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Horace Bell (1830-1918) http://tinyurl.com/MHBell

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Widneyville Oranges

From On the Old West Coast: Being Further Reminiscences of a Ranger, 1930.

Reader: Daniel Maloney

In the 1880s, buying land in southern California was not only exhilerating, it was occasionlly as surreal as a Salvadore Dali painting.

Horace Bell made a habit of chronicalling the peculiar boom and bust cycles of southern California real estate, but even he was astounded by a scheme to sell desert land to uneasy easterners.

"Widneyville-by-the-Desert" was a prize exhibit of those days. The promoters referred to it as "the modern Elysium," I believe, or some such high-toned Greek brag. A tremendous excursion was organized to conduct the speculative hordes to the site of the proposed ideal city on the opening day. A natural and to the Eastern tenderfoot a rather appalling growth of cactus and yucca palms, commonly called Joshua trees, covered the desert hereabouts. These spiny, writhing Joshua trees are really a horrific sight if you are not used to them, but the promoters of Widneyville had a bright idea that saved them the expense of clearing the growth off. They did a little judicious trimming on the cactus plants and yuccas, shaping them up into a certain uniformity, then shipped out a carload of cheap wind-fall oranges and on the end of each bayonet-like spike on the yuccas and on each cactus spine they impaled an orange. Suddenly the desert fruited like the orange grove! Down the lines of the proposed streets staked out in the desert, and around the great square outlined by the surveyors, crowded innumerable orange trees loaded with their golden harvest. The Easterners stood agape at the Elysian sight, hardly listening to the salesmen. . . .

"Widneyville" was really the Mojave Desert town of Hesperia, which was partly developed in the 1880s by prominent southern Californian, Joseph P. Widney.