Backcountry Ghosts by Josh Sides

Author:Josh Sides [Sides, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy)
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

12

Exacting Lives in the Breadbasket

It was often a winding path that brought folks to a California homestead. “The people who have come to the San Joaquin Valley in search of homes,” an 1885 promotional pamphlet from the Immigration Association of California explained, “represent every profession, trade and calling, and the causes inducing them to settle here have been as varied.” This was true for Samuel D. Hopper, as it was for so many others. Born of Irish stock in Monroe County, Ohio, in 1838, Hopper excelled in school, receiving his teaching certificate at the early age of nineteen. He taught in Ohio for several years until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he enlisted in the Sixty-second Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Fighting in the battles of Fort Wagner and Deep Run—he was shot in the foot at the former conflict—Hopper not only survived but rose quickly to the rank of captain. Captain. It was the title he would insist upon long after the war had ended.1

Captain Hopper returned to teaching in Ohio but soon left for Nebraska, met his wife, and started a family there. He continued to teach, supplementing his income by raising cattle. He eventually sold off his stock at a small profit. He had come up, some. But the lure of California burned in him, probably stoked by promotional pamphlets published by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the early 1880s to promote settlement—and passenger travel—to Fresno, the “geographical hub of California.” One pamphlet in later years described Fresno as “the paradise of the industrious man of small means.” Captain Hopper soon packed up his family and headed to Fresno County, settling on a homestead near the town of Del Rey in 1882.2

As was the case in the Kern portion of the San Joaquin Valley, land barons had picked over much of the best land in Fresno. Miller & Lux alone owned close to 700,000 acres there. But for reasons known only to Hopper, he was not discouraged. Instead the captain bought vine cuttings of Muscat and Thompson grapes and planted them in neat rows in order to produce raisins. He joined what was then just a handful of growers in the nascent industry that found Fresno’s conditions superb for raisin cultivation. For raisins, Fresno was blessed by nature: grapes thrived in its sandy loam, hot climate, and in the absence of summer rains and cold winter fogs. But it was transformed by irrigation, chiefly through the ditches and canals of the Fresno Canal and Irrigation Company—incorporated in 1871 by land developers William Chapman and Moses J. Church—drawing water from the Kings River. The biggest ditch owned by the company was one hundred feet wide and thirty-five miles long, a massive operation. “In no portion of the raisin-producing portion of the valley,” scientist and grape expert Gustav Eisen wrote of the San Joaquin Valley in 1890, “can raisin grapes be grown without irrigation, the natural rainfall being entirely insufficient.”3

Today about three thousand growers produce 100 percent of American raisins within a sixty-mile radius of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.

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