Book Review The King of California

Mark Arax and Rick Watzerman wrote the story of a family of means originating from the antebellum period in Georgia, though they claim to have roots in fifteenth century Scottish Royalty, who came to California with the bold patriarch Lieutenant Colonel J.G. Boswell. The book is titled The King of California, J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. It follows much of the family, with anecdotes from family and friends, primary sources, moments with J.G Boswell’s nephew and heir to the empire Jim Boswell, and a narrative like structure following J.G. Boswell’s life after being discharged from the army. The book tells readers how the Boswell family became one of the countries largest land holders, and the biggest in California. At 200,000 acres they are masters of the central valley landscape. The book raises many questions on how these cotton barons, and the cotton crop in general has affected the environment in California, and the treatment of ethnic labor in California.

The book introduces Tulare Lake on a trip with Jim Boswell. Boswell hates describing his land holdings as “immense”, and he says “empire” is a term of nations not business. Still Arax and Watzerman impart the size of his land holdings while describing their trip, which all takes place at what should be the bottom of Tulare Lake. A few chapters later the authors describe the state of the lake when the Spanish missionaries discovered it. “With the exception of Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the continental United States, Tulare Lake was the most dominant feature on the California map, an immense sheet of water that extended out over the desert some 800 square miles.” Vast and domineering, in modern California it is completely gone. The lake was described as a natural paradise. The Yokut, four distinct tribes of Native Americans had occupied the area for nearly 7,000 years. The people would garner large amounts of fish and shellfish from the land, eating along with that turtle and the abundant waterfowl. Successive waves of immigration did not hinder the abundance of this body of water; the authors report that one hundred years later Chinese Fishermen from San Francisco still plied those waters. In the 1850’s and into the 1860sAmerican settlers would move into the region, deforesting the river areas, and letting their livestock wreak havoc on the water quality. However the environmental degradation wrought by these new Californians would not compare to that of the cotton farmers ability to alter the landscape.

Everyone in the cotton business messed with the lake of the Tules. The water was cut away from the lake and used for irrigation. To the point now where it is scarcely acknowledged that a lake even existed there. The army corps of engineers altered the landscape, more so than the Mississippi Valley. In the 1940s, against the will of two Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, congressmen and bureaucrats labeled the rivers feeding the lake as agents of flood, and the flood creating that lake was controlled. The effect of all this lobbying and government law adjusting enabled these farms to grow past the current allowable size, and changed the way water rights and riparian rights were interpreted. So now all these rivers are used for irrigation, with little to no conservation use. The Boswell Company is entitled to a 15 percent draw off the Kings River, an amount worth billions today.

The land taken from the lake would further be bastardized by levies and dikes built by farmers trying to avoid the damages of periodic years of high snow melt. Such as in “1938, 1952, 1969, 1983, 1997, 1998.” In the event that the government damns must allow for flooding, the basin is divided up in a perpetual game of screw your neighbor. One farm family in particular, the Salyers had constructed a large levy on borrowed money to keep their low lake property from flooding. However with the Boswell’s now owning so much, it is easier for them to coordinate and triage the land that gets flooded. Never allowing the water to take its natural root.

In addition to the preservationist tragedy that was the death of the Tulare Lake, the wildlife that used to call Tulare Lake home is still dying every day. “…Jim Boswell was already complaining about the ‘enviros’ in Washington who cared more about Delta smelts and kangaroo rats than about food and fiber.” Boswell had given a large sum of money to a conservation fund to buy land in Idaho so they wouldn’t try to interfere with some of his land in the San Joaquin Valley. Still Jim Boswell was observed by the authors to have a willful ignorance to the effect of his evaporation pools full of pesticides. His large land holdings are unavoidably part of the migration patterns of many waterfowl, and many die on his property every year. There have also been documented incidents of finding ducks with severe birth defects on the property. Tons of dead fish are found dead in his canals every year as well.

The fact remains that the glorious narrative of man conquering nature was very popular in the twentieth century, but the effect that philosophy has a negative effect on our landscape from the twenty first century perspective. So to is the Boswells relationship with labor.

The Boswells got their start in America as part of the Georgia Planter class. Slave owners, who had relatives in the Confederate Ranks throughout the civil war. After abolition they were sharecroppers, and their attitudes toward ethnic labor followed them to some extent to California. Where the Boswells employed many ethnic laborers. Jim Boswell was notoriously found of his Latino workers, and didn’t hesitate to promote some. In contrast he was much more disinterested in his black employees, and often displayed an anti black bias. They did have a reputation for treating their employees well, and being charitable in their town, yet at the end mechanization won over, and the Boswells now have only 300 salaried employees.

The towns once occupying valley, the home to all these farm workers are blighted. The modern cotton industry as it is, doesn’t need ethnic workers much, if at all. Towns such as Arvin, called by a minister “the worse town I ever saw” because of the lack of infrastructure and input from the farmers. Corcoran however has had lots of financial input from the Boswells, to little affect. Cliff Hill a migrant from Oklahoma in 1948 was quoted saying “Corcoran’s gone to the dogs.” As it stands there is lots of evidence to back that up. As cliff and Okie mourns the loss of business, one in ten teenage Latinas in Tulare and Kings County have given birth. That’s a higher teen pregnancy rate than many third world countries. The drug trade and gang membership is equally as prominent, as the story of a young black and Latino man who was murdered and tortured clearly demonstrates. The horrible conditions of the valley today are a legacy of ethnic labor that existed in an economy that never developed beyond farming.

The Boswells story reads like the American dream. The old American dream that didn’t have much regard for environmental degradation, or the welfare of the working classes long term, the Boswells, J.G. and Jim took whatever they could. Exploiting the land gained them a lot. The novel covers a lot of ground, raising not only questions of what this farm land has done to the environment, and to the former workers and decedents of former workers. It also questions how government farm subsidies are given, and should they be given to cotton a surplus crop, and if these huge farms should be allowed to keep their current size.