Prophecies From a Land of Promise

Let’s forget 1991, a miserable year for this state, and instead go back a long way , to a man named Nordhoff and the birthing of the California Promise. It’s not escapism, but a search for context in a bad season.

New York journalist Charles Nordhoff arrived here in 1872, wandered from Eureka to San Diego, and wrote all about it in a book entitled “California, for Health, Pleasure and Residence.” It was a special time. The Gold Rush was waning, the first real estate boom was a decade away, and many people believed that California was destined to dissolve into a ghost state, populated only by roaming cattle and ruffians.

Nordhoff presented a different prophecy--that agriculture would surpass gold mining, that the climate would attract people from around the world, that California, in time, would come to be seen as “the best part of the American continent.” His excursion was underwritten by promotion-minded railroads, and hyperbolic steam rises from more than a few passages. But that aside, there is no question that Nordhoff had an impact on people all across the country.

William Mulholland, for one, was a store clerk in Pittsburgh when he read Nordhoff and set out to try his luck in California. Founders of Ojai first named it “Nordhoff,” acknowledging that his book had drawn them there. Now almost impossible to find, the travelogue was a national bestseller and, as one historian put it, has since been “given more credit for sending people to California than anything else ever written.”

Nordhoff depicted a California of strange people and exotic scenery. He interviewed old-timers who lamented that things had been “going to the dogs since 1849” with the arrival of “the Americans.” He marveled at how miners needing small change simply would pan for a few gold nuggets, and was distressed by their inability to understand that their days were numbered.

In the San Joaquin Valley, he camped by Tulare Lake, which spread for miles across the valley floor. “In the morning, I was awakened by a noise like the rush of a distant railroad train. . . . Clouds of geese rose on all sides of us . . . a great flock extending more than two miles along the shore.”

Los Angeles, Nordhoff determined, was not in a “very angelic state. It is irregularly built, the older part having but one principal street. (But) if you walk down this street, you . . . will see abundant signs of a real and well-founded prosperity, which will surprise you if you have listened to the opinions of San Franciscans.”

Nordhoff sang spiritedly of the Southern California sunshine. He interrupted passages frequently to inform readers that, while it was winter, he was writing outdoors, on a porch or under a tree. In one chapter, he even recorded an early version of the now ubiquitous “another-day-in-paradise” slogan, writing: “When I remarked to a citizen of San Diego that it was a fine day, he looked at me in amazement and said, after a pause, ‘Of course it is a fine day; why not? Every day is fine here.”’

And the local idiom amused him: “You must understand that in California parlance a man ‘has’ Indians, but he ‘is in’ sheep, or cattle, or horses.” And: “Having ‘done’ the coast, you can turn your face eastward. . . .” But not, presumably, before “doing” lunch.

In a remarkable number of instances, Nordhoff foresaw what was coming for California, and was not shy about making suggestions to nudge the future along. He urged San Joaquin Valley farmers to raise less livestock and more raisins. Yosemite, he wrote, needed to be more tightly managed, in a manner that would accommodate tourists but also check cheap construction that was becoming a blight on its splendor. He counseled would-be Los Angeles developers to worry less about the price of land--ranging from $1 to $100 an acre--and more about securing water.

He frequently expressed impatience at how much of California’s potential was untapped.

“Nature,” he wrote, “has done much; man has not, so far, helped her.”

Well, he couldn’t say that today. The question now, 120 years later, is how badly did we botch the job. Tulare Lake no longer exists, its sources dammed decades ago. In the San Joaquin, they now grow more raisins than they can sell. Los Angeles is bigger, but still not very angelic. And the dry air of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which Nordhoff touted as a curative for consumption, is spoiled by smog.

Reading Nordhoff today, one reaction is that we indeed have gone to the dogs. Another is just the opposite. It is surprising how much of Nordhoff’s California is still recognizable. More crowded, more complicated, but still the best part of the American continent. Which, as we flee one year and make promises for the next, is no small comfort.