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Book Reviews
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A California Creek Outside—and In—the Mainstream
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| Vaught, David. After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xi + 310 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8497-9; $30.00 (paper), ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9257-8.
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The conventional historical narrative of nineteenth-century American California usually begins with the drama of the Gold Rush. It moves to the transcontinental railroad and then to the related phenomena of anti-Chinese agitation and the Constitutional Convention of 1879. The Southern Pacific Railroad and California's own "robber barons," the Big Four, provide a basic focus for the last decades of the century before the narrative concludes with the triumph of the progressive movement in the early twentieth century. Most of the action takes place in the gold fields, in the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the San Joaquin Valley, and in the agricultural lands of Southern California. |
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In this significant work, David Vaught consciously stands outside of this narrative. He concentrates on a small rural area in the Sacramento Valley. This volume offers local history in the best sense. The story it tells makes one particular area come alive. But the volume also offers significant implications for the understanding of both California and American history during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. |
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Vaught focuses upon the Putah Creek area, a rich agricultural stretch of land west of Sacramento. The story that Vaught tells is, on one level, fairly straightforward. In an engaging fashion, the book chronicles the different uses to which the land was put. After a brief period in the early 1850s in which cattle were raised, the area soon became a center for the production of grain. The area's farmers constantly struggled against floods and drought. They experienced some boom times in the production of wheat, especially in the late 1860s and in the mid-1870s. But wheat prices began to fall for good in the late 1870s. Beginning in the 1880s, the area gradually shifted into the production of fruits and other labor-intensive crops. By the early twentieth century, the major crop grown in the area was almonds. |
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Vaught's superb treatment of the transformation of this relatively small section of California's landscape raises a number of important issues. The first concerns the mentality of Putah Creek's farmers. They were as far from being simple tillers of the soil as it was possible to be. Vaught observes that many of the original settlers of Putah Creek had moved multiple times before they made the decision to go to California. Each move that they made along the East Coast or in the Midwest had been undertaken to improve their situations, by taking advantage of better land or greater commercial opportunities. The move to California was the largest "remove" that these adventurers had ever contemplated. So, in their minds, the improvement in their status needed to be huge in order to justify the move. A number of them spent some time in the diggings, but, like most California gold seekers, they met with little success. |
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Once they went into farming, they experienced cycles of boom and bust. But they dealt with these cycles by simply transferring to the search for agricultural profits the wild optimism that had originally propelled them to search for gold. For instance, a fire in Sacramento in early 1852 destroyed some grain that was being warehoused along the river. Then, later that year, an unseasonably late storm in the spring destroyed a number of Putah Creek crops. The farmers' reaction to these events was instructive. They borrowed more money and planted again. They were confident that just one good crop would enable them to recoup all their losses. |
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