Imperial Valley

“ As recently as the year 1900, the Imperial Valley had not a single civilized inhabitant, and not one of its hot, arid acres had ever been cultivated. It now has a population of more than forty thousand, with churches, banks, ice factories, electric-light plants and fine school buildings, in half a dozen prosperous towns, and its 400,000 acres of cultivated land have produced, in the last six or eight years, crops to the value of at least $50,000,000. The history of this fertile oasis in the Colorado Desert will [Pg 5] forever be connected with the name of E. H. Harriman. ”

“ Their command of fact is definitely unreliable, their personal viewpoint highly colored and biased. Their accounts are nevertheless valuable for the picture they give of the day-to-day personal contact between the white men and the natives, and for the many interesting sidelights on the life and the land of the Central Valley in its original condition. ”

“ Probably there is no portion of the globe, of equal extent, that contains as much of soil fit for cultivation, and which is capable of sustaining and supplying with all the necessaries and conveniences, and most of the luxuries of life, so dense a population as this great Valley. Deducting one third of its surface for water and desert, which is a very liberal allowance, and there remains 866,667 square miles, or 554,666,880 acres of arable land. ”

“ I've sat here as the hills were glowing in the changing evening lights and our valley grew dark and cold. What a fair country that must be where the sun sets! And we stay here in our dim light, in our dull monotones, when, to the westward, there's a land all capped with clouds of red and gold. There is Tip's Valley of Peace. John Shadrack's widow may not be a celestial being, but that is my sunset country. ”

“ But it was the glitter of the bayonets in the valley that caused the hearts of the Virginians to beat most fiercely. Banners and guidons, clusters of white tents, and dark swarms of men marked where the foot of the invading stranger trod their soil. The Virginians loved the great valley. Enclosed between the blue mountains it was the richest and most beautiful part of all their state. It hurt them terribly to see the overwhelming forces of the North occupying its towns and villages and encamped in its fields. ”

“ Now the Sun river valley and its tributaries have developed into some of the most extensive and wealthy settlements in the state. It has several towns with populations ranging from one hundred to thirteen thousand, having schools, churches, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, flouring mills, refineries and smelters, electric lights and power and many public works.
The once hostile Indians have been subdued and are now on their reservations cultivating the soil by following the plow, running the mower and self-binder, raising horses, sheep and cattle, and are fast becoming civilized. ”

“ In these five years a great transformation has taken place in and around the Happy Valley. A land settlement has been come to with the natives and is duly laid down in a rough survey and in signed documents drawn up in German and Swahili. The native villages, plantations, pasture ground and reserves are clearly defined so that they may be placed outside the scope of white encroachment ”

“ When they had protected themselves from prospective settlers, it would be safe for them to develop their water away up the valley. When they were ready, it would be easy enough, to suddenly discover that a desert valley had, by some stupid error, been included in a Forest Reserve, the boundaries would be readjusted immediately, the valley once more thrown open for entry and—dummy entrymen, Johnny-on-the-spot, to file on the land for the water company! ”

“ And that this country will, at some future day, be filled with such a population, there cannot be a doubt; as it contains, in most places over all the country known as the Walawala Valley, as abundance of the most nutrutious grass, so that, within the bounds of this valley, great numbers of stock can be kept through the year ”

“ With the opening of the Eichbaum toll road from Lone Pine to Stovepipe Wells in 1926-7 a trickle of tourists began, but actually as late as 1932, Death Valley had fewer visitors than the Congo. A few prospectors, a few daring adventurers and a few ranchers had found in the areas adjoining, something in the great Wide Open that answered man’s inherent craving for freedom and peace. ”

“ The old frontier conditions have gone. If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.
This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. ”

“ You can wander in this happy, aimless fashion all about Green Valley, go in and out its deep-rooted old homes, stroll through its tree-guarded old streets, and at every turn taste romance and adventure, revel in beauty of some sort. ”

“ FARM SCENE IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHENANDOAH, VIRGINIA.—The war between the States found the valley of the Shenandoah an ideal pastoral country, of rich and beautiful farms, of wealthy and aristocratic families, where life in its ease and sunshine rivaled that in older lands. The war left it a bare, blackened and blasted region, its homes destroyed, its farms desolated, and its able-bodied population decimated in the field. ”

“ The economy of the West Branch Valley was basically agrarian—a farmers' frontier. The "new order of Americanism" [1] which arose on this frontier was in part due to the cultural background of its inhabitants, the knowledge and traditional values which they had brought with them. It was further influenced by the frontier status of the region itself—an area of virgin land in the earliest stages of development. And finally, it was affected by the physical characteristics of the territory, particularly the mountains which separated these settlers from the more established settlements. ”

“ Beyond, painted with the delicate shadings of distance and yellow sunlight, Indian Valley lay quietly across the lap of the world, its farms and roads and fences sketched in lightly, as with the swift pencil strokes of an artist ”

“ Although, largely in the eighteenth century, economic pressure in the happier valleys forced many farmers to move to the hills, the opening of the West drew many of, them to the prairies during the following century, and the population, like water which had been forced above its level, slowly drained off the uplands again, through the sluiceway of the Mohawk Valley. To-day, dying hill-towns, abandoned farms, and the yet unpeopled wilderness of northern Maine, tell the story of this struggle against geographical conditions. ”

“ Whether the historian is analyzing old frontiers or charting new ones, the timeless question remains: does man have the intelligence adequate to secure his own survival? The old frontiers, such as the Fair Play territory of the West Branch of the Susquehanna, were free lands of opportunity for a better life, and the history of the westward movement of the American people gives ample proof of [Pg 111] their conquest. ”

“ This place was the joint result of mining and military matters, a post having been established here during the Indian disturbances of 1859, which followed upon the rush to the British Columbia mines. Some French and half-breed settlers, with a few Americans, remained in the valley upon farms, where civilization is at length in danger of overtaking them. A railroad—the Spokane and Northern—passes up the Valley to Colville, and terminates beyond at Little Dalles of the Columbia, where the great river offers one of its several obstacles to navigation. ”

“ It is rare to die in the "Happy Valley," save from old age or accident. Obviously there is no dust to speak of in the upper parts of the tributary valleys.
Once the railway is completed that unites the Kicking Horse Pass and the Crow's Nest Pass, the country will be settled by an agrarian population. Some 45,000 acres are owned by the Columbia Valley Irrigated Fruit Lands Company which is also a colonizing company selling its lands direct to the settler. ”

“ It has had its forts within the Arctic Circle; it has successfully exploited a country larger than the United States. The Red River Valley, the Saskatchewan Valley, and British Columbia, are now belted by a great railway, and given to the plough; but in the far north life is much the same as it was a hundred years ago. ”

“ There is some granite in this Valley; but the prevailing rock is basaltic. The Umqua Indians, are quite numerous. They are not openly hostile to the whites; but yet, it is not considered entirely safe, for a few persons to travel through their country. No settlement has yet been made in the Valley, and no person has yet visited it, except those passing through, to or from California. ”

“ Even while engaged in the War for Independence, the American frontiersman crossed the Appalachians and secured Kentucky and the Northwest Territory, and with them the richest and most productive regions of the Temperate Zone,—the Mississippi Valley. ”

“ The inhabitants of Green Valley were mostly farmers, who, besides "owing no man any thing," had each a comfortable dwelling and ample outhouses of his own, nothing better than his neighbors, but equaling theirs in the well-to-do look of the fences, the garden and door-yard. ”

“ Hence every early community stands, to start with, near its own cultivable territory, usually a broad river-valley, an alluvial plain, a 'carse' or lowland, for uplands as yet were incapable of tillage by the primitive agriculture of those early epochs. But it does not stand actually in the carse; it occupies as a rule the nearest convenient height or hill-top, most often the one that juts out farthest into the subjacent plain, by way of security against the attack of enemies. This is the beginning of almost every great historical European town ”

“ For instance, the Koorum Valley, the Samana Range, the countries of the Afredis and the Mohmunds, the districts of Chitral, Bajour, Dir, Swat, Bonair, and others, are all included within it; and in many instances fortified positions, occupied by British troops, are to be found either within or along their borders. ”

“ The Green Valley had long been called the Black Valley, when those who laboured and grew rich in it awoke—as man must sooner or later awake—to the needs of the spirit above the flesh. They were a race famed for music, and they became more so. ”

“ Continuing down the Valley on the West side we found, all along on the River, villages of Indians living in miserable huts made of poles, set on end in a circle on the ground, leaned together, fastened at the top, and covered with grass and dirt. We found those in the upper part of the Valley, entirely naked, and so wild that they fled from our approach into the thickets, leaving their villages and all their property behind them. ”

“ Beneath the protection of the fort, and of the privileges granted by the laws of the kingdom to the new settlers, the valley was cultivated with great industry and success, each individual entering on the enjoyment of the portion of territory to which he became entitled by the greater or smaller degree of his application and constancy. ”

“ Here the Visigoths were fought and were absorbed. When the Arabs faced north of Andalusia, they veered to the east: and the Ebro was their path back to Spain’s center. Commerce and nurture went this way: but were the servants of War. Signs of War still mark the valley for its own. Encased in desert and rock, the towns rise above the plethoric vineyards like parts of the stone world. War has brought the desert ranges down and has made cities of them. The Valley, pressing up through Aragon, through Navarre to Castile, is clad in armor of rock towns. ”

“ As this was a farmer's frontier, and as transportation and communication facilities were extremely limited, a generally self-sufficient and naturally self-reliant community developed as a matter of survival. The characteristics which this frontier nurtured, and the non-English—even anti-English—composition of its population make understandable the sentiment in this region for independence from Great Britain. This, of course, is supremely demonstrated in the separate declaration of independence drawn, according to the report, by the settlers of the Fair Play frontier. ”

“ This valley, it must be recollected, is inclosed on all sides except the north by mountains that exceed 10,000 feet in height, while the commissariat capacity of barbaric tribes is not such as to provide extensive supplies from a distance. Under such circumstances, we should look for an extremely limited population. Yet the most surprising part of the story of the conquest is the enormous population assigned to the numerous large cities which they allege the valley contained. ”

“ The settlers and miners of Phoenix mills, 15 Illinois valley, Deer creek, and Galice creek, also petitioned for permission to raise companies for defense, and the outlying settlements prayed for guards to be sent them. ”

“ Pilgrim. But what have you seen?
Men. Seen? Why the Valley itself, which is as dark as pitch; we also saw there the hobgoblins, bogies, and dragons of the pit; we also heard in that Valley a continual howling and yelling, as of a people under unutterable misery, who there sat bound in affliction and chains; and over that Valley hang the discouraging clouds of Confusion; Discord, also, doth always spread its wings over it. In a word, it is every whit dreadful, being utterly without Law and Order. ”