"Kings River at Kingsburg Bridge," with permission from Water Resources Reports and Papers in the J.B. Lippincott Collection, c. 1900. Larger.
When nineteenth century pioneers moved onto railroad land in the southern San Joaquin Valley, they had more to contend with than a powerful monopoly. They had to water a forbidding landscape dry as desert.
Though the arid San Joaquin Valley offered settlers a daunting challenge, they overcame it by diverting water from the Kings River into a network of hand-dug irrigation canals throughout the region. As novelist May Merrill Miller tells us through the perspective of one of her characters, opening the headgate for the first time was an emotional triumph.
The . . . waters rushed into the void. One huge shining silty moving mass, a momentary crashing waterfall, then released, pouring and thrashing down through the wooden flume-box into the way cut for it in the dry valley earth. Amelie's eyes followed the running tongue of water, the ditch bed dry before it, until it reached to the next gate, with a group of men standing ready; then it too was opened--and on to the next, and the next, and the next, men standing waiting by the gates as far as she could see. . .
Amelie looked once more toward the blue Sierras. She could see the constant snow upon them. Her eyes were wet as she turned again to her neighbors, silent beside the controlled waters.
May Merrill Miller's 1938 novel First the Blade draws on the history of the San Joaquin Valley to create a vividly imagined version of nineteenth century pioneer life.
"Wildflowers, San Joaquin River Gorge," photographed by U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management, 2009. Larger.
On May 11, 1880, one of the deadliest gunfights in the history of the west erupted in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The Mussel Slough gun battle grew out of a contentious land dispute between local pioneer settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Novelist May Merrill Miller grew up in region, and told the story of the pioneers who settled Mussel Slough in her 1938 novel, First the Blade, which not only includes the story of the gunfight, but—through the perspective of its main character Amelie Blansford—paints a vivid picture of the men and women who settled the region and the qualities of the landscape that drew them there.
For the first time since Amelie had come to the valley, all the wild flowers blossomed. Not one feeble tint laid upon the drying grass by Indian paintbrushes, but orange poppies, lavender wild hyacinths, cream and yellow marguerites, rose, blue, and purple larkspur, and the ethereal white sand lilies that bloomed only in good years, sometimes withholding any sign for seven seasons. Pale ponds of bluebells mirrored the sky. Great gray bushes speared with blue lupines tangled in green-needled alfilaria and button mallow. Black-spotted mauve bird's-eyes, sweet white four-o'clocks, deep yellow buttercups, and lighter creamcups circled in great separate swirls, white-foamed with daisies. But the poppies were the ground swell of it all—when she looked far off the other hues became pastel foaming eddies caught in that great molten sea. For poppies flowed upon the valley to the dikes of the mountains—the brown earthworks of the Coast Range to the west, the blue white-painted Sierras halting the flux to the east. And the sun rose and the sun set and the miracle continues.
May Merrill Miller's First the Blade gives readers an intimate glimpse of the domestic life and the natural landscape of the southern San Joaquin region of the late nineteenth century.
below to hear radio segment.
