly pleasure, even laughter, are hard to avoid. When we learn that the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno christened Monterey in 1602 and described it in such superlatives that those who came after him could not recognize it for 167 years, the only accurate term for this rhetorical flourish is joke, and a pretty good one. Punch lines are not commonly thought to be part of the guidebook writer’s arsenal. But when they really work, as they do here, a reader can only bow down in gratitude.

Whoever told Southern California editorial director Leon Dorais and his Northern counterpart, James Hopper, that wit was an allowable mode of imparting information is not recorded. Many other fine WPA guides, though by no means all, make do almost completely without it. If not an edict from Washington, one can only assume that Hopper and Dorais authorized this dispensation themselves, made it known among their contributors and then, in time-honored editorial fashion, hoped like hell the brass wouldn’t mind—or, better yet, notice.

As with almost all their writers, not much is known about either man. Dorais was said to be a novelist; about Hopper, we can’t confirm even that much. Either or both of them not only appreciated a sense of humor but had one. The sum total of bylined writing in the guide is their brief shared preface, and it’s as high-spirited as what follows. There they allow that, although the distance between the borders of Oregon and Mexico is more miles than [the editors] like to think about, they have covered every mile. Wit like this tells us two things: that they wielded the true humorist’s trusty weapons of self-deprecation and complaint; and that they were hands-on editors who, whether from curiosity or mistrust, got out from behind their desks and saw the state firsthand.

One should never, of course, make the auteurist’s mistake of conflating direction with authorship. All the editorial direction in the world wouldn’t have saved the guide from dullness—or incompletion—if Dorais and Hopper hadn’t lucked into at least a few crackerjack reporters and writers. A couple of these, one above the Tehachapis and one below, we don’t have to guess at. The San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth worked hard on multiple California guides, and the composer-writer-hobo Harry Partch did likewise from Los Angeles. Authors Tillie Olsen (Tell Me a Riddle) and Kenneth Patchen (Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer) pitched in too, uncredited.

Who did what is a WPA maven’s neverending favorite parlor game, but real evidence is hard to come by. The only single-author WPA guides may be Idaho’s, by Vardis Fisher (who also wrote the novel on which Jeremiah Johnson is based), and Camping in the Western Mountains by Rexroth, which neither the project nor anyone else has ever published between covers in its entirety. Why did the project squelch Rexroth’s outdoorsman’s manual? Probably for the same reason that its surviving manuscript bears his byline and no other: Team playing was never among Rexroth’s many gifts. Nature writing, however, was: The bark is a deep purplish red; the foliage is delicate and feathery. A virgin redwood forest, with the light filtering through the treetops and the light falling in diagonal beams between the great columns, is one of the most beautiful sights in the world. (25)

Few can doubt that we owe the most resplendent scenic accounts in the California guide, at least in part, to Rexroth. For any better attribution, we may as well ask the redwoods—and perhaps expect a joke back for an answer.

III. THE FOLDING STATE

Wake any number of Angelenos in the middle of the night and ask where they live, and very few would think to say, California. Ask their northern counterparts the same question, and the answers will come back just as fast: San Francisco. (Or, just possibly, Not Los Angeles.) Contemporary Californians mostly limit their environs to their region of residence, not their state. Put another way: 1. Fold along the Tehachapis. 2. Cut here.

California’s internecine warfare may feel as old as the hills—which, for anybody keeping score, are geologically older in the north than in the south—but it is not. No matter how fervent his local patriotism, this guide informed readers in 1939, "the Californian will stop arguing the claims of rival regions when faced with the challenge of an out-of-State visitor. At once he becomes a citizen of ‘the greatest State of all,’ just as the caballeros of pre-American days haughtily set themselves up as Califomios, a race apart" (6).

Alas, the proud capitalization of the word State isn’t the only anachronism here. Today’s Californians are less likely to dispute external criticism than they are to parrot it, blaming the state’s faults on their immediate neighbors. Most pan-California alliances nowadays tend toward the governmental, and the majority of these are statutorily endowed (the California Highway Patrol, the University of California, etc.). Politically, about the only time north and south come together in Sacramento is to pit east against west, the more liberal, densely populated coast versus the comparatively conservative, lonesome interior. A few plucky statewide institutions survive beyond the generosity of state subsidies—among them the California Studies Association, The California Report, calbuzz.com., Heyday Books, California Watch, and the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus—but even these contend with periodic disruptions by sectarian strife.

This book’s author of record, The Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of California, is no exception to this friction along the Tehachapis. The California project appointed state directors for both Northern and Southern California, but the north could claim sixteen credited staffers, while the south had but five. This could have been political payback under the Roosevelt administration for L.A.’s open-shop Republicanism or, just as likely, a hangover from San Francisco’s more storied publishing tradition.

Either way, in those distant days the northern and southern offices somehow managed to make common cause. They commiserated in a united front, against both meddlesome editorial nitpicking from higher-ups and occasional subliterate field reporting from a few lower-downs. An uppity whiff of Californio independence pervades some of the State Project’s internal correspondence now archived at UCLA, a sense that Federal One just didn’t get why it should take 713 pages to tell the story of California in full—or why it should take a faintly puckish, anti-authoritarian sense of humor to get it right.

IV. THE SHAPE WE’RE IN

Italy has its boot, Michigan its mitten, but California has always defied easy isomorphism. It looks a bit like a pair of brass knuckles stood on end, but only a bit. What it really looks like is a pair of overlapping Yale keys, jagged on the coast, smooth and straight along the Nevada and Arizona borders, and meeting right around Lake Tahoe. This even makes a certain amount of sense, since crossed keys have always symbolized St. Peter’s keys to heaven. That, and pubs.

And there you have California. Half heaven, half public house, it’s an earthly paradise where people nevertheless overindulge and get violent. From the state’s inception, malice and majesty have intercoiled like California king snakes. This was true in 1939, when the guide first saw print, and it hasn’t changed much since. The California writers project enjoyed no immunity from these excesses, according to Jere Mangione’s invaluable history of the entire project, The Dream and the Deal. To the contrary, the San Francisco office sounds like a hotbed of political argument, supply-closet romance, and the avoidance of water as either cleaning agent or beverage.

Politics made itself known in the guide in subtle ways, yielding an underlying historical narrative beyond the book’s unrivalled readability and style. The WPA guide to California is, for all its frequent prescience, a document of its time. In describing those Salinas nativists’ misinterpretation of roadside red flags, cited earlier, one of the office’s many progressives plainly couldn’t resist sticking it to the cops and growers. It’s 1939, remember, and apologists for unfettered capitalism aren’t exactly thick on the ground, especially among project workers. Regardless of whether you think capitalism deserved it, passages like these failed to endear FWP chief Henry Alsberg to the congressional anti-communists, who would ultimately red-bait the New Deal into oblivion.

The California guide is also the first of the state’s WPA guides written not just for tourists, but by them. The office’s later guidebooks for Los Angeles and San Francisco—and probably every other California WPA guide except Death Valley’s—feel as if they were written primarily by locals, or at least by long-resident transplants. Painstaking research improved their detail and accuracy, but the critically tempered affection wafting off their pages could only have come from the immersive, sidelong absorption of a native.

The tone of the California guide is different. Maybe its city sections were drafted by locals, but it seems unlikely that WPA staffers had an equally intimate knowledge of every wide spot in the road from Aberdeen to Yucca Grove. To read this book, though, you might actually think they did. The guide chronicles all these delightful jerkwater towns with loving if perforce sparing detail, and almost all emerge as unfailingly interesting, and well worth pulling over to explore. In fact, let’s.

V. A CALIFORNIA SCHEHERAZADE

The two shunpike speed traps of Aberdeen and Yucca Grove are the municipal alpha and omega—okay, the alpha and psi—of this guidebook’s index. Apparently even California wasn’t big enough to have a Z in 1937. Today it’s got Zenia, in Trinity County—all the reason needed, for some of us, to commission a brand-new guide.

At first glance, Aberdeen must have looked like any other one-horse town on highway 395 through Inyo County, with most of its 25 souls surely either reclusive or related. But take a closer look. Thanks to the guide entry, 1939 readers could know it as the starting point of the Los Angeles Aqueduct—whose length, years of construction, cost, pipe width, and half a dozen other statistics are then promptly enumerated. Far from being just another hamlet, full of rusting flyblown cafes, swaybacked barns, and mythically bountiful trout streams, Aberdeen was the staging ground for the water grab that created modern Los Angeles. Those eateries once fed the army of sandhogs who helped William Mulholland siphon off most of the Owens River Valley. Without Aberdeen, I’m not here, and just maybe neither are you. Not bad for a place you never heard of—or for some citified guide writers who only discovered it yesterday.

On to Yucca Grove. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Altitude 4,000 feet. A population that diminishes by half when the coffeeshop closes. It’s the only point of interest worth mentioning between Paso Alto and Soda Lake, neither of which sound exactly spellbinding either. But again, look more closely. Just what is a yucca, anyway? Only the botanical family that embraces, in the case of this particular grove, yucca brevifolia, otherwise known as the Joshua tree.

Until awarded federal protection, this tree—named by Mormon pilgrims, once represented by Sonny Bono, immortalized by still another musical Bono—was once Hollywood’s principal source of breakaway bar fight furniture. Now the land once known as Yucca Grove goes by the name of Joshua Tree National Park, and surpasses the Salton Sea and the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm as Southern California’s preferred desert repository of cosmic significance. In the daytime the fantastic posturing of yucca limbs seems to mock the traveler, marvels the guide. At night the dusky shadows of the contorted arms, backed by the star-crowded Mojave skies and the looming black bulks of hills, lend an air of deeper mystery to the desert.(603)

As such passages make plain, the WPA guide to California stands as some of the best anonymous literature since that other deathless filibuster, One Thousand and One Nights. These Depression-era Scheherazades of the California project, storytelling as if their lives depended on it, threatened by a Congress just itching to kill their program—based in, but never captive of, San Francisco and Los Angeles—gave every unsung corner of the state its moment. Would that the scribes’ names shared the immortality of their words. Good enough for government work, and then some.

David Kipen

California, 2012

PART I

California: From Past to Present

El Dorado Up to Date

THE FIRST to come were explorers by sea, venturing uneasily northward along the shores in pygmy galleons on the lookout for fabled El Dorado, a vaguely imagined treasure trove of gold and spices somewhere near the Indies. Finding no riches, they returned disappointed. But the legend of El Dorado lingered, even when men driving their cattle in the dusty march from the south searched in vain for hidden wealth. At least the new country was a land of rich soil and gentle climate, and the newcomers stayed to grow rich from the herds they pastured, the fields and orchards they planted. Who could foresee that the legend would prove to be true almost as soon as the province had passed into the hands of the next comers from the East? Once more the old fable illumined California, more refulgent than before, as gold-seekers thronged westward by land and sea, risking hardship in the hope of ease. After a few years it faded. And yet people still came, tempted by the picture of rich acres, unbelievably fertile. California became that legendary land of perpetual summer, of orange groves in sight of snowy peaks, of oil wells spouting wealth, of real estate promising fortunes, of cinema stars and bathing beauties. It seemed to promise a new start, a kinder providence, a rebirth of soul and body. The aura faded again, slowly. And yet people came—in rickety automobiles piled high with all their belongings, people asking nothing but a chance to work in a country where the weather might be gentle enough to let them live.

All the passengers . . . thronged with shining eyes upon the platform, exulted Robert Louis Stevenson as the train that had carried him across the continent headed down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. At every turn we could look further into the land of our happy future. At every turn the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this indeed was our destination—this was ‘the good country’ we have been going to so long.

It required little literary artifice to spin legends of an earthly Utopia so real that men would risk toil, hunger, and even death to seek it in the West. The diarists of the early expeditions, the newly settled immigrants who wrote back home, the enthusiastic globetrotters who recorded their travels—all extolled the virtues of El Dorado, and after them a growing throng of professional boosters—newspaper lyricists, real-estate promoters, chamber-of-commerce press agents—swelled the chorus.

I love you, California, you’re the greatest State of all, begins the semiofficial State song; it closes with the solemn declaration:

And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh For my sunny California.

When the first white men came by foot into California in 1769, they failed to recognize the Bay of Monterey, so overenthusiastically described by the chronicler of Sebastian Vizcaino’s expedition, and passed by. Since their time, similar panegyrics have misled others, for California is both more and less than its eulogists have claimed it to be. There is something more to it than sunshine and vineyards and orange orchards, bathing beaches and redwood trees and movie studios—more than the hurried visitor to a few chosen showplaces may glimpse. For California, in more than one sense, is all things to all men. The ballyhooers have called it a sun-kissed garden spot cooled by gentle zephyrs from the sea. The description is appropriate enough for the sloping valley plains along the coast. They might also call it a sun-scorched waste of boulder-scarred mountains and desert plains, or a rain-drenched highland of timbered gorges and snow-capped granite peaks. Or they might describe the vast spreading plains of its Central Valley, or the smooth-worn brown slopes of its undulating oak-dotted foothills, or the lava crags and juniper forests of its volcanic plateaus. Its seashore has stretches of smoothly curving sandy beach and of saw-toothed, rock-strewn coast; its plains are checkered with fertile fields and pastures, and desolate with crags and alkali; its rivers brim with water between fringes of greenery and lose their flow underground in sandy washes. California’s contrasts are extreme. It has fierce heat and bitter cold, some of the country’s wettest regions and some of its driest, the continent’s lowest point and the country’s second highest. Its landscape is so variegated that when the Californian goes traveling, he is apt to say to himself as he looks at parts of the rest of the country: I have seen all this before.

The people are as diverse as their environment. The tide of newcomers who arrived on foot, in prairie schooners, on clipper ships when California became American territory were from every corner of the land: New England farm boys, Irish-Americans from the streets of New York, younger sons of southern slave-owning families, and mid-westerners imitating their fathers’ trek from still farther east. Before this onrush of men with the California fever, the leisure-loving pastoral civilization of the Spanish-Californians was swept into oblivion. It disappeared as fast as the way of life of the short, dark aborigines had disappeared three-quarters of a century before. The Yankee conquerors, all citizens of the same Nation, were still of every possible variety, as traveler Bayard Taylor wrote in 1849. They differed individually from each other almost as much as they differed collectively from their predecessors.

People from nearly every nation of the earth still mingle in a polyglot conglomeration. In the dark and grotesque alleyways of Chinatowns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller cities live the Chinese, descendants of pioneers who came in the Gold Rush. The Japanese are found in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and in small towns and farms in southern California. In Imperial Valley, in Los Angeles and its suburbs thousands of Mexican field workers live in rude shacks. The short brown men of the Philippine Islands gather in employment agencies and shabby roominghouses of the big cities. The vineyards around Santa Rosa and Napa, the fishing fleets of the seaports, the shops of San Francisco’s North Beach give employment to the Italians. On the dairy farms of Alameda County live the Portuguese; in the lumber towns of the northern coast, the Scandinavians. In the big cities are colonies of Russians, Germans, French, and people of every other nation in Europe. Negroes live in the Central Avenue District of Los Angeles and the West End of Oakland—railroad porters and waiters, domestics and bootblacks, entertainers, and businessmen.

The people differ in more than their place of origin. Their lives have been shaped by the parts of the State in which they have settled. The sawmill workers of the bleak mountain shack towns of Weed and Westwood are a world removed from the orange growers of garden-surrounded Whittier and Pomona. It is a far cry from the tough-skinned, wizened old-timers of the Mother Lode ghost towns to the comfortable, retired midwestern farmers and storekeepers of Long Beach and San Diego, and a farther cry from the cowboys and sheep-herders of Susanville and Alturas to the cameramen and movie extras of Hollywood. The vineyardgrowers of the sun-warmed Napa and Sonoma valleys, the grease-stained oil workers of the torrid Kettleman Hills, the wandering pea-and-cotton-pickers of the San Joaquin Valley’s river-bottom camps—all are strangers to each other.

The Union’s second largest State in area might well have been christened by its discoverers Las Californias, for there are several Californias. Of all the many rivalries that make the life of the State an exciting clash of opposites, the chief has always been the rivalry between San Francisco and its neighbor cities and Los Angeles and its neighbor cities. Northern California was peopled with Americans during the Gold Rush, four decades before real estate booms brought settlers to southern California. Los Angeles remained a lazy village long after San Francisco had grown into a thriving city. San Francisco, with its more deeply rooted population, has the charm and conservatism of an older town, holding still to some of the traditions of gold rush days. In the interior towns of the north, more characteristically rural than those of the south, are the old-fashioned houses and quiet, tree-lined streets of a country village back East—especially in the towns of the mining country, where descendants of forty-niners live in almost clannish isolation from the State’s more up-and-coming sections. In rural southern California, on the other hand, the inhabitants are more likely to be recent immigrants from the Middle West, and their towns have the neon lights, the stucco Spanish bungalows, and the chromium-trimmed cocktail bars of their big-city neighbors. The southlanders, for the most part, have had only a short time to get used to what is still a strange wondrous land—which accounts, perhaps, for their famed susceptibility to unorthodox religions, architectures, and political movements frowned upon by northerners. The inter-sectional rivalry has often prompted demands for the division of the State; yet despite the geographical, temperamental and commercial differences, the sentiment for divorce has never grown very strong.

No matter how fervent his local patriotism, the Californian will stop arguing the claims of rival regions when faced with the challenge of an out-of-State visitor. At once he becomes a citizen of the greatest State of all, just as the caballeros of pre-American days haughtily set themselves up as Californios, a race apart. Whether northerner or southerner, native son or transplanted Iowan, the true Californian develops a proprietary interest that prompts him to tell the world about his State. So fond is he of bragging about it that he is always ready to sell California to whoever will lend an ear. Few joys in life so please him as an opportunity to declare with pride—and perhaps even on occasion with justification—that it has the tallest trees, the highest mountains, the biggest bridges, the fastest-growing population—in fact, the best, the most, or the greatest of whatever is being discussed at the moment.

The Californian may possibly be pardoned his pride in the extension, by three or four generations of human effort, of the bounties of nature. The aggressive energy of the Yankees, against which the leisure-loving ways of the easy-going Californios could not prevail (with some few exceptions in the south) still moves a people who have built aqueducts from faraway mountains to reclaim whole deserts, strung power lines from mighty dams across inaccessible wilderness to distant cities, dredged one of the Nation’s great harbors from mud flats and flung the world’s biggest bridges across a bay. The wild wastes of a century ago are dotted now with lumber mills, mine shafts and smelters, power plants and factories. The valleys are squared off in grain field and pasture, vegetable patch, vineyard and fruit orchard, watered with a labyrinth of irrigation ditches and criss-crossed with highways and railroads. Mountain streams have been dammed for electric power; plains and slopes drilled for oil. Under the earth extends a network of pipelines for oil and natural gas and above it, a network of high-tension wires for electric current. The canneries and packing houses, oil refineries, aircraft factories and movie studios ship their products to every corner of the Nation and beyond. The Californian of today feels a personal pride in the State’s gargantuan public works: highways, bridges, dams, and aqueducts. And most of all, of course, he exults in the region’s happy future.

The days when the American people finally reached land’s end on the Pacific are almost within the memory of living men. If Californians seem to display the brash boastfulness of adolescents, perhaps they deserve charitable forgiveness; for after all, they are citizens of a young State. And boastfulness is not the only telltale sign of its youth. The restlessness of the men who made the westward trek persists in the unquenchable wanderlust with which their descendants have taken to the automobile, thronging the highways with never-ending streams of traffic bound for seashore, deserts, forests and mountains. And the sturdy instinct for independence that inspired the rough-and-ready democracy of the mining camps and towns has lasted too; quiescent at intervals, it has always revived in time to save Californians from unprotesting resignation to hardship. They hope, perhaps, that the stubborn search for a better land that brought their grandfathers here to the shores of the Pacific has not spent itself. They hope, in fact, that they can yet make of El Dorado the promised land that has fired men’s imaginations for four hundred years.

Natural Setting and Conservation

IF CALIFORNIA lies beyond those mountains we shall never be able to reach it, wrote John Bidwell, leader of the first overland emigrant train, in his journal on October 29, 1841. But on the next day he set down: We had gone about three miles this morning, when lo! to our great delight we beheld a wide valley. . . . Rivers evidently meandered through it, for timber was seen in long extended lines as far as the eye could reach. The day after he continued: Joyful sight to us poor, famished wretches! Hundreds of antelope in view! Elk tracks, thousands! The valley of the river was very fertile, and the young, tender grass covered it like a field of wheat in May."

Thousands of later emigrants who struggled to the crest of the Sierra Nevada, towering like a massive wall along the State’s eastern border, were equally overjoyed at their first glimpse of El Dorado. As they stood at the summit, the dry wilderness of the Great Basin lay behind them. To north and south rose the rock-ribbed flanks of the huge Sierra Nevada, about 385 miles long and with an average width of about 80 miles. Westward they looked toward the Great Valley of California, a vast elliptical bowl averaging 50 miles in width and more than 400 miles long, larger in area than Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Beyond the valley stood the dim blue peaks of the Coast Range, skirting the ocean and parallel to the Sierra in chains from 20 to 40 miles wide and 500 miles long. Far to the north, beyond their vision, the rugged Cascade Range and Klamath Mountains closed in on the valley’s northern rim; and far to the south, the Tehachapi Mountains thrust their barrier from east to west across its southern end.

California, with a total area of 158,297 square miles, is the Union’s second largest State. In the language of the geographer, its latitude extends from 32° 30’ to 42° N., and its longitude from 114° to 124° 29’ W. Its medial line, from Oregon to the Mexican border, is 780 miles long. Its width varies from 150 to 350 miles. Its coastline is approximately 1,200 miles—somewhat less than one-tenth of the total coastline of the United States. So pronounced is the eastward curve of the State’s southern coast that San Diego lies farther east than Reno in Nevada, although Eureka, a northern port, is the most westward city in the United States. On the east the State is bordered by Nevada and by the Colorado River, which separates its southeastern corner from Arizona.

Beyond each end of the mountain-walled Great Valley, which is California’s most distinctive topographic feature, the terrain is broken and rugged. Northward lie the Siskiyou Mountains, a natural barrier between California and Oregon. In the northwest, wild timbered slopes reach to the Pacific; in the northeast, mountain spurs hem in barren lava-bed plateaus. South of the Tehachapis’ dividing line lies southern California comprising one-third of the State’s area. Here the complex network of the Sierra Madre, the San Bernardino, and other ranges separates the so-called Valley of Southern California, a broad strip of broken country near the coast, from the arid wastes of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts in the hinterland. From Point Concepcion, where the Coast Range breaks into numerous ridges and the coast swings in sharply to the east, the Valley of Southern California, which includes the V-shaped coastal plain of the Los Angeles Basin, stretches southward to the Mexican border.

These chief geographical districts—the Sierra and Coast Range regions and the Central (Sacramento-San Joaquin) Valley in the north, the coastal lowlands, the mountains, and the desert country in the south—present startling physiographic contrasts and extremes, from active volcano to glacier, from arctic flora on mountain tops to cotton plantations below sea level. From the peak of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the United States, it is but 60 miles to Death Valley, the continent’s lowest area. Human activities range from fur-trapping in the snows of the Klamath region to prospecting for minerals in the furnace-like heat of the southeastern deserts.

California’s contour is marked by lofty mountain peaks towering above precipitous gorges and canyons. Of the 41 peaks that exceed 10,000 feet in height, the tallest is Mount Whitney (14,496 alt.) in the southern Sierra. The Sierra’s abrupt eastern slope has one of the steepest general gradients on the North American continent. Over a 160-mile stretch the lowest pass is at an altitude of 9,000 feet, while Kearsage, the most frequently used pack horse pass on this stretch, is 12,050 feet; in this area the peaks range from 13,000 to 14,000 feet in height. Although there is a gradual decline in altitude to the north, other isolated peaks of the Sierra rise above 14,000 feet. Northward the western slopes are gashed by river canyons sometimes half a mile deep.

The Sierra’s sculptured splendor is in part the work of glaciers which carved deep valleys, expanses of polished rock, and towering granite walls over which roar great waterfalls, glacial lakes and meadows. Most beautiful of the valleys is Yosemite, in the midsection of the Sierra; loveliest of the lakes is Tahoe (6,225 alt.), cupped between the main Sierra and the basin ranges at the angle of the Nevada-California boundary. A few glaciers even now survive on the highest summits, the finest of them being a group of five supported by Mount Shasta (14,161 alt.).

Dominating the northern end of the Sacramento Valley is Mount Shasta, the most striking of the many extinct or dormant volcanoes in the northern California mountains. Lassen Peak (10,435 alt.), 85 miles southeast of Mount Shasta, is a mildly active volcano—the only one in the United States that has had a generally observed eruption. Although traces of volcanic action are most abundant in the State’s northeastern sector, where lava beds spread over vast tracts, there are also extinct or dormant volcanoes in Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert, and numerous hot springs in the Coast Range.

The Coast Range, more complex than the Sierra, includes numerous indistinct chains from 2,000 to 7,000 feet high. Each chain is broken down into forested spurs and ridges enclosing small pleasant valleys and plains drained by rapid streams.

The Santa Ynez, San Barnardino, and San Gabriel Mountains bound the lowland of southern California on the north and northeast, and subdivide it into more or less distinct valleys or basins. Farther south the coastal lowland is bounded by the Santa Ana and San Jacinto Ranges, an elevation that extends into Mexico. The southern California ranges are marked by the lofty peaks (more than 10,000 feet high) of San Bernardino, San Jacinto, and San Antonio and by the well-defined passes of Soledad, Cajon, and San Gorgonio.

Among the mountain-walled valleys between the southern end of the Sierra and the border of Nevada is the long and narrow Owens Valley, bordered by granite walls. About 40 miles east of dry Owens Lake, along the California-Nevada border, lies Death Valley, its lowest point 276 feet below sea level. It stretches between the sheer rocky walls of the Panamint Range on the east and the Amargosa Range on the west—130 miles long and from 6 to 14 miles wide—a region of stark simplicity, majestic silence, and spectacular desolation. South of Death Valley spread the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. The Mojave is an expanse of ancient dried lake bottoms, short rugged ranges, and immense sandy valleys. Parts of the Colorado Desert lie below sea level—250 feet below at its lowest point. In its southern end is the fertile Imperial Valley, largely reclaimed from the desert for agricultural use by irrigation, where the Salton Sea, formed when the Colorado River broke its banks in 1905, floods an ancient lake bottom.

In addition to the Great Valley in the north and the coastal district (including the rich Los Angeles Basin and Santa Clara and San Fernando Valleys) in the south, cultivated lowlands occur elsewhere in the State. Below San Francisco Bay stretches another Santa Clara Valley; and southeast of Monterey Bay, between the Santa Lucia and Gabilan Ranges, lies the long Salinas Valley. North of San Francisco in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Humboldt Counties are similar areas. The northeast corner of the State, hemmed in by steep ranges, is suitable for cattle raising and restricted agriculture despite its lava beds and sagebrush.

In the whole 400-mile length of the Great Valley there is only one break in the mountain walls through which the waters of the interior can escape to the sea. Behind the Golden Gate at San Francisco, cutting across the full width of the Coast Range, is a great gap through which passes almost the entire drainage of the Great Valley. Into Suisun Bay pour the waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers; they empty through Carquinez Strait into San Pablo and San Francisco Bays, and through the Golden Gate into the Pacific Ocean.

The scantily forested eastern flanks of the Coast Range contribute no stream lasting enough to reach either the Sacramento or the San Joaquin in the dry season; but down the western slopes of the Sierra, tributaries pour through precipitous canyons to the great rivers at each end of the valley. Fed by Mount Shasta’s melting snows, the Sacramento, California’s largest river, is joined by the Pit, McCloud, Feather, Indian, Yuba, and American Rivers as it flows southward 350 miles to its confluence with the San Joaquin in the Delta region. The Sacramento’s lower course is through a marshy plain partly inundated yearly. The San Joaquin, whose valley comprises more than three-fifths of the central basin, flows northward from its headwaters in the mountains of Fresno County. Into it drain the waters of the Fresno, Merced, Tuolumne, Stanislaus, Calaveras, Mokelumne, and Consumnes Rivers, together with many smaller streams.

The seaward slopes of the Coast Range are drained by the Klamath (joined by the Scott and Trinity), Mad, Eel, and Russian Rivers north of San Francisco, and south of it by the Salinas, Santa Maria, Santa Ynez, Santa Clara and other secondary rivers, many of them intermittently dry. Southern California’s so-called rivers—the Ventura, Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Santa Ana, San Luis Rey, Santa Margarita, and San Diego—are for the most part dry creek beds except during spring floods.

A peculiarity of the State’s drainage system is its many river sinks where the waters either dry up from evaporation or, like the Amargosa River in Death Valley, disappear beneath the surface. Through Modoc and Lassen Counties, in the far northeast, stretches a chain of alkaline lakes—Goose, Upper and Middle, and Honey Lakes. They are all without drainage to the sea, and the spring run-off rapidly evaporates. In the Central Valley, south of the area drained by the San Joaquin, the Kings, Kaweah, and Kern Rivers, fed by the melting snows of the high Sierra, formerly emptied into shallow marsh-girt lakes. But with the impounding of water for irrigation these lakes have dried up, and the old lake beds have become farm lands. The Mojave Desert, in whose sandy wastes the Mojave River is swallowed up, is dotted with glistening alkaline-incrusted dry lake beds. In Riverside, San Diego, and Imperial Counties, many creeks (so-called rivers whose beds are normally dry) run toward the desert sink of the Salton Sea region.

California has two magnificent natural harbors, San Francisco and San Diego Bays, both landlocked; and one great artificially built harbor, the port of Los Angeles. San Francisco Bay, entered through the Golden Gate, is among the world’s finest; here, besides the port of San Francisco itself, are those of Oakland, Alameda, and Richmond. San Diego Bay, safe at all seasons, is sheltered from ocean winds by Point Loma, a promontory seven miles in length. The Los Angeles harbor, fronting on open San Pedro Bay, 20 miles from the city, is protected by a breakwater. California’s best minor harbors are those of Monterey and Santa Cruz, on Monterey Bay, and Eureka, on Humboldt Bay, some 280 miles north of San Francisco.

There are two groups of islands off the California coast. The Santa Barbara Islands, nine in number, lie between Point Concepcion and San Diego, 20 to 60 miles from the mainland. From San Miguel Island in the north to San Clemente Island in the south they are scattered over a distance of 155 miles. The best known island of the group is rugged Santa Catalina, 25 miles long with an average width of four miles, which stands 20 miles south of San Pedro. The Farallones, a group of six small rocky islands, lie about 28 miles west of the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

CLIMATE

The first American writer to describe California’s natural features refrained from the rhapsody which has characterized most of the subsequent discussion of the State’s far-famed weather. The climate of California, wrote Captain William Shaler, generally is dry and temperate, and remarkably healthy; on the western coast the sky is generally obscured by fogs and haze, but on the opposite side it is constantly clear; not a cloud is to be seen, night or day. The northwest winds blow very strong eight months in the year, on the western coast, with very little interruption; the land breezes at that time are hardly perceptible; but in the winter months they are stronger and regular. In the months of January, February, and March there are at times very high gales from the southeast, which render most of the bays and harbours on the coast unsafe at that season.

California’s climate is characterized by certain peculiar features: the temperature of the entire Pacific Coast is milder and more uniform than that of regions in corresponding latitudes east of the mountains; the year divides, in general, into two seasons—wet and dry—instead of into the usual four seasons; and where extreme summer heat occurs, its discomfort is lessened by the dryness of the air.

Despite these general characteristics the State is a place of many climates, due to distance from the ocean, situation in reference to mountains, and, above all, altitude. Thus there are sharp climatic contrasts within a single limited area. One may go sleighing within sight of blossoming orchards, or view snow-clad peaks while bathing in the sea. A winter traveler in the high Sierra will be reminded of the Alps, while anyone venturing into the scorching inland valleys in midsummer will conclude that whoever labeled California semitropical was a master of understatement.

The term, however, is applied with good reason to the strip of land between the coastal mountains and the ocean. For those who have never visited this area the most restrained account of its climate is likely to seem hyperbole. The year-round weather is more equable than that of any other part of the United States; and from San Francisco southward to Monterey, the difference between the average summer and winter temperatures is seldom more than 10 degrees. In this coastal region frost heavy enough to halt the greening of the hills under winter rains is as rare as thunder and lightning; and always some flowers are in bloom. Sea breezes and fogs tend to stabilize the temperature without extremes of heat or cold.

The annual mean temperature of San Francisco is 56°; the summer mean is less than 6o°, the winter 51°, and the lowest recorded temperature 27°. In San Diego the winter mean temperature is 54°, the summer 68°. In Monterey the difference between January and August mean temperatures is from 10° to 14°; in Los Angeles 14° to 16°. Because of the California current and the marine air from the Pacific anticyclone, summer in San Francisco is actually cooler than fall. These same factors induce fogs, night and morning, in that region and all along the California coast during the greater part of the summer. So dense and persistent are these coastal fogs that great areas south of San Francisco devoted to truck gardening require no other moisture during the summer months. The Coast redwood, as well as the plants which grow beneath it, is watered by the fog that condenses on its foliage.

In the southern part of the Central Valley, temperatures are often very high. Although the annual mean temperature of the inland is 64°, in Fresno and Bakersfield the mercury occasionally soars above 110°. The desert temperatures are still higher, the summer mean in Fort Yuma being 92°. In Death Valley, the average daily minimum for July, the hottest month, is 87.6°. But on July 10, 1913, it reached 134°, only slightly less than the highest natural air temperature hitherto accurately measured. In the mountain regions, on the other hand, summer temperatures are much lower and the winters are very severe. At the top of Mount Lassen, in the winter of 1932-33, the mercury registered 56° below zero.

Annual rainfall in the State varies from about 80 inches at Crescent City in the extreme north to about 10 inches at San Diego in the extreme south. At San Francisco the annual average is about 22 inches; at Los Angeles, 16 inches. The northern half of the Sierra and the northwest counties are covered by a heavy rain belt. In the high mountains precipitation, almost entirely in the form of snow, provides most of the run-off which supplies water for the cities and for irrigation. In the high Sierra the average annual snowfall is from 300 to 400 inches. At Tamarack in Alpine County the snowfall during the winter of 1906-7 was 844 inches, the greatest ever recorded for a single season anywhere in the United States. The belt of heavy rain shades off to a region of lighter rainfall which covers all the rest of the State except Inyo, Kern, San Bernardino, and Imperial Counties, and the eastern portion of Riverside County. The limits of this third region may, in dry years, include all of the State below Fresno and the entire Central Valley.

In general, rains occur in California only in the months from October to May. Even during this rainy season, the valley districts usually have no more than from 25 to 35 rainy days. Throughout the rest of the year excursions may be planned everywhere, except in some parts of the mountains, with considerable confidence that no rain will dampen the occasion.

GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY

Every major division of geologic time is represented in California by marine sediments, and many of them by continental deposits as well. As the Pacific Ocean on the west and the ancient Great Basin Sea on the east alternately encroached on the California region, each supplied that part of the record which the other omitted. In formations of the last two periods, the Tertiary and the Quaternary, California is particularly rich.

Structurally the Sierra Nevada is a single colossal block of earth’s crust lifted along its eastern edge to a height of more than 11,000 feet above the adjoining blocks, and gently tilted westward. The oldest known rocks making up these mountains are intrusions of molten rock (magma) and limestones, cherts, shales, and sandstones, all sedimentary, and nearly all changed into their metamorphic equivalents in the process of mountain building. These older sedimentary rocks were deposited in ancient seas of shifting extent and depth, which during the second half of the Paleozoic and the first two periods of the Mesozoic era, covered now one part, now another, of the Pacific Coast. Toward the close of the Jurassic period, the lands that were eventually to become the ancestral Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Klamath Mountains began to emerge from the sea.

During the Cretaceous period the Sierra’s whole block tilted westward. This process of tilting and folding wrenched open leaves of slates, once shales; heated mineral-bearing solutions escaped from the magma that was cooling and solidifying below and filled the slate openings with gold-bearing quartz. The Eocene epoch of the Tertiary period was comparatively quiet. The Sierra slowly underwent additional elevations and subsidences accompanied by active erosion of the surface rocks. Meanwhile the rivers were cutting their channels down the western slope and carrying the products of erosion to the inland sea. There was further release of gold from the bedrock, and the formation of rich placers. In the Oligocene epoch following, there was volcanic activity, and the Sierra gold-bearing stream channels were dammed and filled with rhyolite ash.

Volcanic activity continued during the Miocene age, and in addition to lava there were extensive mud flows and tuffs. In the Pliocene epoch the volcanoes were far less active, and in the Pleistocene the volcanic cover was removed in part by erosion. The veins and buried stream channels were cut into, and gold-bearing gravels were washed from their ancient channels and redistributed along new streams. This is the origin of so-called free gold. The Sierra had been greatly worn down in late Tertiary times, but the Pleistocene epoch of the Quaternary period was an era of re-elevation. There was much faulting, and a new period of volcanic activity began which is not quite ended today.

In the early Tertiary period the Sierra slopes were luxuriant with vegetation, but toward the end of that period the climate became much cooler. The slopes and summits were encased in thick ice and snow, which kept them captive. The glacial periods of the Pleistocene were relieved by intervals during which the ice fields retreated toward the crests, yielding to climates even milder than that of California today. But when the ice of the last glacial age had finally retreated (traces of this epoch still linger in various glaciers such as those on Shasta), the Sierra crest stood stripped of vegetation and soil, exposing those bare expanses of whitish granites and schists that now give it its dazzling beauty. Yosemite and other extraordinary Sierra valleys and canyons are also glacial legacies, as are the numerous lakes in the high Sierra. Tahoe, lovely lake and the deepest in the United States, was made partially by glaciation and partly by faulting, erosion, and volcanic damming.

The volcanic activity of Miocene times was especially great in the Cascade Range, where a number of volcanic peaks rose in a comparatively short time. Mount Shasta was one; the still active Mount Lassen was another, and the volcanic range extends north into Oregon and Washington. Eastward from the range extends one of the largest lava fields in the world, covering 200,000 square miles to depths of from 200 to 2,000 feet. This lava plateau, generally decomposed on the surface, which stretches beyond California into Oregon and across into Idaho and Wyoming, did not for the most part erupt through typical volcanic vents, but flooded up through great cracks or fissures. The Pit River, flowing through the Cascades, has cut deep into the series of volcanic rocks (andesites) some 7,500 feet in thickness, and the thin but widespread basalts. Because of the depth of this covering, the pre-Miocene history of the region is uncertain.

The oldest of the accessible formations of the Klamath Mountains are pre-Cambrian metamorphic rocks including schists, quartzites, and crystalline limestones—the last named consisting partly of sedimentary, partly of igneous rocks, both metamorphosed. The first two periods of the Mesozoic are represented by smaller proportions of sedimentary rocks which are covered by remnants of once extensive beds of sandstones, shales, and conglomerates of the Cretaceous period. There were also periods when volcanoes were active, especially the early Devonian period and the greater part of the Mesozoic era. The mass had been uplifted during the Jurassic period, but erosion and subsidence brought the ancestral Klamath mountains to below sea level in the Cretaceous period. This oscillation continued more or less quietly, except for an outburst of great volcanic activity in the middle of the Miocene. The most recent re-elevation, like that of the Sierra, was at the beginning of the Quaternary period. At approximately the same time, gold-bearing gravels were carried down along the sides of many canyons by erosion.

There are no Paleozoic (old life) rocks in the northern Coast Range, but crystalline limestone and schist, probably of this age, are found in the Santa Cruz, Gabilan, and Santa Lucia Ranges. Of the next era, the Mesozoic, Triassic period remains are lacking, but from the Jurassic come most of that complex series of Coast Range rocks known as the Franciscan. These are sedimentary rocks of several types: conglomerate, sandstone, shale, variegated chert, and (rarely) limestone. With them is embedded a great series of volcanic and plutonic rocks of the same age.

Cretaceous rocks in the Coast Range are abundant. They make up considerable parts of the Santa Lucia, the Temblor, and Diablo Ranges, and they become even more widespread north of San Francisco. The rocks consist chiefly of shale, siltstone and sandstone, with some small streaks of coal, and—near Coalinga—shale, which is the source of the oil in overlying Tertiary beds. The Cretaceous sea covered considerable parts of what is now the north Coast Range, but the region that now comprises the Santa Lucia Range and the Salinas Valley was relatively higher than at present, and formed Salinia, a long narrow peninsula running out to the northwest. The Eocene strata are relatively uncommon except in the eastern foothills near Coalinga and in the Mount Diablo region. The rocks are similar to those of the Cretaceous. There are considerable beds of coal, but the latter is of poor quality. Salinia had become an island, and there was a similar island whose axis ran along what are now the Gabilan and Mount Hamilton Ranges northwest to Marin County.

The Oligocene formations in the Coast Range are chiefly of red sandstone; there are also certain organic shales, which seem to be the source rocks for the oil of Kettleman Hills. The seas had become less widespread. Salinia extended farther north and west, but the San Joaquin Valley still formed an arm of the sea into which drained the rivers of Mohavia—a name given to the region now covered by the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, and the Owens River Valley. In the early Miocene there was much volcanic activity in the Coast Range, and this ultimately cut off the sedimentary deposits from Mohavia and prevented their reaching the sea. There followed in the late Miocene another period of widespread shallow seas and many coastal islands. Much organic siliceous shale was laid down, and this is the source