History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 11

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682

USA > California > Kern County > History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 11

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August 29, 1874-The Southern Pacific is grading for the depot (at the present site in East Bakersfield.) A large body of land in the vicinity has been covered with indemnity scrip, and the railroad probably will lay out a town.

October 10, 1874-The Bakersfield Fire Company meets to adopt a con- stitution. N. R. Wilkinson is foreman; W. McFarland, assistant foreman ; A. T. Whitman, secretary ; W. E. Houghton, treasurer. A fireman's ball is planned for November 6th.

December 19, 1874 Judge Brundage plants out eucalyptus trees about his residence (at the northwest corner of H and Eighteenth streets).

Mining excitement at Panamint.

January, 1875-The river is in flood and the only way to cross is by the railroad bridge. No damage.

February, 1875-Seven or eight Mexicans, supposed to have been led by Chavez, one of Vasquez' lieutenants, rob the store of William Scodie about

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

five miles above Weldon on the South Fork. They tied Scodie, stole about $800, a new outfit of clothing and a horse apiece and left toward Indian Wells. W. B. Carr expects to sow about 1500 acres of alfalfa this season. The Southern Pacific engineers are struggling with the grade up Tehachapi. The roadbed is built about fourteen miles east of Bakersfield.

February 27, 1875-The Bakersfield brass band holds its third anniversary ball. A revival is in progress at the Methodist church. The Good Templars organize Kern Island lodge. Murders and robberies are constantly reported throughout the county.

March, 1875-Much building is going on in Bakersfield. Lumber is $40 per thousand, and brick are $10. The great Kernville gold ledge has been traced for twenty-five miles. A thousand men are working on the railroad grade to Tehachapi.

Bakersfield Tires of Being a City and Disincorporates

On February 27, 1875, the Kern County Courier announced that the town government was a miserable failure. A large amount of money had been collected in the form of licenses, the editor declared, but there was little or nothing to show for it. If a beginning had been made toward build- ing a sewer system or a municipal water works or if some other substantial public improvement were in evidence, the incorporation of the city might be justified, but there were none of these. This was the line of argument that appeared in the press. Pioneers who were active in public affairs at the time, however, say that the town was disincorporated to get rid of the marshal- Alex Mills.

Alex Mills was one of the thousand or more picturesque characters that have graced the history of Kern county and given it the pungent, preservative spice of human interest. He was an old man, by the time he became marshal of Bakersfield, and walked with a cane. But he was a Kentuckian, a handy man with a gun and not lacking in initiative and resource when the mood moved him. For example, once when he was given papers to serve in an attachment suit against the Southern Pacific railroad, Alex chained a log to the rails, sat down on it with his rifle in his hands and announced that he had attached the track, the roadbed, and the right of way and there would be nothing stirring over them until the judgment was satisfied. It was promptly satisfied.

But these exhibitions of energy on the part of the town's historic marshal seem not to have happened very often. Urged to relate what Alex did that the town should want to get rid of his services, pioneers, one after another declare, "Nothing. He just stumped around from one saloon to another and at the end of the month he drew his seventy-six dollars." But diligent re- search reveals the fact that Alex had a habit of telling the truth on unfelicitous occasions. Perhaps he would stump into the office or store of a prominent citizen and something like this conversation would ensue :

"Mr. Blank, suh, good morning."

"Good morning, Mr. Mills."

"Mr. Blank, suh, you're the pop-eyed progeny of a race of runts. Nature never marks her critters wrong, suh. A pop-eyed man will steal, a pop-eyed pup will suck eggs, and a pop-eyed woman will flirt with the hired help.

"Good morning, suh."

And the marshal would stump out.

Of course this is not what Marshal Mills really said. His language was

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

apt to be too lurid and literal for the genteel purposes of print. But the paraphrase furnishes some faint idea of the historic marshal's frank and freehand offensiveness. Such means of recall as were then available were dis- cussed by the good citizens, but they were assured by the undaunted Alex that "you may remove me from my office, suh, but my constituents will triumphantly elect me again," which everyone knew to be a fact.

And so the good citizens disguised the issue. They pleaded economy and everything else that might suggest itself as an argument for disincor- poration. A petition was duly circulated, duly signed by more than three- fourths of the legal voters of the city, and the county supervisors, acting under the law as it then existed, on January 4, 1876, declared that Bakers- field was disincorporated. Samuel J. Lansing was appointed to close the municipality's financial affairs. On April 3, 1876, Lansing filed his report with the county board, and Bakersfield was free from all restraint, expense and contumely incident to city marshals until January 11, 1898, a respite of twenty-two years, during which period Bakersfield and Kern county passed through many experiences and were the scene of many stirring events, the story of which must now be recounted.

CHAPTER IX

The Contests Over Water Rights Begin

Referring back to the news items reproduced in the previous chapter it will be noted that on August 23, 1873, appeared a legal notice to the effect that the affairs of the California Cotton Growers' Association, and Livermore & Chester had been transferred to J. H. Redington; that in November of the same year J. C. Crocker and Miller & Lux were fencing in a great tract of land between Buena Vista and Goose lakes and preparing to sow alfalfa ; that in January, 1874, "the world-renowned Billy Carr, political Napoleon for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company," was in Kern county looking over his possessions here and planning how to increase them.

About 1874 Dr. George F. Thornton was getting the Bellvue and McClung ranches established for J. B. Haggin. In the same year W. G. Souther was having the big plow built at Hollister for use in completing the reclamation of swamp land district No. 111, a task which had been taken over by the Kern Island Irrigation Canal Company, which was a Livermore & Chester enterprise, now assigned to J. H. Redington. In March, 1876, Liver- more mortgaged to William Houston 5736 acres of land for $60,000. On October 1, 1877, Livermore mortgaged 9792.72 acres of Kern county land to Redington for $97,000. On the same date another mortgage was executed between the same parties involving 12,800 acres of land and $128,000. In the same year, which was one of exceptional drought, Livermore & Chester (as the concern continued to be known despite the transfers noted) are credited by newspaper report with having spent $20,000 in the construction of a dam of brush and gravel thrown across Kern river for the purpose of turning the water into the Kern Island canal. On July 2, 1877, the Kern Valley Water Company, of which J. H. Redington was president and H. P. Livermore was secretary, made an agreement with the trustees of swamp land district No. 116 or 121 (lying north of Buena Vista lake) to complete the

COL. THOMAS BAKER

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

work of reclamation which the trustees of the district had begun. In March, 1877, Congress passed the desert land act, and work was begun on the Calloway canal. In January, 1878, Livermore made another mortgage to Redington covering 4480 acres for a consideration of $44,800. In 1878 the Kern Valley Colony issued a prospectus offering seventeen sections of land under the Kern Island canal for sale at $25 per acre in tracts of forty to eighty acres at terms of one-fifth cash, with the balance in four annual pay- ments; interest at nine per cent. For information apply to H. P. Livermore, San Francisco, or Celsus Brower, Bakersfield.

In June, 1879, Livermore and Redington sold to J. B. Haggin the Cot- ton ranch, comprising 729.03 acres in what is now the northwestern part of the city of Bakersfield. The consideration was nothing. A previous deed had conveyed all the other Livermore and Redington holdings in Kern county to Haggin, and after the deal had been completed Redington threw in this remaining body of land-now selling in town lots at $20 to $200 per front foot-for good measure, and also, as there is good reason to suppose, because he did not care to keep any souvenir of his Kern county investments.

Add to the foregoing the record of suit after suit filed against Livermore & Chester, Livermore & Redington and the different parties individually by Haggin & Carr, all dismissed or compromised, and you will have a fairly com- plete syllabus of the complicated chapter in the history of Kern county which bridges over the period during which Haggin & Carr and Miller & Lux came to be the overshadowing factors in Kern county's development ; during which Bakersfield's first hope of colonization came to naught, and most of the remaining sections of valuable farming land in the valley portion of the county were thoughtfully gathered up. The chapter includes, also, the first bitter contests over the control of the waters of Kern river, and the placing of the troops and batteries for the great battle that was to come later on between the appropriators represented by Haggin and the riparianists represented by Miller & Lux:

The Decline of Livermore & Chester

Livermore & Redington were wholesale druggists of San Francisco, men of large wealth outside of their drug business, and are referred to by their Kern county acquaintances as of most estimable character. From the start their Kern county land investments were a side venture, and commanded little of their personal attention. Livermore came to Bakersfield but seldom, and Redington almost never. Taking them on their face, nothing could have been more promising than the Kern county swamp land projects. The early reclamation contracts, as we have seen, were taken on the basis of an acre of land in return for moving two cubic yards of earth in the construction of canals and levees. Ten or a dozen years later E. M. Roberts and H. W. Broad took a contract to finish the Calloway canal at seven cents for moving ordinary earth and nine cents for hardpan, and they made big money. The haul is longer and heavier in building a big canal like the Calloway than in a smaller canal like the Kern Island, and the earth moved in the former averaged much heavier and harder to handle than was that in the latter. It would seem that under normal circumstances and management the men who participated with Colonel Baker in the original contract for the reclamation of district No. 111 should have secured their land at an outlay of ten or fifteen cents per acre.

But many things combined to overturn what seemed to be perfectly laid

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

plans. Before the arrival of the railroad, materials of all kinds that had to be shipped in were exceedingly high in price, and after the railroad came the expected reductions in transportation charges were only partially realized. Labor was scarce and inefficient. Drinking water from shallow wells or irrigation ditches resulted in a liberal infection of workmen with the microbe of weariness, and efforts to drown the microbes in the bad liquors that unlimited saloons dispensed were not wholly successful from all points of view.

Then it was an era of large ideas. The big plow that Souther had built at Hollister was not his first nor largest invention of the kind. He built in the Livermore & Chester shops at Bakersfield a plow designed to cut a furrow five feet in width and three feet deep, whereas the Hollister plow cut a furrow . three feet wide and two feet deep. The top of the mould board of the first plow was even with the head of a man on horseback. The depth of the cut was controlled by a screw operated from a platform high over the shear, and a long lever extending to the rear was used in keeping the furrow straight. With forty yoke of oxen hitched to it the plow would cut through a cottonwood root as thick as a fat man's arm and the shear. and coulter shaveil a clean path through the thickets of button willows that grew along the sloughis. The plow was perfectly designed and constructed, according to men who saw its try-out, but the oxen walked so slowly that the earth which the shear picked up was not carried out on the mould board but fell back in the furrow as in the case of a plow that does not "scour." When the bull whackers beat the cattle into a faster gait the plow made a clean furrow, but the faster gait could not be maintained, and at the end of a twelve-mile furrow it was evident that the big plow was almost as unsuited for ditch- building as it would be for a watch charm.

Then Souther had the "little" plow built at Hollister. This could be handled with forty head of mules, and the faster animals made the new plow a success. Many of the smaller ditches about the delta were made with the Hollister plow, but its use benefited chiefly the assigns of Livermore & Redington.

Fertile Causes of Litigation

In the early days of irrigation in Kern county it was the custom to build wing dams of sand or of sand and brush in times when the river was low to force the water into the canals. These wing dams would start just below the head of the canal and extend at an angle upward and across the river nearly to the farther bank. A freshet sufficient to raise the water above the top of these dams would speedily melt them away, scattering the brush to form impeding islands in the river bed, and the work would have to be re- peated so soon as the river fell again. Before the Kern valley canal was finished the cost of these wing dams had reached so great an aggregate that the managers of the enterprise decided to move the intake higher up on the river. This was done, the new intake being finished in 1874. The old south fork channel, however, was still used in lieu of a canal, the water being turned into the old channel from the new intake. Still later the head of the Kern Island canal was moved still farther up the river, and an artificial canal sub- stituted for the old natural channel south as far as the present mill. All these changes were made the excuse for a number of law suits over water rights, the questions involved turning on use, priority and the right of riparian owners to have a natural water course maintained. The suits and the

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

questions involved were technical and of little interest to the average reader except to suggest the numberless good opportunities for litigation that arose while the waters of Kern river were being apportioned. Few such oppor- tunities, it may be added, were allowed to pass unseized.

The agreement between the Kern Island Canal Company and the trustees of the irrigation district was that the company should construct the canal and necessary levees for $16,240, the company to own the canal and retain the right to the use of the water, provided that the owner of swamp land should be given one share of stock in the canal company for every fifty dollars which his land paid into the reclamation fund, and provided that the owners of. swamp land in the district should have the preference right-or the exclusive right in case they demanded it-to purchase the water in the canal at rates which would net the canal company a return not to exceed ten per cent of its capital stock annually.

First Great Fight Over Water Rights

When the very dry year of 1877 came the former expedients to which the Kern Island Canal Company had resorted to draw the water into its ditch did not suffice, and the dam, which is alleged to have cost $20,000 was built across the river. Not only were brush and sand used, but wooden chutes were built against the shoulder of Panorama heights and gravel and boulders were chuted down to the river edge to serve as more enduring bal- last. Heavy timbers also were used to stay the waters, and the dam took on so much the character of a permanent work that settlers and water users over the entire delta from Bakersfield to Buena Vista lake were up in vigor- ous protest against this alleged effort to monopolize the entire flow of the river.

It is profitless now, as well as difficult, to decide just where the right and justice lay. Those who were close to Livermore say that the dam was never intended to take all the water of the river and never did so. It was to act merely as the present weirs do, and it was only for the purpose of diverting into the Kern Island canal the amount of water which was due it by right of prior appropriation. This right, they point out, was later estab- lished and affirmed by the Miller-Haggin agreement and the Shaw decree, and to this day the canal is entitled to its quota of water whenever there is that much in the river and whether there is anything left for other canals or not.

Partisans of Livermore go on to say that much of the outcry against the Kern Island was raised by Carr, who had begun a systematic campaign to oust Livermore and Redington from their commanding position on the river and (like the astute and experienced politician that he was) sought to enlist popular sentiment as one of the chief means for carrying out his ends.

At any rate, it appears that about this time Carr was a prince of good fellows. He was suffering as much as any of the smaller water users, but he was willing to divide with everyone the little trickles that the monopolistic Kern Island people permitted to come down past their works. In fact Carr was the leader and ally of the anti-monopolists, and he was efficient and resourceful.

The men who relate the story from the other side say that no objection ever was made to the Kern Island company's dams so long as they built them of brush and sand as others did, and no complaint was made against the Kern Island taking all the water to which it was entitled and which the

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

irrigators under it could use. The objectors, however, go on to affirm that so much water was forced into the Kern Island canal that it broke and the precious fluid ran to waste over untilled lands while settlers farther down the river had to stand by and see their crops perish for want of moisture. Out of this difference of opinion regarding right and equity and of understanding as to matters of fact, arose the first great contest over the waters of Kern river.

The contests between Haggin & Carr and Livermore & Chester were not so fierce nor on so large a scale as those that came later between Haggin & Carr and Miller & Lux, but they were fairly strenuous. On one occasion when Carr had secured from the court a restraining order to prevent Liver- more & Chester from placing a dam across the river to force the water into the Kern Island canal, instructions were issued to the Livermore superintend- ents to proceed with the work on the assurance that the injunction would be lifted the following morning. From every camp the men and teams were started out at noon, each taking an independent course as though going about some ordinary work, but all of them arriving during the afternoon at the foot of Panorama heights where the Kern Island intake was. The hours until nightfall were spent in quietly filling bags with sand and piling them on the river's edge. When darkness fell, two hundred men under the direc- tion of C. L. Connor and C. C. Stockton began building a wall of sand bags out into the stream.

Carr's scouts discovered what was going on about midnight, but nothing was done until morning, when Connor and Stockton were placed under arrest for contempt of court. There had been a hitch and the injunction was not lifted. The judge was furious, and Carr was insistent on the officers placing Connor and Stockton in jail, but J. C. Crocker interceded, and Crocker's influence in those days was potent, even with a judge whose dignity had been badly ruffled. The men did not go to jail, and both of them afterward were given good positions by Carr, who could recognize an efficient fighter no matter which side he happened to be on.

As to just what happened to Livermore & Chester's dams the testimony differs, but a notice published in a paper of a little later date offers a sub- stantial reward for the arrest and conviction of the person or persons that dynamited them.

Colony Plan Is Nipped in the Tender Bud

Of course, with Haggin's millions and Carr's far-famed genius and gen- eralship arrayed against them. Livermore and Redington did not fight as stubbornly as they might under more equal terms. No suit of importance seenis to have been decided against them, and their contention respecting the paramount rights of the Kern Island canal was never overwhelmed. In 1878 they demonstrated their faith in their position by putting a magnificent body of land under the Kern Island canal on the market and printing a book and maps descriptive of the advantages of Kern county that would do high honor to any colonization agency of present days. At the rate of $1000 for a forty-acre farm and the best water right in the county, $200 down and $200 each year for four years, the seventeen sections which the Kern Valley Colony offered should have sold readily and Bakersfield's early colonization hopes should have been redeemed. But the sale to Haggin checked the colony plans before they got under way, and a long halt was called in the matter of inducing settlement, for Carr had drawn his plans on a much greater scale

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

than any of the earlier land holders, and he was by no means ready to begin subdivision in the year 1879.

Purposes of Haggin & Carr

It would be a matter of much interest were it possible to ascertain with absolute certainty what were the ultimate plans that Carr had in mind for the vast estate which he helped to upbuild. Some of his old friends state with assurance that he intended (when he had gotten together all the land avail- able in the county and had secured full control of the water) to launch a great colonization scheme and build a little empire of small land owners. Carr is quoted as having called attention to the fact that he was a younger man than either J. B. Haggin or Lloyd Tevis, the other and larger partners in the enterprise, and remarking that in the end he expected his plans to prevail. But the oldest of the three men survives alone, and years before his death Carr's policy was over-ridden and his interest in the Kern county lands purchased.

In a statement published in May, 1880, J. B. Haggin over his signature declared that his purpose was not to monopolize the lands he was acquiring in Kern county but that he intended to offer them for sale on liberal terms. In the early days, however, Haggin's trips to Kern county were very few and very brief. He came in his private car, was driven direct to Belle View, where he looked at the blooded racers that were bred for him there, returned to his car and was sped away. Lloyd Tevis was a banker of San Francisco, and while his financial interest in the Kern county venture dates from the beginning of operations here, his name was not connected with the firm, which for years was known locally as Haggin & Carr or Carr & Haggin, and which appeared in the chief legal documents as J. B. Haggin.

Carr's money contribution to the Kern county venture is variously esti- mated as high as $500,000 to $800,000. Others declare it was very much less. The Gates tract of approximately 52,000 acres, being the odd sections in townships 30-26, 30-27, 31-26, and 31-27, and comprising the heart of the Kern river delta, was the foundation of the Carr & Haggin holdings. This was a tract of railroad land which fell into the hands of Isaac Gates of New York shortly after the grant of the odd sections along the line of the pro- posed Atlantic & Pacific railway had been made by Congress. Carr's position as political manipulator for the Southern Pacific enabled him, without doubt, to secure other railroad lands on agreeable terms, and he took steps at once to share in the wealth of swamp land which was being so rapidly and cheaply acquired when he arrived in Kern county. All through the records of swamp land districts from 1875 to 1893 the names of Haggin, Carr and Hearst figure prominently.

Carr's Dealings With the Ditch Companies

Meantime, Carr, on his first arrival here, began taking steps to gain a controlling interest in the canal companies that had locations on Kern river. Few if any of these companies were incorporated and Carr early set himself to induce the owners to organize under the laws of the state. Different methods were pursued in different cases, but one by one the companies filed incorporation papers, and just as surely Haggin and Carr eventually got a controlling interest in the stock. To tell how this was done would require a separate chapter for every canal company, and in most cases they would be interesting chapters. In every case, however, Carr presented the advantages of co-operation, showed how much faster and more effectually the work of

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History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 11

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog] Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1682

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682