HISTORY
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Philip Fradkin's Sierra Nevada
The environmental historian Philip Fradkin is the author of ten books on the American West, California, and Alaska. Two of his books have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes. He left the Times and went to work in state government in 1975. As assistant secretary of the California Resources Agency in the administration of Governor Jerry Brown, Fradkin handled coastal legislation, energy developments, and public affairs for the state's principal environmental agency. In 1975, Philip Fradkin wrote The Seven States of California: A Human and Natural History, an examination of the ecological and cultural aspects of seven distinct regions within California. One of these regions is the Sierra Nevada. Excerpted in this exhibit are three of Fradkin’s passages from the Sierra Nevada chapter of The Seven States of California. In these excerpts, he examines the impact of the automobile; the fascinating story of The Shirley Letters; and the compelling symbol of the region and the state, the Grizzly Bear. Passages from The Seven States of California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) – Used by permission of the author
The Bold Red Line on the Map At the dawn of this century the automobile came to California via Donner Pass, and the state has never been the same since then. In 1903 a doctor made the first transcontinental automobile trip in sixty-five days from San Francisco to New York. He drove a 20-horsepower, open-topped Winton and won a fifty-dollar bet. It was a different state then. There was no smog or gridlock, no tourist camps that became cabin camps that became auto courts that became motels that assumed the name of inns, no freeways or highways, and no paved roads of any considerable length. Over Donner Pass there was just an unpaved, eroded wagon road that had gotten little use in forty years. Its sides were supported by unmortared stone walls carefully put into place years ago by Chinese laborers. The demands of commerce and the military would change the form and name of the route numerous times during the twentieth century. The artery went from being a part of the landscape to being imposed upon it. What remained the same was the one geographical fact that could not be changed either by names or vast improvement in earthmoving equipment-- the Sierra Nevada was a barrier that could be surmounted on a large scale in only one place. Lincoln Highway historian Drake Hokanson wrote of the geography of the central route across America that eventually snaked its way across Donner Pass: Crossing the country by motorcar-- and getting a highway in place that would make that crossing practicable-- quickly became a commercial venture. The second transcontinental trip was sponsored by the Packard Motor Car Company, a maker of luxury cars. The public relations gimmick took fifty-one days. "I realized that we had to attract public attention with a spectacle, but it had to be a useful spectacle," said Packard's general manager. The resulting photographs were spectacular. "This performance created a very favorable public impression," he added. The Lincoln Highway Association, a promotional group, was formed by various members of the automobile industry to designate a cross- country route and funnel donations to the various jurisdictions responsible for improving the highway. The group first envisioned a highway paved with gravel, but came to favor concrete. Henry Ford, whose cars dominated what roads there were, refused to join the association, believing that public tax monies should be the source of funding for a transcontinental highway. The bold red line on association maps was just that-- a line -- in places. But across the Sierra it followed the route of the abandoned wagon road. The Lincoln Highway came to be a combination of dirt, gravel, and pavement across the Sierra. Early motorists were amazed at how easy it was to cross Donner Pass compared to the experiences of the early emigrants. There were difficulties, however. Teams of horses or groups of men pulled or pushed vehicles out of late-season snowbanks and mud. A dash had to be made over the railroad tracks just east of the summit lest a car be hit by a train emerging unexpectedly from a snow shed on either side of the crossing. A long-slung Winton got hung up on the tracks in the summer of 1914; the wife and child fled the car while the husband worked frantically to free it. The motorist was successful and recalled, "Needless to say, a railroad track is no place to tarry, and we were scared stiff." Once beyond the desert and mountain barriers, the weary motorists rejoiced. Alice H. Ramsey was the first woman to cross the continent by car. She traveled with three female companions in anew 1909 Maxwell. On clearing the summit, she noted: “Majestic sugar pines, Douglas firs and redwoods lined our roads on both sides. What a land! What mountains! What blue skies and clear, sparkling water! Our hearts leapt within us. None of us had ever seen the like-and we loved it. We almost chirped as we exclaimed over the grandeur that surrounded us on all sides. We started talking over plans when the trip was completed.” World War I gave a huge boost to highway construction. The railroads could not move all the men and materials, so motortrucks came into widespread use in the East. The army seized the initiative after the war and organized a cross-country convoy. Seventy-two vehicles, mostly trucks, and two hundred ninety-five officers and enlisted men set out with great fanfare from mile zero in Washington, D.C., on July 7,1919. The convoy arrived sixty-two days later in San Francisco after destroying and subsequently rebuilding nearly one hundred bridges designed to handle carts and wagons. The boomers from the Lincoln Highway Association said the convoy was a great success. The association stated, "The convoy would impress upon the Nation the coming necessity for the establishment of a Federal Highway System for the military and commercial needs of the Nation." Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who joined the convoy just before its departure, saw it somewhat differently. He wrote: “Delays, sadly, were to be the order of the day. The convoy had been literally thrown together and there was little discernible control. All drivers had claimed lengthy experience in driving trucks; some of them, it turned out, had never handled anything more advanced than a Model T. Most colored the air with expressions concerning starting and stopping that indicated a longer association with teams of horses than with internal combustion engines.” Despite these handicaps, some of which would prove to be endemic to future military convoys, federal funds for highway construction were soon forthcoming. There was a frenzy of construction: by 1922 a total of nine coast-to-coast highways existed in name, if not in reality. Groups formed to promote a route that would benefit them. They raised money, erected signs, and lobbied for federal funds. Such was the case with the Victory Highway, whose signs were placed along the Lincoln Highway across the Sierra but whose route differed in its approach through Utah and Nevada. The jumble of names was too much for the federal government, which then devised a numbering system. So the Lincoln and Victory Highways across the Sierra became U.S. Highway 40. A two-lane, paved roadway expressly engineered for vehicles propelled by internal combustion engines was completed in 1926. In some places it superseded the wagon road, in others it carved its own path through or around the granite. After World War II, California boomed and the traffic increased accordingly. Donner Pass became the most intensively utilized transportation and communications corridor in the nation. Concrete and asphalt, steel and wood, overhead and underground lines, cables, and pipelines were the umbilical cords that plugged California into the remainder of the nation. As motorcars and touring had captured the nation's imagination after the First World War, so the airplane was the new, glamorous kid on the block following World War II. Above Donner Pass was a major flight corridor. George Stewart, not only a historian of the Donner party but also of Donner Pass, observed: “In general, therefore, the keynote for the whole area has been transportation. Out of the opportunity to cross the mountains at this point, the whole history of the region has developed. It has kept a rendezvous with history, and its interest to the person who passes here should be historical as much as scenic. At the summit, for instance, one can enjoy the beauty of the view, but can also see the remains of two primitive roads in addition to the present highway, can look across at the rail- road, and can also know that the emigrant wagons were dragged up somewhere to reach the same gap. “ In 1956, at the height of the cold war, a lieutenant colonel who had become president signed the Interstate Highway Act. Eisenhower had not forgotten his trip across the country almost forty years earlier nor how quickly the German armies had been transported on the autobahns of Europe. The highway act "promised to hurry the nation's commerce and military" across the nation, wrote historian Drake Hokanson. To hurry the traffic over Donner Pass, a gradual grade up the side of a ridge two miles to the north of Donner Pass proper was selected by highway engineers over the more frontal assault of the old roadways. The new earthmoving equipment developed during and after World War II was at their disposal. Contours meant little. Straightness with the least amount of grade-- the Judah dictum for the railroad-- meant everything. Not only terrain but history was lost in the process. Yes, speed was greatly increased, as was reliability, since it was much easier to clear snow from the interstate than from the old highway. But those who crossed Donner Pass had, through the years, lost contact with the landscape and its history as travel progressed from bare feet padding along the trail, to shod horses, to iron-rimmed wagon wheels, to the steel wheels of enclosed railroad cars, to the solid rubber and then the pneumatic tires of automobiles, which were first open to the air, then enclosed, and then equipped with heaters, air conditioners, radios, tape decks, cellular telephones, and smoked glass.
Dam Shirley Sees the Elephant Rich Bar sprang instantaneously into existence in the summer of 1850 when a prospector found $3,000 worth of gold on the banks of the North Fork of the Feather River. Among those who flocked to the wide gravel bar in the deep canyon were a New England doctor and his wife, Louisa Clapp. She penned twenty-three letters to her sister in the East during the thirteen months she and her husband were in Rich Bar and the neighboring settlement of Indian Bar. After the letters were published in a San Francisco periodical, Bret Harte and Mark Twain helped themselves to material from them for their more famous stories of the era. Clapp saw almost everything there was to see in a gold-rush mining settlement. On the eve of her departure she wrote, "I certainly fancied that I had a right to brag of having taken a full view of that most piquant specimen of the brute creation, the California 'Elephant.' " The elephant became the symbol of the gold-rush. "To see the Elephant" was a phrase used in many gold-rush diaries, journals, and letters. Rocks along the overland trails, stationery used in the gold fields, posters containing the Miners' Ten Commandments, and souvenir items produced in San Francisco were emblazoned with a likeness of the giant beast. From Big Bar on the American River in May 1851, a miner wrote to a friend at home on a piece of stationery whose letterhead bore the like- ness of an elephant: “If you have never seen the Elephant take a peep at the above or else amuse with a trip across the desert wilds that lay between the rocky and sierra mountains. Travel in the midst of an epidemic that is slaying its hundreds. Stand guard all night when all the elements seem to be at war while it not only rains but pours down. And you will be better able to realize what seeing the "Elephant" means.” The phrase had originated in the East during the previous decade when a farmer longed to see an elephant at a time when they were still a novelty. The story continued: When a circus, complete with elephants, came to a nearby town, he loaded his wagon with eggs and vegetables and started for the market there. En route he met the circus parade led by the elephant. The farmer was enchanted but his horses were terrified. They bucked, pitched, overturned the wagon and ran away, scattering broken eggs and bruised vegetables over the countryside. "1 don't give a hang," said the farmer, "1 have seen the elephant." Referring to the account of a 1841-1842 trip across Texas to Santa Fe by a New Orleans newspaper editor named Kendall, George P. Hammond, the director of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, explained the evolution of the phrase in a 1964 speech to the California Historical Society: “It is clear that by Kendall's time the phrase had already taken on its secondary and more famous meaning, namely, of having seen and been disappointed, of having labored and failed. The idea of anticipation, of seeing the supernatural, of attaining the wonderful was undoubtedly the basic or original significance of the term, but as bright shiny dreams tarnish, so did the optimism of the original meaning. The hard realities of life rarely come up to man's hopes. “ Nor to a woman's expectations, I should add. At the age of thirty, Louisa Clapp sailed to San Francisco in 1849 to see the elephant. She had been raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her parents died while she was young, but her guardian saw to it that she received a proper education for a young lady. On the verge of spinsterhood, Clapp married a medical student who was five years younger. She was described as "small, fair, and golden haired, delicately beautiful and not physically strong. Frequent headaches were among her afflictions. But Clapp loved travel and adventure. The couple lived for a while in San Francisco and then the Sacramento Valley before setting off on mules for Rich Bar, where they arrived in September 1851. Clapp was one of three women in the settlement. A fourth died that same month of peritonitis. The couple stayed at the Empire, a two-story hotel. Clapp had difficulty sleeping, what with the loud swearing that went on all night in the downstairs bar. She was enchanted by the colorful language. For instance, the phrase "honest Indian" indicated doubt. "Whether this phrase is a slur or a compliment to the aborigines of this country, I do not know," she wrote. They moved into a newly built log cabin at Indian Bar, within walking distance of Rich Bar. She described the frenetic activity: “At every step gold diggers or their operation greet your vision. Sometimes in the form of a dam; sometimes in that of a river, turned slightly from its channel, to aid the indefatigable gold hunters in their mining projects. Now, on the side of a hill you will see a long-tom,-a huge machine invented to facilitate the separation of the ore from its native element; or a man busily engaged in working a rocker,-a much smaller and simpler machine, used for the same object; or more primitive still, some solitary prospector, with a pan of dirt in his hands, which he is carefully washing at the water's edge, to see if he can ‘get the color,’ as it is technically phrased, which means literally the smallest particle of gold.” The scenery was strange and wondrous to this New Englander. "Not a spot of verdure is to be seen in this place; but the glorious hills rising on every side vested in foliage of living green, make ample amends for the sterility of the tiny level upon which we camp." Wildlife was abundant. A miner shot a female grizzly bear and captured her two cubs. He sold one for fifty dollars. "They are certainly the funniest-looking things that I ever saw, and the oddest possible pets," wrote Clapp. There were "darker shades of our mountain life," she said, such as earthquakes, landslides, and a hanging. The hanging victim, a Swede, had stolen some gold dust. After a quick trial, the jury found a nearby tree and hanged the petty thief. "In truth, life was only crushed out of him, by hauling the writhing body up and down several times in succession, by the rope which was round a large bough of his green-leafed gallows." The body was left hanging from the tree, and the falling snow formed a "soft, white shroud" upon the dead man. Indians and Mexicans were about; the Chinese did not arrive at the diggings until later in 1852: "As well as I can judge, there are upon this river as many foreigners as Americans. The former, with a few exceptions, are extremely ignorant and degraded." As for the latter, "the majority are of the better class of mechanics." There were also farmers, sailors, merchants, four doctors, and one lawyer. "Our countrymen are the most discontented of mortals. They are always longing for 'big strikes,' " Clapp observed. When it became apparent in the spring of 1852 that there would be no such bonanzas, racism reared its ugly head. An Anglo stabbed a Mexican, who had politely asked that a monetary debt be repaid. No action was taken against the assailant. "Foreigners," meaning Mexicans as well as others, were barred from mining at Rich Bar despite the fact that many Mexicans, by virtue of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were Then violence exploded in Rich Bar on July 4, 1852. Miners "drunk with whiskey and patriotism" attacked a group of Mexicans, and two or three were seriously hurt. A few days later a group of armed Mexicans entered the settlement. A Mexican stabbed an Anglo and swam safely across the river amid a hail of bullets. The Anglo, a man of Irish descent, was in the company of a Mexican woman. He was laid out in a bakery and died with the distraught woman at his side. Miners swarmed down from the hills armed with rifles, pistols, clubs, swords, knives, and other weapons, while others barricaded themselves in a saloon. The rumor circulated that the Mexicans were out to kill all the Americans, who cried for vengeance and the blood of foreigners. From the hillside, Clapp watched the action unfold. There were shots. The mob ran. One wounded man was led to a log cabin, another to a saloon frequented by Mexicans. A gun had accidentally discharged in a struggle, wounding an Anglo and an Argentinean. The latter eventually died of his wounds. A vigilante committee was formed to find the killers of the Irishman. After a gunfight, they captured the Mexican woman. Believing she was the cause of his death, some said she should be hanged. Instead, she was banished from the community. The vigilantes rounded up a half-dozen other Mexicans, and the mob yelled for their deaths. A compromise was struck: four were banished and two were sentenced to be whipped. One of those to be whipped implored that he be hanged instead. Both were beaten. Clapp, who flinched from little, described the scene: “I had never thought that I should be compelled to hear such fearful sounds, and, although I immediately buried my head in a shawl, nothing can efface from memory the disgust and horror of that moment. I had heard of such things, but heretofore had not realized, that in the nineteenth century, men could be beaten like dogs, much less that other men, not only could sentence such barbarism, but could actually stand by and see their own manhood degraded in such disgraceful manner.” During this time, two other foreigners, a Frenchman and a black man, also lost their lives in violent incidents. One by one the flume companies failed, as did the individual miners and the businesses that depended upon them in Rich Bar. There was an exodus in the early fall. Few wanted to spend another depressing winter in that place. Those who remained hurled lawsuits and insults at one another. Piles of gravel and trash lay about. The Clapps departed, and their marriage dissolved soon after. Louisa Clapp remained in San Francisco, where she taught school. She ended her days back east. Clapp, who wrote nothing more of consequence, had seen the elephant.
“The fearsome grizzly bear” The fearsome grizzly bear {Ursus horribilis) was at the top of the food chain until the Europeans came along with rifles. The bear ranged throughout all regions of the state except the extreme northeast and the deserts. What would become Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento were then grizzly bear habitats. Because of the great diversity of the landscapes, bears differed between regions in size, color, and skull characteristics. The number of subspecies was not known with precision, since no mammalogists were at work within the state at that time, but by the late nineteenth century it was known that the California variety, named californicus, was distinct from grizzly bears found in the American Rockies, Canada, and Alaska. The Indians feared grizzlies in much the same way they feared the whites: the Washo names for an unpredictable wild beast and a white man were the same. The earliest recorded sighting of a California grizzly was in 1602 by a Spanish explorer who saw bears feeding on a whale carcass on the beach at Monterey. Spaniards' and Mexicans' herds of horses and cattle became wild and spread throughout the state, thus providing an abundant food source for the grizzlies. The bears multiplied accordingly. For the first time in North America, bears {both black bears and grizzlies) provided sport. The Mexicans hunted the bears, as the Indians had been unable to do, on horseback with guns, lances, and reatas. There were organized bear hunts and man-bear and bull-bear contests. The bears were goaded with nails on a stick to attack the bulls, who usually lost. One bear fought three bulls, one at a time, and succumbed only when exhausted by a fourth encounter. With the coming of the North Americans, what little sport there was went out of bullbaiting, and a commercial element was introduced. Bear-bull fights were taxed by the state. Bears were put on display and made to perform anthropomorphic tricks. And they were shot by bounty hunters, farmers, meat hunters, sportsmen, and just about anyone who could raise a heavy-caliber rifle to his shoulder. Grizzlies became the major four-legged nemesis of the early settlers. They attacked oxen on Donner Pass, devoured livestock in the Great Valley, and killed or maimed the careless hunter no matter where he was. The hunters retaliated, and the mountains were stained red. One bear hunter boasted of shooting two hundred grizzlies in his lifetime, another said he had killed more than that number in a single year, and three hunters in Southern California were said to have felled one hundred and fifty bears in one year. The bear population collapsed. The grizzly became extinct in the 1920s, the last verified sighting being in the southern Sierra Nevada. It was there, in 1864, that William Brewer had spotted a female grizzly and her two cubs. He wrote of the encounter: “She was enormous-- would weigh as much as a small ox. After we looked at her a few minutes we all set up a shout. She rose on her hind legs, but did not see us, as we sat perfectly still. We continued to shout. She became frightened at the unseen noise, which echoed from the cliffs so that she could not tell where it came from, so she galloped away with the cubs.” The grizzly bear was reduced to an emblem, a stand-in for the real thing. It is the official state animal. Its likeness appears on state monuments, flags, and the state seal. On the seal, the grizzly has been reduced to the size of a puppy dog standing beside the seated figure of Minerva, the Roman goddess of political wisdom and martial prowess. The bear (or bruin) is the mascot of the two principal University of California campuses. More than five hundred landscape features, including seven rivers, carry the name bear. In one small Sierra basin alone there are Bear, Little Bear, and Cub Lakes. The day I hiked through that basin, I heard rifle shots echo off the granite walls. It was hunting season.
Biography The environmental historian Philip Fradkin is the author of ten books on the American West, California, and Alaska. His most recent book, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself was published in April, 2005. He has begun work on a biography of Wallace Stegner for Alfred A. Knopf. Two of his books have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes.  |