4 - California Historical Society

california history
volume 87 number 4 2010
The Journal of the California Historical Society

Executive Director
DaviD Crosson
Editor
JanET FirEMan
Managing Editor
shElly KalE
Reviews Editor
JaMEs J. raWls
Spotlight Editor
JonaThan spaulDing
Design/Production
sanDy bEll
Editorial Consultants
LARRY E . BURGESS
ROBERT W . CHERNY
JAMES N . GREGORY
JUDSON A . GRENIER
ROBERT V . HINE
LANE R . HIRABAYASHI
LAWRENCE J . JELINEK
PAUL J . KARLSTROM
R . JEFFREY LUSTIG
SALLY M . MILLER
GEORGE H . PHILLIPS
LEONARD PITT
California History is printed in
Los Angeles by Delta Graphics.
Editorial offices and support for
California History are provided by
Loyola Marymount University,
Los Angeles.
california history
volume 87 number 4 2010 The Journal of the California Historical Society
c o n t e n t s
From the Editor: Something in the Soil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
California Legacies: James D . Houston, Californian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
By Forrest G. Robinson
Sidebar: Farewell to Manzanar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Luther Burbank’s Spineless Cactus:
Boom Times in the California Desert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
By Jane S. Smith
A Life Remembered: The Voice and Passions of
Feminist Writer and Community Activist Flora Kimball . . . . . . . . 48
By Matthew Nye
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Donors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
on the front cover
Spineless cactus at the Luther Burbank Home &
Gardens, Santa Rosa
Famed plant breeder Luther Burbank “has shown
us the way to new continents, new forms of life, new
sources of wealth,” declared California Governor
George C. Pardee in 1905. When Burbank offered his
new spineless cactus for public sale in 1907, after more
than twenty years of experimentation, it was instantly
hailed as a miracle crop that would transform desert
ranching. Jane S. Smith reveals the little known but
fascinating “race to riches” story of the spineless cactus
craze in her essay, “Luther Burbank’s Spineless Cactus:
Boom Times in the California Desert.”
Photograph by photojournalist Debra Lee
Baldwin, author of Designing with Succulents
(Timber Press); www.debraleebaldwin.com
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CALIFORNIA HISTORY, September 2010
Published quarterly © 2010 by California
Historical Society
LC 75-640289/ISSN 0162-2897
$40.00 of each membership is designated
for California Historical Society membership
services, including the subscription to California
History.
KNOWN OFFICE OF PUBLICATION:
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Attn: Janet Fireman
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Website: www.californiahistoricalsociety.org
Periodicals Postage Paid at Los Angeles,
California, and at additional mailing offices.
POSTMASTER
Send address changes to:
California History CHS
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San Francisco, CA 94105-4014
THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY is a
statewide membership-based organization designated
by the Legislature as the state historical
society. The California Historical Society inspires
and empowers Californians to make the past a
meaningful part of their contemporary lives. In
support of this mission, CHS respects and incorporates
the multiple perspectives, stories, and
experiences of California; acts as a respon sible
steward of historical resources within its care;
supports the work of other historical organizations
throughout the state; fosters and disseminates
scholarship to the broadest audi ences; and
ensures that California history is integrated fully
into the social studies curricula at all levels.
A quarterly journal published by CHS since 1922,
California History features articles by leading
scholars and writers focusing on the heritage
of California and the West from pre-Columbian
to modern times. Illustrated articles, pictorial
essays, and book reviews examine the ongoing
dialogue between the past and the present.
Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted
and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America:
History and Life. The Society assumes no
responsibility for statements or opinions of the
authors . MANUSCRIPTS for publication and
editorial correspondence should be sent to
Janet Fireman, Editor, California History, History
Department, Loyola Marymount University,
One LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045-8415,
or jfireman@lmu.edu. BOOKS FOR REVIEW
should be sent to James Rawls, Reviews Editor,
California Historical Society, 678 Mission Street,
San Francisco, CA 94105-4014 .
California historical society
www.californiahistoricalsociety.org
f r o m t h e e d i t o r
soMEThing in ThE soil
What produces a writer who, grounded so deeply in his native state, rousingly
evoked the heights and depths of his characters’ hearts and souls commensurate
with powerful portrayals of lofty mountains and the arc of the ocean waves?
What nurtures the quirky genius of a New England immigrant whose imagination
and unique skill in plant breeding were so productive and innovative that
he was heralded by scientists and poets alike: “a unique, great genius” (the
botanist Hugo De Vries) and “the man who is helping God make the earth more
beautiful” (the poet Joaquin Miller)?
What yields the steadfastness of an isolated, rural woman who promoted radical
ideas about women’s suffrage and financial independence, persevering and
finally translating her commitments into effective civic activism, including
becoming the first woman in the country elected Master of a chapter of the
Grange, the influential farmers’ movement?
For each of these extraordinarily creative and gifted individuals, California provided
the challenge, environment, and inspiration to carve a distinctive niche
and establish varying degrees of recognition and status in their own times.
In this issue, Forrest G. Robinson sketches the life and labor of an author whose
novels and nonfiction works replicated and memorialized his beloved California
and his adopted second home of Hawaii. With “James D. Houston, Californian,”
Robinson delineates Houston’s status as a California Legacy.
Jane S. Smith’s “Luther Burbank’s Spineless Cactus: Boom Times in the California
Desert” is a witty telling of a fascinating experiment. With narrative as
smooth as the spineless paddles of the un-prickled pear (Opuntia) cactus that
the Wizard of Santa Rosa bred, Smith unveils the ingredients of the spineless
cactus craze—an agricultural bubble based on practicality, greed, science, and
Burbank’s own deliberate quest for fame, all generated by his development of
countless horicultural feats.
Matthew Nye brings to light for the first time “A Life Remembered: The Voice
and Passions of Feminist Writer and Community Activist Flora Kimball.” Educator,
writer, and influential advocate of equal suffrage for women, Kimball was a
founder, with her husband and his brothers, of National City. Through her writings
in the statewide Grange publication, the California Patron, she left a permanent
record of her position on the equality of women, surely representative of
thousands of her silent contemporaries.
What spurred the exceptional accomplishments of Houston, Burbank, and Kimball?
Could it have been something in the soil?
Janet Fireman
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010

c o l l e c t i o n s
Ex Libris
(From the Library of . . .)
The bookplates of hundreds of individuals
and organizations in CHS’s
Kemble Collections on Western
Printing and Publishing are part of a
long-standing tradition. Beginning in
the fourteenth century, when books
were rare, book owners glued decorative
labels to the inside covers of their
books to safeguard their possessions.
As the popularity of bookplates soared
between 1890 and 1940, the number
of collectors in the United States grew
to about 5,000. The CHS bookplate
collection, which merges literature
with art and typography, preserves this
time-honored hobby and confirms its
appeal. Its example can only hint at the
satisfaction that comes from knowing
a book’s provenance and its owner’s
interests.
After the 1950s, perhaps due to the
introduction of the paperback book,
William A. Brewer Collection of California Bookplates,
Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing
bookplate production nearly disappeared.
Today, with the advent of electronic
book-readers, many people may
never even know about, much less
use them.
The accompanying plates reveal varieties
of self-expression and styles of art,
as well as individual attitudes toward
book ownership—from a sketch club’s
warning to “Drink deep or taste not” to
the claim, illustrated by bookplate artist
Franklin Bittner, that “Dog on it, this is
my Book.”
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c o l l e c t i o n s
4 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010

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c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
James D. Houston, Californian
By Forrest G. Robinson
James D. Houston, known to his friends as
Jim, placed a high value on order, stability,
continuity, permanence. He spent virtually
all of his adult life married to the same
woman, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston; they lived
together and raised three children in the same
old house in Santa Cruz, a coastal town tucked
into the northwestern end of Monterey Bay,
about an hour and a half south of San Francisco
on scenic Highway 1. The town—itself pretty old,
as such things go in this region—is famous for
its redwoods, its surfing, and its branch of the
University of California.
Jim loved northern California—the land, the
history, the culture—and he especially loved
the beautiful setting and slow-paced, unpretentious
style of life in the seaside town that he and
Jeanne made their home. It was here that Jim,
over a period of nearly half a century, established
himself as a writer, a musician, a teacher, a very
visible and valued member of the local community,
and a beloved friend to many. When he and
Jeanne first moved to Santa Cruz in 1962, Jim
recalled in a recent interview, “We both agreed
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
we wanted to live here. . . . There was no lucrative
job calling us. It wasn’t about professional advantage.
Something about the locale itself had an
appeal that turned out to be very strengthening.
You might say I was sticking close to my natural
habitat.” 1
Jim was born in San Francisco in 1933. His parents
were newcomers to California, recent arrivals
from Texas who joined the Depression-era
migration west in search of a better life. They
weren’t disappointed. The family moved only
once more, just a short distance south to the
Santa Clara Valley, where they put down roots.
After finishing high school, Jim completed a
B.A., studying drama at nearby San Jose State
University. Here he met Jeanne Wakatsuki, the
daughter of Japanese immigrants who were living
in the area. They were married in Honolulu
in 1957, then moved to England where Jim completed
a three-year tour as an information officer
with a tactical fighter-bomber wing of the U.S.
Air Force. The young couple traveled extensively
in Europe before returning to northern California
and to a course of study leading to an M.A. in
American Literature at Stanford University.

Alfred Russel Wallace
Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–
1913) is considered by many the codiscoverer,
with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural
selection. During his 1886–87 lecture
tour in America, Wallace explained the principles
of evolution to American audiences
from Boston to San Francisco. Later, his
lectures were published in his signature work
on that subject, Darwinism (1889). Among
the noted individuals he met in California
was pioneer environmentalist John Muir,
to whom he presented this studio portrait,
made in San Francisco, with a note of “kind
remembrances” on the back.
John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special
Collections, University of the Pacific Library;
copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust
“Few writers have more consistently addressed the
enduring issues arising out of the California experience,”
wrote Kevin Starr about James D. Houston
(1933–2009). Finding inspiration in the state’s natural
environment, history, and culture, and empathizing
with the human emotions they produced, Houston
contributed to the California literary landscape with
eight novels, numerous essays, and nonfiction books.
This photograph, made circa 2000 in his studio in the
cupola of his historic Santa Cruz home, provides an
intimate glimpse of the man and his work: standing up
to write, with drafts of pages displayed on a clothesline
running across the length of his desk.
Courtesy of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston;
photograph by Thomas Becker
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c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
Once settled in Santa Cruz, just an hour’s drive
away, Jim returned to Stanford in 1966, this
time as a fellow in the celebrated creative writing
program directed by Wallace Stegner, who was a
valued mentor and enduring influence. Jim supported
his growing family and bought time for
writing by teaching classical and folk guitar and
playing bass in a local piano bar. His first book,
Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, which he coauthored
with Ben R. Finney and which reflected
his strong attraction to Hawaiian culture,
appeared in 1966. A teaching stint at Stanford
coincided with the publication of his first novel,
Between Battles, in 1968. Teaching on a more
permanent footing commenced at the new Santa
Cruz campus of the University of California in
1969. A second novel, Gig, winner of the Joseph
Henry Jackson Award for Fiction—presented by
the San Francisco Foundation as an encouragement
to new writers—and dedicated “with special
thanks to Wallace Stegner,” appeared in the
same year. Jim’s career as a full-time professional
writer was now well launched.
It is probably impossible to overstate the importance
of place—of northern California and the
wide Pacific region it embraces—in Jim’s life
and work. “By place,” he has written, “I don’t
mean simply names and points of interest and
identified on a map.” Rather, it is “the relationship
between a locale and the lives lived there,
the relationship between terrain and the feelings
it can call out of us, the way a certain place can
provide us with grounding, location, meaning,
can bear upon the dreams we dream, can sometimes
shape our view of history.” 2
Drawn directly from Jim’s personal experience,
this credo for literature and life took reinforcement
from his teacher Wallace Stegner’s emphasis
on a western “geography of hope” and echoes
the views of his contemporary and friend Kevin
Starr, preeminent chronicler of the California
Dream. Jim’s earliest published writing may
appear, in retrospect, to be journeyman work in
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
which he perfected his technical skills and at the
same time sharpened his focus on the specific
place, culture, and themes that came, in time,
to define his literary identity as a modern realist
and historical novelist of California and the
Pacific Rim.
Early WorK
Surfing is an enthusiast’s overview of all aspects
of the sport, with special attention to its antiquity
and to its decline during the century of foreign
incursions to the Hawaiian Islands culminating
in the American takeover in 1898. This
“tragedy,” which robbed the Hawaiians of their
social, economic, and political independence,
was accompanied by a sharp decline in the native
population and in traditional religious beliefs and
cultural practices. Against this grave background,
Houston welcomes the twentieth-century revival
of surfing, which spread from Waikiki Beach in
Honolulu to the coast of California, and more
widely after World War II to coastal sites around
the world. Much of the wonder of the old Hawaiian
order was lost forever. But the renewal and
flourishing of this ancient sporting institution—
complete with “clubs, championships, commercial
importance, mountainous waves to generate
modern myths, and worldwide romantic symbolism”
3 —is the source of evident gratification to
a lover of natural beauty, sunshine, the sea, and
time-tested expressions of human pleasure and
solidarity.
Between Battles draws on another major dimension
in Jim’s early life, his military service on
an American air base in England. Though set
in the historical period “between battles” of the
late 1950s, the novel was written and published
a decade later, as the Vietnam War escalated. It is
everywhere alive to the comedy of incompetence
and waste and tedium of military life. Some of its
best writing surfaces in brief, wonderfully imagined
takes on the all-too-human actors in a peacetime
army. There is the colonel who “resembled

Houston began writing in the Air Force while stationed in Britain, publishing his first story in 1959 in the London
literary journal Gemini. Another early work won a U.S. Air Force short story contest. In this photograph from 1959,
he and his new wife, Jeanne, look out the window of Hillcrest, their thatched-roof cottage in Finchingfield.
Courtesy of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
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c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
Orson Welles trying to imitate Curtis LeMay” and
“Staff Sgt. Hart, a serious little man from Nevada,
with the neck and face of a surprised turkey.” 4
But with an obvious eye to the much more consequential
realities of Vietnam, the novel offers
itself as a cautionary tale about how good people
can get caught up in the darkly seductive allure
of modern warfare. Don Stillwell, a pilot whose
plan to become an architect is cut short by a fatal
crash, admits just before the book’s end that his
military career has been “entirely senseless.”
He is “sickened” by the thought of “training for
years just to learn more efficient ways to destroy
installations and cities with nuclear weapons,”
and looks forward instead to learning “how to
build cities” for the future. Stillwell’s message is
not lost on the novel’s narrator, Lieutenant Sam
Young, a college graduate and fledgling writer
from California clearly modeled on the novelist
himself. Traveling across England by train after
his discharge, he surveys the “thatched rooves
and tangled lanes and steeples poking over every
country knoll” and reflects that “this world had
often beguiled me. I too was drawn to things
that lasted.” 5
Jim’s third book and second novel, Gig, is the
first actually set in northern California. Written
during the year of his Wallace Stegner Creative
Writing Fellowship at Stanford, Gig draws
directly on Jim’s experiences as the bass player
in a combo playing at a fashionable Santa Cruz
restaurant. The novel’s narrator and protagonist,
Roy Ambrose, confines his story to the events of a
single evening at the lounge where he entertains
a large handful of patrons who gather to drink
and socialize around his piano. Attentive in an
evidently self-conscious way to the classical unities
of time, place, and action, the narrative has a
partial focus in what Roy describes as his “invisible
iron maiden,” 6 the fear that he will somehow
fail as an entertainer and lose his audience.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
Along with occasional traces of then fashionable
existentialism, the novel demonstrates signs
of impatience with the smug conservatism of
American middle-class life in the late 1960s, a
time when “spending is the ultimate act of faith”
and people “are dying of complacency and too
much food.” 7 Though well written and lively in
its pacing, it is a rather slender performance, and
feels at times like a linked sequence of literary
exercises in plot management, characterization,
and dialogue.
Though none of these early books fully anticipates
the more important work that would soon
follow, viewed in the aggregate, Surfing, Between
Battles, and Gig display many of the most prominent
elements in that later writing. The key
locations—Santa Cruz, northern California, and
Hawaii—are all featured. So are many of the key
players: young people, musicians, Hawaiians,
surfers. There is the emphasis that would endure
on ordinary people following their dreams in
search of the good life as it is frequently imagined
and sometimes realized in the golden West.
hisToriCal QuEsTs For ThE
CaliFornia DrEaM
It was clear from the start that Jim’s writing
would draw heavily on his own experience, and
that it would form itself into realistic, often
redemptive narratives strong on tolerance,
humor, pleasure, and peace. Much of this would
find expression in his favorite music, which
figures prominently both in the lives of his characters
and in the themes that dominate their
stories. Indeed, Jim was aware from early on that
music was definitive in his life, as a form of pleasure,
as a profession, and as a range of preferred
styles and techniques that situated him in time.
Though he began to emerge as a novelist of note
during the era of the Beatles and rock and roll,
Jim’s tastes ran to a wide array of earlier musical
forms—the Hawaiian slack-key guitar and “Okie”

Houston’s passion for music nurtured his writing and revealed his individuality. His Santa Cruz bluegrass band, the Red Mountain
Boys—shown here walking in an open field on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus circa 1972—was a popular
mainstay of the area’s music scene: (left to right) Jim Houston, Ron Litowski, Marsh Leiceter, Kent Taylor, and Page Stegner.
Courtesy of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
songs that his father loved, traditional bluegrass,
and the popular tunes, show music, and big-band
sound that Gig’s Roy Ambrose claims for people
of his own generation, “whose tastes and images
were mainly shaped during the thirties and forties.”
Jim was certainly attuned to and supportive
of the forward-looking ideals of young people in
the 1960s and 1970s, but his musical tastes were
part and parcel with his attraction to the values
and lifestyles of ordinary people in an earlier, less
sophisticated America. As Ambrose goes on to
observe of his generation, we “are afflicted with
nostalgia and constantly look for ways to bring
our past into the present.” 8 The fictional narrator
speaks clearly here for his maker, a novelist alive
to the lessons of history and to the great value of
“things that lasted.”
Published just two years after Gig, A Native Son of
the Golden West is a more ambitious installment
on the theme of historical continuities. The novel
is longer, formally more sophisticated, and more
elaborate in matters of plot and characterization
than anything that Jim previously had written.
Hooper Dunlap, a young, footloose surfer from
southern California, quits college and migrates
to Hawaii, where he hopes to satisfy his yearning
for adventure—which he defines quite vaguely
as “something improbable we can take real
pride in.” 9
Hooper’s character and quest are variations on
a Dunlap family tradition, represented in the
narrative by a series of flashbacks to generations
of forebearers migrating from Great Britain to
the United States in the eighteenth century and
crossing the continent to California in the twentieth.
But Dunlap habits of mobility are in tension
for the young protagonist with the values of his
father, a hardworking Christian fundamentalist
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c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
who has put down roots in California. In taking
flight to Hawaii, Hooper has rejected religious
rectitude and domestic stability for a life of aimless,
sun-drenched self-indulgence in surfing,
sex, booze, and music. His role model and adoptive
father figure in Honolulu is Jackson Broome,
an aging vagabond who owns the condemned
boardinghouse where Hooper takes up temporary
residence. They recognize their kinship almost
immediately. “Whenever that Hooper comes in
here,” Broome declares, “he makes me want
to cry. He’s so much like me at that age, I can’t
hardly stand it. Not much idea what he wants to
do. Just out here farting around. The way all of
us wish we could do all our lives. Matter of what
you can get away with. I’ve always thought that
was the main aim of damn near every man I’ve
ever run across, to fart around as much as possible.
Sooner or later a woman’ll come along,
though, and throw you off course.” 10
The old man proves prophetic; indeed, the
woman who comes along to throw Hooper off
course is Broome’s niece, Nona, a beautiful
young dancer who works at a hotel near the
boardinghouse. She is soon pregnant, and looks
to Hooper for commitments to herself, their
child, and a responsible future. But he is indecisive.
This is not what he had in mind when he
left California. Events accelerate toward a crisis.
Broome dies suddenly of a heart attack; Hooper
and a friend transport his body in a sailboat out
to sea for burial. But will he decide to go back
for Nona? That question goes unanswered when
Hooper is killed in a careless accident. The novel
closes nearly two decades later, as his son leaves
California on his own.
Like father, like son. And yet in seeming to
affirm Hooper’s legacy, A Native Son of the
Golden West represents the young man’s dream
of carefree wandering in a decidedly critical
light. Though a talented and attractive character,
Hooper is emotionally immature; he takes what
he wants from others, but shares little of him-
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
self in return. “I keep getting the feeling,” Nona
complains, “that you don’t care about me.” 11 Her
concerns are well founded. Hooper is enthralled
by an image of himself engaged in endless new
beginnings—new places, new people, new experiences,
with little that is constant save sunshine,
music, sexual conquest, and the regularity of
change itself.
We can be sure that Jim Houston had a more
than passing familiarity with his young protagonist’s
ideas about the good life. The proof is in
the energy and plausibility of his writing about
those ideas. But where Hooper succumbed in his
early twenties to the consequences of his own
carelessness, the rising novelist in his late thirties
was preparing to settle down in one place
with a wife and growing family. Cast in this light,
A Native Son of the Golden West may be read as
a meditation on two versions of the California
dream, one of youthful indulgence in variety and
change, the other of mature dedication to growth,
continuity, and permanence.
Jim’s ambivalence about accelerating change in
California takes humorous expression in The
Adventures of Charlie Bates, first published in 1973
and reissued in slightly modified form as Gasoline
in 1980. The slender volume is a gathering
of seven darkly comical stories unified around
the eponymous hero and his love/hate relationship
with the modern automobile. In the course
of his adventures, Charlie runs through several
cars, as many fascinating females, several nearly
global traffic jams and earth-shaking collisions,
right into the madhouse. Cars are potently seductive—fast,
liberating, fun. But they are also the
chrome-plated symptoms—internally combustible
metal monsters roaring at breakneck speed
through toxic fumes on endless miles of concrete
over hubcaps and tailpipes and humans and
other debris—of accelerating social lunacy. One
of society’s children, Charlie is literally car crazy.

The stories trace the gradual deepening of
Charlie’s derangement. The first, “Gas Mask,”
finds him at the numb stage. Ingenuous, utterly
uncritical, he views a weeklong traffic jam as an
interesting diversion. Charlie and his wife, Fay,
pack sandwiches and a thermos, rent an apartment
near the freeway, and calmly survey the
spectacle through a pair of navy binoculars. After
all, Charlie reflects, “this was really the only civilized
way to behave.” But as one story succeeds
another, Charlie’s world becomes more chaotic
and absurd. Against a background of squealing
tires, collapsing bumpers, and the hiss of steam
from twisted radiators, baffled motorists try in
vain to find their way. “Hey, what the hell’s going
on around here!” 12 cries a red-faced man lost on
the fifty-fifth floor of a hundred-story parking
tower. There are no answers. The wreckage simply
continues to pile up as more and more people
disappear under it.
Charlie survives, but only by retreating into a
world of fantasy. The final story, “The Odyssey
of Charlie Bates,” opens to the cacophony of a
multicar collision outside a freeway tunnel. Bolting
from what remains of his car, Charlie runs
into Antonia, a fetching astrology freak. Together
they wander into the tunnel, where hundreds of
frenzied accident victims surrender to their animal
urges. Naked bodies writhe; a mad bomber
threatens; soldiers join in with guns and clubs.
Reaching the far end of the long, narrowing tunnel,
Charlie next teams up with Fanny, a vendor
of griddle cakes. In a fanciful rebirth, they emerge
from the darkness into a pre-automotive world of
banjo bands and bicycles built for two. The only
answer to the madness of the present, it appears,
is nostalgic retreat to an imagined, idyllic past.
Jim’s next novel emphatically confirms that his
imaginative treatment of the California dream
runs readily and frequently to nightmare. Published
in 1978, Continental Drift is the first of
three novels centrally concerned with the lives
and mingled fortunes of the Doyle family. The
book’s title refers to the massive fault line that
runs like original sin right down the spine of
California, always there, below the surface of
the action, ready to unleash destruction. It cuts
across the west side of the inherited, northern
California family ranch of Monty Doyle and
serves as a constant reminder that the dream of
human possibility in this Pacific outpost of paradise
is extremely fragile, just one major upheaval
away from disintegration.
Jim’s writing is more confident than ever in
Continental Drift, probably the best of the three
volumes in the Doyle trilogy. It is a very complicated
narrative, with lots of twists and turns
through multiple strands and perspectives deftly
coordinated to produce a maximum of suspense.
In many of its episodes, and in its pervasive tone
of imminent catastrophe, the novel is strongly
reminiscent of the period and place in which it
is set, Santa Cruz in the 1970s, with its backdrop
of war, generational conflict, drugs, cults, and
ghastly serial murders. “You ever get the feeling
that everybody in the whole wide world is going
nuts?” asks Monty’s older son, Grover. “It’s more
than a feeling,” his father replies; “I get an absolute
certainty.” 13
Geological instability is the natural correlative to
major disturbances in the local community as
they play themselves out in the Doyle family. In
the broadest historical terms, such troubles are
linked to those of all the fortune seekers who
have come to California, “dreaming of conquest,
dreaming of ranches . . . unending waves of
explorers, wizards, gypsies, visionaries, conquistadors,
people who want to take what is here and
turn it into something else.” 14
Closer to home, tremors run through the family
in waves of marital infidelity, sibling rivalry,
and the bitter harvest of war. Monty’s younger
son, Travis, is just back from a tour of duty in
Vietnam, an experience that has left him physically
and emotionally handicapped. He places
the blame for his suffering on his father, “the old
13

14
Santa Cruz’s 1894 courthouse—renamed the Cooper House in the 1960s and destroyed by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake—was
the scene for this 1973 assemblage of members of the Santa Cruz literary community: (windows, left to right) Morton Marcus,
Peter S. Beagle, Anne Steinhardt, Robert Lundquist, James B. Hall, Steve Levine, Victor Perera, T. Mike Walker; (standing, left
to right) James D. Houston, William Everson, Mason Smith; (seated, left to right) John Deck, Lou Mathews, Nels Hanson,
George Hitchcock.
Courtesy of Gary Griggs
conquistador” who now deeply regrets having “let
his son be crippled fighting another country’s
wars.” It hardly helps that Monty lusts after Crystal,
the pretty but promiscuous girl that Travis
has brought home with him. She is a potent
reminder of old fractures in Monty’s marriage to
Leona, his wife of many years and the intuitive,
morally grounded center of gravity in the entire
trilogy. Leona is attentive to the movements
of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, and to
ominous turbulence around the dread “ring of
fire” that encircles the Pacific Rim. The times
are out of joint. Globally, nationally, locally, and
right at home, Leona is witness to linked portents
of an “apocalyptic turning point in the near or
distant future.” 15
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
The domestic drama at the center of Continental
Drift intersects with a gripping murder mystery
that Monty—who is a journalist when he is
not tending to the ranch—follows closely and
finally helps to solve. It will not do to spoil the
pleasure of future readers by summarizing the
plot. Suffice it to say that the unraveling of the
mystery brings the members of the Doyle family
through a painful crisis to subsequent stages of
clarification and real, if incomplete, resolution.
The earthquake of their recent lives is restored
to calm and sanity at the Tassajara hot springs, a
remote Zen Buddhist retreat in the Ventana Wilderness
east of Big Sur. Here, at novel’s end, the
Doyles rediscover what they love about California,
the health and wholeness and union with nature
that generously compensate for its faults. Travis

makes the trip but draws back from the reunited
family once they have arrived in order to explore
the healing potential of Zen spirituality. We have
not heard the last of his troubles.
Jim returned to the Doyle saga with Love Life,
published in 1985. It is a novel true to its title,
mixing roughly equal parts of family drama,
soul-searching dialogue, sex, whiskey, country
music, and the mysterious tides of fate, all set
in and around the family ranch in northern
California. The domestic crisis is played out this
time against a background of biblical flood reminiscent
of the punitive deluge that swamped the
region in the winter of 1981.
In a strikingly formal departure, Jim elected to
tell his story in the first-person voice of Holly
Doyle, the thirty-two-year-old wife of Monty and
Leona’s older son, Grover. He succeeds admirably
in creating a narrative around topics and in a
tone that will strike many as distinctively “feminine.”
Indeed, Love Life comes closer than anything
else Jim wrote to being a popular romance.
It is all about the trials and tribulations—some
serious, some decidedly humorous—of sexually
liberated modern love. The narrative is set
in motion by Grover’s infidelity. There is no
little attention to women’s liberation, to selfactualization,
and to sexual experiment. “There
is a male within the female,” Grover insists,
“and there is a female within the male. Until you
are in touch with that, you are only living half
a life.” As if to acknowledge that her story tilts
rather perilously toward pulp melodrama, Holly
tells her friend Maureen that “we were all acting
like those people you hear about on the jukebox.
No matter how hard you try, sooner or later
you end up somewhere inside a country-andwestern
song.” 16
The natural fury unleashed by the storm of
Grover’s betrayal brings ordinary life to a standstill,
and forces Holly and Grover into a week
of isolation on their remote homestead. There,
threatened by mudslides and on limited supplies,
but thanks to the sage counsel of Leona and the
lubricating influence of alcohol, they come to
terms with some hard truths about themselves
and their marriage. Down to earth and completely
honest, Leona admits that she has made
mistakes in raising her sons but nonetheless
brings Holly to the recognition that her own
doubts and fears have been major obstacles to the
success of her marriage to Grover. Leona is more
bluntly open with her son. “Mothers always know
what’s going on,” she warns, but only as the
prelude to a tearful outpouring of maternal love.
Strengthened inwardly by his mother’s display of
support, Grover comes in time to recognize that
his own disabling fear of losing control has been
an impediment to the fruition of his relationship
with Holly. The storm has passed, and the novel
ends, as Jim’s novels tend to, with a renewal of
clarity and with real, if measured, affirmations
of home, family, continuity, and the informing
influence of place. Fittingly enough, Hank Williams
has what amounts to the last word: “I can’t
help it if I’m still in love with you.” 17
The final volume in the Doyle trilogy, The Last
Paradise, appeared in 1998. Like Continental Drift,
it is a mystery novel, this time with a discernibly
noir plot and tone. And like both of its predecessors,
it follows a love story through multiple
complications to a crisis and final resolution. The
action of the novel has moved to Hawaii, though
ties with northern California are clearly maintained,
and there are constant reminders of geological,
historical, and cultural continuities within
the region defined by the Pacific Rim. Nature is
again one of the principal dramatis personae,
this time as the molten “ring of fire” encircling
the entire Pacific and locally manifest in Pele, the
mythological goddess of volcanoes, said to reside
in the Halemaumau Crater at the summit of
Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. Like
the earthquakes and storms in the earlier novels,
Pele is a force to be reckoned with, chastening
foolish humans when they wander from the path
of natural goodness.
15

16
c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
Travis Doyle, last seen seeking the truth at Tassajara,
is now thirty-two years old and still lost.
His marriage is on the rocks, and he is an insurance
claims adjuster on assignment in Hawaii,
where a mainland company drilling for geothermal
energy is locked in conflict with the local
Hawaiians, who have had enough of outsiders
exploiting and desecrating their sacred homeland.
Travis has a special affinity for the Pacific.
As his mother, Leona, later reveals to him, his
“touch point” in life, the place of his conception,
was right on the fault line. For a long time, she
believed that “his years of restlessness and roaming”
were directly linked to the fact that he was
“a natural-born son of earthquake country.” But
events persuade her that “we have been looking
in the wrong place” for explanations. Instead
of looking back to their ranch on the fault line,
poised “to break loose at any moment and float
away,” they should “look straight ahead and think
about this ring, this rim we are on. . . . Aren’t we
on the edge of some great big wheel here?” 18 As it
turns out, Travis’s business trip to Hawaii is the
beginning of a spiritual journey toward the hub of
that wheel, the volcanic Pacific Rim, where he will
discover his rightful place and people.
It is entirely consistent with Leona’s prophetic
emphasis on hidden continuities that Travis’s
future should centrally involve a woman who
emerges out of his past. He first met Evangeline—his
destined evangelist and literary descendant
of the heroine of Longfellow’s famous
poem—during a visit to Hawaii when he was just
sixteen. While their fathers paid their respects at
the national monument at Pearl Harbor, Travis
and Evangeline commenced a passionate eightweek
romance that lived on in his consciousness,
not in words or remembered images but as “a
globe of honey-colored light.” 19 Now, two decades
later, they are fatefully reunited at a time of crisis
in which their rekindled love nearly succumbs to
the torque of competing affiliations.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
In time, however, Evangeline converts Travis to
the teachings of Pele and enlists his support in
the struggle to protect the native environment
from the depredations of the mainland developers.
Like Travis, Evangeline is a child of fire,
having been baptized by her native Hawaiian
great-grandmother in the name of Pele. In bringing
Travis to the fire goddess, she restores him to
his natal spirituality, and thus reaffirms the special
force of the love that first drew them together.
At novel’s end, Travis returns to California, leaving
Evangeline, who is pregnant with their child,
temporarily behind. But we feel that their future
as a couple is secure, aligned as it is with traditional
spirituality and grounded in primordial
continuities linking remote ancestors with the
children of tomorrow. “The mind forgets” such
things, Evangeline reflects, “but the body can
remember and hear that oldest calling.” 20
farewell to Manzanar anD
nonFiCTion WorKs
In the course of his long, extremely productive
career as a professional writer, Jim earned wide
recognition as a regional novelist of the first
rank. But he also made stellar contributions to
the field of nonfiction. Most notably, perhaps, he
worked together with his wife, Jeanne, in composing
Farewell to Manzanar, the autobiographical
narrative of her childhood years in a World
War II Japanese American internment camp in
the Owens Valley. First published in 1972—and
adapted for a two-hour television production in
1976—the memoir broke important new historical
ground and quickly established itself as
a staple in high school and university courses
across the country.
Jim and Jeanne teamed up again in the singlevolume
1985 publication that combined her
Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American
Womanhood with his One Can Think About Life
After the Fish Is in the Canoe, and Other Coastal
ConTinUeD on P. 20

Farewell to Manzanar
In the early 1970s, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston began
to recall long-suppressed memories of her family’s
exile in an internment camp in Owens Valley during
World War II. These encounters with her past produced a
groundbreaking and compelling account of the wartime
treatment of Japanese Americans, which was published
in 1973 as Farewell to Manzanar. Co-authored with her
husband, the book is now a California classic and standard
reading in schools and colleges across the country.
As James recalled in a 2007 interview, “Not long after
Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese military in
December 1941, an entire subculture was rounded up
and evacuated to ten camps, remote and godforsaken
places well inland, away from the coast—120,000 people,
whole families and mostly native-born American citizens,
my wife among them, her nine brothers and sisters, her
mother and father. The book we wrote together is her
story, her family’s story. She was seven when the war
started, eleven when they got out of Manzanar. Twentyfive
years later we sat down in our living room here with
a tape recorder and she began to voice things she’d
never talked about, not with me, not with anyone.” 1
Houston also spoke of his writing in the contexts of California
as a cultural crossroads and as a region of dreams,
“the ones that come true and the ones that unravel”—
themes that ring true in Farewell to Manzanar. “For me,”
he acknowledged, “meeting Jeanne and her family, then
working with her on Farewell to Manzanar was a huge
awakening. . . . It was the beginning of an education . . .
my first glimpse of another place, another way of being
in this land, of a life and a history that reaches both ways
across the water.” 2
The following excerpts, paired with selections from the
collection of Ansel Adams’s photographs of Japanese
American internment at Manzanar, housed in the Library
of Congress, give a personal voice to a troubled era in
California’s history.
—The Editors
excerpts from Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki
Houston and James D. Houston. Copyright © 1973 by James D.
Houston. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The cover of this edition of Farewell to Manzanar, published
by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, features photographs
of Jeanne and members of the Wakatsuki family during their
internment, circa 1942–43.
“We rode all day. By the time we reached our destination, the shades were
up. It was late afternoon. The first thing I saw was a yellow swirl across
a blurred, reddish setting sun. The bus was being pelted by what sounded
like splattering rain. It wasn’t rain. This was my first look at something
I would soon know very well, a billowing flurry of dust and sand churned
up by the wind through Owens Valley.”
17

“We drove past a barbed-wire fence, through a
gate, and into an open space where trunks and
sacks and packages had been dumped from the
baggage trucks that drove out ahead of us. I could
see a few tents set up, the first rows of black barracks,
and beyond them, blurred by sand, rows of
barracks that seemed to spread for miles across this
plain.”
“In Spanish, Manzanar means ‘apple orchard.’
Great stretches of Owens Valley were once green
with orchards and alfalfa fields. It has been a desert
ever since its water started flowing south into
Los Angeles. . . . But a few rows of untended pear
and apple trees were still growing there when the
camp opened, where a shallow water table had
kept them alive. In the spring of 1943 we moved
to Block 28, right up next to one of the old pear
orchards. That’s where we stayed until the end of
the war, and those trees stand in my memory for
the turning of our life in camp, from the outrageous
to the tolerable.”
18 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010

“Before Manzanar, mealtime had always been
the center of our family scene. In camp, and
afterward, I would often recall with deep yearning
the old round wooden table in our dining room
in Ocean Park, the biggest piece of furniture we
owned, large enough to seat twelve or thirteen of
us at once. . . . Dinners were always noisy, and they
were always abundant with great pots of boiled
rice, platters of home-grown vegetables, fish Papa
caught. . . . My own family, after three years of
mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit.
Whatever dignity or feeling of filial strength we
may have known before December 1941 was lost.”
“As the months at Manzanar turned to years,
it became a world unto itself, with its own logic
and familiar ways. In time, staying there seemed
far simpler than moving once again to another,
unknown place. It was as if the war were forgotten,
our reason for being there forgotten. The present,
the little bit of busywork you had right in front
of you, became the most urgent thing. In such a
narrowed world, in order to survive, you learn to
contain your rage and your despair, and you try to
re-create, as well as you can, your normality, some
sense of things continuing.”
19

c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
Sketches. Jim’s very readable Californians: Searching
for the Golden State, a collection of brief travel
narratives featuring exchanges with such notables
as Luis Valdez, Steve Jobs, and Tom Bradley,
appeared in 1982. Where Light Takes Its Color
from the Sea, A California Notebook, published in
2008, is a kindred selection of memories and
reflections highlighted by illuminating chapters
on Wallace Stegner and Ray Carver.
And there is more—a substantial shelf of nonfiction
that stretches to include Open Field (1974),
a biography of 49ers quarterback John Brodie;
The Men in My Life (1987), a volume of “More or
Less True Recollections of Kinship”; In the Ring of
Fire (1997), the narrative of a journey through the
Pacific Basin; Hawaiian Son: The Life and Music
of Eddie Kamae (2004), a tribute to the legendary
ukulele virtuoso; and numerous collections of
West Coast writing, most notably volume 1 of The
Literature of California, co-edited with Jack Hicks,
Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young, published
by the University of California Press in 2000.
Snow Mountain PaSSage anD
laTEr WorKs
But Jim will be remembered best for his novels,
the writing that most fully engaged his creative
attention and talent. Doubtless the most memorable
novel of them all is Snow Mountain Passage,
the superb fictional re-creation of a defining
chapter in California history, published to considerable
acclaim in 2001. The inspiration for the
novel lent great credence to Jim’s sense that the
important things in life happen for a reason.
After inhabiting their Santa Cruz Victorian for
several decades, all the while employing its lofty
cupola as his study, Jim discovered, apparently
quite by chance, that Patty Reed, one of the children
who survived the infamous Donner Party
tragedy of 1846–47, had lived in the house until
the end of her long life. Her father, James Frazier
Reed, was one of the principal organizers of
the ill-fated wagon train and a protagonist in the
20 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
conflicted events that left the party trapped for
the winter in the frozen Sierra.
For a novelist interested in history, family, and
continuities of time and place, and who believed,
as Jim certainly did, that “old voices are always in
the air, in the towns and in the soil, waiting to be
heard,” this was a story he was destined to write.
In “Where Does History Live?”—his essay on the
novel’s fateful provenance—Jim describes his
surrender to the potent attraction of the project
and his sudden, startling access to the characterizing
words and cadences of Patty Reed’s voice.
“I would not call it an actual sound in my head,”
he recalls; “nor was it the quaver of ghostly sentences
rising out of shadowy cobwebs at the far
side of the attic. Rather, it was the distinct sense
of a certain way of remembering, a way of speaking
as the elderly woman Patty Reed might have
spoken in the years when she lived here, before
she died in the bedroom downstairs.” It was the
advent of that voice, he goes on, that “gave me a
way into this novel.” 21
There can be no question that Jim’s empathic
ingress to Patty’s sensibility is integral to the success
of Snow Mountain Passage. She is a sturdy
but forgiving moralist who does not shrink from
the appraisal of her father’s very consequential
character flaws and errors in judgment. “I cannot
excuse him,” she admits; “yet neither is it my
place to judge him, as others have, or to judge
the way he contended with the trials of that crossing.”
Her father attracted enemies, she recalls, in
her vigorous western vernacular, “like an open jar
of jam will gather ants and blowflies. This cannot
be denied.” 22
Patty is a woman made wise before her years
by the terrible events of her childhood. “By age
nine,” she reflects, “I had come to see that each
hour of my life was a wonder.” But we approach
the deep human center of what Patty Reed has
taken from her experience in the novel’s extraordinary
opening, an extract from the fictional “trail
notes” that Jim created as the vehicle for her

unique voice. Describing a dream in which she
sees her mother, Patty writes, “She was speaking
words I could not hear. I ran through the snow,
while her mouth spoke the silent words. I was
young, a little girl, and also the age I am now. For
a long time I ran toward her with outstretched
arms. Finally I was close enough to hear her soft
voice say, ‘You understand that men will always
leave you.’ I stopped running and in my mind
called out to her, ‘No. It isn’t so!’ Her mouth
twitched, as if she were about to speak again.
She wanted to say, ‘Listen to me, Patty.’ She was
trying to say it. I woke up then and spoke aloud.
‘Women leave you too.’ I was speaking right to
her, and I waited, expecting to hear her voice in
my ear, as if she were close by me in the dark. I
whispered, ‘Don’t you remember?’ But she was
gone.” 23
Too soon and too painfully for a child, that long,
desperate winter in the Sierra taught Patty that
there are no sure things in life, no durable stays
against the sense of defenseless isolation and
vulnerability that overtakes many people, usually
at some later stage in their allotted time. When
she needs them most—when her child’s real-
Approximately half of the members of the Donner Party who were
trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the deadly winter of 1846–47
perished. Among those who survived, the Reed family settled in San
Jose. Later, Patty Reed (1838–1923) lived in the Victorian house
overlooking the East Cliff beaches of Santa Cruz that became home
in 1962 to Houston and his wife, Jeanne. Patty posed for this photograph
circa 1920 at the house, from which Houston envisioned her
recollections of the Donner saga in Snow Mountain Passage. Following
the book’s publication, Houston recalled:
“I can still sit in the rocking chair Patty Reed sat in eighty-five
years ago. I can look into a beveled mirror she once looked into,
above the oak-paneled fireplace. From the verandah I can regard
her view of Monterey Bay, which still glitters and beckons, and
consider that on the day we moved in, back in 1962, her story,
her family’s story, was already waiting here, inside the house.”
Courtesy, History San José
ity is suddenly exposed to extremes of danger,
deprivation, and the grossest human degradation—both
parents, responding to the necessities
of the crisis, leave her to face the nightmare
on her own. Mortal diminishment and panic in
the face of encroaching anomie is the novel’s
defining theme. Bereft “in the midst of a treeless
desert,” the pioneers are “strangers again, more
estranged than before they met, estranged and
abandoned.” 24
Unfairly judged and then banished from the
wagon train, James Frazier Reed imagines himself
“marooned upon the lonesome face of a
far-off planet, a hundred million miles out into
space, looking back upon this rolling speck, as
small as the smallest pinpoint in the vault of
stars.” All such images have their affective center
of gravity in Patty’s shattering childhood encounter
with parental betrayal at a time of crisis. “I
don’t have to tell you what it felt like,” she writes,
evidently confident that we will understand, “to
be that age and have both your mother and your
father disappear into country that seemed to have
no beginning and no end.” 25
21

22
This photograph of Truckee Lake, where Patty Reed and sixteen other members of the Donner Party were rescued, was taken
from Frémont Pass in 1868 as the Central Pacific Railroad reached completion. The areas inhabited by the emigrants became
known as Donner Pass, Donner Lake, and Donner Peak. In Snow Mountain Passage, Patty observed:
“When I was a girl there were no trains anywhere yet out here. When we came through the mountains there was hardly
any trail. Where the train cuts through the Sierra Nevada now, we made that trail. What a long road we have traveled.”
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Central Regional Library, A. J. Russell Collection
Taking a cue from Grace Paley, Jim has acknowledged
that in order to finish his novel he had
to supplement Patty Reed’s voice with a second
narrative, one which “comes rising up next to the
first, or sometimes comes rising up inside it, and
it’s the telling of the two together that makes the
story.” This second formal and thematic ingredient
integral to the success of Snow Mountain
Passage is the omniscient treatment of the larger
story of the star-crossed migration from Illinois,
through the horrific winter in the Sierra, and
down at last to the promised land in California.
The featured player in this half of the drama, and
the counterpoint to Patty’s “strong and contem-
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
plative presence,” is her father, who embodies the
“restless male urge to pull up stakes and make
the headlong continental crossing.” 26
Like so many others who risked the dangerous
journey, James Frazier Reed comes to California
following a dream of a fresh start in a new
land. He wants adventure and opportunities for
leadership. Most of all, he looks forward to the
day when his family will settle and prosper in a
place of beauty and abundance, a place like the
orchard land adjacent to an abandoned mission
near San Jose. He covets this land as a sanctuary
whose possession will answer a deep human

craving—felt most profoundly by his daughter
Patty—for security, permanence, and repose. “In
his mind,” Reed “sees the year turn, he sees the
pruned limbs sprout new buds. He sees the pears
and plums spring forth, burdening the limbs. He
sees his children climbing among the branches,
and scurrying between the rows to gather windfall
fruit.” 27 This, surely, is something worth
fighting for.
But in the course of achieving his dream, Reed
and his fellow pioneers help to wrest power from
the resident colonials and to violently dispossess
the much larger indigenous population. By the
terms of conquest, security and abundance for
the conquerors are the yield on terrible deracination
and penury for the conquered. While her
father fights valiantly for control of the territory,
Patty, clinging to life in the snowbound Sierra,
discovers “another hero standing in reserve. His
name was Salvador.” 28 In token of his loyalty to
the forsaken child, the young Indian guide gives
her his adobe amulet to wear around her neck.
Later on, as circumstances grow increasingly
dire, poor Salvador is killed and cannibalized by
other members of the party. At novel’s end, his
surviving brother, Carlos, turns up at the mission
orchard that the victorious Reed has now claimed
as a home for his family. Carlos recognizes the
amulet and demands an account of his brother’s
fate. As the terrible truth spills out, Patty realizes
that Salvador’s family, “the sons, the father, the
mother too, a family much like ours,” had until
very recently made their home on the mission
orchard. Carlos gives voice to “a low groan” that
The reunion of Patty and her father, James Frazier Reed, is imagined in this sketch from an 1849 account of the California
and Oregon territories. Through Patty’s voice in Snow Mountain Passage, Houston described James at the start of their journey—a
depiction that was inevitably altered by the tragic events that followed:
“He was a dreamer, as they all were then, dreaming and scheming, never content, and we were all drawn along in
the wagon behind the dreamer, drawn along in the dusty wake. . . . Sometimes very early, before it gets light, I will
still see him the way he looked the day we left Illinois. In his face I see true pleasure and a boyish gleam that meant
his joy of life was running at the full.”
J. Quinn Thornton, Oregon and California in 1848, vol. 2 (new York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1849), 196;
California Historical Society
23

24
c a l i f o r n i a l e g a c i e s
soon “swelled to a howling wail” of grief for his
brother and for the many thousands more whose
lives were destroyed by the conquest. 29
In this powerfully moving denouement, Jim
draws into sharpened focus the sense of imminent,
retributive catastrophe that runs through
his earlier novels. All those restless, conquering
dreamers and adventurers and settlers are prey
to the nameless, unshakable melancholy, rooted
in historical guilt, which hangs over places like
California, where innocent people have been
made homeless so that others might claim a
new place in the world. This is the deeper moral
significance of those recurrent earthquakes and
floods and volcanic eruptions. Patty recognizes
that the faithful Salvador, truly her savior, was
sacrificed to the fruition of her father’s dream of
possession, continuity, and prosperity. She sees
that her long, stable, abundant life has its roots
in Salvador’s lonely grave. Here, then, is the
source of the chastened gratitude and melancholy
that run through Patty’s story. “If only we could
find a way to inhabit a place without having to
possess it,” she broods; “it’s possession that
divides us.” 30
The formal and thematic elements that combine
so successfully in Snow Mountain Passage reappear
in Jim’s last complete novel, Bird of Another
Heaven, which was published in 2007. Sheridan
Brody, a young radio talk show host in San Francisco,
is unexpectedly contacted by a long-lost
grandmother who puts him in touch with his
remote Hawaiian and Native American roots.
The theme, once again, is history, this time with
a special emphasis on racial diversity and on the
grave injustices wrought by nineteenth-century
American expansion in California and the Hawaiian
Islands. Sheridan’s program, which reaches
out to a highly diverse audience, is dedicated
to letting “the past speak to the present,” 31 not
least of all by renewing and strengthening ties
between generations.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
Locating the self in space is also important, as
the novel’s leading characters scrutinize complex
genealogies in order to find their proper homes
in the sprawling geography of the Pacific Rim.
For Nani Keala, Jim’s mixed-race great-grandmother,
identity runs “deeper than ownership,
deeper than boosterism or patriotism. . . . Hers
was an ancestral bond rooted in bedrock not
made of documents.” 32 Finally, like Snow Mountain
Passage before it, Bird of Another Heaven
unfolds in two narratives that run along parallel
tracks toward a final, clarifying resolution.
Sheridan’s story, related in the first person, is
an attempted reconstruction of the mysterious
events surrounding the 1891 death of the Hawaiian
King Kalakaua in San Francisco’s Palace
Hotel. At intervals, meanwhile, Sheridan’s greatgrandmother’s
intimate role in the mystery—she
was the king’s distant cousin and lover—is set
forth by an omniscient narrator. The partial solution
to the mystery emerges from the convergence
of the two narratives at the novel’s end.
Quite in spite of these important similarities, the
two novels differ dramatically in tone and overall
effect. Snow Mountain Passage is grounded in
well-documented history. It enhances our sense
of the past not by expanding our knowledge of
what happened, but rather by imagining—with
extraordinary empathy—how those events might
have felt to a vulnerable young person caught up
in them. So persuasive and so profound is Jim’s
insight into Patty Reed’s ordeal that we come
away from the novel with an enhanced appreciation
of what it means to be human. By comparison,
Bird of Another Heaven builds on a very
slight historical foundation, the death of the king
of Hawaii in San Francisco. The rest, except for
intermittent references to the American takeover,
is mostly invented.
The paired strands of narrative that Jim erects on
this base are both extremely intricate, involving
a cast of characters bridging several generations,
scattered across numerous locales, and engaged

in a wide variety of activities. True, there is a
measure of clarifying convergence at the novel’s
conclusion, but the overall journey has a diffuseness
that contrasts with the focused forward
thrust of Snow Mountain Passage. The realism
of the parallel narratives of Patty Reed and her
father is plausible and compelling; we never
doubt that these events happened in this way and
with this impact on the actors involved.
Bird of Another Heaven, by contrast, with its
emphasis on mystery and conspiracy, its exotic
settings, improbable alliances, breathless sexuality,
and heavy reliance on coincidence, has the
feel of a romance, complete with the resolution
of conflict in a concluding marriage. The
pleasures to be derived from fiction constructed
along such lines are many, to be sure, especially
when the workmanship is as skillful as Jim’s.
Yet it seems likely that some—and perhaps
many—of his most devoted readers will continue
to gravitate to Snow Mountain Passage for the
sterner but more bracing and durable satisfactions
that it affords.
At the end of his life, Jim left behind the wellconstructed
first draft of a substantial portion—perhaps
a quarter or a third—of a kind of
sequel to Bird of Another Heaven. Titled A Queen’s
Journey, it is the story of King Kalakaua’s sister
and successor to the throne, Queen Liliuokalani,
who labored strenuously but ultimately in vain
to obstruct the 1898 American annexation of the
Hawaiian Islands. The novel, cast in the same
literary mold as its predecessor, is narrated by a
New Englander who has loved the queen since
their first meeting in Honolulu in 1868 and who
now, thirty years later, serves as her personal secretary
during a lobbying mission to Washington,
D.C. It is, of course, a narrative moving with
historical inevitability toward ultimate defeat.
Equally clearly, however, the plans for its unfolding
made ample provision for romance, mystery,
and intrigue. 33
a naTivE son oF ThE golDEn WEsT
Jim Houston, husband, parent, musician,
teacher, and professional writer par excellence,
was a native son of the golden West, genus californianus.
But if he was a superb example of a
human type often represented in his writing,
he was also something more. In his books, as
in his life, Jim never lost sight of the larger
world—stretching from Europe across the Atlantic,
westward across the United States, and outward
into the Pacific—whose people and stories
flowed together and fused in his identity. He was
intensely local and just as intensely global all at
the same time.
A writer of imagination, style, and seemingly
effortless lucidity, he was self-effacing in all
things, not least in eschewing trendy literary
sophistication. A splendid raconteur, he always
put the story first—a story of restless people in
motion, seeking opportunity, wealth, security,
and redemption in regions new at least to themselves,
receding ever westward. He loved the
ease and warmth and freedom of life in northern
California, most especially in coastal country
made famous before him by Jeffers and Steinbeck.
His humor, optimism, and generosity of
spirit were deeply rooted in this most favored
of places, though he knew something as well of
earthquakes, floods, and the answering history of
human destructiveness in the region. Emerging
as it does from this richly mingled background,
Jim’s message to us is clear: love this place as
you love your life in it, and preserve it for those
who follow.
Forrest G. Robinson is professor of humanities at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. He took his B.A. at
Northwestern University and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard
University. He has published numerous books and articles on
western subjects, including, most notably, Mark Twain, Wallace
Stegner, Owen Wister, Willa Cather, Jack London, Josiah
Royce, Carey McWilliams, Jack Schaefer, Kevin Starr, and the
new western history.
25

LUTH BurbAnk’s
spinELEss CAcTus:
Boom TimEs in ThE
CALIForniA DEs T
By Jane S. Smith
here’s a way to end world hunger
and make the desert bloom: take
the common prickly pear cactus
that grows wild throughout the Southwest, use
hybridization and selection to “persuade” it to
relinquish its sharp spines, plant the improved
version across the arid regions of the world, and
open up the range to grazing cattle.
That was the plan of Luther Burbank, California’s
most celebrated plant breeder in the early years
of the twentieth century, and it captured the
imagination—and the dollars—of a surprising
number of people the world over. From 1905 to
1916, Burbank’s spineless cactus was the center
of an agricultural bubble held aloft by the combined
winds of genuine need, popular science,
the eternal pursuit of quick profits, and, most of
all, the extraordinary fame of Burbank himself.
The story of the spineless cactus craze is a
tragicomedy in several acts, with many prickly
repercussions, but at the turn of the last century
26 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
it was hardly an isolated example of California’s
pursuit of new and better crops. From grapes
and olives in the Napa Valley to cotton in Kern
County and dates in Indio, California was being
transformed by agricultural innovation. All over
the state, optimistic growers were busy draining,
irrigating, terracing, tilling, and doing whatever
else seemed necessary to transform the largely
uncultivated Pacific paradise into a functioning
commercial garden.
Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was the most famous
plant breeder of his day. By his own successful example—well
publicized by myriad writers and reporters—
he popularized the idea that plants can be shaped to
fit human needs. Credited with advancing the science
of plant breeding, he was an early and major contributor
to the state’s growing agricultural industry. This
photograph of Burbank at leisure circa 1895 belies his
indefatigable efforts, for more than fifty years, to create
new plants, including the spineless cactus—one of
approximately 800 Burbank varieties of trees, flowers,
fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, and grains.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

28
Burbank’s spineless cactus plan never quite
worked, as either cattle feed or instant riches, and
its decade-long burst of promotion, cultivation,
speculation, and exploitation is now almost lost
in the crowded annals of financial miscalculation.
Specimens still grow in many parts of California,
often as unnamed components of the home
garden, but both the man and his contribution
to desert agriculture have faded from popular
memory. 1 Like the eucalyptus tree, widely promoted
during the same period as a fast-growing
source of timber and now tolerated as a fragrant
fire hazard of little or no commercial value, the
spineless cactus, with its aura of easy profits, is a
reminder of the race to riches that has characterized
California history from the Gold Rush to the
dot.com bubbles of the late twentieth century.
ThE WizarD oF sanTa rosa
Excitement about the spineless cactus—a thornfree
variety of the Opuntia—had been building
for several years when Burbank launched his
newest plant wonder on the open market with
a special twenty-eight-page catalog, The New
Agricultural-Horticultural Opuntias: Plant Creations
for Arid Regions, on June 1, 1907. In the
timeless tradition of nursery catalogs, the publication
featured enticing descriptions, testimonial
letters, and optimistic projects of potential yields,
here combined with laboratory analyses of the
cactus’s nutritional value and clear photographic
evidence of the product’s existence. In part, the
catalog’s simplistic style seemed more appropriate
for young readers. “Everybody knows that
Baldwin apples, Bartlett pears and our favorite
peaches, plums and cherries cannot be raised
from seeds,” Burbank wrote. “The same laws
hold true with the improved Opuntias, but fortunately
they can be raised from cuttings in any
quantity with the utmost ease. More truly they
raise themselves, for when broken from the par-
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
ent plant, the cuttings attend to the rooting without
further attention, whether planted right end
up, bottom up, sideways or not at all.” 2
Such simplicity did not come cheap, however.
The marvelous new cacti were well beyond the
reach of child and almost every adult; the price
for complete possession of one of Burbank’s
eight new varieties ranged from one to ten thousand
dollars. The New Agricultural-Horticultural
Opuntias was aimed at professional plant dealers
who would buy the prototypes, multiply them
on their own grounds, and sell the results to
the retail trade. This was Burbank’s preferred
method for disseminating his work, and both
his extraordinary products and his eye-popping
prices ensured huge publicity for the new spineless
cactus, as it had for his other introductions
in the past.
By 1907, Burbank was already an international
celebrity unique in the annals of plant breeding.
As a young man, he had read Charles Darwin’s
Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
and had been inspired to seek out and foster
the innate variability of all living things. While
still in his early twenties and living in Massachusetts,
he developed an admirably large, productive,
tasty, blight-resistant potato. After exhibiting
his new potato at agricultural fairs, Burbank sold
the rights to a local seed merchant and used the
profit—the grand sum of $150—to emigrate
in 1875 to Santa Rosa, the small but booming
town north of San Francisco where his younger
brother Alfred lived.
Today, over a century later, the Burbank potato—
usually seen in its russet-skinned variation
and now known as the Idaho potato, the russet
potato, or simply the baking potato—remains the
most widely grown potato in the world. But for
Burbank, it was only the beginning of his life’s
work in California: the development of at least
eight hundred new varieties of agricultural and
horticultural wonders for farm and garden. 3

Burbank considered the rich and fertile soil of Sonoma County ideal for conducting his plant-breeding experiments. In 1885, he
purchased ten acres west of Sebastopol and established the Gold Ridge Experiment Farm as an open-air laboratory for his largescale
investigations. There he planted his creations, usually several hundred at a time, in long rows—sometimes more than 700
feet—running north and south. Though he did not develop the spineless cactus at Gold Ridge, Burbank demonstrated that the climate
of Sonoma County was favorable for growing numerous varieties of the specimen.
Courtesy of the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa, California, lutherburbank.org
For more than thirty years since his arrival in
Santa Rosa, Burbank had produced a steady
stream of new products—fruits, vegetables,
flowers, nuts, berries, trees, and grains. Catalogs
advertising his “new creations,” bred behind the
picket fence of his large garden in Santa Rosa
or at his experiment farm in nearby Sebastopol,
were distributed to growers throughout California
and the United States and to every continent
except Antarctica.
Hybrid plums, giant cherries, freestone peaches,
exotic lilies, the enormously popular Shasta
daisy, and a winter rhubarb so profitable grow-
ers called it ”the mortgage lifter” all helped to
generate large commercial markets in a period
of agricultural expansion that amounted to a second
gold rush for Burbank’s adopted state. For
years, reporters and photographers hovered about
his grounds, waiting for the latest report of this
season’s dazzling new improvements on the raw
material of nature.
Burbank was lauded by growers, processors, and
shippers for the new businesses built from his
products, but he was even more celebrated for
his almost magical ability to transform plants by
removing what would seem to be their defining
29

Among Burbank’s creations was a gigantic white evening primrose. In his posthumously published book The Harvest
of the Years, Burbank called the effect of a field of his primroses “handkerchiefs spread on a lawn.” This photograph,
made circa 1909 behind his Santa Rosa home, shows beds of poppies beyond the primroses and several varieties of
cactus against the fence.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
30 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010

characteristic. Since publication of his first New
Creations in Fruits and Flowers catalog in 1893,
reporters had gleefully called him the Wizard of
Santa Rosa, filling their columns with descriptions
of paradoxical varieties like the white
blackberry, the stoneless plum, the “everlasting”
flower, a bright red version of the golden California
poppy, and the Paradox walnut tree that provided
valuable hardwood lumber but grew as fast
as a pine or other soft wood.
In the context of these earlier triumphs, the
spineless cactus was only the latest demonstration
of Burbank’s uncanny ability to bend nature
to his will. In the words of Governor George C.
Pardee, “Working quietly and modestly among
his trees and vines, our friend Burbank has
worked what, to our lay minds, appear almost
like miracles. He has changed the characters
and appearances of fruits and flowers, turned
pigmies into giants, sweetened the bitter and the
sour, transformed noxious weeds into valuable
plants, and verily set the seal of his disapproval
upon much that to him and us seems wrong in
Nature’s handiwork. For us he has done much;
and to him the whole world is indebted.” 4
Governor Pardee, like California’s commercial
leaders, recognized how much Burbank had contributed
to the state’s highly profitable shift from
fertile promise to actual production. In the search
for a man of genius who could embody both the
aspirations and achievements of California as
the major supplier of the world’s food, no single
individual rivaled Luther Burbank, and no praise
seemed too excessive.
a sElF-MaDE invEnTor
To many of his admirers, Burbank’s life was as
appealing as his garden inventions. First there
was his New England lineage, a fact that Burbank
himself did not consider very important
but which other people honored as a link to the
nation’s very beginnings. When Burbank was
A Man of Genius
Edward J. Wickson, professor of agriculture at
the University of California, joined notables such
as Thomas A. Edison and Theodore Roosevelt in
voicing his admiration of Luther Burbank. Wickson
dedicated his book The California Fruits and
How to Grow Them (1900) to the imaginative and
productive plant breeder:
To LuTHEr BurBAnk, of SAnTA
roSA, wHoSE CrEATivE Hor-
TiCuLTurAL gEniuS HAS, By
nEw CoinAgE of “BLooming,
AmBroSiAL fruiT of vEgETA-
BLE goLD,” AmpLy rEquiTED
THE worLD’S gifT of THE
CHoiCEST fLowErS AnD fruiTS
for THE ADvAnCEmEnT AnD
ADornmEnT of CALiforniA—
THuS BESTowing nEw HonorS
upon THE STATE AnD nEw
riCHES upon mAnkinD—THiS
work iS CorDiALLy inSCriBED
AS An ExponEnT of ESTEEm
AnD ApprECiATion.
Edward J. Wickson, The California Fruits and How to Grow Them:
A Manual of Methods Which Have Yielded Greatest Success; With
Lists of Varieties Best Adapted to the Different Districts of the State
(San Francisco: Pacific Rural Press, 1900); California Historical Society
31

32
born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1849, the
family already had lived in New England for
over two centuries and could claim a long line of
teachers, clergymen, craftsmen, and manufacturers.
At a time when Massachusetts dominated
the cultural scene, such contemporary literary
lions as Longfellow, Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau
were familiar names in the house, and
Emerson and Thoreau, along with Alexander von
Humboldt, remained Burbank’s favorite authors
throughout his life.
Burbank’s second appeal was that he had left
New England. Luther was Samuel Burbank’s thirteenth
child by his third wife, and two older half
brothers had joined the surge of migrants to California
in the 1850s, settling in Marin County. A
true child of the Gold Rush years, Luther grew up
reading his brothers’ letters about the wonders
of their adopted state. That he followed them
west made him a perfect representative of the
transcontinental transfer of power and influence
that has long been a point of pride for California
boosters.
Finally, there was Burbank’s status as a selftaught
genius, always a form of popular hero.
The Burbank brickyard in Lancaster had provided
a comfortable living, but the family was far from
rich. When Samuel’s death ended Luther’s studies
at the Lancaster Academy and foreclosed
any prospect of college, the fatherless young
man escaped his factory job by going to the
Lancaster Public Library, where he read natural
history, including Darwin. Thirty years later, he
was recognized as a practical inventor on a par
with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, two other
giants who had skipped the lecture hall to create
the transformational products that formed the
modern world. 5
Despite the lack of any sort of advanced education
in biology, botany, horticulture, or agriculture,
Burbank won great respect from the expand-
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
ing profession of science. Beginning in the late
1890s, there had been a rising tide of professional
interest in his achievements from those working
in both the laboratory and the field. Scientific
groups invited him to deliver papers, and federal
agents from the newly formed Agricultural Experiment
Stations made pilgrimages to Santa Rosa to
meet the master and observe his work. Hugo de
Vries, the Dutch geneticist who was a celebrated
leader in the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel and
the inventor of the word “mutation,” accepted an
invitation to lecture at the University of California
at Berkeley because, he admitted, he wanted to
visit Burbank; afterward, he took back photographs
and samples of Burbank products to use
in his lectures in Europe. Liberty Hyde Bailey, the
Cornell University professor widely regarded as
the dean of American horticulture, also came to
Berkeley largely because of its proximity to Santa
Rosa; dazzled by the range of experiments he saw
in Burbank’s small garden in the middle of the
city, he praised the self-educated plant breeder as
“a painstaking, conscientious investigator of the
best type.” 6
Local boosters were even more enthusiastic about
Burbank’s achievements. In 1903, the California
Academy of Sciences celebrated its fiftieth anniversary
by awarding Burbank a gold medal “for
meritorious work in developing new forms of
plant life,” calling him the most important scientist
of the past half century. 7 Edward Wickson,
soon to be dean of the College of Agriculture at
the University of California, declared that “Mr.
Burbank’s thought and work have passed beyond
even the highest levels of horticulture, known
as horticultural science, into the domain of science
itself.” 8 David Starr Jordan, president of
Stanford University and himself a noted biologist,
appointed Burbank Special Lecturer on
Evolution; Jordan later collaborated with Vernon
Kellogg, professor of entomology at Stanford,
on a series of articles known collectively as The
Scientific Aspects of Luther Burbank’s Work. 9 And

in 1905, as though bestowing a special seal of
scientific approval, the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, D.C., granted Burbank the enormous
sum of ten thousand dollars per year to
support his experiments in plant evolution and
hired a young geneticist, complete with the Ph.D.
Burbank lacked, to record his methods.
ThE MiraCulous oPuntia
By the time Burbank had introduced his spineless
cactus, then, he was a star whose name and
face were familiar around the world, a darling
of the business community whose products and
reputation elevated every phase of California
commerce, and a plant “evoluter” (his own preferred
title) whose abilities had been certified by
leaders of academic science. And now he was
offering a new crop from which a great many
people hoped to make a lot of money.
In September 1907, three months after the New
Opuntias catalog appeared, the National Irrigation
Congress held its fifteenth annual meeting
in Sacramento. As the main speaker, Luther Burbank
repeated his prediction that the spineless
cactus would solve the problem of what to feed
livestock in the parched regions of the world.
“Of course my first object was to get a thornless
[cactus],” Burbank told the assembly. “Then next
to get an individual which would produce a great
weight of forage to the acre. That has been very
well accomplished. I have now a cactus that will
produce 200 tons of food per acre . . . as safe to
handle and as safe to feed as beets, potatoes, carrots
or pumpkins.” 10 Warning his listeners that
much remained to be done, Burbank concluded
his speech with a bit of boastful hyperbole that
would become the gospel of his many promoters:
“My object is to combine this great production
with great nutrition. Then, my opinion is, the
cactus will be the most important plant on earth
for arid regions and I have not the least doubt of
securing that.” 11
Other presenters addressed such important
issues as grazing rights, timber sales in U.S.
forests, federal support for irrigation programs,
and the development of inland waterways, but
it was Burbank’s spineless cactus that received
the most extensive coverage in the press. The
Los Angeles Times, among many other papers,
printed the Associated Press’s report on the conference
on its front page the following day under
the headline “Wizard’s Wisdom.” Other reports
noted that the cactus fruit, no longer a “prickly”
pear, would now become a delectable treat on the
family table. Already, Burbank’s cautions that his
spineless cactus was still a work in progress were
forgotten under the dazzling prospect of succulent
fruits and nourishing fodder newly available
for painless consumption.
Indeed, miraculous crop introductions could and
did happen. In 1873, Eliza Tibbets, a resident
of the struggling three-year-old city of Riverside,
California, received two bud stocks from
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),
“sports” that were derived from a seedless orange
discovered in Bahia, Brazil. The fruit proved to
be hearty, delicious, and conveniently free of
seeds. The new navel orange, as it was called,
did very well in southern California’s dry climate
and soon other growers were planting cuttings
from the Tibbets tree. By 1880, local grower
Thomas W. Cover had employed Chinese and
Native American workers to bud seven hundred
trees to navels; a few years later, profits from the
Riverside navels had allowed the community to
survive the 1888 collapse in land values (another
frequent event in California history). By 1895,
Riverside boasted the highest per capita income
in the state. There was no reason at all to think
that lightning couldn’t strike twice.
33

34
Numerous catalogs and flyers advertised the spineless cactus. “Dry seasons, which
are certain to come,” Burbank wrote, “have been and will continue to be the
source of irreparable loss to stock raisers.” Burbank promoted the advantages of
his thornless Opuntia—represented by this specimen (right)—to food producers
throughout the country and worldwide as fodder for animals, for its medicinal
properties, and in the production of juice, jams and preserves, drinks, candy,
and candles.
Flyer, Courtesy of Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa, California,
lutherburbank.org; Cactus specimen, California Historical Society,
USC Special Collections
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010

ThE WizarD hybriDizEr
Today, planting the desert with an experimental
breed of spineless cactus seems a very complicated
way to solve a not-too-pressing problem.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, a
combination of high-yield varieties and government
subsidies has made corn so plentiful and
inexpensive that it now supplies up to 40 percent
of cattle feed in the United States. Grass-fed
beef—like the analog clock, the acoustic guitar, or
the gin martini—was a descriptive name coined
after World War II to distinguish it from earlier
products; today the term “corn-fed”—like digital,
electric, or vodka—has become the new norm.
But a hundred years ago, things were different.
In those days, cattle grazed, brought to pasture
by ranchers during the summer months. As
cattle ranches expanded into the deserts of the
American West, where grass did not grow—and
into the arid stretches of South America, Spain,
India, New Zealand, and Africa—the question of
what the animals would eat loomed large.
Burbank was not by any means the first person
to look to the Opuntia for food or profit. In Mexico,
prickly pears (tunas) and paddles (nopales)
had been eaten long before the Spanish conquest,
and the cactus plant had been cultivated
for just as long as a host for the cochineal insect,
a parasite that provided a valuable red dye. The
prickly pear cactus also was used as emergency
livestock feed in the desert, though it required
a laborious process of singeing or rubbing with
abrasives to remove the spines that would otherwise
injure or even kill cattle. During the drought
To cattle ranchers in the dry regions of the Southwest, news of forage that would thrive in the desert and safely nourish
their livestock was especially welcome. “Millions have died from the thorns of the prickly pear cactus,” Burbank noted.
“How would you enjoy being fed on needles, fish-hooks, toothpicks, barbed wire fence, nettles, and chestnut burrs?” he
asked would-be buyers in a catalog. “The wild, thorny cactus is and always must be more or less of a pest.”
California Historical Society, USC Special Collections
35

year of 1903–4, ranchers had turned to modern
gasoline torches to burn off the spines, and the
USDA had conducted extensive analyses of the
nutritional content of the cactus paddles. What
was missing was a way to make the process easy,
attractive, and profitable. That was where the
wizard hybridizer came in, at least according to
the many people who regarded Burbank as a foolproof
source of lucrative products.
The research had been going on for years. When
Burbank first arrived in California, he was
entranced by the many local varieties of cactus,
some of which grew very large, and particularly
by the Opuntia, which has edible fruit and is
relatively tolerant of cold. He began working with
the prickly pears in earnest around 1892, following
his usual method: massive hybridization, the
ruthless selection from thousands of specimens
of a few promising seedlings, and repetition of
the process over multiple generations.
The first step of Burbank’s experiment was
to amass a large collection of cacti, primarily
Opuntia. Working with professional plant hunters
and building on his worldwide fame, he
imported specimens from all over California;
from states as unlikely as Maine and as close as
Arizona; and from Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Sicily,
South Africa, Mexico, South America, and
Central America. Admirers, knowledgeable about
Burbank’s interest in cacti from the vast number
of newspaper accounts that spread his fame, sent
additional specimens.
The federal government also supported his
efforts. David Fairchild, who worked for the
USDA in a position with the wonderful title of
Plant Explorer, arranged for Burbank to receive
samples from Italy, France, and North Africa, several
of which became direct ancestors of Burbank
varieties. The USDA greenhouse in Washington,
D.C., provided other specimens. The city of San
Diego offered a section of the city park as an
Agricultural Experiment Station for the spine-
36 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
less cactus, 12 and cactus experiment stations were
established in Chico, California, and in San Antonio,
Texas, among other locations.
Burbank, meanwhile, rented land in Livermore,
Alameda County, as his own experimental
ground, and contracted with ranchers in other
regions both to test the viability of different
breeds and to grow the quantities of spineless
cactus he would need if he were to have enough
to market. He also sent samples to the head of
the University of California’s Department of
Nutrition and Foods at Berkeley, who tested them
and declared them “to have nutritive powers
three-fourths of alfalfa.” 13
MarKETing ThE nEW CaCTus
The first sales of spineless cactus were to dealers
who planned to take them overseas to propagate
for foreign markets. John Rutland, a nurseryman
from Australia who had moved to Sebastopol
to be closer to Burbank’s work, bought the first
slabs of spineless cactus in 1905, a transaction
Burbank publicized by telling reporters he had
made enough on the sale to pay for a new house
in Santa Rosa. 14
Accounts of the new desert crop began to appear
in popular magazines and books, making exaggerated
promises that Burbank claimed forced
him to issue a catalog that would at least be
an accurate description of what was available.
William S. Harwood, a prolific though highly
unreliable reporter who had already written
several ecstatic articles about Burbank when he
published New Creations in Plant Life in 1905, 15
greatly exaggerated all the marvels of Burbank’s
work. In April of the same year, The World Today
published “The Spineless Cactus: The Latest
Plant Marvel Originated by Luther Burbank,” by
Hamilton Wright, who was identified as secretary
of the California Promotion Committee.

Burbank conducted extensive experiments in the development of his spineless cactus. Here, Opuntia grow in planters and fields at Burbank’s
experiment grounds in Santa Rosa. David Starr Jordon, president of Stanford University, described Burbank’s process in a 1905
article: “. . . the original stock, prickly; the second generation, slightly prickly; the third, without thorns. . . . This will have very great value
in the arid regions.” Despite Burbank’s lack of formal scientific training, he was inducted into the Agricultural, National Inventors, and
Horticultural halls of fame.
California Historical Society, USC Special Collections
Wright was paid to boost California’s reputation
as a source of spectacular new products. A less
partisan reporter, George Wharton James, also
succumbed to the excitement of the spineless cactus
in his 1906 paean to the beauty and romance
of the Southwest, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert
(Southern California). Describing the desperate
efforts to rescue livestock during recent drought
years by feeding them cactus paddles from which
the injurious spines had been burned, James was
relieved to report: “Luther Burbank, the wizard of
plant life, has solved the spine problem without
singeing. He has developed a species of spineless
cactus which has high nutritive and water value.
This cactus will undoubtedly, in time, be planted
in large areas of the Colorado and other deserts
and thus aid cattle, if not man, in solving that
most difficult of desert problems,—the permanent
and well-distributed supply of water in the
driest areas.” 16
37

The plant that would rescue cattle also provided
fodder for little minds. Excerpts from
“The Spineless Cactus: The Latest Wonder from
Luther Burbank” appeared in the Texas School
Journal in 1905—the same year Burbank’s own
“The Training of the Human Plant” appeared in
Century magazine, bringing his theories of education
to a wide audience. 17 By December 1907,
three months after his appearance at the National
Irrigation Conference, Burbank seemed a natural
choice to speak at the Southern California Teachers’
Association meeting in Los Angeles, where
he once again described his work with the spineless
cactus.
As Burbank was careful to note in his catalogs
and many speeches, cactus is a slow-growing
plant and his best varieties were still under
development. Apart from the early sales to Rutland,
what he offered was a promise—for future
delivery, future profits, and future salvation of
the starving peoples of the world. Marketing was
not something that interested Burbank, and he
wasn’t very good at it. Whenever possible, he
licensed or sold his plant prototypes to large,
well-established companies like Burpee Seeds in
Pennsylvania, Stark Bro’s Nurseries in Missouri,
or Child’s Nurseries, whose establishment was so
large it became the city of Floral Park, New York.
The spineless cactus had little appeal for northern
or eastern dealers, but a number of Californians
were eager to relieve Burbank of the
burden of taking his promising new product to
the retail level. The first of these entrepreneurs
was Charles Jay Welch, a well-established rancher
in Merced County. Sometime in 1907, before
Burbank issued his New Opuntias catalog, Welch
had formed the Thornless Cactus Farming Company
in Los Angeles with several partners and
paid Burbank twenty-seven thousand dollars for
the right to grow and market seven varieties of
his new cactus, the biggest single sale Burbank
would ever make.
38 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
By spring 1908, Welch boasted the production of
1,000 new plants each week at Copa de Oro, his
cactus farm in the Coachella Valley. 18 Later that
summer, he advertised that “Burbank’s Thornless
Cactus will produce as high as 200 or 300 tons
of rich, succulent fodder to the acre. Burbank’s
Improved Fruiting Varieties (for Semi-Thornless)
Cactus will produce as much as 100 tons of delicious
fruit to the acre. . . . The Burbank Cactus
has just started its first distribution of these wonderful
plants. Hundreds of people cheerfully paid
their money for plants two years ago and waited
till June, 1909, for delivery.” The Thornless Cactus
Farming Company asserted that it had taken
requests for 50,000 starter slabs of spineless cactus
from customers around the world, before a
single plant had been shipped. Customers ordering
now, however, would receive theirs at once. 19
The prospect of all these far-flung buyers—and
the even more enticing vision of ongoing trade
in both cactus paddles as cattle feed and cactus
fruit as a grocery item—caught the attention of
shipping companies. Railroads wanted new crops
that would appeal to distant markets, and many
carriers already had profited handsomely from
Burbank’s earlier introductions. From potatoes to
prunes, Burbank products were a significant part
of the tons of specialty crops that filled cars heading
east from California. 20 Hoping to be both
producer and shipper, the Southern Pacific Railroad
worked from 1908 to 1912 to bring value to
its barren acreage in southern California and the
Great Basin by growing Burbank’s spineless cactus.
21 During the same period, the Union Pacific
Railroad sponsored promotions of Burbank products
around the country, with particular emphasis
on the spineless cactus. 22
Meanwhile, Burbank had new varieties ready
for production. Apparently dissatisfied with his
contract with the Thornless Cactus Farming
Company, which was having trouble meeting
scheduled payments, in February 1909 he began
negotiating with Herbert and Hartland Law, who

had made a good deal of money in the patent
medicine business and were the current owners
of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. The Law
brothers established Luther Burbank Products,
Incorporated, to market all of Burbank’s creations,
including the spineless cactus, but at the
last minute the man whose name and fame were
vital to the operation got cold feet and pulled out
of the agreement. For the time being, Burbank
would continue to sell spineless cactus through
his own catalogs and the Thornless Cactus Farming
Company.
aTTraCTing buyErs
While trying to find someone else to handle the
sales of his spineless cactus, Burbank entered
into a separate agreement to market himself
through the publication of a multivolume work
that would provide practical information to budding
farmers and gardeners. The numerous
efforts to write about Luther Burbank are too
vast and complicated to be described here, but
the spineless cactus also figured prominently in
efforts to sell books. 23
Starting in 1911, potential subscribers around
the country received elaborate brochures from a
new organization, the Luther Burbank Publishing
Company, which would soon form a Luther
Burbank Society of subscribers and supporters.
The goal was a multivolume work, with lavish
color photographs, that would be at once a practical
guide, a scientific record, and an inspiration
to gardeners and farmers around the world. The
1911 brochure summarized Burbank’s career in
glowing terms and focused on his latest creation,
noting: “There are three billion acres of desert
in the world. . . . It took the imagination of a Burbank
to conceive a way to transform these three
billion acres into productivity.” Using a tense that
might be called “future superlative,” the prospectus
described the amazing values to be expected
of the fruit harvest from the prickly pear without
As a member of the Luther Burbank Society from 1912 to 1917, the philanthropist
Phoebe A. Hearst received this 1913 proof book as the first
installment of the society’s plans for publication of the 12-volume Luther
Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application.
The chapter on the spineless cactus explained how “in a dozen
years, Mr. Burbank carried the cactus back ages in its ancestry, how he
proved beyond question by planting a thousand cactus seeds that the
spiny cactus descended from a smooth slabbed line of forefathers—how
he brought forth a new race without the suspicion of a spine, and with a
velvet skin, and how he so re-established these old characteristics that the
result was fixed and permanent.”
California Historical Society
its prickles and the forage value of the spineless
cactus after the pears were gathered. In an eerie
foreshadowing of the ethanol controversies of
recent years, the booksellers also predicted that
spineless cactus “can produce $1200 of Denatured
Alcohol per acre as against $35 from an
acre of Indian corn.” 24
39

40
The director of the Luther Burbank Publishing
Company was a tireless enthusiast named Oscar
Binner, who also had helped assemble and publicize
a traveling exhibit of Burbank’s marvels,
a large glass-sided display case in which some
two hundred glass jars held pickled specimens
of Burbank fruits and vegetables. A large paddle
of spineless cactus, flanked by luscious spineless
prickly pears, occupied the central shelf, directly
under a bust of Burbank.
The Luther Burbank traveling display was a
huge attraction. In January 1911, the cabinet of
botanical curiosities was featured at the Western
Land Products Exposition in Omaha, where it
warranted a large photograph in the Omaha Bee.
In March, it was declared the premier feature of
the Pacific Lands and Products Exposition in Los
Angeles, where the Los Angeles Times reported
on the entire show under the headline “Plant
Freaks to Be Shown” and the subhead “Wizard
Burbank Will Exhibit Some Queer Ones.” 25 By
November, the exhibit had made its way to New
York’s Madison Square Garden, where it attracted
considerable interest at the Land and Irrigation
Exposition despite such distractions as the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir singing “Ode to Irrigation”
under the sponsorship of the state of Utah.
Even skeptics were enthralled when several specimens
of spineless cactus were taken to the cows
in the New York State display and enthusiastically
consumed. 26
Many were gawking, but who was buying? Jack
London, for one. The writer, adventurer, and
rancher lived close enough to Burbank to ride
over to Santa Rosa for agricultural advice while
he was trying to make his new Sonoma County
enterprise a model of modern farm management,
and he placed his orders directly with the cactus’s
creator. On June 26, 1911, while traveling in
Hawaii, London sent his sister Eliza (who served
as his farm manager) an order for 130 cuttings
of sixteen different varieties of spineless cactus
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
to be purchased directly from Burbank in Santa
Rosa. He also included detailed instructions on
dynamiting holes for planting, separating forage
cactus from ones that would be grown for their
fruit, and asking Burbank himself about whether
the drainage conditions of the site he had in mind
made it suitable for growing the cactus. 27
There is no record of London’s success, but the
signs are not good. Among the many brochures,
clippings, and scribbled notes the writer kept for
his farm experiments is a set of four sheets of yellow
foolscap paper, stapled together. The sheets
are blank except for the word “cactus” penciled
at the top in London’s handwriting. Four years
after the first planting, Eliza wrote to her brother,
“On the one sore patch just northerly from your
dwelling, in fork of the roads, I have permitted
Mr. Lawson to plant cactus. He is furnishing
the plants and keeping ground in condition at
no expense to us and is to give us 25% of cactus
raised. I thought this a good chance for us to try
out the cactus proposition without expense.” 28
Unfortunately, the nearly empty ledger of London’s
spineless cactus experiment seems to have
been typical. As often happens with investment
bubbles, the spineless cactus had its greatest
value as something to be sold, not used, and
records of anyone using it for cattle feed or fruit
production in the United States are far scarcer
than evidence of the multiple ways people hoped
to profit by supplying those end users.
From the beginning, there had been warnings
that the spineless cactus was not an easy
or instant panacea for the problems of desert
ranches. For several years, David Griffiths, a
cactus expert at the USDA’s Bureau of Plant
Industry, had been mounting a campaign against
Burbank and those who promoted him. In 1905,
before the boom began, the bureau had issued
Griffiths’ booklet, The Prickly Pear and Other
Cacti as Food for Stock, which investigated singeing,
steaming, chopping, disjointing, and other

means of preparing cacti as feed for cows, sheep,
goats, and hogs. In 1907, Griffiths’ The Tuna as
Food for Man, which explored the nutritive qualities
of the prickly pear fruit, was prefaced by a
distinctly grumpy acknowledgment that “interest
in cacti in general, from both a food and a
forage standpoint, has been greatly stimulated
by popular writers during the past two or three
years.” In 1909, Griffiths felt compelled to issue
“The ‘Spineless’ Prickly Pears,” stressing “limitations
. . . placed upon the growing of the plants as
farm crops which ought to be of service to those
who may be misled by ill-advised stories of the
phenomenal adaptability of this class of prickly
pears in the agriculture of our arid States.” 29
By 1912, Griffiths had risen from assistant agrostologist
to agriculturalist at the USDA, all the
while continuing to criticize Luther Burbank. On
February 29, 1912, Representative Everis Anson
Hayes from Los Angeles rose to the defense of
his state’s favorite agricultural hero. As reported
in the Los Angeles Times, “Mr. Hayes delivered in
the House a speech deploring that recently an
employee of the Department of Agriculture had
seen fit to assail Burbank and even ridicule his
genius and the great work he has done and is
still doing.” Noting that 95 percent of the plums
shipped from California were Burbank varieties,
as well as almost all the state’s potatoes, Hayes
declared the spineless cactus Burbank’s greatest
triumph and insisted that a photograph of
Burbank’s cactus field be inserted in the Congressional
Record, possibly the first such pictorial
introduction. 30
Many more spineless cactus photographs
appeared the following July in the Pacific Dairy
Review, which devoted its first four pages to the
“immense possibilities” of fodder from the cactus
before concluding, “Later we may take up some
of the problems of cactus, or opuntia, culture, if
in fact there shall be any problems in connection
with it. From our present state of knowledge it
looks so simple that it may not even leave room
for the agricultural or dairy editor to do anything
but say ‘plant opuntias.’” 31
Like so many others, the editors of the Pacific
Dairy Review were overly optimistic. The problems
Griffiths cited were ones that Burbank
had always acknowledged, though his various
promoters tended to downplay any difficulties
in their own accounts. A careful reader who
could penetrate the thicket of adjectives in the
New Opuntias catalog might have lingered on
the conclusion of the following sentence when
considering a purchase: “Systematic work for
their improvement has shown how pliable and
readily molded is this unique, hardy denizen of
rocky, drought-cursed, wind-swept, sun-blistered
districts and how readily it adapts itself to more
fertile soils and how rapidly it improves under
cultivation and improved conditions.” 32
spinElEss sChEMEs
As it happened, fertile soil, cultivation, and
improved conditions were precisely what the
desert lacked, along with water for irrigation
and cheap labor to install the fencing needed to
protect the defenseless plants from hungry rabbits
and other predators. Growers in India or
North Africa sent Burbank testimonial letters,
but American ranchers were looking for a fast,
easy solution to their feed problems. Growing
spineless cactus took too long, required too much
work, and needed more water than nature provided
in truly arid areas with much less rainfall
than Sonoma or Riverside. If ranchers in the
California desert could provide such ideal conditions,
they would be raising alfalfa, which was, in
fact, a better feed.
But if the cactus wasn’t flourishing as hoped,
the enthusiasm of those who wanted to sell it
remained as fresh and green as the grass the
Opuntia was supposed to replace. And since this
was California, it is no surprise that the spineless
cactus boom inspired a side bubble in real estate.
41

By the second decade of the twentieth century,
corporate agriculture had already replaced the
small family farm as an economic force in
California. 33 The vision of moving to the Golden
State and living off the products of the land
of sunshine continued to lure many migrants
from other regions, however, and they were the
target of real estate vendors who embraced the
spineless cactus as a way to sell barren land
previously considered undesirable for cultivation.
In 1912, for example, a former cattle ranch in
the San Joaquin Valley was divided into twentyacre
lots and renamed Oro Loma, the Spineless
Cactus Land. The developers advertised that
buyers could turn virgin desert into profitable
farms by planting spineless cactus, whose
paddles would be provided with every purchase.
If the buyer didn’t initiate cactus cultivation right
away, the sellers would still allow them to get into
the market on the ground floor by providing, for
the paltry additional price of $125, a quarter-acre
plot that was fenced and planted with “100 cactus
plants of several varieties.” “A small charge
for superintendence” would bring management
and sales of the resulting product “until the purchaser
is ready to occupy his farm.” 34
For some time, similar schemes had filled mailboxes
and crowded the advertising pages of
newspapers and popular magazines. Two typical
advertisers from the pages of Sunset Magazine
were the Terra Bella Development Company,
which offered “fortunes in fruit,” and the Conservative
Rubber Production Company, which
projected “$1500 A Year for Life.” 35 The Oro
Loma Company, however, offered the special
reassurance that came with the name of Luther
Burbank, whose photograph occupied the first
page of its brochure; on page 2 was another
photograph captioned “Young Spineless Cactus
on Luther Burbank’s Experimental Grounds,”
which appears to be a reproduction of a 1908
postcard. 36
42 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
Inside pages featured more photographs of cactus
fields, as well as other crops that might be
used to supplement income while waiting for
the cactus profits to roll in. Describing what they
called “the spineless cactus industry,” the Oro
Loma sellers noted that “during the next five
years the people that now have a spineless cactus
nursery started, or that quickly establish one,
on ORO LOMA LANDS, should realize a handsome
independence out of the sale of leaves and
cuttings” by selling them to other growers and
ranchers who did not have the foresight to get
into the market early. 37
Lest the buyer be unwilling to do the math, the
numbers were provided: “Each acre of the spineless
cactus should supply, during the third and
later years . . . at least 150,000 leaves per annum.
The selling price of the leaves ranges from 20c
to $2.50 each, at present. It is not likely they will
sell below 20c. each for at least five years. . . .
That means $30,000 per acre, per year. If sold at
10 cents each, it means $15,000. Even at 5 cents
each, it amounts to $7,500.” Finally, readers were
encouraged to organize a colony of friends to buy
Oro Loma lands where together they could “enjoy
the comforts and luxuries that are common to
the people who live in this region.” 38
If twenty acres seemed too much, smaller parcels
also were available for those eager to enter
the surefire business of becoming a spineless
cactus supplier. In the fall of 1913, the Magazine
of Wall Street printed a comic response to an
unnamed spineless cactus brochure, which the
author claimed had inspired him to form his
own company, Tailless Jackrabbit (Ltd.): “Today I
have a letter in my mail enclosing a prospectus.
This well-printed document sets forth that the
next great killing in the financial world will be
made by the Spineless Cactus, the one invented
by Luther Burbank. The salesman who sends
me this letter asks me to take an acre or two
and interest a few of my personal friends at so
much commission per friend. I shall not buy

The Spineless Cactus Nursery & Land Co. grew hundreds of acres of thornless cacti—including these of the Melrose variety—in
southern California. In a 1913 interview, William L. Wilson, the company’s secretary and treasurer, known as the “King of the
Spineless Cactus Growers,” predicted: “When the value of spineless cactus is fully realized and appreciated, Southern California
will have an industry that will loom larger than anything yet attempted in the land of sunshine and flowers.”
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Spineless Cactus Incorporated, today; but when
I get my Tailless Jackrabbit (Ltd.), listed on the
Stock Exchange, I shall expect all my friends to
bite. . . . Kind reader, may I not put you down for a
few shares in Tailless Jackrabbit (Ltd.)? If the door
is locked when you call, throw your money over
the transom at the sign of the Rabbit’s Foot.” 39
Eager to discourage pirates and profiteers and
to escape from the cumbersome details of sales,
Burbank tried again to acquire an “official” dealer
for his spineless cactus. Not far from the Oro
Loma Company offices in San Francisco, in the
Exposition Building at the corner of Pine and
Battery streets, a much larger entity called the
Luther Burbank Company appeared in 1913 to
make yet another attempt to handle the sale of
spineless cactus for the harried inventor. The
founders, who had no experience in the plant
trade, paid Burbank $30,000 for the exclusive
rights to market his creations and sold shares in
the company worth well over $300,000. 40
Interest in the spineless cactus was high in
northern California, where Burbank was most
famous for his work with orchard fruit, but it was
even greater in Los Angeles, the gateway to the
desert. The Luther Burbank Company opened
a branch office in Los Angeles, managed by a
recent arrival from Brooklyn named Bingham
Thoburn Wilson, author of The Cat’s Paw, The
Tale of the Phantom Yacht, The Village of Hide and
Seek, and other novels whose very titles should
have constituted fair warning.
It appears that Wilson was a good salesman,
however. In the fall of 1913, a group of Los Angeles
investors, many of them recent arrivals from
Canada, formed the El Campo Investment &
Land Co. with one hundred thousand plants purchased
from the Luther Burbank Company. The
company already had bought land in Arlington,
south of Riverside, where it planned to cultivate
cactus as a prelude to entering the hog and cattle
business. Wilson landed another big order from
Texas and proudly announced a request from
Don Dante Cusi of Mexico City for enough cactus
cuttings to plant one thousand acres.
Like the El Campo company, Cusi envisioned
the cultivation of the spineless cactus as part
of a larger agricultural empire. In 1903, he had
acquired over two hundred and forty square
miles of property in the dry, hot area of Michoacán
and eagerly adopted the latest farming products
and technologies. In later years, he would
import a German railroad, an English steam
43

During the years of the spineless cactus craze, investors formed the
Luther Burbank Company to manage sales of Burbank products. As
the corporation proclaimed in its 1913 catalog, Luther Burbank’s
Spineless Cactus, “The Luther Burbank Company is the sole distributor
of the Burbank Horticultural Productions, and from no
other source can one be positively assured of obtaining genuine
Luther Burbank Productions.”
Huntington Library, San Marino, California
44 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
engine, and enough irrigation equipment to turn
his land into an improbable center for rice growing,
but as the Los Angeles Times correctly noted
in 1913, his spineless cactus order “would take
more than the entire Burbank plantation could
supply at one time.” 41
Overexpansion and difficulties in product delivery
are classic problems of any new business, but
these perils did not seem to bother the managers
of the Luther Burbank Company. For the next
two years, they continued to spend a fortune on
advertising and told their salesmen to accept
every order that came their way. When they didn’t
have enough stock to fill the orders, they bought
ordinary Opuntia, singed off the spines with
blowtorches or rubbed them off with pads, and
sent out the doctored slabs for planting.
Buyers discovered the fraud once the cactus had
been planted, of course, but by then it was too
late. The Luther Burbank Company collapsed
into bankruptcy on February 8, 1916, wiping
out many Santa Rosa investors who had bought
what seemed a sure road to wealth: a share
in marketing their famous neighbor’s plants.
Although Burbank had little or nothing to do
with the company’s sales tactics or its fraudulent
deliveries and was himself suing the managers
for nonpayment of almost ten thousand dollars
due on his original contract, the failure of the
Luther Burbank Company halted sales and tarnished
Burbank’s name, at least among scientific
researchers who recoiled at the entire attempt to
commercialize his product.
Burbank’s critics might have taken comfort in
comparing his profits, such as they were, to the
enormous cost of nurturing his cactus experiments
for several decades. Records are scarce,
but it seems that none of the many companies
formed to exploit Luther Burbank’s name or sell
his creations ever did more than cover expenses
and few managed to get that far. But commercial
failure did not mean an end to general interest.

urbanKian inFluEnCE
The spineless cactus lived on after the marketing
bubble burst, and not only in the scattered
gardens and farm plots of early growers. Burbank
remained a popular hero, and high school
biology textbooks throughout the 1920s featured
him and cited his spineless cactus as an example
of the careful application of Mendelian and
Darwinian principles to the improvement of
agricultural products. 42 Children posed in various
“Burbankian” costumes at events organized to
celebrate the great plant breeder, who was now
revered as much as a spiritual model as he was
as a commercial inventor.
As such celebrations show, many people still
wanted to learn about Burbank’s life and creations.
In December 1907, when he had spoken
about his new spineless cactus to the Southern
California Teachers’ Association, Burbank had
met its president, Henry Augustus Adrian, who
also was Santa Barbara’s superintendent of
schools. Not long after, Adrian left that post to
become a regular performer on the Chautauqua
circuit, making a successful career of explaining
Burbank’s creations to eager crowds who came to
the traveling lecture halls for uplift and education.
Known as the “Luther Burbank Man,” Adrian
toured the country for the next sixteen years
before returning to Santa Barbara in 1925, where
he was promptly elected mayor.
While Adrian was drawing throngs to the big
brown tents that were a Chautauqua trademark,
Burbank remained in Santa Rosa, where he
continued to attract his own horde of visitors
until his death in 1926. His hundreds of
guests included Helen Keller, Thomas Edison,
Henry Ford, the football hero Red Grange,
and the Polish statesman and musician Ignace
Paderewski. In the 1920s, Burbank hosted
Swami Paramahansa Yogananda, who toured the
United States and made several visits to the San
Francisco area before settling in Los Angeles and
To protect against the fraudulent use of Burbank’s name, the Luther
Burbank Company trademarked its corporate identity. Proof of
authenticity also was available to those who bought from the company’s
local representatives, who, as depicted on the back cover of the
1914 Burbank Seed Book, received an official certificate of appointment,
as well as an official Burbank dealer seed case.
California Historical Society
45

46
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
In the years following World War I, the public embraced
Burbank as both an embodiment of the values of the natural
world and an innovative businessman. (Below) Luther
posed with his wife, Elizabeth, and schoolchildren dressed
as flowers in Santa Rosa, circa 1920. With a great interest
in education, he urged parents and educators to nurture
children as richly and carefully as precious plants. (Left)
Henry Augustus Adrian, the “Luther Burbank Man,”
toured the country, lecturing on Burbank’s life and work
and his spineless cactus as a speaker on the Chautauqua
lecture circuit—one of many well-known performers and
lecturers from the worlds of entertainment, politics, religion,
and culture.
Henry Augustus Adrian, Records of the Redpath Chautauqua
Collection, The University of iowa Libraries, iowa City, iowa;
The Burbanks with children, courtesy of the Luther Burbank
Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa, California, lutherburbank.org.

uying the former Mount Washington Hotel,
which became the headquarters of his Self-
Realization Fellowship.
Yogananda’s visit left a lasting impression on
the young swami. Twenty years later, in 1946, he
dedicated his Autobiography of a Yogi “to Luther
Burbank—An American Saint.” In the chapter
“A Saint Amid the Roses,” he described his first
visit to Santa Rosa. It began with a lesson from
Burbank: “The secret of improved plant breeding,
apart from scientific knowledge, is love.” Stopping
near a bed of spineless cactus, Burbank had
described to Yogananda his method of talking to
the cacti and how it was instrumental in successful
hybridization: “‘You have nothing to fear,’ I
would tell them. ‘You don't need your defensive
thorns. I will protect you.’” Gradually “the useful
plant of the desert emerged in a thornless
variety.” To Yogananda’s request for a few cactus
leaves to plant in his own garden, Burbank
had insisted, “‘I myself will pluck them for the
swami.’ He handed me three leaves, which later
I planted, rejoicing as they grew to huge estate,”
the yogi wrote. 43 The original cactus, or a very
early offspring, can still be seen at the Mount
Washington site today.
Spineless cactus will never be the answer to
world hunger, but it was not an absurd idea. Free
of overpromotion, the Burbank varieties are still a
respected, if modest, agricultural introduction. In
recent years, commercial ranchers and academic
researchers have demonstrated renewed interest
in prickly pear cultivation in Argentina, Chile,
South Africa, southern Texas, and Tunisia, with
a strong preference for the spineless varieties. 44
The Food and Agriculture Organization, a branch
of the United Nations, calls spineless cactus “an
important crop for the subsistence agriculture of
the semi-arid and arid-regions,” serving as feed
for livestock and also controlling desertification
and restoring depleted natural rangelands. Commercial
plantations of spineless cactus for nopalitos,
which have been cultivated for centuries in
Mexico, are moving north across the border,
along with the burgeoning interest in Mexican
cooking. 45
None of these modern efforts matches the enthusiasm
for grand agricultural experiments that
made Luther Burbank such an idol a century ago.
In 1916, the same year the Luther Burbank Company
failed, Congress passed the Stock Raising
Homestead Act, increasing the land homesteaders
could claim in the arid parts of western states
from 160 to 640 acres on the grounds that it was
impossible for livestock to survive on less land,
given the sparseness of fodder. The Southern
Pacific Land Company had already abandoned
its efforts to turn its desert holdings into spineless
cactus farms and returned its attention to
fostering orchard crops in more fertile areas. And
in 1922, the Santa Fe Railroad concluded that
eucalyptus timber was unsuitable for railroad
ties and converted its tree farm into a pricey real
estate development, Rancho Santa Fe. But that’s
another story.
Jane S. Smith is the author of The Garden of Invention:
Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants (Penguin
Press, 2009), from which portions of this essay are adapted.
Her history of the first polio vaccine, Patenting the Sun: Polio
and the Salk Vaccine, received the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize for Science and Technology. A member of the History
Department at Northwestern University, she writes about the
intersection of science, business, and popular taste.
47

A Life RemembeRed:
The Voice and Passions of Feminist Writer
and Community Activist Flora Kimball
F lora Kimball was an active and
prominent voice in California during
the state’s early history. In clear, strong
language, she articulated the growing views
held by both women and men in rural white
America in support of women’s suffrage and
increased independence for women outside of
the traditional confines of the family. Kimball
carried the banner raised by her contemporaries,
including the political writers and activists
Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. 2 A look into her life and writings
offers us a wonderful glimpse into the mind-set
of a progressive agrarian woman in nineteenthcentury
California.
Flora Kimball was a writer, a community activist,
and a lay horticulturalist. Through her writing,
she articulated her views on the changing social
and economic dynamics for women and the
need for a more equitable society. Through her
civic commitments, she activated those beliefs.
48 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
By Matthew Nye
I wished–oh! so ardently–that a moral earthquake would startle the women in this country
who are in a death-like sleep, oblivious to the laws that oppress them.
Shocks are not harmful, but on the contrary may have the effect of showing us
more clearly the “wrongs we know of” in our very midst.
—Flora Kimball, California Patron, 1879 1
She offered her opinions freely, but she was not
a maverick, nor was she always unique in her
vision. Many politically astute women of the time
asked both men and women to rethink their positions
and responsibilities in the evolving society
of the 1800s, among them Carrie A. Colby,
Maria B. Landers, and L. M. Daugherty.
Though her writing and activism were not on
the same scale as the era’s nationally recognized
women in their notoriety or scope, Kimball did
help spread the gospel of California’s growing
woman’s suffrage movement. And though she
neglected to address the greater range of issues
that Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and
others (including twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury
contemporary activists) would consider
inclusionary in the capacity of the suffrage movement—such
as race and class 3 —she addressed
the pressing concerns of rural women: their
changing role within the family, work outside of
the home, and the right to vote.

The pioneering spirit of Flora Kimball (1829–1898) is exemplified in her civic involvement to bring cultural
and political change to the new state of California. Her reputation as a preeminent feminist was earned as a
writer for the California Patron. At the time of her death, it was said she was the most well-known woman
in the state. While consistently expressing her political views in her writing, the National City Record aptly
noted that she was also “among the best writers on the Pacific Coast.”
Morgan Local History Room, national City Public Library
49

In her life and writing, Kimball exhibited contrary
aspects of feminist thought, simultaneously
championing the importance of women
in the home and the need for self-sufficiency
outside the home. Through her own example,
she encouraged women to achieve mastery
over their own lives. A product of, as well as an
influence on, the changing society for women in
nineteenth-century California, she brought the
philosophies of New England liberalism—the
antislavery, suffragist politics of the Northeast—
to the West. In a style that was often dogmatic
and occasionally sentimental, she wrote with
passion and persistence on issues that helped
to spread these views and propel California into
the twentieth century. Kimball’s name and voice
has gone unheard for many years, and while her
work may not necessarily garner a place of academic
merit or even recollection, its focus on the
role of nineteenth-century women and its fervor
and determination do warrant historical attention
and review.
ThE JournEy WEsT
Flora Mary Morrill was born in Warner, New
Hampshire, on July 24, 1829, one of ten children
of John and Hannah Hall Morrill. Her maternal
grandfather was the Revolutionary War surgeon
Dr. John Hall. Her paternal grandparents, Zebulon
and Mary Morrill, espoused the theological,
intellectual, and social reform tenets of Congregationalism.
4 Her older sister Hannah Frances
Foster (Brown), the well-known Spiritualist,
was, like Flora, an avid abolitionist and women’s
suffragist. 5
Embarking on a career at the young age of
fifteen, Flora was a teacher in her hometown.
She worked for ten years in the schools of New
Hampshire, eventually becoming the head of
Concord High School. She would draw upon
this example of the independent woman working
outside the home in her later writings. Her
50 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
campaign for the independence of women within
the family and her advocacy for their equal
rights in society began during these early years.
She reportedly attributed her awareness of the
inequality of women to her experience as a ten-
year-old working alongside a neighbor boy to
drop corn; she received five cents for her day’s
work to the boy’s ten. She experienced this same
ratio as a beginning teacher, earning one dollar a
week to the two-dollar weekly salary for men. 6
In 1855, Warren C. Kimball, from the neighboring
town of Contoocook, recruited the young
Miss Flora Morrill to come and teach in the town
school. Warren had grown up in Contoocook on
his family farm with his four brothers, Frank,
George, Levi, and Charles, and his two sisters,
Mary and Lucy. On December 13, 1857, two years
after Flora’s arrival in Contoocook, she and Warren
married. On that same day, Warren’s brother,
Levi, married Flora’s younger sister, Louisa.
In 1861, Warren and his younger brother Frank
arrived in California, having traveled by way of
Panama. 7 Joining Levi in San Francisco, the three
siblings set up shop as contractors. The Kimball
brothers were successful in constructing homes
and commercial buildings in the city. 8 In 1862,
Frank felt established enough to send for his
wife, Sarah Currier. But his mother refused to
give Sarah her consent to undertake the dangerous
journey until Flora agreed to accompany her
sister-in-law on the voyage. Frank noted in his
diary: “Sarah writes that she is only waiting for
Flora to decide when she will be ready. Hope it
will be by the 21 st . Bless her.” 9
On December 18, 1862, Flora arrived in California,
a land already rich in history, though one
wrought with stories of conquest and struggle.
The native peoples had been displaced by Spaniards
in their conquest for souls and dominion,
and the Californios had lost out to the Anglo-
Americans in claims over water, land title, and
prosperity. It was a land where everyone seemed
to be fighting for a place of his own. 10 To this

dynamic Flora Kimball brought her own agenda:
the fight toward victory for women of her class
and race.
The Kimball families had landed in San Francisco
during the city’s vibrant, formative years. In this
new metropolis, Flora noted, “first you will meet
but a few old people, for this is a new country and
a great way from the old states, and but few old
people break early ties and wander so far. The few
whose hair is gray and step feeble, feel like the
first of a race whose early associates have wearied
of life’s toils and laid down to rest. So all is a
bustle—the stir of more than a hundred thousand
souls, in the beginning and prime of life.” 11
Kimball found the San Francisco of the 1860s a
contradiction of wealth and poverty. Her observations
in some of her early writing reflect her
humanity. She wrote about the downtrodden,
such as the homeless “Ragged Frenchman . . .
his eye fixed on the ground, ready to spy out any
pile of dirt, and eager to seize on any mouldy
[sic] crust that might be found therein . . . and
his locks long and shaggy, straying over his face
and shoulders, combed only by the wind, and
powdered with sand . . . did I not see in that once
fine form, and through the dirty face, traces of
beauty and intellect?” With poetic observance,
she described two young men walking down the
street “. . . each with a cigar in his mouth, the latest
Paris cut clothes and his kid gloves. One of
them took his cigar between the ends of the first
two fingers of his right hand, gradually expelling
the smoke from his mouth.” 12
Kimball was first published during these years in
San Francisco, when she and Warren rented, for
ten dollars a month, the back parlor of Frank and
Sarah’s place at 16 Tehama Street, just south of
Market and only five blocks from the bay. 13 She
wrote letters to young readers in the East about
the adolescent city for the publication Rising
Tide, which published her accounts in columns
with such titles as “California Sketches,” “Letters
from California,” “Little Neighbor,” “Shells and
Sea-weed,” “To the Children,” “From Aunt Prudence,”
and “Our California Correspondent.” Her
early journalism style was typical of the period in
which she wrote: eloquent, yet in a manner often
thick with extended descriptive sentences. As a
correspondent, she chose subject matters that
reflected her passions: plants and horticulture,
education, and, most strongly, “the new woman”
and her role in society and the home.
In one of her “California Sketches,” Kimball
offered a glimpse into one of the most important
issues of the day, the Civil War. Her response
to the Confederate defeat at Charleston, South
Carolina, which she considered cause for celebration,
reveals her view of the event in its broader
implications for women. “God and men grant
that the good old flag may again continue to float
over Sumter until every intelligent citizen of our
country, male and female, shall enjoy the rights
of suffrage, then we may properly be called what
we never were—a Republic,” she yearned in
one of her early ventures into the body politic of
women’s suffrage. 14
The travesty of war was a theme in Kimball’s
personal writing as well. In a private letter she
sent back East, she wrote: “Peace ‘reigns within
our borders’ and all we see of war, are the daily
telegrams which bring us news of carnage and
bloodshed. Those who have visited the Atlantic
States the past year, return almost regretting
the journey. Brave brother had fallen in battle,
fathers and mothers prematurely gray, friends all
mourning the loss of some household treasure,
and our beautiful country one vast funeral and
burying ground.” 15
During her years in northern California, Kimball
often touched upon the topic of children; she recognized
the consequences of the environment in
their formation and championed the advantages
of solid morals. As witness to the devastating
effects of mining on families in post–Gold Rush
San Francisco, she observed: “The mania for
51

52
This photograph, made circa 1882, more than twelve years after Flora Kimball arrived at Rancho de la
Nación, illustrates the sparse landscape of nineteenth-century southern California, the challenges the Kimballs
faced in creating National City, and the isolated environment in which Flora lived and wrote.
Morgan Local History Room, national City Public Library
speculation in mining stocks . . . has possessed
our people like an evil spirit the last year, reducing
many from wealth to poverty.” On hand to
celebrate the 1867 expansion of the San Francisco
Industrial School, she witnessed personally
the cost to the city’s youth. The school, located
six miles outside the city, trained boys and girls
from the ages of four to eighteen; the older children
had committed crimes while many of the
younger ones had been “deserted by their parents.”
Kimball believed that part of the problem
for youths was derived from city life: “Cities do
not possess . . . remedies for the moral delinquencies
of youth. Give a mischievous city lad a dozen
fine fruit trees, all his very own; his to cultivate
and enjoy the fruit thereof; and his early reformation
may be predicted.” 16
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
a nEW sTarT
Life changed dramatically for Flora when, in
1868, in a state of ailing health, her brother-inlaw
Frank decided he needed to leave the inclement
weather of the Bay Area for a more moderate
locale. Joined once again by Warren and Levi, the
brothers purchased a former Mexican land grant,
Rancho de la Nación (listed in the land patent as
the National Ranch), 17 located in the most southern
reaches of the state. 18 On December 5, 1868,
Frank and Sarah left for San Diego, followed
shortly after by Warren and Flora.
In his January 19, 1869, diary entry, Frank
noted simply, “Flora and Warren came in on the
Orizaba.” 19 Flora would describe their arrival in
southern California in more romantic terms:

“Ten years ago we passed through the ‘Silver
Gate’ of San Diego Bay on the Orizaba to make
another home in this genial clime. We were
borne to the shore on the arms of gallant sailors,
for the busy people were too much absorbed in
buying and selling corner lots to indulge in the
luxury of wharf building.” 20 Little more is known
of Flora’s feelings on relocating to such an arid,
open country. Though her thoughts on the subject
are not documented, the home and lifestyle
she and husband created indicate that it was a
positive move.
The industrious Kimball brothers wasted no time
in developing their newly purchased land, naming
and then surveying the town-site of National
City. Frank and Warren built a wharf, constructed
roads, and planted orchards—all to entice more
settlers and, more importantly, the railroad to the
region. Competition to bring a rail terminus to
southern California was fierce. Fledgling farming
communities like National City could use the
railroad to expeditiously ship their produce out
of the remote region of southern California. 21
The construction of homes was also a priority
for the brothers; they built twelve during
the first year and an additional seventy-five the
following year. 22
The close and loving connection that Warren
and Flora displayed throughout their marriage—
though minus any offspring—was exemplified in
their National City home, which was a regional
showpiece. Their residence, named Olivewood,
was built in the early 1870s on what would
become 24th Street, between D and F avenues.
With its grand panoramic views, Olivewood was
a stately Italianate-modeled home decorated in
Flora and Warren Kimball’s home, Olivewood, was a traditional Italianate design: balanced and symmetrical with
overhanging eaves and cornices. It was built on a rise and faced west toward the bay, easily catching the ocean
breezes. The Kimballs were known as gracious hosts and entertained visitors regularly.
Morgan Local History Room, national City Public Library
53

54
traditional Victorian fashion. But its real treasure
was the gardens built by Warren and Flora,
described in an 1889 article in the National City
Record as “a twenty-acre tract, the east half set
in olives alone, and the west half in olives, various
other fruits, lawns, flowers and hedges. In
all there are two thousand trees; 1,300 olive; 300
orange and the balance are lemon, lime, peach,
pear, apple, apricot, pomegranate, guava, plum,
fig, loquat, and grapes.” 23
As one of the National Ranch’s first farms, it was
difficult to determine what would grow in its soil.
The Kimballs planted almost any type of tree they
could obtain: eucalyptus, magnolia, camphor,
pepper, Grevillea robusta, rubber, mulberry, Norfolk
Island pine, ginkgo, crape myrtle, and 185
rods of Monterey cypress hedge—an impressive
number and variety of species given the absence
of nearby nurseries. Many of their plantings
were gifts from friends: a Japanese persimmon
tree brought from Japan; an American persimmon
from Kentucky; a Smyrna fig brought from
Turkey; an olive tree from France; a magnolia
from Natchez; a palm from Mexico; two orange
trees from New Orleans; cosmos seeds from
New Mexico. Particularly famous were more than
seventy-five varieties of roses, including Homer,
Captain Christy, Xavier, Anton Morton, Baroness
Rothschild, Bon Silence, Cecil Brunner, Black
Prince, and La France, which Flora planted. 24
In the management of Olivewood and the tending
of her gardens, Flora made concrete her ideas
about the value and importance of home—recurring
themes in her literary output. Confirming
the emotional connection to her home, she
wrote, “There is no word in our language so suggestive
of the best in human nature, love purity,
and happiness, as home. Our home should be
the expression of our most lofty ideas, a combination
of the poetical, artistic and refined.” 25 Flora
and Warren’s beautiful home and gardens were
evidence of the elite status the Kimballs held in
their community.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
a liFE oF WorDs
Following the Civil War, many women across
the country were extremely frustrated and disenchanted
with the failure of the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments to include universal
suffrage for all Americans. For women who
participated in the suffrage movement, enfranchisement
was a pivotal goal; it was crucial not
only as a symbol of women’s equality but also
as a means of improving social conditions for
themselves and their families. 26 Thus, the formation
in 1867 of the National Grange of the Order
of Patrons of Husbandry, the first secret society
to admit women to full and equal membership,
played a significant and symbolic role in the
lives of many women, allowing them to participate
intellectually and socially in a community
organization alongside men. “When the order of
Patrons was established,” Kimball wrote in hindsight
in 1878, “it seemed to us that the dawn of
woman’s, as well as the farmer’s, prosperity had
come. That those who originated the movement
must have drank from the fountain of inspiration,
that before another decade the moral, social
and educational effects of the Grange would be
felt and appreciated throughout the country.” 27
The Grange was the culmination of a large number
of agricultural organizations formed by men
and women of the farming class who were seeking
economic and social change. In 1873, the first
annual convention of the state chapter, the State
Grange of California, was held at San Jose, with
104 local granges represented. In 1882, Grange
master Daniel Flint identified the state branch
as “one of the factors in voicing the wishes of
the farmer, defending his rights, and making an
aggressive warfare, instead of forever standing in
the background and acting on the defense.” 28
In his 1875 book, The Patrons of Husbandry on
the Pacific Coast, Ezra S. Carr described the
Grange’s objective, which so intently encompassed
both men and women: “The barriers to

Scenes of farm life are depicted in this 1873 promotional poster for the Granger movement, “Gift for the Grangers.” Grange members
surely would have recognized the guiding principles of faith, hope, charity, and fidelity and have agreed with the nearly hidden
words “I Pay for All,” suggesting the central role farmers played in the life and well-being of the nation.
Library of Congress
55

56
social intercourse that are thrown around society
by despotic fashion, are ruthlessly thrown down
with us, and we meet on a common footing, with
a common object in view. . . . To make country
homes and country society attractive, refined,
and enjoyable; to balance exhaustive labors by
instructive amusements and accomplishments, is
part of our mission and our aim.” 29 The California
Patron—the state grange’s newspaper—also
expressed a rationale for the inclusion of women.
A woman stands, the publication opined, “as
firm and self-reliant as the bravest and strongest
brother in the band, and fearlessly helps to maintain
everything that is good of the order; and by
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
the way, anything that is good for the Grange is
good for the whole country—aye, for the good of
the nation and the whole world for that matter.” 30
National City’s local, or subordinate, grange,
National Ranch Grange No. 235, was formed in
November 1874, with Frank Kimball serving as
its first master. In 1879, Flora was elected master—the
first woman in the country to hold the
position. Working for the Grange was a natural
fit for Flora; it was in line with her love of plants
and agriculture; it reflected the pride she held for
the life of the rural family; and it reinforced the
support she touted for the role of women outside
National Ranch Grange No. 235, located at 828 National Avenue (now National City Boulevard), was constructed in
1875. The second floor of the building operated as the Grange meeting hall, while the first floor housed a furniture store in
the front and a tin and plumbing shop in the rear. The hall also was used for many community events, and was the site of
the public library for a short period.
Morgan Local History Room, national City Public Library

of the home. Through her association with the
Grange, she was able to meld her interests.
Many states published Grange newspapers: the
Dirigo Rural in Maine; the American Grange Bulletin
of Ohio; the Grange Visitor of Michigan; and
the Patron of Husbandry of Mississippi. California’s
paper, the California Patron, was devoted to
the interests of agriculture and the homes of its
readers. It also covered political issues, though
with the conviction that no party had a monopoly
on its principles. Owned and managed entirely
by the State Grange of California, and published
in San Francisco, the California Patron first
appeared on March 17, 1876, and continued as
a monthly for almost two years, at which time
it became a semimonthly. Suspended for four
months in October 1879, it resumed in March
1880 as a weekly. “The California Patron,” wrote
the academic Solon J. Buck in 1913, “exerted a
wholesome influence upon the social and intellectual
conditions of the farmer as well as helped
to stay the decline of the Grange.” 31
In 1878, the California Patron carried a regular
feature for women called the Matrons’ Department,
under the editorship of Carrie A. Colby.
Colby’s columns regularly revolved around
domestic issues, temperance, voting rights, and
education. 32 In July of that year, Kimball began to
contribute articles, both fiction and nonfiction,
focusing on similar issues. She saw the California
Patron as providing mental food for households
scattered throughout the state, many of
them far from their neighbors. In March 1880,
she became editor of the Matrons’ Department,
which was soon renamed Family Circle. It was
here, in the pages of the California Patron, that
Kimball honed her skills and critique as a feminist
suffragist.
While her contemporary Susan B. Anthony
pursued women’s rights through governmental
legislation, and Sojourner Truth linked women’s
rights to Christian values, Flora Kimball made
a cultural connection to women’s issues. With
a frequent interest and focus on the home life,
she wrote stories and editorials about simple discrepancies
between the sexes within the family.
These early columns occasionally revealed a hint
of innocence: “I often wondered . . . why careworn
mothers and little sisters should spend the long
winter evenings knitting and darning for the boys
while they were free to enjoy themselves as they
chose. Boy’s fingers are as easily educated to knit
and sew as girls. . . . When a boy learns to care
for his own clothing will he appreciate the kind
offices of those who have worked so faithfully for
him, and his future wife will be blest with a husband
who, if necessary, can relieve her of many
little burdens.” 33
As editor of Family Circle, Kimball included
poems and a supplemental feature for young
readers. But she always came back to her central
theme: rural women and the roles to which they
were often subjugated. “Much drudgery is borne
by women for no other reason than because she
is a woman,” she observed. She stressed that a
woman ought to be a master of her work, not
a slave, and believed that the work of reform
should commence with women. Advocating that
older children take some of the burden off their
mother, she encouraged sons to learn chores
around the house and fathers to assist with the
laundry (if they did, she believed, many homes
would soon have washing machines and wringers!).
“When the wife and mother make it the
object of her life to wear herself out for her family,
it is carrying a good thing quite beyond the
bounds of reason and common sense,” 34 she
maintained.
Young women also should prepare for an independent
life outside of the home—a central
theme in many of Kimball’s writings that was
not just revolutionary but prophetic in its vision
of what the next century would bring about for
women. In “Trades for Girls,” Kimball elaborated
on this provocative notion: “Every argument that
57

58
Flora Kimball was a frequent, and popular, contributor
to the pages of the California Patron,
the publication of the State Grange of California,
writing on issues of relevance to women in the
state’s rural and urban communities. As editor
of the women’s section, renamed Family Circle
in 1880, she combined her passion for women’s
social and political rights with the feature’s focus
on the tender relationships and camaraderie
among women.
Morgan Local History Room, national City
Public Library
can be adduced in favor of boys learning trades
applies with equal favor to girls. I believe it
even more important that young women should
become self-supporting than young men, for the
common reasons, that, homeless, helpless girls
often marry for no higher motive than to be supported.
Such loveless unions inevitably result in
miserable lives, and death alone can bring relief.
Divorce is sometimes resorted to, but the wife
is still left incapable of earning a livelihood as
before the marriage.” 35
Although she lived the life of a rural farm wife,
Kimball understood the burdens confronting
her cosmopolitan sisters. She noted that women
could not enjoy the public sphere unescorted by
a man, or even by another woman. “As a woman,
I defend the right of women to ‘life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness,’ equally as men,” she
asserted. Because women are American citizens
subject to the same laws with men, and share
alike the burden of taxation, she pointed out, “the
laws should protect them without being obliged
to summon a protector to protect them from their
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
protectors.” Further, if a lady is treated with disrespect
at a theater or elsewhere in public, she
argued, those public officials whose salary is paid
by her taxes should “promptly arrest such offenders,
and in a short time a woman will be as safe
in public as a man.” 36
Kimball was cognizant of the effect of gender on
women’s day-to-day existence. In one column,
she addressed the story of a woman who was
arrested in New York for donning men’s clothes
in order to procure men’s wages and who subsequently
received a six-month prison sentence: “I
cannot help thinking that it is a wicked state of
affairs that drives young women to the questionable
expediency of donning male attire to gain an
increase of wages, and then, on detection, being
thrown into prison for six months! . . . I cannot
see why it is not a crime more heinous than
wearing male attire, withholding from woman
the wages justly her due. An unjust discrimination
against sex is a blot more foul in our social
world than many offenses for which the victims
are thrown in prison.” 37

a ChaMpion For ThE MovEMEnT
The promotion of women’s suffrage in nineteenth-century
America had many detractors.
Betsy B., 38 writing for the San Francisco Argonaut
in 1882, observed, “In point of fact, great women
are uncomfortable creatures, and no one seeks
to be where they abound. No man wants one of
them on his hearthstone.” Kimball responded
sharply: “Why not, pray? A great woman may
possibly make a little man ‘uncomfortable,’ but
how ‘two hearts that beat as one’ can render each
other uncomfortable is a new riddle in social science.
. . . Flippant, female scribblers pander to a
silly prejudice when they depreciate their own sex
by flings at feminine greatness.” 39
Kimball also published a retort to an 1881 article
in the North American by Charles W. Elliott titled
“Woman’s Work and Woman’s Wages,” in which
Elliott railed against the legitimacy of the role of
women in the workforce: “To-day woman seems
to be the least valuable of created beings. . . . No
queen works, no chieftain’s wife works, no trader’s
wife works, no lady works or wishes to work
or expects to work.” 40 She called Elliott’s article
a feeble attempt at sarcasm and described him
as “a relic, no doubt, of that decaying, conservative
class that flourished in the last century, who
believe that women’s intellect, genius, strength
and fortitude were given her for the sole purpose
of ministering to the comfort of man.” 41
Kimball also responded to an article by the editor
of Scribner’s Monthly, F. G. Holland, who in
“Women and Her Work” bewailed the degeneration
of women of the present day and their
desire for freedom and independence in seeking
employment options other than those found in
their own homes. To Holland’s objection that
women “claim the right to mark out for themselves
and achieve an independent career,” Kimball
argued: “Thanks to the growing intelligence
of the age, women of sense not only ‘claim the
right,’ but thousands on thousands are exercising
the right to make themselves so independent that
they will not condescend to violate their womanly
purity and marry simply for support, notwithstanding
that the fossil pens of such teachers as
Dr. Holland are forever telling them that ‘marriage
is the great end of a woman’s life.’” 42
Like her contemporary Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Kimball championed women’s issues other
than the right to vote, including an eight-hour
workday, equal pay for working women, divorce
reform that would obliterate forever the notion
that wives “belonged” to their husbands, and selfsupport.
She repeatedly promoted the latter in
her writings, asserting that self-sufficiency was
one of the first things young people, especially
girls, should learn: “There is no sadder sight than
that of young women who have been trained to
luxurious indolence, bereft of means, with no
trade or practical education, adrift on the world,
an easy prey to the evils that beset the way of the
objectless.” 43
Kimball also supported Stanton’s campaign
against the enslavement of women to fashion. 44
To the suffragists, nineteenth-century clothing
reform was a serious concern, regarding both
comfort and preoccupation. In “Feminine Folly,”
Kimball lamented the time and intellect wasted
by women on fashion. One can almost hear her
anguish as she writes, “We do not, and no one
should, ignore taste and beauty in dress; but we
do remonstrate, with all the power of an outraged
womanhood, against this soul-degrading practice
of debasing the intellect of our sex, our precious
time and the means that might make suffering
humanity comfortable, to the senseless pursuit of
every new style that cunning brain of French or
American dress artist can invent.” 45
To Kimball, subordinating refinement, health,
and economy to the demands of fashion was a
peril to women; their fixation on fashion’s frivolity
only debased a brilliant intellect. “It is a blind
obedience to the behests of fashion, more than
anything else that confirms men in the belief of
59

60
women’s intellectual inferiority, and shuts her
out from the avenues of labor to which by nature
she is peculiarly adapted,” she wrote. Reiterating
the need for women to design their lives for independence,
she remarked, “The work of unfitting
her for a life of honorable self-support begins
in fancy.” 46
Kimball’s contributions to the California Patron
were not limited to editorials. She wrote poems
as well as stories under the pen names Pearl
Dogood, Pearl Victor, Aunt Prudence, and Betsy
Snow. Written in the style of early Jane Austen
stories, these fictionalized narratives depicted
nineteenth-century families and lessons of
morality learned within the confines of the
home. 47 Some were satirical allegories in which
the simple wife was guided by her husband. In
Something Original: Advice to Young Wives, the
young spouse Betsy Snow readily agrees with all
the advice from her husband, Fred, including:
“Never appear at the breakfast table with your
hair undressed. . . . On the contrary when I have
been awake all night with the baby, instead of
catching a little sleep at early dawn, when the
weary sufferer is quiet, I get out of bed and go at
my frizzes.” 48
In Betsy Snow Stays Home, a subservient Betsy
questions Fred when he sells some of their land,
naively believing that a wife had to agree to the
transaction. When Fred reminds her that the
law is different in California than in other states,
Betsy is humbled and remembers her place. 49
In Extravagant Wives, Betsy Snow sardonically
writes, “Extravagant wives drive more husbands
to bankruptcy than any mismanagement of business
or hard times. A twenty-five dollar hat, every
time the breeze of fashion changes, soon gets to
the bottom of the longest purse.” She goes on to
note various men who have recently squandered
their business, attributing the loss to a bonnet
the wife had recently purchased. 50
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
In the sentimental “Two Thanksgivings,” Kimball
chronicled the lives of a simple New England
family who succumbed to the delusions of prosperity
during the Gold Rush. In a rash move, the
family migrates to the western frontier, leaving
behind all that is true and dear to them. But the
characters in Kimball’s story are “high-minded
and noble-hearted” people, and in this new land
they find not gold but redemption and thankfulness.
Though often simple, Kimball’s stories
need not necessarily be judged on their intrinsic
literary merit but rather on the social, political,
and cultural discourses they encouraged.
Under the pen name F. M. Lebelle, in 1872
Kimball wrote The Fairfields, considered by some
local historians the first novel written by a San
Diego–area author. The book was published by
Kimball’s sister Louisa, who was working for the
Lyceum Banner, a Chicago-based periodical with
ties to the Spiritualist movement. Using a shortened
form of her sister’s name that mirrors the
genderless—and thereby perhaps more commercially
acceptable—aspect of her own pen names,
Flora dedicated the book “To Lou H. Kimball,
the untiring friend of children.” Writing for the
San Diego Union in 1964, Gene Ingles described
the book as “. . . a novel for children full of moral
teaching—a novel you might expect to have
been written by someone in a town not too far
removed from frontier days.” 51
In her prose on nature, Kimball’s writing most
reflects her New England heritage—as inspired
by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) and
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the
Woods (1854)—particularly the growing focus
on the environment and man’s relationship to
nature. She embraced the era’s ecological philosophy,
believing that life on a farm elevated
mankind through the agency of Nature: “I pity
the child who is cast upon the piles of brick and
mortar of cities, whose feet never touched the
soft, yielding grass, and whose heart has not beat
with joy in the shadowy embrace of open armed

This young woman’s stylish silhouette—captured in the studio of Joshua Vansant Jr. in Eureka circa 1885–1908—
was characteristic of women’s fashions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her air of discomfort
may be attributed to her heavy corset—which applied twenty or more pounds of pressure on the abdomen—and the
additional weight of her layered skirt. In her 1881 column in the California Patron, Kimball called women’s fashion
of the era “Feminine Folly.”
California Historical Society
61

trees; whose childish appetite has not been
appeased with fruits, and whose sense of beauty
has not been ministered to by the happy, laughing
flowers.” 52 She occasionally made a connection
between nature and religion: “Flowers are
sermons that fit us for a life hereafter and make
us better in the present. They inculcate the virtues
that will save us from sin.” 53
Kimball wrote throughout the 1880s. In 1889,
R. H. Young launched The Great Southwest, a
monthly publication devoted to agricultural and
industrial pursuits in San Diego and National
City. He brought in Kimball as the horticulture
editor of the column Home and Family. Yet Kimball
continued to advocate the need for women
to lay claim to their natural given rights, always
striking that seemingly contradictory balance
between supporting a woman’s right for independence
and championing her place in the home.
About the economic opportunities for women,
she observed: “All about us are struggling women
with dependent families, and all about us are the
golden opportunities adapted to the capacities of
each. To bring them together is to make happy
and comfortable homes where poverty now
exists. Poverty is the birth-right of none.” 54
a CiviC liFE
In an 1889 article, Kimball acknowledged the
change in women’s lives over the years: “One
by one the ponderous doors that have for ages
shut women out from participation in affairs as
vital to their interest as to men’s—have swung
back on their rusty hinges.” 55 And it was Kimball
who had helped open many of those doors.
Aside from her role as the nation’s first female
master of a grange, she also was involved in the
early development of the National City Public
Library. 56 In 1883, Governor George Stoneman
appointed her to the State Board of Agriculture,
along with six other “ladies.” 57
62 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
In 1889, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce
invited its members’ wives to establish a “Ladies
Day.” Kimball and seven other socially energetic
women organized the Annex to the Chamber
of Commerce, the first group of its kind in the
country. As historian Irene Philips has noted: “In
two months they had 700 [members] from all
parts of the county to aid the men in the industrial,
commercial and horticultural interest in
the county in which men as well as women had
interest.” With the backing of a new local paper,
the Pacific Rural Press, Kimball was instrumental
in providing the Annex with good publicity.
She wrote, in part: “It is an old notion which is
constantly melting away in the light of the 20th
century that it is good for man to be alone in all
public work in which the community, as a whole,
is engaged. Our first aims are a market-house for
farmer’s products, a library building, an Opera
House and cheap water for San Diego.” 58
The Pacific Rural Press observed that Kimball’s
reputation and name were larger than National
City itself when she was chosen to represent
southern California on the board of managers
for the upcoming 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago,
declaring, “We can think of no one more competent
and every way desirable for that honorable
office than the lady mentioned. She would certainly
do credit to our State.” 59
The year 1889 was significant for Kimball. In
June she was elected to the school board of the
National School District, the first woman in the
state to receive that honor. She would hold the
post for eight years. Despite tough competition,
Kimball had received strong support, especially
from the National City Record, which had
endorsed her as the most available and strongest
candidate. Promoting her intelligence, independence,
and hard work, the editors concluded that
“she will be actuated by the dictates of her own
conscience, and will always work for the best
interest of National City.” 60

Like many nineteenth-century women, Kimball
was involved in a number of social organizations
and clubs, including the New England Society of
San Diego County. 61 This association, formed by
Frank Kimball and other community members,
touted the objective of providing “social converse
and intellectual amusement” to those of New
England birth, though strangers were welcome at
their free monthly socials on Saturday evenings
“nearest the full of the moon.” 62
Kimball also helped found the Home Improvement
Society and was an officer of the Tuesday
Club, as well as an organizer and honorary
member of the Social Science Club, later the
Friday Club. 63 In the early days of the Social Science
Club, members took turns reading from
such books as George Harrison’s Moral Evolution,
Henry Drummond’s The Ascent of Man, and
Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution. They wrote
papers on the books, which they then read to
one another. On October 21, 1897, the National
City Record reported that Flora Kimball closed
a meeting of the Social Science Club “with an
eloquent appeal for Women’s Suffrage, which
brought conviction with it.” The National City
Record identified her as president of the Woman’s
Suffrage Club, an associate of the San Diego
Woman’s Club, and a member of the Women’s
Parliament and the New Hampshire Antiquarian
Society. 64
In June 1895, the San Diego Woman’s Club
arranged for Susan B. Anthony and Anna Shaw
to come to town and speak. The event was a big
success, as reported in the San Diego Union: “The
ushers in the First Methodist church could not
find seats enough last night to accommodate all
who went there to hear Susan B. Anthony and
Rev. Anna Shaw speak on woman suffrage. . . .
Mrs. Flora M. acted as chairman of the meeting.”
The following day, the Kimballs hosted a large
reception at Olivewood. The house and grounds
were attractively decorated for the occasion “with
nothing left undone. . . . The guests of honor . . .
Miss Susan B. Anthony and Rev. Anna Shaw and
about 100 persons sat down to a most beautiful
repast that had been spread upon tables on the
lawn . . . Miss Estelle Thompson read an original
poem entitled ‘Olivewood.’ Miss Anthony called
for ‘Our Host, the Planter of Olivewood,’ and
Mrs. Kimball responded in a speech which elicited
much applause.” 65
In 1890, Kimball undertook a unique civic project
that added to her celebrity. Authorized by
the City Council to procure trees and supervise
their planting throughout National City, Kimball
planted a large number of eucalyptus trees along
the property line in various sections of the city.
The trees were watered from a large hose that
was connected to one of the horse-drawn street
sprinklers. On March 10, 1892, the city purchased
five hundred additional trees at a cost of
six cents each. These were planted in the same
manner. By May 1893, there were about five thousand
shade trees along the city’s curb lines. Eventually
reaching nearly eight thousand, the trees
became a National City trademark. 66
Kimball saw a “richer harvest of morality, beauty
and religion” spring forward from the influence
of man’s connection with nature: “I can easily
forgive the idolatry of the ancients, who
worshipped trees. They must have possessed
aesthetic and refined nature.” The civic-minded
Kimball had envisioned National City, “a desolate
town, with cut-offs at every available place,” as a
place where residents could benefit in nature’s
rewards. “No nature is so depraved that it does
not respond to the refining influences of trees,
their flowers and fruits, and none so perfect
that it may not be made pure and better by their
blessed presence,” she claimed. 67 Sadly, over the
next seventy years, the city gradually removed the
majority of the trees Kimball had planted, replacing
the gravel with hewn granite sidewalks.
63

Susan B. Anthony (seated, center) and Anna Shaw (seated, left) met with California’s suffragist leaders at this June
1895 luncheon party at the home of California State Suffrage Association president Nellie Holbrook Blinn (standing,
third from left). Anthony and Shaw also were hosted that month in National City by the San Diego Woman’s Club
and at a reception by Flora Kimball at Olivewood, for “200 guests who came by train and carriage.”
California Historical Society
an iDEal CiTizEn in an iDEal hoME
Late in her life, Flora, along with her husband,
opened an eatery on their Olivewood property.
The Lunch Parlor became a popular destination
on the National City and Otay Railroad line,
which ran down 24th Street with a stop in front
of Olivewood. During a seventy-minute stopover,
riders could partake of a home-cooked meal and
a chance to rest in the shade of Olivewood’s
trees. A Lunch Parlor promotional brochure
announced, “On the return from Old Mexico, at
1 o’clock p.m. lunch will be served to tourists at
this ideal California home.” 68
64 California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
On July 2, 1898, following a six-month illness,
Flora Kimball died of heart disease. Although not
unexpected, the news of her death sent shockwaves
throughout the city and surrounding localities.
That she was endeared to many was evident
in the announcement of her death in the San
Diego Union: “The many friends of Mrs. Kimball,
not only in the bay region, but in all parts of
the United States, will be pained to hear of her
[death]. During her residence of over a quarter
of a century at National City she has been one of
the most prominent and highly respected ladies
in this part of the state, and has been foremost
in charitable and educational works. . . . Mrs.

Kimball was perhaps the best known woman in
this part of the state. Her exceptional genius as
a writer, philanthropic interest in the affairs of
her fellow creatures and liberal hospitality had
endeared her to thousands of persons who will
learn of her death with deep regret.” 69
Today, though most of her writings are relegated
to the backrooms of archives, Flora Kimball has
left her mark. Her liberal writing and activism
fostered a discourse for progressive politics;
particularly women’s rights; self-sufficiency; the
enduring significance of the home; the values
and morals of youth; and the vital connection
between man and nature. Wearing her passions
on her sleeve, she sought to enhance the fabric of
life in nineteenth-century California, particularly
for women of her era and for future generations.
Matthew Nye, MLIS, is the Collection Manager for the San
Diego Women’s History Museum and Educational Center
and a librarian for the San Diego Public Library. Formerly,
he was a librarian for the National City Public Library and
for the San Diego Museum of Photographic Art’s Edmund L.
and Nancy K. Dubois Library. He has published articles in the
Journal of San Diego History and the University of San Diego’s
USD Magazine. He is co-author with historian Marilyn
Carnes of Early National City (2008).
Olivewood was a regular and popular stop on the National City and Otay Railroad, whose tracks ran up 24th Street. A sign to
the right of the Olivewood estate’s entrance advertised the charming and inviting Lunch Parlor, where guests could buy lunch
for 25 cents. Tourists also could bring their own basket lunch and enjoy the welcoming relaxation of Olivewood’s gardens.
Morgan Local History Room, national City Public Library
65

66
n o t e s
Cover caption sources: (front cover) Complimentary
Banquet in Honor of Luther Burbank
Given by the California State Board of Trade
at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco: California
State Board of Trade Bulletin No. 14, Sept.
14, 1905; (back cover) Luther Burbank with
Wilbur Hall, The Harvest of the Years (Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1927).
James D. Houston, Californian, By
forrest G. roBinson, PP 6–25
Caption sources: Carolyn Kellogg, “Jacket
Copy: James D. Houston Dies at 75,” Los
Angeles Times, Apr. 18, 2009; James D.
Houston, Where the Light Takes Its Color from
the Sea: A California Notebook (Berkeley:
Heyday, 2008), www.heyday-books.com;
James D. Houston, Snow Mountain Passage
(New York: Knopf, 2001).
1
Interview with Morton Marcus, “Always
on the Brink: Facing West from California,”
The Bloomsbury Review (Nov./Dec. 2007);
www.jamesdhouston.com/pdfs/Always-onthe%20Brink.pdf.
2
“A Writers Sense of Place,” in The True
Subject: Writers on Life and Craft, ed. Kurt
Brown (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1993),
92.
3
Ben R. Finney and James D. Houston,
Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian
Sport, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Pomegranate
Artbooks, 1996), 78.
4
Houston, Between Battles (New York: Dial
Press, 1968), 54, 78.
5
Ibid., 121, 124, 221.
6
Houston, Gig (New York: Dial Press,
1969), 13.
7
Ibid., 20, 90.
8
Ibid, 77.
9
Houston, A Native Son of the Golden West
(New York: Dial Press, 1971), Prologue.
10
Ibid., 146–47.
11
Ibid., 163.
12
Houston, The Adventures of Charlie Bates
(Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1973), 13, 44.
13
Houston, Continental Drift (New York:
Knopf, 1978), 138.
14
Ibid., 10.
15 Ibid., 166, 301.
16
Houston, Love Life (New York: Knopf,
1985), 52, 57.
17
Ibid., 198, 260.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
18
Houston, The Last Paradise (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 34.
19
Ibid., 25.
20
Ibid., 364.
21
Houston, “Where Does History Live?”
Rethinking History 11 (2007): 57–58, 60.
Also in Where the Light Takes Its Color from
the Sea: A California Notebook (Berkeley, CA:
Heyday, 2008), 189–201.
22
Houston, Snow Mountain Passage (New
York: Knopf, 2001), 5.
23
Ibid., 3, 304.
24
Ibid., 35.
25
Ibid., 65, 217.
26
Houston, “Where Does History Live?”, 59.
27 Houston, Snow Mountain Passage, 149.
28
Ibid., 215.
29 I
bid., 312–13.
30
Ibid., 316.
31
Houston, Bird of Another Heaven (New
York: Knopf, 2007), 334.
32
Ibid., 309.
33 Special thanks to Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
for her permission to read the manuscript
of A Queen’s Journey, to be published
by Heyday in 2011.
siDeBar: farewell to Manzanar,
PP 17–19
1
Morton Marcus, “Always on the Brink:
Facing West from California,” The Bloomsbury
Review (Nov./Dec. 2007), www.
jamesdhouston.com/pdfs/Always-onthe%20Brink.pdf.
2
Ibid.
lutHer BurBank’s sPineless CaCtus:
Boom times in tHe California Desert,
By Jane s. smitH, PP 26–47
Portions of this essay are adapted from The
Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the
Business of Breeding Plants (New York: Penguin
Press, 2009). The editors and author
would like to thank horticultural historian
Bob Hornback and Rebecca Baker and the
staff of the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens,
Santa Rosa, California, for assistance
with research; Sue Hodson and Melanie
Thorpe of the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California, for help locating fugitive
documents; and Adam Shapiro, for access to
his collection of biology textbooks.
Caption sources: Luther Burbank with Wilbur
Hall, The Harvest of the Years (Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1927); Luther Burbank’s Spineless Cactus (San
Francisco: The Luther Burbank Company);
David Starr Jordan, “Some Experiments of
Luther Burbank,” Popular Science Monthly
66 (January 1905); Proof Book Number 1
(Santa Rosa, CA: The Luther Burbank
Society, 1913); The Burbank Seed Book (San
Francisco: The Luther Burbank Company,
1914); “The Planting of the Largest Spineless
Cactus Nursery in the World,” Out West,
New Series 6, no. 3 (Sept. 1913).
1
See Roy Wiersma, Luther Burbank Spineless
Cactus Identification Project (Bloomington,
IN: AuthorHouse, 2008).
2
Luther Burbank, “Of Easy Culture
and Rapid Growth,” New Agricultural-
Horticultural Opuntias (Los Angeles:
Kruckeberg Press, 1907), 5. See also: http://
plantanswers.tamu.edu/publications/cactus/
cactuscatalog/.
3
Burbank often sold complete control over
his plant inventions, including naming
rights, so it is impossible to trace his complete
work. The best inventory is Walter L.
Howard, Luther Burbank’s Plant Contributions,
University of California College of
Agriculture, Agricultural Experiment Station,
Berkeley, CA, Bulletin 691, Mar. 1945.
4
Honorable George C. Pardee, Governor of
California, Complimentary Banquet in Honor
of Luther Burbank Given by the California
State Board of Trade at the Palace Hotel, San
Francisco: California State Board of Trade
Bulletin No. 14, Sept. 14, 1905, 15–16.
5
When Edison and Ford came to Santa
Rosa in 1915, the well-publicized visit was
regarded as a meeting of the masters of
invention. It was the start of a long friendship
and, for Ford, the inspiration for
what would become a large collection of
Burbankiana at The Henry Ford Museum
and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, MI.
Among many other items, the collection
includes the building where Burbank was
born, transported from Massachusetts, and
Burbank’s garden spade set in cement at the
museum entry.

6 Liberty Hyde Bailey, “Stoneless Prunes, the
Latest Wonder,” Sunset Magazine 7, nos. 2–3
(June–July 1901): 81.
7
The medal, so inscribed, is in the collection
of the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens,
Santa Rosa, CA.
8
E. J. Wickson, “Luther Burbank: Man,
Methods and Achievements, Part III,” Sunset
Magazine 8, no. 6 (April 1902): 277.
9
David Starr Jordan and Vernon Lyman
Kellogg, Scientific Aspects of Luther Burbank’s
Work (San Francisco: Philopolis Press,
1909).
10
“Wizard’s Wisdom,” Los Angeles Times,
Sept. 6, 1907.
11
Ibid.
12
Minutes of the Board of Park Commissioners,
July 25, 1905: Moved by Mr. Moran,
seconded by Mr. White, that the Park Commissioners
offer to Dr. David Griffiths of
the Department of Agriculture the use of
about five acres of land near the southeast
corner of city park for a government forage
experimental station for a length of time
as may be required, not to exceed 15 years,
Balboa Park History, 1905; http://www.
sandiegohistory.org/amero/notes-1905.htm.
13
Burbank, “Voices of the Press and Public,”
New Agricultural-Horticultural Opuntias,
8.
14
Rutland also bought rights to an early
variety of Burbank’s plumcot, a plumapricot
hybrid that many breeders discredited
because they thought the cross was
impossible. The plumcot is the ancestor of
the modern pluot, which has the distinction
of being patented, a protection not available
to Burbank. Over the next five years, official
delegations from India, Tunisia, and Australia
came to Santa Rosa to meet Burbank
and examine his newest creation; in letters
to his friend Samuel Leib, Burbank also
reported that the governments of Brazil,
Mexico, and Argentina had invited him to
visit and advise them on starting spineless
cactus plantations.
15
W. S. Harwood, New Creations in Plant
Life: An Authoritative Account of the Life and
Work of Luther Burbank (New York: Macmillan,
1905).
16
George Wharton James, The Wonders of
the Colorado Desert (Southern California),
vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1906), 224. In a footnote, James noted
that after meeting Burbank he realized the
cactus would require fencing to survive
predators that would no longer be repelled
by spines.
17
Burbank, The Training of the Human
Plant (New York: The Century Co., 1907).
By 1908, the Mothers Clubs of California
had begun a successful effort to declare
Burbank’s birthday, Mar. 7, Bird and Arbor
Day in California and designate it as a time
for schoolchildren to learn about Luther
Burbank’s works.
18
“Greatest Opportunity of the Age,” [Spokane]
Spokesman-Review, Apr. 26, 1908.
19
The Venice Vanguard, July 14, 1909.
20
According to Norton Parker Chipman,
head of the California State Board of Trade,
exports had risen from some 16,194 carloads
of fruits and vegetables in 1890, each
carload holding ten tons of produce, to over
80,000 carloads in 1904; Pardee, Complimentary
Banquet, 3.
21
See Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The
Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development
of the American West, 1850–1930 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005),
289.
22
See Oscar Binner, Luther Burbank: How
His Discoveries Are to Be Put into Practical
Use (Chicago: Oscar E. Binner Co., 1911), 16.
23
By 1911, several books about Burbank
and his work had already been published,
including Jordan and Kellogg’s Scientific
Aspects of Luther Burbank’s Work and multiple
editions of Harwood’s New Creations in
Plant Life. The Carnegie Institution of Washington,
DC, still expected to publish a scholarly
volume on Burbank’s methods, written
by George Shull, and the directors were
shocked to learn that Burbank had signed
a contract with Dugall Cree, a Minneapolis
publisher, for an illustrated 10-volume set
about his work to be aimed at a popular
audience and sold by subscription. At least
two ghostwriters had already begun work on
these books when Cree sold the contract to
Oscar Binner, who moved his family from
Chicago to Santa Rosa and hired a stable
of researchers, photographers, and writers
to complete what he felt would be a great
contribution to world knowledge. Cobbled
together from the work of five to ten ghostwriters,
including some material that seems
to have been left in Santa Rosa by Shull, the
Binner project finally appeared in twelve
volumes under the title Luther Burbank: His
Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical
Applications (New York and London: Luther
Burbank Press, 1914). Shull never finished
his book for the Carnegie Institution, but
he kept his notes for decades, planning to
return to the project some day.
24
Binner, Luther Burbank.
25
“Plant Freaks to Be Shown,” Los Angeles
Times, Mar. 16, 1911.
26
George Willoughby, “The Gathering of
the Clans,” National Magazine 35 (Oct.
1911–Mar. 1912).
27
Jack London letters to Eliza Shepherd,
Box 300, Jack London Collection, Manuscripts
Department, Huntington Library,
San Marino, CA (hereafter cited as London
Collection).
28
Eliza London to Jack London, May 8, 1915,
box 372 (30), London Collection.
29
David Griffiths, The Prickly Pear and
Other Cacti as Food for Stock, U.S. Department
of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry,
bulletin no. 74 (Washington, DC: GPO,
1905); Griffiths, The Tuna as Food for Man,
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau
of Plant Industry, bulletin no. 116 (Washington,
DC: GPO, 1907), 3; Griffiths, The
“Spineless” Prickly Pears, U.S. Department
of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry,
bulletin no. 140 (Washington, DC: GPO,
1909), 3.
30
“An Innovation in Washington: To Run
Pictures in the Congressional Record,” Los
Angeles Times, Mar. 1, 1912.
31
“Fodder from the Cactus,” Pacific Dairy
Review 16, no. 26 (July 1912): 1.
32
Burbank, “Hardy Spineless Opuntia
Ready for the Hybridizer,” New Agricultural-
Horticultural Opuntias, 2. See also: http://
plantanswers.tamu.edu/publications/cactus/
cactuscatalog.
33
See Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell,
“The Citrus Industry and the Revolution of
Corporate Capitalism in Southern California,
1887–1944,” California History 74, no. 1
(Spring 1995), 6–21; and H. Vincent Moses,
“‘The Orange-Grower Is Not a Farmer’: G.
Harold Powell, Riverside Orchardists, and
the Coming of Industrial Agriculture, 1893–
1930,” California History 74, no. 1 (Spring
1995), 22–37.
34
Heisner & Shanklin, Oro Loma: Spineless
Cactus Lands (Oakland, CA: Horwinski Co.,
ca. 1912), 17. All quotations from Heisner
& Shanklin, Oro Loma, Huntington Library
Rare Book Collection, San Marino, CA.
67

68
n o t e s
35 Sunset Magazine 20, no. 3 (January 1908).
36 Heisner & Shanklin, Oro Loma, 2.
37 Ibid, 13.
38 Ibid, 19.
39 “The Sharpshooter,” Magazine of Wall
Street 12 (May–Oct. 1913): 387.
40
See Peter Dreyer, A Gardener Touched with
Genius (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985) for a fuller account of the many
businesses that sought to capitalize on Burbank
and his creations.
41
“Big Ranch in Cactus,” Los Angeles Times,
Oct. 4, 1913.
42
See George W. Hunter, A Civic Biology
(New York: American Book Company, 1914)
and A New Civic Biology (1926); Benjamin
Gruenberg, Elementary Biology (Boston:
Ginn and Company, 1919) and Biology and
Human Life (1925); Arthur G. Clement, Living
Things: An Elementary Biology (Syracuse,
NY: Iroquois Publishing Company, 1925);
Alfred Kinsey, An Introduction to Biology
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co, 1926);
W. M. Smallwood, Ida L. Reveley, and Guy
A. Bailey, New General Biology (Boston: Allyn
and Bacon, 1929); Frank M. Wheat and Elizabeth
T. Fitzpatrick, Advanced Biology (New
York: American Book Company, 1929); S. J.
Holmes, Life and Evolution (London: A. &.
C. Black, 1931).
43
Paramahansa Yogananda, The Autobiography
of a Yogi (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1946), 396.
44
See Peter Felker, “Commercializing Mesquite,
Leucaena, and Cactus in Texas,” in
Progress in New Crops, ed. J. Janick (Alexandria,
VA: ASHS Press, 1996): 133–37;
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1996/v3-133.html.
See also Salah
Chouki, Spineless Cactus Plantation for
Forage, http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/
doc/PUBLICAT/cactusnt/cactus3.htm;
Felker, Utilization of Opuntia for Forage in
the United States of America, http://www.
fao.org/docrep/005/y2808e/y2808eoa.htm;
Gerhard C. De Kock, The Use of Opuntia
as a Fodder Source in Arid Areas of Southern
Africa, http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/
y2808e/y2808eof.htm; Juan C. Guevara and
Oscar R. Estevez, Opuntia Spp. [spineless]
for Fodder and Forage Production in Argentina:
Experiences and Prospects, http://www.
fao.org/docrep/005/y2808e/y2808e0c.
htm; Patricio Azócar, Opuntia as Feed for
Ruminants in Chile, http://www.fao.org/
docrep/005/y2808e/y2808e0b.htm.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
45 Felker, “Commercializing Mesquite, Leucaena,
and Cactus in Texas.”
a life rememBereD: tHe VoiCe anD
Passions of feminist Writer anD
Community aCtiVist flora kimBall,
By mattHeW nye, PP 48–66
Caption sources: “Mrs. Kimball Dead,”
San Diego Union, July 3, 1898; Ida Husted
Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B.
Anthony, vol. 2 (Indianapolis and Kansas
City: The Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898).
1
Flora Kimball, “Suffragette,” California
Patron, Apr. 5, 1879.
2
Lucretia Mott is a good example of those
who influenced Flora Kimball’s writing; see
Dana Greene, ed., Lucretia Mott: Her Complete
Speeches and Sermons (New York: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1980).
3
For a variety of reasons, during the late
nineteenth century, many white suffragists
turned their backs on African American
women; see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African
American Women and the Woman Suffrage
Movement,” in One Woman, One Vote,
Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement,
ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR:
NewSage Press, 1995): 135.
4
From its beginnings in 1846, Congregationalism
was the major support for the
Association Missionary Society, an interdenominational
missionary society devoted
to abolitionist principles. The intellectual,
political, and moral influence of Congregationalism
could easily account for the activist
nature of Flora and her sister Hannah
T. Brown. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis
Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1969); Robert C. Senior, “The New
England Congregationalist and the Antislave
Movement, 1830–1860,” PhD diss., Yale
University, 1954; Clifford S. Griffin, “The
Abolitionist and the Benevolent Societies,
1831–1861,” in The History of the American
Abolitionist Movement: A Bibliography of
Scholarly Articles, ed. John. R. McKivigan
(Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1999),
101. While there is minimal religious reference
in Flora’s writing, she did express her
views on occasion: “Religious belief is a
strong sentiment in human nature valued
by its possessor above pride, but while we
cling so tenaciously to our own, we are too
apt to stand voluntary guardians over that
of our neighbors” (California Patron, July 2,
1881).
5
Flora’s sister Hannah (1817–1881) was
married to John G. Brown. The couple
moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Hannah
started the abolitionist paper The Agitator,
which she edited and published herself. The
paper covered issues of race and gender
equality. She also wrote The False and True
Marriage; the Reason and Results (Cleveland:
Viets & Savage, 1861), a radical treatise
critiquing the institution. She later helped
found the United States Spiritual Association
and served as its president. In 1870,
she joined Flora in National City, where she
bought land from Warren and Frank Kimball
for $2,300. The property is now the site
of Sweetwater High School. After an active
life as a writer and lecturer in the Spiritualist
movement in National City and San
Diego, Hannah Brown died of consumption
in 1881; San Diego Union, July 3, 1898.
6
Irene Phillips, “Flora Kimball Campaigned
Here for Women’s Rights,” The Star News,
Feb. 23, 1961; San Diego Union, July 3, 1898.
7
“First Kimball Reunion, Golden Gate Park,
August 7, 1897,” collection of the California
Historical Society, San Francisco. Brothers
Levi and Charles Kimball initially came out
to California in 1860 by way of the Horn.
Warren and Frank opted for the train service
across the Isthmus of Panama, which
began operating in February 1855, just six
years prior to their journey. The 47-mile
train ride, at a cost of $25, took four and a
half hours. But the Transcontinental Railroad,
completed in 1869, quickly became
the favored means of travel to California.
Ann Graham Gaines, The Panama Canal
in American History (Berkeley Heights, NJ.:
Enslow Publishers, Inc. 1999), 47.
8
The Kimball Brothers were responsible for
construction of the Green Street Church at
the corner of Stockton Street, the Tehama
Street School in 1866, and most notably
the city’s Alms-House in 1867. Bill Roddy,
American Hurrah, http://americahurrah.
com/SanFrancisco/MunicipalReports/Alms-
House/History.htm.
9
Frank Kimball, Diary, Oct. 1, 1861,
National City Public Library, Morgan Local
History Room (hereafter cited as Kimball
Diary). Many of Frank’s 52 diaries, spanning
the years 1854 to 1912, were donated
to the National City Public Library in 1958
by Gordon Stanley Kimball, Flora’s greatgrandnephew.
The brief entries describe
historical events, modes of travel, business
experience, and the hardships of daily life,
including the progress of National City as

an agricultural and horticultural center,
the development of water resources, and
Kimball’s efforts to bring the railroad to
National City. A Guide to the Kimball Family
Collection, 1854–1934 has been processed
by Marisa Abramo and Mary Allely. For
more information on National City and the
Kimball family, see Leslie Trook, National
City: Kimball’s Dream (National City, CA:
National City Chamber of Commerce, 1992)
and William Smythe, History of San Diego,
1542–1908 (San Diego: San Diego History
Co., 1907).
10
David Wyatt writes about the subjugation
of one people after another in California’s
history. He sees the invasion of wild oat into
California and its displacement of the native
bunchgrass as a metaphor for the human
story that the botanical process paralleled;
David Wyatt, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe,
and the Shaping of California (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc.: 1997),
8.
11
Kimball, “California Sketches No. 1,” Rising
Tide, ca. 1865.
12
Kimball, “California Sketches No. 2,” Rising
Tide, ca. 1865.
13
Kimball Diary, June 15, 1865.
14 Kimball, “California Sketches No. 2.”
15
Flora Kimball to Dear Age, n.d., Flora
Kimball Collection, Box 122, National City
Public Library, Morgan Local History Room
(hereafter cited as Kimball Collection).
16
Flora Kimball, “Fruit Growers,” National
City Record, Apr. 18, 1889. This is an excerpt
from Flora’s speech at the 11th Annual Convention
of Fruit Growers held in National
City.
17
The land the Kimballs purchased had
belonged to the Kumeyaay people; see
Michael Connolly Miskwish, Kumeyaay: A
History Textbook, Volume I: Precontact to 1893
(El Cajon, CA: Sycuan Press, 2007), and
Richard Carrico, Strangers in a Stolen Land,
American Indians in San Diego, 1850–1880
(Sacramento, CA: Sierra Oaks Publishing
Company, 1987). Rancho de la Nación
was initially owned by Don Juan Forster (a
native of Liverpool, England), who was married
to Maria Ysidora, sister to the last Mexican
governor of California, Pío Pico. The
story of the region’s evolution from Spanish
to Mexican to Anglo domination is explored
in Carey McWilliams, Southern California:
An Island on the Land (Layton, UT: Gibbs
Smith, 1946).
18
Kimball Diary, June 15, 1868. Frank notes
that they had agreed to buy 26,632 acres
from San Francisco bankers Francois Louis
Pioche and J. B. Bayerque for $30,000, onethird
in cash, with the balance purchased
in three annual payments at 8 percent per
annum.
19
The Orizaba first arrived in San Diego on
Jan. 10, 1865, and ran until 1887. The voyage
between San Francisco and San Diego
generally took 3 days. The ship made port
in San Diego about every 12 days; Jerry
MacMullen “The Orizaba—And Johnston
Heights,” The Journal of San Diego History
5, no. 3 (July 1959): 47. “Designed for service
between New York and Vera Cruz and
launched in 1854, she [the Orizaba] came
to the Pacific in 1856 and spent the next
eight years running between San Francisco
and Nicaragua and Panama. Purchased by
the California Steam Navigation Co. from
the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. in 1865,
she began 20 years of voyages from San
Francisco to San Diego, varied by occasional
spells on the line north to Portland and Victoria.
A steamer of 1334 tons and 246 feet
long, Orizaba could carry 75 cabin and 200
steerage passengers as well as 600 tons of
cargo. This made her one of the largest vessels
in the coastwise trade until after 1880”;
John Haskell Kemble, Early Transportation in
Southern California: Orizaba on the California
Coast, 1876 (San Francisco: The Book Club
of California, 1954), 8.
20
Kimball, “Travel to National City,” California
Patron, May 10, 1879.
21
For more information on National City’s
history with the California Southern Railroad,
see Douglas L. Lowell, “The California
Southern Railroad and the Growth of San
Diego, Part II, Journal of San Diego History
32, no. 1 (Winter 1986); https://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/86winter/railroad.
htm.
22
Leslie Trook, National City: Kimball’s
Dream (National City, CA: National City
Chamber of Commerce, 1992), 12.
23
National City Record, July 4, 1889.
24 This author was unable to find any reference
as to who planted the Kimballs’ gardens.
Yet Frank Kimball makes several notes
in his diaries: “Hired an Indian boy to herd
sheep at $8 a month”; “Only 7 Chinamen
at work grading 24th in am and 9 in pm”;
“Harry, Clinton, and Ah Lun, Ah Bin, Ah
On and 20 other heathens at work”; Kimball
Diary, Mar. 17, 1879, Mar. 4, 1882, July 12,
1883.
25
Kimball, “Home and Family—Beautiful
Lines from the Pen of Flora Kimball,”
National City Record, Aug. 15, 1889.
26
See Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One
Woman, One Vote, Rediscovering the Woman
Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage
Press, 1995).
27
Kimball, California Patron, Nov. 2, 1878.
28
Daniel Flint, Journal of Proceedings of the
Sixteenth Session of the National Grange of
the Patrons of Husbandry (Philadelphia: J.A.
Wagenweller, 1882), 26.
29
Ezra Slocum Carr, The Patrons of Husbandry
on the Pacific Coast (San Francisco:
A. L. Bancroft and Company, 1875), 107.
Gilbert C. Fite notes: “The National Grange,
established in 1868, was the first general
farm organization founded in the United
States. Formed during a period of low prices
following the Civil War, the principle objectives
of the Grange were to improve the
social and economic welfare of rural people
through organization and cooperation.
However, the Grange turned to politics in
the early 1870s and was largely responsible
for the so-called Grange Laws which were
designed to regulate railroads and other
corporations. The political influence of the
Grange was short-lived, however, and after
the middle 1870s it had relatively little force
in politics until it became active politically
during the 1920s, nearly half a century
later”; Fite, “The Changing Political Role of
the Farmer,” in Pressure Groups in American
Politics, ed. H. R. Mahood (New York: Scribner,
1967), 166.
30
California Patron, May 8, 1880.
31 Solon Justus Buck, The Grange Movement:
A Study of Agricultural Organization and
its Political, Economic and Social Manifestations
1870–1880 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1913), 289. On Jan. 1,
1882, the San Diego Union reported: “In the
autumn and early winter of 1874, Brother
Wright organized seven granges in San
Diego County. Six died young, decay resulting
in the death of most other Granges—
lack of harmony and just appreciation of
the benefits accruing from a connection
with the Order. . . . For nearly seven years
this Grange [the National Ranch Grange]
did not fail to meet every two weeks, in the
afternoon.”
69

70
n o t e s
32
Carrie A. Colby covered many of the same
issues as Flora Kimball : “Education for
Women,” California Patron, July 6, 1878;
“Labor,” California Patron, Nov. 2, 1887;
“Weak Women,” California Patron, July 5,
1879.
33
Kimball, “Women’s Equality,” California
Patron, July 6, 1878.
34
L. M. Daugherty, “Our Homes,” California
Patron, July 10, 1880.
35
Kimball, “Trades for Girls,” California
Patron, Dec. 3, 1881.
36
Kimball, “New Departure,” California
Patron, Feb. 4, 1882.
37
Kimball, “Mrs. Glover’s Kitchen Stories—Woman’s
Work,” California Patron,
Mar. 23, 1882.
38
Betsy B. was the pen name for theatre
critic Mary Therese Austin; William Cushing,
Initials and Pseudonyms—A Dictionary
of Literary Disguises (Boston: Thomas Y.
Crowell & Co., 1885), 337.
39
Kimball, “Great Women,” California
Patron, June 3, 1882.
40
Charles Elliott, “Woman’s Work and
Woman’s Wages,” North American (August
1881).
41
Kimball, “Troublesome Women,” California
Patron, Sept. 2, 1881.
42
Kimball, “Suffragette, Fossil Literature,”
California Patron, Apr. 16, 1881.
43
Kimball, “Suffragette, Self Support,” California
Patron, June 26, 1880.
44
Geoffrey C. Ward, et al., Not for Ourselves
Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony (Alfred A. Knopf:
New York, 1999), 122. In 1853, Stanton
wore a “loose-fitting skirt that ended just
four inches below the knee over capacious
‘Turkish’ trousers.” “The costume had been
devised in the autumn of 1850 by Stanton’s’
cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller.” Amelia
Bloomer publicized trousers in her newspaper
The Lily and they were soon referred to
as Bloomers. For a comprehensive chronicle
of the social history of American women
and fashion, see Lois W. Banner, American
Beauty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
In her chapter “The Feminist Challenge and
Fashion’s Response,” Banner explores the
social and political sources that agitated for
style change for American women.
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
45
Kimball, “Fashion: Feminine Folly,”
California Patron, Feb. 12, 1881. Nineteenthcentury
women were imprisoned in their
clothing. A corset applied an average of 21
pounds of pressure to a woman’s abdominal
area, with some as much as 88 pounds. The
skirts that descended from a constricted
center weighed, again on average, almost
20 pounds, and they dragged in layers on
the ground. “Both poor and wealthy women
wore their dresses long, losing the use of
one hand to the continual lifting of the
skirts”; Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Women’s Liberty (New
York: Facts on File, 1992), 63.
46
Kimball, “Fashion Notes,” California
Patron, Oct. 23, 1880.
47
Jamie Aronson, “Jane Austen: Background
and Early Life,” History Reference
Center, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/
detail. In the late nineteenth century, Marietta
Holley (1836–1926) also wrote humorous
political stories focusing on women’s
suffrage; see Michael H. Epp, “The Traffic
in Affect: Marietta Holley, Suffrage, and
Late Nineteenth-Century Popular Humour,”
Canadian Review of American Studies 36, no.
1 (2006): 93.
48
Betsy Snow, “Something Original: Advice
to Young Wives,” California Patron, July 25,
1885.
49
Snow, “Betsy Snow Stays at Home,” California
Patron, Sept. 19, 1885.
50
Snow, “Extravagant Wives,” California
Patron, Aug. 8, 1885.
51
Gene Ingles, “The Literary Ghost in San
Diego’s Attic,” San Diego Union, Oct. 4,
1964. Ingles notes that The Fairfields is a
small book approximately 3 x 5 inches, with
175 pages and dark green cover with gold
lettering. An obscure, rarely seen book,
he believed that its authorship was one of
the biggest mysteries in San Diego literary
circles. A copy exists today in the California
State Library in Sacramento.
52
Kimball, “Fruit Growers.”
53
Kimball, “Our Homes—What They Ought
To Be,” California Patron, June 5, 1880.
54
Kimball, “Possibilities,” The Great Southwest,
Feb. 12, 1890.
55
Kimball, The Great Southwest, Sept. 5,
1889.
56
Notes, Board of Trustees meeting, July
15, 1896, 5, National City Public Library
Collection.
57 San Diego Union, Apr. 26, 1883.
58
Irene Philips, “In Old National City,”
Chula Vista Star News, June 23, 1960.
59
San Diego Union (reprinted from the
Pacific Rural Press), Sept. 5, 1890.
60
National City Record, May 30, 1889.
The National School District at that time
included Chula Vista, National City, and
Coronado.
61
Some of Flora Kimball’s contemporaries
in the San Diego area who were involved in
socially active clubs and organizations were
Annie Slone, Ella Allen, and Dr. Charlotte
Baker, president of the local Equal Suffrage
Association; see Marilyn Kneeland, “Modern
Boston Tea Party: the San Diego Suffrage
Camp of 1911,” The Journal of San Diego History
23, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 35. Another contemporary
was Lydia Knapp Horton, who
was president of the San Diego Wednesday
Club and a member of the Board of Trustees
of the San Diego Public Library; see Elizabeth
C. MacPhail, “A ‘Liberated’ Woman in
Early San Diego,” The Journal of San Diego
History 27, no. 1. (Winter 1981): 17. Rebecca
Mead explores the role many of these social
clubs played in the theater of California’s
political life in the late nineteenth century,
highlighting Caroline M. Severance and
Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman; Mead,
How the Vote Was Won (New York: New York
University Press, 2004), 74–76.
62
“New England Meeting,” National City
Record, Feb. 25, 1886.
63
“Origins of the Friday Club,” Friday Club
Collection, Morgan Local History Room, box
32, folder 3.
64
“Social Science Club Meeting,” National
City Record, Oct. 21, 1897. The Social Science
Club, later to be called the Friday Club,
is one of the oldest clubs in California. The
date of origin for the original organization
was the first Friday of Sept. 1897, but there
are neither minute books nor other historical
data from 1897 to 1900 in the club files.
The Social Science Club was a literary parlor
club with room for 20 active members and
10 associate members. The name Social
Science Club held from Sept. 1897 to Sept.
1898, after which the club was referred to
as the Friday Club; National City Record,
July 3, 1898. In 1910, 12 years after Flora
Kimball’s death, her husband would build
the Olivewood Club House to honor his
wife. This seemed an appropriate memorial
to a woman so vested in social clubs. The

empty clubhouse still stands on the corner
of F Avenue and 24th Street. For more on
early National City clubs and the Olivewood
Club House, see Clarence Alan McGrew,
City of San Diego and San Diego County, vol.
1 (Chicago: American Historical Society,
1922), 388, and San Diego County California:
A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress
and Achievement, vol. 2 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke
Publishing Co., 1913), 338.
65
“Woman Suffrage,” San Diego Union,
June 18 and 21, 1895. Susan B. Anthony
was the proprietor of The Revolution, a 16page
weekly, which first appeared on Jan. 8,
1868. Along with writer Elizabeth Stanton,
Anthony had for a long time championed
the right of women to vote and also supported
labor’s right to strike, called for equal
pay for equal work, and encouraged building
a coalition with organized labor. See also
Ward, et al., Not for Ourselves Alone.
66
“Street Widening Dooms 24 Trees,” San
Diego Union, Jan. 14, 1957.
67
Flora Kimball, “Fruit Growers.” See also
San Diego Union, Mar. 8, 1895; Frank Kimball,
“The Supreme Attraction of National
City Is Her Sidewalk Shade Trees,” National
City Record, June 1, 1907; and “The Trees
of National City,” San Diego Union, Jan. 14,
1957.
68
Marilyn Carnes and Matthew Nye, Early
National City (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing,
2009), 96. The Lunch Parlor was
also used as advertisement for the region:
“As there are not more attractive grounds
or groves to interest the tourist unused to
Southern California sights, there could be
no better means of advertising what this
region can produce than to show, upon their
own stalks and boughs, such flowers and
fruits as at Olivewood flourish from January
to January almost without cessation”; San
Diego Union, June 1, 1890.
69
San Diego Union, July 3, 1898. Flora was
buried at National City’s La Vista Cemetery;
the ceremony was conducted by E. T.
Blackmer, the second husband of her sister
Louisa.
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Photographs by Todd Stewart;
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2008, 132 pp., $34.95, cloth)
tHe first to Cry DoWn
inJustiCe? Western JeWs
anD JaPanese remoVal
DurinG WorlD War ii
By Ellen M. Eisenberg (Plymouth,
UK: Lexington Books, 2008,
204 pp., $65 cloth, $24.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY ELENA TAJIMA CREEF, ASSOCI-
ATE PROFESSOR OF WOMEN’S AND GENDER
STUDIES, WELLESLEY COLLEGE, AND AUTHOR
OF IMAGInG JApAnese AMerICA: THe VIsuAL
ConsTruCTIon oF CITIzensHIp, nATIon,
And THe Body
Todd Stewart’s color photographs in
Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration
of Japanese American Internment
bear witness to this dark chapter of
American wartime history. His stark
images confront us with the physical
memory of where 110,000 Japanese
Americans were incarcerated, banished
to the margins of mainstream American
consciousness and the remote
corners of the nation’s interior, during
World War II.
In her essay, Karen J. Leong notes that
it “was not until the 1980s that thirdgeneration
Japanese Americans were
able to voice what their parents and
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
grandparents had struggled to keep
silent for so long.” I would add that
first- and second-generation silence
was officially broken during the 1981
hearings held by the Commission on
Wartime Relocation and Internment
of Civilians, in which former internees
spoke up—many for the first time—for
the Congressional Record. Leong is
correct that today, some twenty years
after the reparations and redress movement,
the Japanese American internment
experience has become prominent
in American national consciousness—especially
in a post–9/11 world.
Stewart’s work helps us, she argues,
to render this history visible—indeed,
the inclusion of detailed contemporary
site maps of all ten former internment
camps at the end of this volume literally
illustrates what an archaeology of
historical memory, space, and place
might look like.
While Stewart’s photographs are moving,
what is unacknowledged is the
indebtedness of his compilation to
other artists whose landscape images
of camp ruins comprise the larger
visual archive of this subject. Missing
is any reference to the works of
Masumi Hayashi and Joan Myers,
whose brilliant color collages and
black-and-white landscape photographs
also explore the ghostlike abandoned
spaces of these former camps.
An afterword by John Tateishi offers
what is perhaps the most stirring contribution
to Placing Memory. His personal
reflections as a former internee
who spent his early childhood behind
barbed wire ironically undercuts the
book’s opening comment by Natasha
Egan that there is a “diversity of opinion
among those interred concerning
the justice of this wartime government
policy.” Tateishi’s powerful closing
commentary reminds us, in no uncertain
terms, that the injustice of the
camps and the psychic wounds of that
experience are to this day carried by
surviving former internees whose lives
were turned upside down as a result
of Executive Order 9066—a collective
experience that is inexpressible in
words and which not even Todd Stewart’s
haunting photographs can come
close to capturing on film.
Ellen M. Eisenberg’s fine historical
study, The First to Cry Down Injustice?
Western Jews and Japanese Removal during
World War II, offers a different kind
of intervention in the history of Japanese
American relocation and internment.
Her meticulous and impeccably
researched book documents the Jewish

esponses to Executive Order 9066 in
the West Coast communities spanning
the Pacific Northwest and California.
Eisenberg interrogates the silence of
the Jewish community and the nuances
of this silence, uniquely mapping a different
kind of “ethnic landscape” of the
American West, with its comparative
treatment of the Japanese American
and Jewish communities. She reveals
how the Jewish press responded to the
Japanese American wartime experience
(with various levels of avoidance and
discomfort) and chronicles those individuals
and groups that stood in opposition
to the wartime treatment of Japanese
Americans. Most profound is the
documentation of how one Los Angeles–based
Jewish news organization
was involved in anti-Nikkei propaganda
as the end result of a longer history
ironically devoted to antidiscrimination
and anti-Semitic activities.
The First to Cry Down Injustice makes
important new contributions to the
extant scholarship on prewar and wartime
Japanese American and Jewish
race relations.
WHereVer tHere’s a
fiGHt: HoW runaWay
slaVes, suffraGists,
immiGrants, strikers,
anD Poets sHaPeD CiVil
liBerties in California
By Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi
(Berkeley: Heyday, 2009, 512 pp.,
$24.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY CHARLES WOLLENBERG, BERKE-
LEY CITY COLLEGE, AUTHOR OF BerkeLey: A
CITy In HIsTory
In their introduction to this fine
book, authors Elaine Elinson and Stan
Yogi use one of my favorite California
quotations—Wallace Stegner’s observation
that the state “is just like the rest
of the United States only more so”—in
describing California as an exaggerated
version of the American experience.
That’s certainly true of the themes
treated in this volume. California has
an extraordinary record of racism,
repression, and violation of civil rights
and civil liberties, but the state also
has a remarkable heritage of struggle
against these conditions. Elinson and
Yogi discuss the soft underbelly of
the California dream, from the ethnic
cleansing of indigenous inhabitants
to the contemporary violations of the
rights of immigrants, gays, and lesbians.
But in this narrative, victims
fight back, gain valuable allies, and
sometimes win significant victories.
The authors argue that “for every
crisis, there were resonant voices of
resistance.”
Elinson and Yogi are former and present
staff members of the American
Civil Liberties Union. While they discuss
many forms of historical struggle,
including strikes and political organizing,
their primary focus, like that of
the ACLU, is on legal battles and court
decisions. California judges often supported
repression and injustice, but the
courts were an arena where defenders
of civil rights and civil liberties had
more than a fighting chance. Since
the establishment of its first California
affiliates in the 1920s and 1930s, the
ACLU has been an important part of
this process. Past ACLU leaders, such
as attorney A. L. Wirin of the southern
California chapter and executive director
Ernest Besig of the northern California
branch, play significant roles in
the narrative.
Plenty of other prominent historical
figures put in appearances as well,
including writers John Steinbeck and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, screenwriter
Dalton Trumbo, labor leaders Cesar
Chavez and Harry Bridges, and Black
Panther Party founder Huey Newton.
73

74
r e v i e w s
The book also tells impressive stories
of lesser known people, such as former
slave Biddy Mason, suffragist Selma
Solomons, and Mary Tape and Gonzalo
Mendez, parents who fought against
racial segregation and exclusion in
California public schools. Fred Korematsu
receives special treatment. He
eventually won a reversal of his original
conviction for resisting the 1940s
wartime internment of people of Japanese
descent and lived long enough to
condemn the detention of suspected
terrorists without due process in the
aftermath of 9/11.
The book proceeds thematically, with
separate chapters focusing on topics
such as ethnic discrimination, labor
exploitation, political censorship, and
discrimination based on sexual preference.
This structure promotes the
discussion of historical continuities
but discourages the examination of the
links between various forms of repression
and resistance and the importance
of particular eras and decades. In the
1960s, for example, the various separate
protest movements fed off one
another and reinforced processes of
social and cultural change. As might be
expected in a study of this magnitude,
there are occasional factual errors.
For example, author, activist, and civil
libertarian Upton Sinclair did not win
the Nobel Prize for Literature (Sinclair
Lewis did). But this nitpicking should
not detract from the overall strength
of the book. It is a prime example of
Wallace Stegner’s observation put into
scholarly practice—a solid study of
California events and conditions that
provides extraordinary perspective on
some of the worst and best elements of
American life and culture.
o, my anCestor:
reCoGnition anD
reneWal for tHe
GaBrielino-tonGVa
PeoPle of tHe los
anGeles area
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
By Claudia Jurmain and William
McCawley (Berkeley: Heyday, 2009,
368 pp., $21.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY DAVID R . M . BECK, PROFESSOR
OF NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY
OF MONTANA, AND AUTHOR OF SEEking
REcognition: thE tERmination and REStoRation
oF thE cooS, LowER UmpqUa
and SiUSLaw indianS oF SoUthwEStERn
oREgon in hiStoRicaL contExt, 1855–1984
This book is about the Gabrielino-
Tongva American Indian community, a
“landless urban tribe” whose ancestors
lived in what is now the greater Los
Angeles area (xviii, 201). The book “is
a general publication in partnership
with the Tongva people” and Rancho
Los Alamitos, located on their original
homeland, which intends, “for the
first time, [to] give voice to individuals,
families, and groups within the
Tongva community today” (xvi). As
the authors tell us, “This is a story of
revitalization and renewal, of a people
who have continuously redefined themselves
by blending their own cultural
traditions with the cultures of newcomers—whether
Spanish, Mexican or
American” (xxii).
The volume is a coffee table–sized
work, consisting of three lengthy
essays that are organized by theme
and utilize ethnographic monographs
and interviews with tribal members
as sources. Each essay is followed by
several of ten transcribed conversations
the authors held with individual
tribe members. The first, “Continuity
within Change: Identity and Culture,”
describes identity in cultural, political,
and personal terms and explores the
reasons these forms of identity have
been attacked and hidden during the
Spanish, Mexican, and American years.
The conversations illuminate ways in
which modern generations have been
reclaiming these various identities.
The second essay, “A Connection to
Place: Land and History,” describes
Povuu’ngna, the Gabrielino-Tongva
ancient homeland, and the emergent
place of the “law-giver God”
Chinigchinich, in historic and modern
terms (104). The land, dispossessed
over time in a variety of ways, “exists
simultaneously in their cultural memory
both as a thing taken from them
and, paradoxically, as a thing that can
never be lost” (101).
The third essay, “The Enduring Vision:
Recognition and Renewal,” identifies
the significance of federal recognition
to tribe members and observes that
though deeply divided on the role of
recognition in their future, they are
relatively united on the goal of achieving
recognition as they seek justice for
past wrongs. This has been the basis of

a “passionate debate over . . . how best
to achieve it,” but also addresses dissent
over the structural form the tribal
government should take (201). Paradoxically,
the essay observes, the “Tongva
do not need recognition, federal or otherwise,
to define who they are” (214).
As may be expected of a communitybased
history, O, My Ancestor is not
error free—the Heye Foundation was
in New York, not Chicago, for example.
The term “sacred” is used liberally but
defined loosely. The group conversations
would be easier to follow if the
names of individuals were spelled
out each time they spoke, rather than
initialized. Nonetheless, this is a beautifully
produced book with a moving
story of a federally unrecognized group
of people regaining their identity after
severe historic losses. “The Tongva culture
has always been a rich and diverse
blend of cultural influences,” the book
posits (213). This cultural elasticity has
been a basis for survival that long predates
the arrival of the Spanish to the
Tongva homeland. The book’s strength
is in the individual stories that illustrate
the continuities and changes in
community life.
CosmoPolitans: a
soCial & Cultural
History of tHe JeWs
of tHe san franCisCo
Bay area
By Fred Rosenbaum (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009,
462 pp., $39.95 cloth)
REVIEWED BY AVA F . KAHN, COAUTHOR WITH
ELLEN EISENBERG AND WILLIAM TOLL OF
JEwS oF thE paciFic coaSt: REinvEnting
commUnity on amERica’S EdgE; EDITOR
OF JewIsH VoICes oF THe CALIFornIA rusH
AND JewIsH LIFe In THe AMerICAn wesT;
AND COEDITOR WITH MARC DOLLINGER OF
CALIFornIA Jews
In her pioneering article “Forging
a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture: The
Regional Identity of San Francisco and
Northern California,” historian Glenna
Matthews enumerated the region’s
singular features. She emphasized the
lasting effects of its Gold Rush founding,
the diversity of its population,
its religious pluralism, and its opportunities
for social mobility. Inspired
by Matthews and identifying these
same characteristics in the Jewish
community, Fred Rosenbaum chose
Cosmopolitans as the title and organizing
principle for his hundred-year
history. He describes the “essence” of
San Francisco’s Jewish community as
“more universalistic than particularistic,
artistically creative and economically
powerful, philanthropic and civicminded,
borrowing freely from other
traditions and interacting fully with
non-Jews.” He supports his conclusion
by placing the Jewish community in
historical context, examining generational
differences, and demonstrating
the community’s exceptionalism as
compared to the wider American Jewish
community.
A comprehensive history that begins
with the Gold Rush, Cosmopolitans
illuminates the events and personalities
that shaped the Bay Area’s Jewish
and civic communities in chronological
and thematic chapters. Beginning,
for example, with an 1859 meeting to
protest the kidnapping of an Italian
Jewish child, Jews joined with non-Jews
to support common causes. Among the
individuals Rosenbaum considers are
the young merchants Anthony Zellerbach,
Jesse Steinhart, and Levi Strauss,
who not only achieved wealth but also
elevated their families’ places in the
new society, becoming prominent in
the arts and philanthropies, and the
politicians Adolph Sutro, the first Jewish
mayor of a major city, and Florence
Prag Kahn, the first Jewish congresswoman.
As Rosenbaum demonstrates,
Jewish artists, authors, dramatists, and
musicians enhanced the city’s cultural
identity.
Rabbis and professionals alike
embraced Progressivism and social
justice causes. Rosenbaum explains
synagogue histories, the relationships
between Jews and their city and other
75

76
r e v i e w s
ethnic groups, and the continuing
influence of the German Jewish elites
years after they had been usurped by
Eastern Europeans in other western cities.
However, the Jewish community’s
most notable characteristic, Rosenbaum
believes, was its diversity. Strong
voices debated how to cope with Eastern
European migrants, multiple forms
of Jewish affiliation and the unaffiliated,
concerns about dual loyalties, and
reactions to the Holocaust, Zionism,
and McCarthyism.
An immensely valuable history, Cosmopolitans
could have contributed further
to scholarship had it placed San Francisco
Jewry in a western context. As is
the case with many ethnic histories, at
times the book overemphasizes Jewish
contributions. These are minor points.
While scholars may quibble about a
few interpretations, Cosmopolitans is a
well-balanced work that describes the
laudable as well as the less desirable
aspects of San Francisco Jewry. Thoroughly
researched and footnoted, with
multiple asterisks elaborating content,
it is extremely well written.
Many Jews believed that in San Francisco
they had found the Promised
Land. One thing is certain: without the
presence of Jewish merchants, philanthropists,
politicians, reformers, artists,
authors, and musicians, San Francisco
would be a very different place. Cosmopolitans
supplies a crucial piece of San
Francisco’s ethnic puzzle.
WHeels of CHanGe:
from Zero to 600
m.P.H.: tHe amaZinG
story of California
anD tHe automoBile
By Kevin Nelson (Berkeley: Heyday
and California Historical Society,
2009, 400 pp., $24.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT, AUTHOR
OF thE gREat caR cRazE: how SoUthERn
caLiFoRnia coLLidEd with thE aUtomobiLE
in thE 1920S
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
This book has two themes, not very
harmoniously interwoven. One is a
general account of the development of
California’s car culture from its beginnings
in the late nineteenth century
up to 1965. The other is a lovingly
detailed chronicle of motor racing, car
design and production, and the pursuit
of speed records, focusing on, but not
limited to, California.
If you enjoy lap-by-lap descriptions of
race meets, time trials, hot-rod encounters,
endurance runs, and drag racing
souped up with a parade of celebrity
speed addicts like Clark Gable, Steve
McQueen, and James Dean, this book
is for you. If, on the other hand, you
are more interested in just how the
automobile has affected daily life in
the Golden State, there is plenty of
well-researched information between
these covers. But the work as a whole
is almost useless for reference purposes
due to an incredibly poor index,
evidently limited to proper names.
Thus, for example, although there are
valuable accounts of the development
of freeways, oil and gasoline, trailers
and motor homes, drive-in movies, and
smog, there is no easy way of locating
any of these; they are not indexed.
Also lamentably lacking are any maps.
Although the book is full of motor
voyages, routes, and place-names, there
is not a single map to facilitate the
reader’s own journey.
Kevin Nelson writes well and entertainingly.
His approach is largely biographical,
with extensive coverage of the lives
and careers of car sales tycoons such as
Earle C. Anthony, racing legends such
as Barney Oldfield, and car designers
and builders such as Harley Earl and
Harry A. Miller. A full seven pages are
devoted to the life and violent track
death of Jimmie Murphy, a motor racing
idol of the 1920s. (Significantly,
the book’s dedication includes “all the
people whose lives ended, too soon,
in a car.” And this reviewer’s one
appearance in the text—hereby happily
acknowledged—is my observation,
concerning the streets of Los Angeles
in the 1920s, that “Never before in
human history, except in time of war,
had so many people been exposed in
the course of their daily lives to the risk
of violent death.”)
Nelson traveled extensively around
California in the course of his research,
and the book is well balanced geographically.
He grew up in the Bay

Area—and his account of the role of
automobiles in the 1906 earthquake
and fire, changing their image from
“devil wagons” to “chariots of mercy”—
is particularly good.
The more mundane aspects of California’s
automotive revolution, however,
such as parking, have been ignored in
favor of the sensational. And, as a resident
of Santa Barbara, I must point out
that although Nelson gives us proper
credit as the birthplace of Motel 6, he
neglects, in his list of fast-food chains
that began in southern California, to
include the once-huge Sambo’s, whose
original restaurant is still operating
here by the beach, with off-street customer
parking for sixteen cars.
soliDarity stories:
an oral History of
tHe ilWu
By Harvey Schwartz (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2009,
352 pp., $50 cloth, $24.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY GREG MARqUIS, PROFESSOR OF
HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK
SAINT JOHN, CANADA
This evocative volume is based
on an oral history project in the early
1980s and its interviews with more
than 200 men and women who were
members of the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
This militant, left-wing Pacific coast
union, organized in the struggles of the
1930s, earned an important place in
American and Canadian labor history.
The book begins with a useful introduction
that explains the long-term
political stance of the ILWU, which
supported Republican Spain against
fascism in the 1930s, urged a peaceful
settlement to the Vietnam War, supported
unions in other parts of the
world, and has condemned American
support for military dictatorships
and aspects of free-trade agreements
and globalization. In the late 1940s,
the ILWU was one of the few unions
purged by the Congress of Industrial
Organizations to survive. Readers of
these interviews will conclude that
despite the importance of such leaders
as the famous Harry Bridges, the
ILWU is the sum of its parts—in this
case, a large number of dedicated,
loyal, and proud members and their
families who simply wanted to help
working people.
Editor Harvey Schwartz has skillfully
omitted the original interview questions
in order to give voice to rank-andfile
members who toiled on docks, in
the holds of ships, in warehouses, on
Hawaiian pineapple plantations, and at
cotton compresses in California. The
union “marched inland” to organize
inland boat workers and warehouse
workers. The most recent campaign
reported in the book was the organiza-
tion campaign at Portland, Oregon,
bookstores in 1998–2000. The interviews
presented deal principally with
Los Angeles and Long Beach, the San
Francisco Bay area, California’s Central
Valley, ports in the Pacific Northwest
such as Coos Bay, Seattle, Portland,
Tacoma, Vancouver, and Hawaii.
Reflecting the segmented nature of the
workforce in the past, most of those
interviewed were white males, but
given the ethnic patterns in plantation
agriculture and greater support for
civil rights in the post-1945 era, interviewees
also represented the African-,
Hispanic Filipino-, Chinese-, Japanese-
American and native Hawaiian communities
and women, such as Valerie
Taylor, who served as president of the
ILWU women’s federated auxiliaries
from 1949 to 1973.
Solidarity Stories contains not only
personal stories but also details of
interest to social historians, such as the
struggle against the “shape up system”
that ended with union control of dispatching
(selecting workers for specific
jobs). The personal accounts remind
us that history is also made by ordinary
people who take risks and often suffer
for their activism. This is important to
remember at a time when the proportion
of unionized American workers
has declined to less than 13 percent.
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78
r e v i e w s
California inDians anD
tHeir enVironment: an
introDuCtion
By Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis
Parrish (Berkeley: University of
California, 2009, 512 pp., $50 cloth,
$24.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY JAN TIMBROOK, CURATOR OF
ETHNOGRAPHY, SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM
OF NATURAL HISTORY AND AUTHOR OF CHu-
MAsH eTHnoBoTAny: pLAnT knowLedGe
AMonG THe CHuMAsH IndIAns oF souTHern
CALIFornIA
Reading through California Indians
and Their Environment, I found myself
making notes in the margins—“Good”
“Yes!” “Excellent”—and marking whole
paragraphs with asterisks. The first
150 pages, grouped under the heading
“Rethinking California Indians,” are
required reading for anyone wishing
to understand Native peoples’ relationships
with the natural resources of
our state.
Kent Lightfoot, a well-known archaeologist,
and Otis Parrish, a respected
Kashaya Pomo elder, demolish the persistent
stereotype of California Indians
as noble savages who hunted, gathered,
and fished in perfect harmony with the
environment. As they point out, many
instances of overexploitation and famine
occurred throughout prehistory.
They are also unwilling to accept
a newly popular characterization
derived from mounting evidence that
California Indians used fire as an environmental
management tool. Some
writers have characterized this practice
as “incipient cultivation” or “proto-
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
agriculture.” Lightfoot and Parrish
argue that such terms wrongly imply
that California Native people were gradually
proceeding along a linear evolutionary
track toward true agriculture as
the mark of all truly advanced societies,
and that it completely misses what was
really going on.
California Indians’ principal subsistence
strategy, like so much else about
California’s Native cultures, doesn’t fit
neatly into established anthropological
categories of human systems. Their
goal was not to use fire to alter habitats,
but to maximize the quantity and
variety of wild resources upon which
they depended for food, material culture,
and other necessities of life. So
the authors coin the term “pyrodiversity
collectors,” which, though a perfectly
apt description, becomes another
of the unfortunate neologisms with
which anthropological jargon often has
been burdened. It’s unlikely to catch
on with the wider public. Even so, this
is an excellent, cogent summary of California
Indians’ interactions with their
environment and why that matters.
In the book’s “Visual Guide to Natural
Resources,” 114 beautiful color photographs
of marine and terrestrial plants,
shellfish, insects, fish, reptiles, birds,
marine and terrestrial mammals provide
a sampling of the species utilized
by Native peoples. These and others
are discussed in six subsequent sections,
pertaining to the state’s different
geographical/cultural provinces: northwest,
central, and south coasts, northeast,
Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, and
southern deserts. Principal resources
and their uses are described, supported
by copious references for those wish-
ing more information about particular
Native groups or about the species
themselves. It is particularly gratifying
to see that clear distinctions are made
among California’s diverse Native
groups, rather than lumping them all
as “the Indians.”
No summary work can be completely
exhaustive, but this comes close. It is
well-written, interesting, and makes
important intellectual contributions.
The most important literature, as well
as more obscure research papers, has
been referenced either in the text or
in the copious endnotes. An excellent
index is also provided. California Indians
and Their Environment progresses
far beyond its predecessor, The Natural
World of the California Indians (Heizer
and Elsasser 1980). Beautiful and useful,
this book belongs on the bookshelf
of everyone interested in California history,
anthropology, or ethnobiology.

Juana Briones of 19tH
Century California
By Jeanne Farr McDonnell (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2008,
288 pp., $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper)
REVIEWED BY MARLENE SMITH-BARANzINI,
AUTHOR, HISTORICAL RESEARCHER, EDITOR
OF THe sHIrLey LeTTers: FroM THe CALI-
FornIA MInes, 1851–1852, BY LOUISE AMELIA
KNAPP SMITH CLAPPE, AND CO-AUTHOR, WITH
JOHN MCCLELLAND, OF A MANUSCRIPT ON
PACIFIC NORTHWEST HISTORY
Her 1820s house at El Polin Springs
on the San Francisco Presidio grounds
is being excavated. Plans are afoot to
save the remains of her 1884 Palo Alto
adobe. She is presented in schools
and portrayed in Chautauqua performances.
Now comes the long-awaited
biography of Juana Briones, a contextually
detailed treatment of a woman and
her times. Jeanne Farr McDonnell, a
journalist and women’s history activist,
has unearthed sources—against many
odds—to bring this veiled figure to life.
Juana Briones y Tapia de Miranda
(1802–1889) was born in 1802 at Villa
de Branciforte, near Santa Cruz. Her
father came to California in 1770 from
New Spain; her mother was a child
in the 1776 Anza expedition. Briones
lived through every wave of the state’s
cultural upheaval—from Indian times
through the Mission period, the Mexican
era, the American takeover, the
tumultuous Gold Rush years, and the
emergence of California as an ambitious
western state. At every turn,
the resourceful, hard-working Briones
adapted her life and moved with
the times.
From Indians and family elders Briones
learned the medicinal healing that,
more than anything else, lately has
defined her. When her marriage to
Apolinaro Miranda turned mean, she
was granted a rare Church separation.
She moved her large family from the
Presidio and started a small farm in
the area that became Yerba Buena.
Next she owned a vast ranch on former
Mission Santa Clara lands. Finally,
in her eighties, she moved to the
Palo Alto home. Her life was unique.
Driven by an insatiable quest for
answers, McDonnell reveals how she
accomplished it.
Firsthand documents testify to Juana’s
intelligence, physical stamina, the
ability to navigate the shifting human
landscape, the intuitive wisdom to
trust herself and protect her children,
her genuine enjoyment of others,
her knowledge of healing, and her
will to live a dynamic life under any
circumstances.
The “paper trail” left by future women
is short for Juana, though probably
not exhausted. She lived in patriarchal
societies and may not have been able to
write in Spanish (or later, English), but
her activities appear in legal documents
in both languages, in memoirs by others
who knew her, especially European
and American arrivals, and in early
histories of the places where she lived.
Her names—maiden, married, and
their phonetic-like variations—surely
complicated the research.
The history that frames this biography
is detailed and meticulously documented
by rare early sources and current
specialists’ thinking, thus providing
a valuable orientation to the period,
especially regarding Indian–Anglo
relationships. At times, however, when
evidence of what Briones and others
thought or did is missing, McDonnell
inserts conjectures that, however reasonable,
may or may not be so. While
this construction keeps the author
actively in the narrative, readers can
easily evaluate her interpretations.
An ambitious labor of intellect and
love, this book enlightens our understanding
of life during a transformative
century. Readers should find it thoroughly
interesting and informative.
79

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i n d e x
Volume 87
a
Adams, Ansel (87, 4), 17–19
Adrian, Henry Augustus (87, 4), 45, 46
African Americans and teaching California
history (87, 1) 47, 48
African Americans and the Panama-Pacific
International Exhibition (87, 3),
26–45
Club women, 29–30, 40, 41, 45
Migration to the West, 15–16, 19
African Dip (PPIE exhibit) (87, 3), 38, 39,
40, 45
Alameda County Day (PPIE) (87, 3), 40–42,
44
Anthony, Susan B. (87, 4), 48, 57, 63, 64
Avalon (Santa Catalina Island) (87, 1), 7, 9,
10, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23
Axelrod, Jeremiah B. C., Inventing Autopia:
Dreams and Visions of the Modern
Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles,
review (87, 3), 72–73
b
Babour, Clitus (87, 3), 50
Bakersfield (87, 3), 8, 17
“Bakersfield sound,” 8, 18
Dust Bowl migrants, 18
Banks, Frank H., “Diary: 28 March–16
November 1877,” A Whaling Voyage
(CHS Collections) (87, 1), 4–5
Banning family (87, 1), 6–23
Banning, Hancock (87, 1), 9, 11, 12, 13, 17,
19, 22, 23
Banning, Joseph (87, 1), 9, 13, 15, 19, 22
Banning, Phineas (87, 1), 8, 9
Banning, William (87, 1), 9, 11, 13, 15, 16,
19, 22, 23
Beasley, Delilah (87, 3), 26, 27, 28, 31, 35,
38, 39, 42–44, 45
Beerstecher, Charles (87, 3), 48, 59
Bertrand, Michael (87, 3), 7
“Big City” (Merle Haggard) (87, 3), 16–18
Big Read, The (NEA) (87, 2), 50–59
Big Sur (87, 2)
Robinson Jeffers, 22–43
U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey, 44–48
Binner, Oscar (87, 4), 40
Bird, Remsen Dubois (87, 2), 54
Birth of a Nation, The (D. W. Griffith) (87, 3),
26, 31, 37, 42, 44
“Bixby’s Landing” (Robinson Jeffers) (87, 2),
49
“Blue Yodel No. 4 (California Blues)”
(Jimmie Rodgers) (87, 3), 13–14
Bookplates (CHS Collections) (87, 4), 3–5
Broderick, David (87, 3), 48
Brophy, Robert (87, 2), 15, 20, 45
Buffalo Soldiers (87, 3), 34, 35
Bum Blockade (1936) (87, 3), 15
Burbank, Luther (87, 4), 26–47
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
C
Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez (87, 1), 26
Cady, Daniel, “In Tune with Innovation:
The ‘West by Southwest’ Music Panel
at the 2009 Western History
Association Conference (87, 3), 4–25
“Language of a Subculture Redux,” 7–10
“‘West by Southwest: Southern Music in
and About the American West,”
10–20
“Left of Eden: Woody Guthrie, ‘Do Re
Mi,’” 14–15
“Looking West: Jimmie Rodgers, ‘Blue
Yodel No. 4 (California Blues),’”
13–14
“Western Apocalypse: Gram Parsons and
Chris Hillman, ‘Sin City,’”20
“The Price of Freedom: Janis Joplin, ‘Me
and Bobby McGee,’” 20–21
California history, teaching and global
perspective (87, 1) 24–63
California Patron (Grange newspaper)
(87, 4), 48, 49, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61;
Family Circle, 57–58
California Views (photographic archive)
(87, 2), 42–43
California’s Constitutional Convention
(1878–79) (87, 3), 46–64
Delegates, 52–54
Issues debated, 49–51
Origins, 48–51
Proceedings, 54–55
Progressives, 61–62
Reforms, 55–60
California’s Second Constitution (1879)
(87, 3), 46–64
Central Pacific Railroad (87, 3), 49, 57, 59,
61; (87, 4), 22
Cherry, Edgar (Spotlight) (87, 2), 80
Chinese immigrants (87, 3), 51–52, 60
Clansman, The (Thomas Dixon) (87, 3), 26,
31, 42, 44
Colophon, The (CHS Collections) (87, 2), 4–5
Compost, Terri, ed., People’s Park: Still
Blooming, 1969–2009 and On, review
(87, 2), 69–70
Cooper-Molera family (Big Sur) (87, 2), 27
Cover, Thomas W. (87, 4), 33
D
Delgado, James P., Gold Rush Port: The
Maritime Archaeology of San
Francisco’s Waterfront, review (87, 1),
74–75
“Der’ll be Wahm Coons a Prancin’” (CHS
Collections) (87, 3), 3
Deverell, William, “Teaching California in a
Global Context” (87, 1), 57
Dixon, Thomas (87, 3), 26, 27, 31
Donner Party (87, 4), 20–25
“Do Re Mi” (Woody Guthrie) (87, 3), 14–15,
24
Douglas, K. C. (87, 3), 8, 15–16
Dowling, Patrick (87, 3), 48
Dreyfus, Philip J., Our Better Nature:
Environment and the Making of San
Francisco, review (87, 3), 74
Du Bois, W. E. B. (87, 3), 30, 31, 36, 42, 43
Dunbar, Paul (87, 3), 3
Dust Bowl (87, 3), 6, 9, 18, 22
Dust Bowl migrants (87, 3), 6, 8, 14, 15, 17
Dyble, Louise Nelson, Paying the Toll: Local
Power, Regional Politics, and the
Golden Gate Bridge, review (87, 3),
73–74
E
Eisenberg, Ellen M., The First to Cry Down
Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese
Removal During World War II, review
(87, 4), 72–73
Elinson, Elaine and Stan Yogi, Wherever
There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves,
Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and
Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in
California, review (87, 4), 73–74
Elkind, Sarah, “California History as
American History” (87, 1), 25, 57–58
Estee, Morris (87, 3), 56, 58, 59, 61
Ethington, Philip J., “Global California
Contra Greater California” (87, 1), 25,
53–56
F
Farewell to Manzanar (Jeanne Wakatsuki
Houston and James D. Houston)
(87, 3), 16, 17–19
Farm Security Administration (FSA) (87, 3),
8, 9
“First Book: Robinson Jeffers” (CHS
Collections) (87, 2), 4–5

Flamming, Douglas, “In Tune with
Innovation: The ‘West by Southwest’
Music Panel at the 2009 Western
History Association Conference”
(87, 3), 4–25
“Homesick for the South: Otis Redding,
‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,’”
18–19
“Let the Good Times Roll: Bob Geddins
and K. C. Douglas, ‘Mercury
Boogie,’” 15–16
“One Magic Afternoon in Denver,”
21–25
“The Elusive West: Merle Haggard, ‘Big
City,’” 16–18
“The Price of Freedom: Janis Joplin, ‘Me
and Bobby McGee,’” 20–21
“The South and the West in the Creation
of America,” 4–6
“‘West by Southwest: Southern Music in
and About the American West,” 10–
20
Frontier Thesis (Frederick Jackson
Turner) (87, 3), 4
g
Geddins, Bob (87, 3), 8, 15–16
George, Henry (87, 3), 46, 49, 55
“Ghost” (Robinson Jeffers) (87, 2), 64
Gioia, Dana, “Telling Jeffers’ Story” (87, 2),
50–53
Gisel, Bonnie J. with images by Stephen J.
Joseph, Nature’s Beloved Son:
Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical
Legacy, review (87, 2), 74–75
Gold Ridge Experiment Farm (Sebastopol)
(87, 4), 29
Gold Rush and California’s Pacific trade
(87, 1), 29–32, 47
Gold, Christina, “‘Pacific Eldorado’:
Scholarship, Pedagogy, and the
Community College Student” (87, 1),
25, 49–52
Golden Gate International Exhibition
(1939–40) (87, 1), 35
Grange (87, 3), 51; (87, 4) 54–57
“Gray Weather” (Robinson Jeffers) (87, 2),
21
Gregory, James (87, 3), 6, 8
Griffith, D. W. (87, 3), 27, 31, 44
Guthrie, Woody (87, 3), 8, 14–15, 17, 20,
22, 24
h
Haggard, Merle (87, 3), 8, 15
Hathaway, Pat (87, 2), 42
Hawk Tower (87, 2), 8, 13, 14, 15, 50, 58, 60
Hillman, Chris (87, 3), 20
Hoge, Joseph P. (87, 3), 54, 55, 59, 61
Holder, Charles F. (87, 1), 11–12
HoSang, Daniel Martinez, “Teaching
Race in California History beyond
Domination and Diversity” (87, 1),
25, 58
Hotel Metropole (Santa Catalina Island)
(87, 1), 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 21
Houston, James D. (87, 4), 6–25
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki (87, 4), 6, 9,
17–19, 21
Hudson, Lynn M., “‘This Is Our Fair and
Our State’: African Americans
and the Panama-Pacific International
Exhibition (87, 3), 1, 26–45
i
In the Redwoods, Edgar Cherry (Spotlight)
(87, 2), 80
J
Janssen, Volker, “What Makes the World
Go Round: California’s History of
Globalization” (87, 1), 25, 59
Japanese Americans, and WW II relocation
centers (87, 1), 58; (87, 4) 16, 17–19
Ansel Adams photographs of (87, 4),
17–19
Jeffers, Robinson (87, 2), 4–64
Big Sur, 22–41
Biographical sketch, 12–16
“Bixby’s Landing” (poem), 49
Carmel, 8, 9, 13, 27, 32, 50
Cultural heritage, 50–64
“Ghost” (poem), 64
“Gray Weather” (poem), 21
Literary legacy, 6–20
Occidental College, 12, 17–20
Selected bibliography, 65
The Big Read, 50–59
Jeffers, Una (87, 2), 12–13, 16, 26, 27, 32,
51, 54
“Jewel City” (PPIE) (87, 3), 38, 41
Jim Crow (87, 3), 9, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 36,
37, 38, 44, 45
Johnson, C. W. J. (87, 2), 42, 43
Joplin, Janis (87, 3), 12, 20–21
Jordan, David Starr (87, 4), 33, 37
Joy Zone (PPIE) (87, 3), 31, 38, 39, 40
Jurmain, Claudia and William McCawley, O,
My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal
for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the
Los Angeles Area, review (87, 4),
74–75
K
Karman, James, “An Uncommon Voice”
(87, 2), 6–11; 33, 51
Karman, James, ed., The Collected Letters of
Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of
Una Jeffers, vol. 1, 1890–1930, review
(87, 2), 70–71
Kearney, Denis (87, 3), 52, 59, 60
Kimball, Flora (87, 4), 48–59
Kimball, Frank (87, 4), 53, 56
Kimball, Warren C. (87, 4), 50, 51, 53, 54
l
La Chapelle, Peter (87, 3), 7
Latorre, Guisela, Walls of Empowerment:
Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of
California, review (87, 3), 71–72
Landacre, Paul (87, 2), 20
Latin American Pacific Rim (87, 1), 43, 44,
50
Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen, “Rethinking
California History” (87, 1), 25, 59
Lightfoot, Kent G. and Otis Parrish,
California Indians and Their
Environment: An Introduction, review
(87, 4), 78
London, Jack (87, 1), 37; (87, 2), 28; (87, 4),
40
Los Angeles History Research Group
(87, 1) 25
Lummis, Charles (87, 3), 5
Lunch Parlor (National City) (87, 4), 64, 65
Lustig, R. Jeffrey, “Private Rights and Public
Purposes: California’s Second
Constitution Reconsidered” (87, 3),
46–64
Luther Burbank Company (87, 4), 43–44,
45, 47
Luther Burbank Publishing Company
(87, 4), 39, 40
Luther Burbank Society (87, 4), 39
“Luther Burbank’s Spineless Cactus”
(catalog) (87, 4), 44
M
Marcus, Kenneth H., “California History
and the Performing Arts” (87, 1), 25,
60; (87, 3), 7
Mathes, W. Michael, The Russian-Mexican
Frontier: Mexican Documents
Regarding the Russian Establishments
in California, 1808–1842, review
(87, 1), 74
81

82
i n d e x
McCawley, William and Claudia Jurmain, O,
My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal
for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the
Los Angeles Area, review (87, 4),
74–75
McCusker, Kristine M. (87, 3), 7
McDonnell, Jeanne Farr, Juana Briones of
19th Century California, review
(87, 4), 79
“Me and Bobby McGee” (Janis Joplin)
(87, 3), 12, 20–21, 24
“Mercury Boogie (Mercury Blues)” (Bob
Geddins and K. C. Douglas) (87, 3),
8, 15–16, 18
Michael Steiner, “Teaching California
History with McWilliams, Bradbury,
and Tuan” (87, 1), 25, 63
Midwinter International Exhibition
(1893–94) (87, 1), 35–36
Milliken, Randall, Native Americans at
Mission San Jose, review (87, 2),
72–73
Moore, Rebecca, Understanding Jonestown
and Peoples Temple, review (87, 2), 76
n
NAACP, Northern California Branch (87, 3),
26, 31
National City (87, 4), 52, 53, 62, 63
National City Public Library (87, 4), 62
National City Record (87, 4), 49, 54, 62, 63
National Grange of the Order of Patrons of
Husbandry (87, 4), 54–57
National Ranch Grange No. 235 (National
City) (87, 4), 56
National Steinbeck Center (87, 2), 52, 53
Negro Day (PPIE) (87, 3) 38, 40, 41, 44
Nelson, Kevin, Wheels of Change: From Zero
to 600 M.P.H.: The Amazing Story of
California and the Automobile, review
(87, 4), 76–77
Notley family (Big Sur) (87, 2), 32, 40
Nye, Matthew, “A Life Remembered: The
Voice and Passions of Feminist
Writer and Community Activist Flora
Kimball” (87, 4), 48–59
o
Oakland (87, 3), 15, 16, 30, 31
Oakland blues (87, 3), 15–16
Oakland Independent (87, 3), 31
Oakland Sunshine (87, 3), 26, 29, 31, 38, 40,
42, 44
Oakland Tribune (87, 3), 26, 27, 31
Occidental College (87, 2), 12, 17–20, 52, 54,
60
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
Okies (Dust Bowl migrants) (87, 3), 6, 8, 14,
15, 17; (87, 4), 10
Olivewood (Kimball residence) (87, 4),
53–54, 64, 65
Osborne, Thomas J., “Jack London and the
Call of the Pacific” (87, 1), 37
Osborne, Thomas J., “Pacific Eldorado:
Rethinking California’s Greater Past”
(87, 1), 24, 26–45
California dream, 34–36, 38–40
Early international transpacific
commerce, 27–30
Expansion and maritime commercial
prospects, 32–34
Pacific immigration, 31–32
Pacific Rim commercial, strategic, and
cultural affairs, 40–45
Owens, Buck (87, 3), 5, 8
p
Pacific Guano and Fertilizer Co. (87, 1), 29
Pacific Rim, influences on California history
(87, 1) 24–63
Palace of Food Products (PPIE) (87, 3), 31,
39, 43
Panama-Pacific International Exhibition
(PPIE) (1915) (87, 1), 35; (87, 3),
26–45
Pardee, George C. (87, 1), 1, 31
Parker, Harold (Spotlight) (87, 3), 80
Parrish, Otis and Kent G. Lightfoot,
California Indians and Their
Environment: An Introduction,
review (87, 4), 78
Parsons, Gram (87, 3), 8, 9, 20
Pescadero Camp (San Mateo County)
(87, 1), 80
Pfeiffer family (Big Sur) (87, 2), 24, 25, 34
Phelps, Robert, “Teaching California
Cityscapes” (87, 1), 25, 60–61
Presidio (San Francisco) (87, 1), 33, 34
Progress and Poverty (Henry George)
(87, 3), 55
r
Race Betterment booth (PPIE) (87, 3), 32,
33, 45
Ramírez, Catherine S., The Woman in the
Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and
the Cultural Politics of Memory, review
(87, 3), 71–72
Rancho de la Nación (National Ranch)
(87, 4), 52, 54
Redding, Otis (87, 3), 18–19, 20, 24
Reed, James Frazier (87, 4), 20, 21, 22, 23
Reed, Patty (87, 4), 20–24
Reesmen, Jeanne Campbell, Jack London’s
Racial Lives: A Critical Biography,
review (87, 2), 71–72
Regionalism (87, 3), 4–6
Richardson, Heather Cox (87, 3), 6
Richardson, Peter, A Bomb in Every Issue:
How the Short, Unruly Life of
Ramparts Magazine Changed America,
review (87, 2), 69–70
Risvold, Floyd (87, 2), 44
Robinson, Forrest G., “James D. Houston,
Californian” (87, 4), 6–25
Rodgers, Jimmie (87, 3), 12, 14, 15, 24
Rodolph, Frank B. (87, 2), 43
Rosenbaum, Fred, Cosmopolitans: A Social
& Cultural History of the Jews of the
San Francisco Bay Area, review
(87, 4), 75–76
Rosenthal, Nicolas G., Allison Varzally,
et. al, “Teaching California History: A
Conversation” (87, 1), 24–64
Rosenthal, Nicolas G. (87, 1)
Introduction, “Teaching California
History: A Conversation,” 24–25
“Teaching the Messier Realities of
California History,” 61–62
s
San Francisco Workingmen’s Party (87, 3),
48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61
Santa Catalina Island (87, 1), 6–23
“Canvas cities,” 10–11, 14, 15
Isthmus, 17–18, 19
Minorities, 15
Santa Catalina Island Marine Band (87, 1),
10, 11, 18, 19
Santa Rosa (87, 4), 28, 29, 30, 36, 45, 46,
47
Sausalito houseboat community (87, 3), 19
Scharff, Virginia (87, 3), 6, 7, 10, 11, 20, 23,
24, 25
Schrank, Sarah, Art and the City: Civic
Imagination and Cultural Authority in
Los Angeles, review (87, 2), 75
Schrank, Sarah, “California and the
American Popular Imagination:
Using Visual Culture in California
History Pedagogy” (87, 1), 25, 62
Schwartz, Harvey, Solidarity Stories: An Oral
History of the ILWU, review (87, 4) 77
Sectional Thesis (Frederick Jackson Turner)
(87, 3), 4, 6
Shafter migrant camp (FSA) (87, 3), 9
Shatto, George (87, 1), 9, 10
Shaw, Anna (87, 4), 63, 64
Sides, Josh, “To See the Globe for the
Beach” (87, 1), 25, 62–63

“Sin City” (Gram Parsons and Chris
Hillman) (87, 3), 8, 20
“(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” (Otis
Redding) (87, 3), 18–19, 24
Sitton, Tom, “The Bannings on the Magic
Isle: Santa Catalina Island, 1892–
1919” (87, 1), 6–23
Smith, Jane S., “Luther Burbank’s Spineless
Cactus: Boom Times in the
California Desert” (87, 4), 26–47
“Song of the Redwood Tree” (Walt
Whitman) (87, 1), 26; (87, 2), 80
Sonkin, Robert (87, 3), 9
Southern migration (87, 3), 4–25
Sperry Flour booth (PPIE) (87, 3), 38, 39
Spineless Cactus Nursery & Land Co.
(87, 4), 43
Starr, Kevin (87, 1), 34, 43; (87, 4), 7
Starr, Kevin, Golden Dreams: California in an
Age of Abundance, 1950–1963, review
(87, 1), 73
Stegner, Wallace (87, 4), 8
Stephens, Virginia (“Jewel City,” PPIE)
(87, 3), 41, 45
Stevens, Errol Wayne, Radical L.A.: From
Coxey’s Army to the Watts Riots,
1894–1965, review (87, 2), 73
Stewart, Todd, Placing Memory: A
Photographic Exploration of Japanese
American Internment, review (87, 4),
72
Stoneman, George (87, 4), 62
“Student Printmakers’ Response to Jeffers’
Poetry” (Occidental College) (87, 2),
54, 57–59
Summer Home on Lake Tahoe, Harold Parker
(Spotlight) (87, 3), 80
Swetnam family (Big Sur) (87, 2), 28, 35, 38
T
Tanner, Henry Ossawa (87, 3), 1, 43
Terry, David (87, 3), 48, 54, 56, 59
The Crisis (NAACP) (87, 3), 29, 32, 35, 42
The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Delilah
Beasley) (87, 3), 27, 45
The New Agricultural-Horticultural Opuntias:
Plant Creations for Arid Regions,
Luther Burbank (catalog) (87, 4), 28,
33, 38, 41
Thornless Cactus Farming Company
(87, 4), 38–39
Tibbets, Eliza (87, 4), 33
Todd, Charles L. (87, 3), 9
Tor House (87, 2), 8, 13, 16, 50, 51, 53, 60
Tor House Foundation (87, 2), 52
Trotter family (Big Sur) (87, 2), 35, 39–40
Turner, Frederick Jackson (87, 3), 4, 5, 6
u
University of California (87, 3), 48
U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey (87, 2), 44–48
v
Varzally, Allison, Introduction, “Teaching
California History: A Conversation”
(87, 1), 24–25
W
Walton, John, “The Poet as Ethnographer:
Robinson Jeffers in Big Sur” (87, 2),
22–41
Ward, David with Gene Kassebaum,
Alcatraz: The Gangster Years, review
(87, 3), 75
Washington, Booker T., (87, 3), 36, 37, 38,
40, 41, 44, 45
“We Wear the Mask” (Paul Dunbar)
(87, 3), 3
West, Elliot (87, 3), 6
Western History Association (WHA) (87, 1)
24; (87, 3), 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 21,
22, 23, 24, 25
Weston, Cara (87, 2), 54, 56
Weston, Cole (87, 2), 55
Weston, Edward (87, 2), 54, 55
Weston, Kim (87, 2), 54, 55
White, Graham (87, 3), 7
White, Shane (87, 3), 7
Wickson, Edward J. (87, 4), 31
Wiener, Leigh (87, 2), 60–64
Wild, Mark, “Local Contexts, Global
Frameworks, and the Future of the
California History Course” (87, 1), 25,
46–48
Wilkes, Charles (87, 1) 32–33
Wilmington (Los Angeles County) (87, 1),
8, 9
Wilmington Transportation Company
(WTC) (87, 1), 9, 10, 12, 15, 16–17, 19,
21, 22
Worster, Donald, A Passion for Nature: The
Life of John Muir, review (87, 2),
74–75
Wrigley Jr., William (87, 1), 22–23
y
Yogi, Stan and Elaine Elinson, Wherever
There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves,
Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and
Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in
California, review (87, 4), 73–74
83

84
d o n o r s
The California Historical Society is deeply grateful
to the following individuals, corporations, foundations,
and government and business organizations
for their contributions.
INDIVIDUALS
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The Estate of Mr. Louis H. Heilbron,
San Francisco
Drs. Maribelle & Stephen Leavitt,
San Francisco
Dr. & Mrs. Jay Levy, San Francisco
The Estate of Mr. Arthur Mejia, San Francisco
Ms. Jeanne S. Overstreet, Bennington, VT
$5,000 to $ 9,999
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Jan Berckefeldt, Lafayette
Ms. Kevin Cartwright, Los Angeles
Mr. Robert Chattel, Sherman Oaks
Mr. Robert & Mrs. Kaye Hiatt, Mill Valley
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San Francisco
$1,000 to $4,999
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Mr. & Mrs. Ray Dolby, San Francisco
Dorothy & Kenneth Gardner Jr., Genoa, NV
Mrs. Gloria Gordon Getty, San Francisco
Mr. Charles Pollok Gibson, San Francisco
Justice & Mrs. Arthur Gilbert, Pacific Palisades
Mr. Alfred Giuffrida & Ms. Pamela Joyner,
San Francisco
Mr. Brad Goldstone, Novato
Mrs. Constance M. Goodyear Baron &
Barry C. Baron M.D., San Francisco
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Mr. & Mrs. Joe Head, San Jose
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
Mr. & Mrs. Alfred E. Heller, Kentfield
Hon. Robert M. Hertzberg, Los Angeles
Mr. Austin E. Hills, San Francisco
Mrs. Elizabeth & Mr. A.M.D.G. Lampen,
San Francisco
Amb. & Mrs. L. W. Lane Jr., Menlo Park
Mr. Hollis G. Lenderking, La Honda
Mr. & Mrs. Ray Lent, San Rafael
Jill & Joe Lervold, San Francisco
Ms. Linda Lee Lester, Gilroy
Mr. David & Mrs. Julie Levine, San Francisco
Mr. William S. McCreery, Hillsborough
Drs. Thomas & Jane McLaughlin,
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$500 to $999
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Mr. Harry R. Gibson III, South Lake Tahoe
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Mr. Kevin M. Pursglove, San Francisco
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Mrs. George W. Rowe, San Francisco
Mr. Mark Schlesinger & Ms. Christine Russell,
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Mr. Randy Shaw & Ms. Lainey Feingold,
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Jane Twomey, San Francisco

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Mr. Paul L. Wattis Jr., Paicines
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Stein & Lenore Weissenberger, Mountain View
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Ms. Sheila Wishek, San Francisco
Robert A. Young, Los Angeles
Ms. Deborah Zepnick, Calabasas
$250 to $499
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Mr. John Amarant, Danville
Ms. Sigrid Anderson-Kwun, San Francisco
Mr. Scott C. Atthowe, Oakland
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Ms Judith Avery, San Francisco
Mr. Joe Bear, San Marcos
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Katy & John Bejarano, San Mateo
Mary Ann & Leonard Benson, Oakland
Claire & William Bogaard, Pasadena
Janet F. Bollinger, Sacramento
Mr. & Mrs. Dix Boring, San Francisco
Ms. Dorothy Boswell, Greenbrae
Ms. Barbara Bottarini, San Francisco
Mr. DeWitt F. Bowman, Mill Valley
Miss Virginia Bozza, Millbrae
James Brice & Carole Peterson, Pleasanton
Mrs. William H. V. Brooke, San Francisco
Mr. John E. Brown, Riverside
Mr. William Burke, Bakersfield
Mrs. DeWitt K. Burnham, San Francisco
Dr. Julianne Burton-Carvajal, Monterey
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Ms. Christina Cansler, Richmond
Ms. Mary E. Campbell, Mill Valley
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Corinna Cotsen & Lee Rosenbaum,
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Mr. Walter Danielsen, Livermore
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Champe, Belvedere-Tiburon
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Ms. Laura Bekeart Dietz, Corona Del Mar
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Mr. & Mrs. E. L. Fambrini, San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. John Fisher, San Francisco
Ms. Myra Forsythe, San Francisco
Helene & Randall Frakes, San Francisco
Miss Muriel T. French, San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. Robert D. Funk, Genoa, NV
Ms. Ilse L. Gaede, San Francisco
Mr. Michael S. Gagan, Los Angeles
Carolyn Gan, Albany
Mr. Joe Garity, San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. Robin Gates, Redwood City
Mr. Lionel G. Gatley, Long Beach
Mr. Karl E. Geier, Lafayette
Mr. George T. Gibson, Sacramento
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Mr. & Mrs. John Stevens Gilmore, Sacramento
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Mr. Laurence K. Gould Jr., Pasadena
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Ms. Jeannie Gunn, Burbank
Mr. James W. Haas, San Francisco
Mr. Noble Hamilton Jr., Greenbrae
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Dr. & Mrs. R. S. Harrison, San Francisco
Mr. William Alston Hayne, St. Helena
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Dr. Robert L. Hoover, San Luis Obispo
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Mr. Robert C. Hughes, El Cerrito
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Mr. William Kenney, San Mateo
Mr. & Mrs. Gary F. Kurutz, Sacramento
Corrine Laing, Carmichael
Mr. Guy Lampard, Mill Valley
Mr. & Mrs. William C. Landrath, Carmel
Mr. Jack Lapidos, San Francisco
Drs. Juan & Joanne Lara, Pasadena
Mr. Leandro Lewis, Healdsburg
Mrs. Maryon Davies Lewis, San Francisco
Jerri Lightfoot, Fremont
Mr. & Mrs. John G. Lilienthal, San Francisco
Mrs. Robert Livermore, Danville
Robert Machris, Venice
Mr. Tim Madsen, Santa Cruz
Rev. Daniel J. Maguire, San Francisco
Francis R. Mahony III, June Lake
Mr. & Mrs. Leonis C. Malburg, Vernon
Mr. & Mrs. Thomas H. May, Oakville
Mr. & Mrs. Dean Mayberry, Palo Alto
Mr. & Mrs. Edward H. Mayer, San Marino
Ms. Loretta A. McClurg, San Mateo
Mr. Michael McCone, San Francisco
Mrs. David Jamison McDaniel, San Francisco
Mr. David McEwen, Newport Beach
Mrs. Milbank McFie, Santa Barbara
Mr. & Mrs. Lawrence P. McNeil, Rancho
Palos Verdes
Ms. Mary Ann McNicholas, Alameda
Mrs. Charles D. McPherson, San Rafael
Mrs. Suzanne McWilliam Oberlin,
Corte Madera
Mr. & Mrs. Burnett Miller, Sacramento
Mr. & Mrs. O’Malley Miller, Pasadena
Mr. & Mrs. Bruce T. Mitchell, Burlingame
Mrs. Albert J. Moorman, Atherton
Mr. & Mrs. Robert W. Morey, Belvedere-
Tiburon
Ms. Paula Mueda, South San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. J. E. C. Nielsen, Mill Valley
Ms. Joanne Nissen, Soledad
Ms. Mary Ann Notz, Burlingame
Barbara O’Brien, Daly City
Ms. Nancy Leigh Olmsted, San Rafael
Ms. Susan Olney, San Francisco
Ms. Harriett L. Orchard, Carmichael
Mr. & Mrs. Richard C. Otter, Belvedere-
Tiburon
Ms. Mary J. Parrish, San Francisco
Mr. Warren Perry, San Francisco
James & Lauris J. Phillips, San Marino
Dr. & Mrs. John O. Pohlmann, Seal Beach
Mr. Herbert C. Puffer, Folsom
Mr. & Mrs. Richard W. Reinhardt,
San Francisco
Mr. James Reynolds, Berkeley
Mr. Daniel W. Roberts, San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. Hadley Roff, San Francisco
Mr. Robert E. Ronus, Los Angeles
Mr. William C. Rowe, Redwood City
Mr. Allen Rudolph, Menlo Park
Mr. Rudolfo Ruibal, Riverside
Ms. Mary K. Ryan, San Francisco
85

86
d o n o r s
Mr. & Mrs. Bernard Schulte Jr., Orinda
Rev. Thomas L. Seagrave, San Francisco
Mr. L. Dennis Shapiro, San Francisco
Mr. Rocco C. Siciliano, Beverly Hills
Mr. Michael Silveira, Modesto
Ms. Jan Sinnicks, Petaluma
Mr. & Mrs. B. J. Skehan, Los Angeles
Mr. & Mrs. J.E.G. Smit, Santa Ynez
Ms. Harriet Sollod, San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. Moreland L. Stevens, Newcastle
Mr. Daniel F. Sullivan, San Francisco
Tony & Beth Tanke, Davis
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Mr. Jerry Thornhill, San Francisco
Ms. Lynne Tondorf, Daly City
Mr. Richard L. Tower, San Francisco
Ms. Marilyn Tragoutsis, San Mateo
Ms. Catherine Trimbur, Berkeley
Ms. Catherine G. Tripp, San Francisco
Mr. Paul A. Violich, San Francisco
Ms. Wendy Voorsanger, Burlingame
Kathleen Weitz, San Francisco
Miss Nancy P. Weston, San Francisco
Walter & Ann Weybright, San Francisco
Ms. Kathleen Whalen, Sacramento
Mr. Warren R. White, San Francisco
Mr. Ed White & Mrs. Patti White, Los Altos
Mrs. Alice Whitson, Willow Creek
Mr. Walter J. Williams, Oakland
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Mr. Mark L. Woodbury, Oakland
Mrs. Edwin Woods, Santa Maria
Ms. Nancy C. Woodward, Carmichael
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California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
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on the back cover
In his book The Harvest of the Years, Luther Burbank described developing
and perfecting a spineless cactus for forage and for fruit as “the
most elaborate, the most expensive, the most painful and physically
difficult, and most interesting single series of experiments I ever made.”
In her drawing commissioned by Chicago publisher Oscar E. Binner circa
1910–12, Kate Abelmann (1892–1982) juxtaposed the common prickly
pear cactus (top left) and Burbank’s improved creation (top right), and
featured a detail of the fruit (below).
Courtesy of Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa,
California, lutherburbank.org
CAliforniA HistoriCAl
soCiety
o F F i C E r s
JAN BERCKEFELDT, Lafayette, president
THOMAS DECKER, Los Angeles, Vice president
MARK A. MOORE, Burlingame, Treasurer
THOMAS R. OWENS, San Francisco, secretary
b o a r D o F T r u s T E E s
SANDY ALDERSON, San Diego
JOHN BROWN, Riverside
ROBERT CHATTEL, Sherman Oaks
ARTHUR GILBERT, Pacific Palisades
LARRY GOTLIEB, Sherman Oaks
FRED HAMBER, San Francisco
ROBERT HIATT, Mill Valley
AUSTIN HILLS, San Francisco
GARY KURUTz, Sacramento
BILL LEONARD, Sacramento
STEPHEN LeSIEUR, San Francisco
TOM McLAUGHLIN, San Francisco
CARLOTTA MELLON, Riverside
SUE MOLINARI, San Francisco
CHRISTINA ROSE, Los Angeles
RICHARD WULLIGER, Pacific Palisades
BLANCA zARAzúA, Salinas
HELEN zUKIN, Los Angeles
C a l i F o r n i a h i s T o r i C a l
F o u n D a T i o n b o a r D
DEWITT F. BOWMAN, Mill Valley, president
BILL McCREERY, Hillsborough
ROBERT A. McNEELY, San Diego
PETER MUSTO, San Francisco
EDITH L. PINESS, Mill Valley
DAVID BARRY WHITEHEAD, San Francisco
p r E s i D E n T s E M E r i T i
MARIBELLE LEAVITT, San Francisco
ROBERT A . McNEELY, San Diego
EDITH L . PINESS, Mill Valley
STEPHEN L . TABER, San Francisco
JOHN K . VAN DE KAMP, Los Angeles
E x E C u T i v E D i r E C T o r E M E r i T u s
MICHAEL McCONE, San Francisco
s p E C i a l a D v i s o r
HUELL HOWSER, Los Angeles
F E l l o W s
WILLIAM N. DAVIS, JR., Sacramento
RICHARD H. DILLON, Mill Valley
CHARLES A. FRACCHIA, San Francisco
ROBERT V. HINE, Irvine
GLORIA RICCI LOTHROP, Pasadena
JAMES R. MILLS, Coronado
DOYCE B. NUNIS, JR., Los Angeles
JAMES JABUS RAWLS, Sonoma
ANDREW ROLLE, San Marino
EARL F. SCHMIDT, JR., Palo Alto
KEVIN STARR, San Francisco
FRANCIS J. WEBER, Mission Hills
CHARLES WOLLENBERG, Berkeley
87

88
s p o t l i g h t
Photographer
Unknown
Location
Above Pasadena
As John Brown’s body lay stretched
across the bloody wounds of American
slavery and self-righteous violence, two
of his sons came to California looking
for a little peace.
In the 1880s, Owen and Jason Brown
built a cabin above Pasadena, near a
hill they named Little Round Top after
the site of a decisive Union victory in
the war they helped to launch.
“Full of a great love of all humanity,”
according to their niece, the brothers
were nonetheless grateful for their
solitude. Jason was “as gentle as a dove
with all of God’s creatures.” Owen, on
the other hand, was said to carry a pair
of Colt pistols wherever he went.
In October 2009, the Station Fire
roared through Little Round Top. Amid
the ash of the brothers’ former dooryard,
the mountain lilac will bloom.
Jonathan Spaulding
Two Sons of John Brown, 1880s
California History • volume 87 number 4 2010
Braun Research Library
Autry National Center of the American West
a.99.6

Lundy School, Mono County. Stockton St., between Post and
Geary, 1868, San Francisco.
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