What, then, drove farmers to persist under these conditions? Early on, cattle-ranching proved profitable for feeding miners their beef (Pulling 1944; Gates 1967; Jordan 1993). But the main attraction was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary episodes in American agricultural history—California’s bonanza wheat era. As in the various other American Wests, wheat became a major crop in the new state in the 1850s. Its cultivation flourished on the virgin soils of the frontier, its culture was well-known and inexpensive, and it required only a limited amount of largely unskilled labor. It was not unusual for a first crop to return a sizable profit. Moreover, because bread was central to the American and European diets, wheat invariably brought the best market prices of any grain. Wheat was also nonperishable and could be transported at minimal costs to distant markets in oceangoing ships (Fite 1966; Paul 1973; Pisani 1984; Rothstein 1987; Gerber 1993; Gillis and Magliari 2003; Vaught 2007).
Then, in the late 1860s, several factors coincided to turn what had been a modest output into a bonanza. By then, many of the land disputes that had plagued the state had been adjudicated or settled. After a devastating 3-year drought broke in 1865, California produced three straight bumper crops at the same time that Great Britain and other European nations suffered dangerously deficient harvests. Enterprising grain merchants in dozens of new railroad towns in the San Francisco Bay region, up the Sacramento Valley, and down the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys exploited the opportunity to the fullest, as did farmers, who followed the newly laid Southern Pacific tracks onto flat valley lands. With wheat acreage soaring, a large-scale, highly structured export industry emerged overnight, with “Wheat King” Isaac Friedlander, from his office in San Francisco, assembling an international network of banks, warehouses, shipping companies, and grain sack factories to link wheat farmers with consumers primarily in the United Kingdom, but also in Australia and China. Farmers took great pride in the knowledge that their wheat moved in greater volume over greater distances than any product ever before in human history, with fully three-fourths of every harvest exported to foreign markets. “You had to be a true believer,” wrote historian Morton Rothstein, “to plunge into growing and exporting a bulky, low-cost commodity such as wheat over immense distances with any hope of making a profit” (Hill 1954; Paul 1958b; Fite 1966; Rothstein 1975, 1987; Orsi 2005).
The scale of wheat farming varied widely. The largest and most well-known (but still understudied) grower in the state was Hugh Glenn, who amassed an empire of 66,000 acres in the northern Sacramento Valley, extending some 20 miles along the west bank of the Sacramento River. Glenn employed nearly 1000 laborers, invested more than $300,000 in machinery and draft animals, and produced a million bushels a year by 1880. With so many laborers required to bring in the crop, there was work for anyone who wanted it, usually at comparatively good wages of up to $2.00 a day, plus board. Roughly half the workforce consisted of native-born Americans, the other half immigrants from northern Europe. Unemployed common laborers from Sacramento and San Francisco made up most of both groups. Work on Glenn’s mammoth wheat ranch was exhausting, unpleasant, and very dangerous, especially for those laboring near the thresher, where it was not uncommon to lose a finger, a hand, or even an arm in one of the revolving cylinders (Rothstein 1987; Street 1998; Scheuring 2010).
Many things about late nineteenth century California seem larger than life, but Glenn was hardly representative of all wheat growers. Indeed, small ranches and large estates, the federal manuscript census of agriculture reveals, developed side by side up and down the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Those who operated on a smaller scale often became prominent and respected community leaders in the new railroad towns such as Davisville, Vacaville, Santa Clara, and Napa. George W. Pierce of Yolo County, for example, operated his 1200-acre wheat ranch much more like a midwestern farmer—precisely because he was a midwestern farmer—a migrant from Wisconsin, to be precise. Wheat was his cash crop, and it absorbed much of his time and resources, but he did not rely on it exclusively. He also raised alfalfa, barley, grapes, peaches, strawberries, hogs, turkeys, and chickens, and his wife produced butter and eggs—all in substantial quantities for local markets. Pierce knew that his wheat income was subject not only to disastrous droughts and floods, but also world market vagaries. In off years, his family’s other activities had to carry the farm through. He also demonstrated a keen environmental consciousness by fallowing, rotating his crops, and fertilizing on a regular basis. For 10 years, Pierce served as justice of the peace, the township’s most important local official. Though state law limited his jurisdiction to claims of $200 or less, his neighbors invariably turned to him first to settle just about any dispute (Fite 1966; Prescott 1977/1978; Magliari 1992; Vaught 2007).
Virtually all farmers, large or small, made significant contributions to agricultural technology in the age of wheat in California. They were among the first to replace the old walking plow with the gang plow, which had several shares attached to a beam, moved on wheels, and was pulled by a team of horses. At the Glenn ranch, plowing often proceeded with as many as 100 gang plows in echelon formation, each drawn by an eight-horse team. California farmers also used new machines for planting, harrowing, and seeding, many of them developed and manufactured in nearby Stockton. And it was California farmers who ultimately perfected the steam-powered harvesting-threshing combine—machines so large and heavy that they required as many as two dozen horses to move them—and made it popular for the rest of the country. The need for mechanical motive power led directly to the invention of the tractor, first used in the San Joaquin Valley with steam power in 1886. Later, California entrepreneurs would adapt the tractor to the internal combustion engine and develop the “caterpillar” track (Wik 1953, 1975; Olmstead and Rhode 1988).
For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, wheat was California’s largest and most profitable agricultural commodity. But just as California had earned a reputation as the “granary of the world,” with production reaching a peak of 41 million bushels in 1890, the bonanza wheat era ended abruptly. In the late 1880s, other farmers on the Great Plains and in Europe, Asia, and Australia began planting wheat of their own—often using techniques and technology that Californians had perfected earlier. Overproduction, along with 4 years of severe depression in the mid-1890s, glutted world markets and sent wheat prices plummeting. By 1910, California imported most of its wheat from the Midwest (Rothstein 1987; Paul 1988; Rhode 1995; Vaught 2007).
Already underway in California’s farm economy was what economist Paul Rhode has called “one of the most rapid and complete transformations ever witnessed in American agricultural history”—that from wheat to specialty crops. Improved irrigation facilities and rail connections to the east encouraged many farmers—or, more often, their sons, such as George W. Pierce Jr.—to subdivide their fields for more profitable uses—deciduous and citrus fruits; wine, table, and raisin grapes; nuts; winter vegetables; and a host of other specialty crops. Many of these crops were fragile, perishable, and unfamiliar to the state’s farmers. To advance their knowledge, they formed a variety of organizations, some of them state-funded, to establish standards, sponsor innovation, combat disease and pests, and disseminate information in print and in papers delivered at annual fruit growers’ conventions. Indeed, to a much greater degree than their counterparts in the Midwest and the South, Californians were book farmers (Rhode 1995; Vaught 1999; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).
Much of the new production came not from old wheat farms but from planned communities or organized “colonies”—among the most important of which were in San Bernardino, Anaheim, Riverside, and Ontario in southern California, and a number of others near Sacramento. Here, settlers pooled their capital, water rights, labor, expertise, and machinery. Cooperatively, they bought and improved land, developed irrigation, introduced new crops, and provided social and cultural amenities to reduce the isolation of the farm frontier (Starr 1985; Sackman 2009; Sandul 2014).
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