John Muir Writes a Letter From 'Grangerville,' Tulare County.

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1971
• Subjects: John Muir; Bibliography; Kimes; William F. Kimes; Maymie B. Kimes; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; naturalist; annotation; Bancroft; Bonanza; Canada; Carr; Gibbon; Indian; Theodore; glacier*; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/500; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1499&context=jmb

LOS TULARES TULARE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY BOX 948 Lindsay, California 93247 - yk Co *f: NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION U. S. POSTAGE LINDSAY, CA. 93247 PERMIT NO. 99 ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED LOS TULARES Number 88 January, 1971 Special issue printed as a keepsake on the occasion of William F. Kimes speaking to the Society January 16, 1971. Interested people are invited to join the Society. Write to TULARE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY Box 295 Visalia, California 93277 Rodney Homer, President 784-3015 271 E. Gibbon Avenue, Porterville, Ca. 93257 Miss Annie R. Mitchell, Secretary 732-0773 701 Watson Avenue, Visalia, Ca. 93277 Harold G, Schutt, Editor, Los Tulares 562-3102 Box 948, Lindsay, Ca. 93247 Part of Muir's "Range of Light." The Great Western Divide from Moro Rock. Picture, Courtesy Sequoia National Park. A sketch made by John Muir in Kings Canyon. Courtesy of Sequoia National Park. Part of a group by a Big Tree, probably in the Mariposa Grove. President Theodore Roosevelt and Muir camped for several days in the Yosemite country. Picture, courtesy of Sierra Club. JOHN MUIR WRITES A LETTER FROM "GRANGERVILLE". TULARE COUNTY By William F. Kimes The. first writing of John Muir appeared in the Boston Record in 1865ΓÇöa letter describing his finding the rare Calypso Borealis in Canada. Six years later Mrs. Ezra S. Carr sent several of his letters written from the Yosemite Valley to the New York Tribune. In 1874 Muir became a regular contributor to the San Francisco Bulletin, the first letter being dated October 29, 1874. This type of writing continued until June 29, 1889 including letters not only relating to the Sierra Nevada, but to Alaska as well. There were at least eighty-eight letters, all to the San Francisco Bulletin with the exception of some four or five to papers in Portage, Wisconsin; Sacramento and San Francisco, California. The letters were written, if not on the spot, at least from notes taken as Muir traveled. In most instances Muir gave the date the letter was written. The date of publication was several days later depending upon the accessibility of a post office, steamship service and kindred postal problems. Many of the letters published in the San Francisco Bulletin were later revised and expanded into articles for magazines. In turn magazine articles were revised and edited to become chapters in books. A comparison of a topic first developed in a newspaper letter, then a magazine article, and finally a chapter in a book shows many refinements of sentence structure and word usage as well as expansion of material. The final drafts of magazine articles and book chapters came after much rewriting. Muir's daughter, Helen, who was his secretary for more than a year, tells of her father tapping his desk in poetical meter so as to polish his sentence structure. The following letter dated October 25th was published in the San Francisco Bulletin November 17, 1875. It would seem that the spelling of the community as Grangerville was a typesetting error rather than a mistake by Mr. Muir, since it was spelled correctly later in the letter. There is in the Muir papers a typed article titled, "California Agriculture." It. is nineteen double- spaced pages in length; the first ten and a half pages are from the above mentioned letter expanded by more than double the original. The remaining eight pages describe farming east of the Sierra and in Nevada. The last page summarizes the California portion. No record of the publication of the expanded article has been located. The footnotes are quotations from the unpublished article giving a few examples to show how Muir revised a letter for magazine publication. TULARE LEVELS John Muir Comes Down from the Mountains ΓÇö Exuberant Farmers ΓÇö; The Story of an Irrigation Ditch ΓÇö Blessed Ministry of Water. (Special Correspondent of the-Bulletin) Grangerville, Tulare Co., October 25th. When one comes suddenly out of the woods everything is novel. The wide arching sky, the flowing plains, fields, dogs, horses, oxen, are beheld as never seen before, and even our fellow-beings are regarded with something of the same keenness and freshness of perception that is brought to the study of a new species of wild animal. My first specimen of the perpendicular animal were a hearty, jovial company of lumbermen, redolent of pine gum, and as wholly unconventional as saw-logs.1 My next were found in a long string of dusty teamsters hauling lumber from the pines to the plains. These formed two well marked varieties, with distinguishing characteristics derived chiefly from the animals they drove, the one equine, the other bovine, both of which gave forcible illustration of the Scripture, "Dust thou art." At the base of the range I discovered a Rocky Mountain adventurer, whose free wild life was patent in every line and sign of his countenance, and a couple of bearish bear hunters, who lived and moved and had their being in bears. JOLLY FARMERS Lastly, out here in the smooth Tulare levels I found a group of gentle grangers, that, taken all in all, are the most radiant and joyful set of farmers I have yet met in California.2 Every specimen is bright with smiles, and challenges congratulation like house bound prospectors who have "struck it rich." Most California farmers are afflicted with dry rot, which makes these thrifty fellows all the more remarkable.3 It is now autumn, but their fields are yet full of spring. The generous soil seems unwilling to rest, and continues to pour forth its benefactions more lavishly than the most sanguine could anticipate. "Look," say these jubilant fellows, as they triumphantly showed me their wealth. "Look at that broom- corn, dense and impenetrable as canebreak," with panicles enough to sweep the State and "that Indian corn, grown after wheat, with ears so high you cannot reach them; and at these level sheets of alfalfa mowed, heaven knows how often, I tell you, sir, we have found it out; we want no better thing, no bigger bonanza. For the last ten years we have played at farming as at cards, speculating and gambling, scouring over thousand-acre lots with mustangs and gang- plows, and putting in crop after crop, that are in yet; but these dry games are played out.4 Two years ago we had wit enough to construct an irrigation ditch from King's River to Mussel Slough, big enough to moisten our half and quarter sections, and you see the results."5 ALL ABOUT A DITCH It appears, therefore, that all this physical and moral brightness flows directly from a ditch. The village itself, with its school-house and church, has come out of the ditch. In the blocking out of the mountain by glaciers, and in their after-sculpture by torrents and avalanches, an immense quantity of detritus is carried to the lowlands, and it was in tracing these mountain chips that I was led into the Grange- ville fields. The agriculture of a country depends upon its geology and climate, a fact which I state here for the purpose of explaining my interest in farming; besides it is hardly possible that wheat fields can ever be viewed with indifference by one who is often hungry. But to return to the ditch, I find that, it is- three feet deep and twenty-five feet wide at the bottom, and that the water flowed in it for the first time about the end of last April. It appears, therefore, that this grand agricultural revival was accomplished in six monthsΓÇöa fact that seems incredible on passing over the gray, arid plains out of which these green fields are made. In. the application of the water it was found that the soil became thoroughly saturated for a distance of 200 yards or more on either sides of the branch ditches, making it wholly unnecessary to overflow the fields. But so simple a method is not applicable everywhere. The soil of these Grangeville fields, and of a considerable portion of the plain between them and the foothills, is composed of a fine sandy loam, deposited by King's river floods in nearly level sheets like leaves of a book. But the greater portion of the soils of the Sacramento, San Joaquin and Tulare valleys are of an entirely different origin, and the particles of which they are composed are put together in quite another way from those of the river deltas, so that to irrigate them it is found necessary to spread out the water in a sheet over the entire surface. THE NEW AGRICULTURE With reference to irrigation, all the lands of these valleys may be regarded as belonging to two distinct classesΓÇöthe first comprehending all that are being degraded by atmospheric weathering; the second all that are being elevated by deposition of fresh soil from extraordinary river floods. The so-called hog wallow lands belong to the first, all the river bottom to the second, each requiring different methods of irrigation. But farmers are coming to life, experiments are being made, and the problems connected with watering of every kind of soil, are being persistently wrought out. The price of land in this vicinity has nearly quadrupled since the completion of the ditch, ranging now from about five to thirty dollars per acre.6 The greater number of farmers here own shares in the ditch, and as long as show falls on the mountains their water is sure. The price charged for irrigation of fields belonging to outsiders is a dollar and a half per acre; and this Granger company in ' their first love are also offering settlers shares of water at prime cost. To farmers coming from the rainlands of the East it must seem hard to be obliged to buy not only land but water, as if the first comers had taken possession of the clouds. Nevertheless all seem satisfied with the necessities of the new agriculture on trial, every one to whom I have put the question, declaring that he .would rather have a ditch than a cloud of his own. The question of water- rights in general is beset with great difficulties, many of the most important ditches being owned by companies, who refuse to sell a single share to farmers thus forming conditions under which true agricultural independence^ seems impossible. But, notwithstanding "a' that and a' that," the thirsty ground is being watered, cheerless shanties sifted through and through with dry winds, are being displaced by true homes embowered in trees and lovingly broidered with flowers; and contentment, which in California is perhaps the very rarest of the virtues,, is now beginning to take root. Irriguous revivals are breaking out all the glad plains, and wildcat farming is dead.7 John Muir Mr. Kimes retired in 1966 as Superintendent, Business, of Orange Coast Junior College. He now lives at Mariposa. Collecting John Muir material has been a hobby of long standing. He is working on a bibliography of the writing of the famous conservationist-scientist. . Γûá Mr. Kimes was born at Hanford and.was in the school systems of A venal, Delano and San Bernardino before moving to Newport. NOTES 1. ". . . . the first people I met were a company of lumbermen, fragrant rosiny fellows, redolent of pine-gum and balsam. The faces of the older specimens were furrowed like the bark on the logs they were rolling and about as brown. A little of everything in the woods was sticking to them and their trousers instead of wearing thin were evidently growing thicker and stronger with age, gaining concentric rinns of rosin 'and sawdust like the annual wood rings of trees." 2. "In no part of California had I ever before seen a happy farmer." 3. "Inquiring (in a haphazard way) how they were getting along, they seemed so eager to tell.all their good luck (at once) that their words came forth in a hasty choking rush and rumble like boulders from a narrow-throated gorge in a flood." 4. "For the last twenty years we have been playing at farming here like we were playing at cards, hoping for wet seasons and just steadily drying up like scaly horned toads, keeping on speculating and gambling on the clouds and the rain " 5. "But just at the last when we were dried out, dead broke, gone to the dogs, we had just enough of last-gasp and kick left in us to see that, all we wanted .was water so we got together in the desperation of hunger and made a ditch, arid see what's happened." 6. In the expanded article the price of land is given as "from about five dollars to one hundred dollars per acre." 7. In the revised article, page 10, Muir wrote: "Comparatively few as yet have settled in this grand garden valley, though even now it has the largest wine and raisin vineyards in the world, and the largest wheat fields. But the time must surely come when ten millions of happy people shall dwell in this one great California valley enjoying the best things earth has to give as free from want as if in heaven." The expanded article, page 19, is concluded with Muir making his persistent plea for conservation: "The grand California valley seems to lack nothing desirable that is not within easy reach. Opening-to the sea on one side, and with the great white roof of the Sierra, 450 miles long, looming above it on the other and sending down a magnificent row of rivers ΓÇöthe Kern, Tule, Kaweah, Kings, San Joaquin, Fres-. no, Merced, Tuolumne, Stanislaus, Calaveras, Co- sumnes, Mokelumne, American, Feather and SacramentoΓÇö-with all this wealth of water and soil joined with a benevolent climate and sublime scenery Cali- fornians have only to see to it that the forests on which the regular and manageable flow of the rivers depend are preserved, that storage reservoirs are made at the foot of the Range and all the bounty of the mountains put to use; Then will theirs, be the- most foodful and beautiful of all the lowland valleys of like extent in .the world. , John Muir" The portrait on the cover was made by William E. Dassonville, a San Francisco photographer listed in the directories from 1901 to 1920c- The picture was. furnished by the Bancroft Library, U. C. Berkeley. These quotations from John Muir are being used in a magazine article. Please do not copy. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/1499/thumbnail.jpg