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 14
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Heads of the Rival Literary Bureaus
Dozens of portraits of interesting actors in the great drama of the Kern river water contest might be added to this little gallery of character sketches, but I shall attempt but two more-those of the chiefs of the rival literary bureaus that flooded the state with syndicated editorials and syndicated sup- plements setting forth the rival arguments of appropriators and riparian owners and the history, law, custom and usage touching the utilization of water for any and all purposes since Noah launched the ark on the diluvian seas.
In addition to his numerous other activities Julius Chester, in the days of his ascendency in Kern county, founded the Southern Californian and was its editor for a number of years. Like the other weeklies of the pioneer days, the Southern Californian was stronger as an organ of personal opinion than
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it was as a purveyor of news, and Uncle Julius, as he was called by rival editors, was as handy as the best of them in the use of the king's English. He was almost as diplomatic and persuasive in his writing as he was in his speech, and how effective he was in the latter may be gathered from an incident that is related as the truth by a veracious citizen of the time. Uncle Julius had used some of his best literary art in writing up a certain very undesirable citizen. and the day following the appearance of the paper on the street he was sitting comfortably in his office with his feet on the desk when the undesirable citizen appeared. His eye was wild, his breath was laden with liquor and he waved a big six-shooter before the editor's stomach in a very promiscuous manner while he talked.
"Get your feet down from there because I'm going to kill you," the bad citizen commanded.
Uncle Julius recognized that if the bad citizen had really intended to kill him a little matter of his feet being on the desk need not have interfered, and he asked what the trouble was all about as coolly and pleasantly as though it were only an advertiser wanting to know why his announcement did not appear to the top of the page next to pure reading matter as per contract.
"You know blanked well what the matter is," said the bad citizen, "that there thing you wrote about me in your paper."
Chester took his feet down deliberately, deliberately found a copy of the paper, sat down, put his feet on the desk again, adjusted his glasses and began to read the offending article aloud.
He stopped at the end of the first paragraph. "I don't see anything the matter with that, Tom," he said. "That's all so, aint it?"
"Yes," said Tom, "that's all so, but you read on farther."
Chester read another paragraph, and repeated his question as to the accuracy of the narrative.
Tom indicated with his gun that the most offensive portion of the story was to be found still farther down, and Chester read on. When he got to the bottom of the last paragraph Tom had admitted that every assertion in the red hot arraignment-and it was red hot-was true, and the two men went out and had a drink together.
Chester in these days had descended from his former position of prin- cipal factor in the county's industry and commerce, his property was slip- ping out of his hands or had previously escaped, and he was constantly being sued for debt. His fighting instinct never forsook him, and during the latter part of his journalistic career he was engaged, a very large share of his time in putting the county officials on the spit and turning them slowly and scientifically over the coals of incandescent journalism. The county officials winced in patience at first, but after Chester was known to be on the financial toboggan they joined gleefully in pelting him on his way to the bottom. Everything Chester had was attached over and over. Once he was arrested on a charge of stealing corn from a Chinaman, but that prob- ably was only a fair offset to the defamatory charges which Chester heaped upon them. The corn theft case was dismissed. But finally Chester's presses and type were attached and sold to A. C. Maude, and Chester was able to retain possession of them only by showing that they had been leased to George Wear, another of the picturesque and notable newspaper men of the county, who figures more prominently at a little later date. Wear held down
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the outfit, and Chester continued to publish the Southern Californian and to berate the county officials. Maude, who claimed that he had bought not only the outfit but the name of Chester's paper, began publication of the Kern County Californian, with Richard Hudnut as editorial writer and news- gatherer in chief. Finally Wear sold his lease to a printer by name of Warren and a school teacher by name of Vrooman. For a time the latter kept a guard over the shop by night as well as by day, but one evening Maude's forces inveigled the guard away and captured the shop.
With nothing left but the name of his paper, Chester took himself to San Francisco and issued the Southern Californian from there until the close of the political campaign that ended with the defeat of what he was pleased to call the Reed ring, and the election of B. Brundage, the opponent of Judge Reed, to be the first judge of the superior court of Kern county. Judge Reed had been judge of the county court, but that office was abolished by the change in the constitution.
Richard Hudnut was a highly educated and very dignified man. His writing was silkier than Chester's, and he had such an easy, refined and polished way of flaying his victim that after the victim was flayed he knew that he had lost his hide, but had in his mind only a vague, circumstantial suspicion that it was Hudnut who had skinned him. When Chester was charged with stealing the Chinaman's corn Hudnut mourned over him in paragraph after paragraph as one might mourn over the grave of misled innocence.
It will be appreciated readily that in a fight like the one which the great water contest occasioned, where it was necessary to depict everyone on the other side as a red-handed pirate, a dark-alley thug and a horse thief, the peculiar accomplishments of Hudnut and Chester were invaluable. More- over, both Hudnut and Chester had all the history of Kern county water rights at their fingers' ends, and when they were established at Sacramento with the money of the two rival corporations behind them, respectively, they poured out a class and quantity of militant, journalistic literature that marks a milestone in the newspaper history of the state.
Still another journalistic factor was injected into the great fight. When the issue was fairly joined between the riparianists and the appropriators, in 1886, the Kern County Echo was founded by a company of farmers and business men, who gathered one day at the old Burnap drug store and decided that there was still a third side to the great question and that a new organ should be established to advocate it. Capt. John Barker was sent to San Francisco to buy the plant, and S. C. Smith, then a young lawyer of Bakersfield, afterward state senator and still later congressman from the eighth district, was elected managing editor. Through the controversy the Echo urged that neither appropriators nor riparian owners be given a mon- opoly of the water of the river, but that the state retain the ownership in trust for the people and that the use of the water be permitted for irrigation and other purposes under state regulation and control. Water is one of the elements and is no more a proper object of monopoly than is the air, was the gist of the Echo's persistent argument during those days.
The Great Water Suit
The great water suit, known by the title "Lux versus Haggin," not only marks an epoch in the history of Kern county, but marks an epoch, also, in the history of irrigation in the state of California. It began with little
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more notice from the public than any of the other hundred or more suits that had been filed by rival claimants to the waters of Kern river, but before it had gone far local people realized that this was the battle royal, and before it was finally dismissed it had focussed the attention of the state, ranged practically every California newspaper of general circulation on one side or the other, resulted in the calling of two state irrigation conventions and a special session of the legislature, and started a movement to amend the state constitution so that the supreme court, which rendered an unpopular decision in connection with the suit, might be reorganized. The latter movement did not succeed.
In brief, the contention of the plaintiffs was that they were the owners of riparian lands along the lower reaches of Kern river, that Kern river was a natural stream flowing in an established and continuous channel through their lands, and that under the common law of England they were entitled to have the waters of the river flow over, through and upon their lands, undiminished in quantity and unimpaired in quality.
The defendants claimed that they were entitled by right of appropriation to divert the waters from the river for purposes of irrigation, to develop water power, and for domestic and other purposes. It was a contest, in short, between riparian rights and the right of appropriation. In addition to set- ting forth the rights of the plaintiffs the complaint alleged that the defend- ants, by diverting the water in their canals had rendered the lands of the plaintiffs dry and barren to such an extent that their cattle had neither grass to eat nor water to drink.
The papers in the suit were drawn in San Francisco and sent here to be filed in the superior court on September 2, 1880. On the morning of April 15, 1881, the trial began with Judge B. Brundage on the bench and a formidable array of counsel for both parties before the bar. Louis Haggin was in charge of the case for the defendant, and was assisted by John Garber and George Flournoy, Sr., father of the present justice of the peace of the sixth township of Kern county. Hall McAllister was nominally the chief counsel for Lux, but R. E. Houghton, then a comparatively young attorney, was the active man and really the one who outlined and carried on the campaign.
The reporters of the day declared that the testimony, the taking of which consumed forty-nine days, was tedious and uninteresting, but it is suspected that they were too close to the scene to realize in full its dramatic interest or even its numerous comedy features. The witnesses included everybody in the county who was supposed to know anything about the his- tory and habits of Kern river, the locations of its various courses and the dates when these courses were changed, or anything concerning the appro- priation of water from the river, and in addition to these, sundry expert wit- nesses who had read in books what happened in Calcutta or what the river Nile did in the days of the Pharaohs and whose testimony was duly objected to because they had not been present at the times and places mentioned nor seen with their own eyes the things they pretended to describe.
Walter James, chief engineer for Haggin, and S. W. Wible, superin- tendent and engineer for Miller & Lux, were the star performers and spent day after day on the witness stand, mainly under cross-examination. Mean- time all the attorneys whittled redwood shingles, and it was a part of the unofficial duties of the sheriff to see that the supply of timber never ran low.
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John Garber carried a potato in his pocket for luck, and developed a habit of taking it out and shaking it at the witness when he asked a question of especial moment. R. E. Houghton, on a like occasion would stand up, reach across the table and dip his pen in the ink as though he intended forthwith to write the answer down in plain black and white so that it could never be denied, altered or evaded evermore. The witnesses were even more eccen- tric and picturesque. An old man by name of Stevens, who came from the head of the South Fork valley, made a speech in response to every question that was put to him, and finally as he was leaving the stand he swept his long arm out over the big assemblage of pioneers who crowded the space behind the attorneys and remarked : "I'm gettin' to be an old man, and I don't know if I'll ever see you all here together again; and I want to say to you now, while I've got you all together, that I'm the oldest settler in Kern county." Of course one of the attorneys took an exception to the statement and asked that it be stricken from the records.
Each evening when court was adjourned for the day the attorneys and many of the witnesses for Haggin were driven to headquarters at Bellevue where the walls beneath the spacious porches were lined with maps and diagrams. Here the net results of the day's testimony were reviewed, and engineers, zanjeros and scouts of all descriptions were sent out to get what- ever evidence was needed to fill in the gaps.
In the meantime, if the local papers were not doing much in the way of reporting the trial they were sparing no effort to prove what the judgment of the court should be. Despite all efforts to put him out of business, Julius Chester was still editing the Southern Californian, and was presenting through its columns the contentions of the riparianists as represented by Miller & Lux. The Californian, owned by A. C. Maude and edited by Richard Hudnut, was doing no less valiant service for Haggin. But the choicest language of which these masters were possessed they saved for rhetorically pummelling each other.
The last witness was heard on June 2, 1881, and all the testimony, when it was written up, made a stack of paper four feet high. For the convenience of the lawyers the court consented to hear the arguments in San Francisco. The speech-making began on June 20th, and on November 3d, Judge Brun- dage rendered his decision in favor of Haggin, which was to the effect that the appropriators were entitled to the water of the river as against the riparian owners, represented by Lux. Of course Miller & Lux appealed to the supreme court, and forthwith in Kern county there began a fierce political campaign to re-elect Judge Brundage on the one hand and to defeat him on the other.
Kern River Plays Another Prank
We have seen heretofore in the course of this narrative that Kern river seemed possessed of a certain titanic sense of humor, and none will be sur- prised to read that while the supreme court took its time in considering a mass of evidence, a gist of which was that neither party to the suit was willing to let the other have any water, the river began to increase its flow, and in the early part of 1884 the two chief parties to the suit were engaged in a fiercer fight than ever to keep the swollen river from flooding their lands, even though it involved turning the excess waters over on the other.
As indicated in his statement referred to in the previous chapter, Haggin had reclaimed the beds of Kern and Buena Vista lakes and had built the Goose lake canal to carry off any excess water that the Calloway and other
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irrigation canals could not handle. The Goose lake canal led off to the north, and on the south side of the river Haggin had built the Cole levee farther to prevent the river from breaking over and flooding his reclaimed lake bottoms.
By far the greater part of Haggin's reclaimed lands lay to the south of the river, and by far the greater part of Miller & Lux's reclaimed lands lay to the north. The latter had built levees along the north bank to protect their lands, and had constructed the great Kern Valley Water Company's canal to carry any excess waters off to the north of their cultivated fields.
As the snows melted in the mountains and the river lapped higher and higher against the levees it became a most absorbing question as to whether the waters would break on Miller's side or on Haggin's. They broke on Haggin's side on May 17, 1884, and in a few hours there was a hole in the Cole levee forty feet wide and through it a stream of muddy water, twenty feet deep, was rushing to cover all the lands that Haggin had reclaimed with so great expense.
There were great forces of men on the Haggin ranches in those days, and in very short order Billy Carr, Walter James, C. L. Conner, Dave Coffee and other superintendents and foremen for miles around were dispatching work- men, teams, scrapers, shovels and sand bags to the break. With the bags of sand the broken ends of the levee were rip-rapped to prevent further washing, and a row of piling was driven across the break.
Early in these proceedings Henry Miller arrived with R. E. Houghton. Having a suit in the supreme court in which their contention was that they were entitled to have the full flow of the river run over, through and upon their lands at all times, Miller and his attorney were hardly in a position to ob- ject to Haggin's men repairing a break in their levee that would tend to throw the full force of the stream over on Miller & Lux. But Houghton was fully equal to the emergency. It happened that Miller owned forty acres of land in the bed of Buena Vista lake (surrounded by the Haggin sections) and Miller set up the claim that he was entitled to have the river flow unhindered over, through and upon this land, also.
Miller strode up to the break in the levee where Walter James was superintending the driving of the piles. "What are you doing here? What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"I'm just carrying out my instructions," drawled Walter James in his imperturbable manner. "We thought we'd put a few piles in here, because we may want to build a bridge across, or something."
"Well, I don't want you to stop my water. I don't want you to stop my water. Do you understand? I don't want you to stop my water," shouted Miller. "Have a cigar, Mr. James."
So soon as the train could take him back to San Francisco, Houghton went to Judge Hunt of the superior court, and on a petition setting forth that Miller was the owner of a piece of land, to wit, forty acres, etc., and that whereas when the waters of Kern river were allowed to flow over it unhin- dered, etc., large quantities of tules and other plants and grasses valuable for feed grew thereon, and whereas one Haggin had a force of men at work with piles, a pile driver, brush, etc., endeavoring to restrain the said water from flowing over Miller's said land, etc., and whereas Miller would be greatly damaged, etc., etc., an injunction was duly secured.
By the time the injunction was served the ends of the levee were pretty well protected with sand bags, and most of the piling had been driven, but the water was flowing through the break almost as rapidly as ever.
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Walter James was out at the levee when a telegram arrived ordering him to make all speed to San Francisco. He jumped on the horse that brought the messenger, galloped to Bellevue, and found there another horse saddled and waiting. A man thrust into his hand a purse of money. "The gates are all wide open," they shouted, and James was off for the Southern Pacific depot. He got there fifteen minutes late, but the train was an hour behind time, and he walked over to the hotel. The first man he saw was S. W. Wible.
"Hello, James," said Wible, "where are you going?"
"I'm just going down to the city for a few days," said James.
"Well, that's funny," said Wible, "I'm just going down to the city myself. Come in and let's have a drink."
In San Francisco the next morning James assured Louis Haggin that if he had a free hand and all the resources of the Haggin ranches at his command he could stop the break in the Cole levee in twenty-four hours. Haggin told him to take the first train back to Bakersfield, and to look for a telegram at Lathrop. Meantime the lawyer would undertake to get Judge Hunt's injunction lifted, and if he succeeded he would send a message to Lathrop reading, "Make the trip."
It was no small task to get the injunction set aside for the reason that after he had issued it Judge Hunt had gone on a fishing trip back into the mountains, leaving orders for nobody to interfere with any matter in his court during his absence. Louis Haggin, however, prevailed on another judge to set aside Judge Hunt's order, and James got his telegraphic instruc- tion to "Make the trip."
On the journey home James laid out his campaign, and on his arrival at Bellevue orders were dispatched in all directions. Florence Gleason with a gang of men was already at the gap in the levee filling sand bags. Word was sent to C. L. Connor to report at once at the levee with all his men. J. E. Yancey and Frank Collins with the crews under them were to follow a little later, and still later were to come C. W. Jackson and the men from the Poso ranch. There were enough men, altogether, to keep fresh shifts at work at the gap all day and all night.
The camp previously established on the levee was enlarged to accommo- date no less than five hundred men. Under the direction of Dave Coffee the hoisting engine used in driving piles was rigged to haul wagons loaded with sand along the levee. Heavy cables were laced back and forth among the piles, and the work of building in a wall of sand bags to stop the rushing flood proceeded with system and dispatch.
"But R. E. Houghton never overlooked anything," said Walter James in telling the story. While Louis Haggin was getting rid of Judge Hunt's injunction in San Francisco, Houghton was getting another injunction out of the superior court of Napa county. This was issued at the request of George Cornwell, who owned a small piece of land on the south side of the river and many thousands on the north side and who made the same representation as Miller had made before Judge Hunt.
Wible was less than a day behind James, but when he had reached Bakersfield, and came dashing down the road along the Cole levee with his Napa county injunction and Sheriff Coons, James and his great crew of men were swarming over the levee like human ants, working in a frenzy of haste to place the last sand bags that would stop the torrent of water.
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Every superintendent from the Haggin ranches in Kern county was there, with Billy Carr in personal command. The sheriff waved the injunction and ordered the work stopped, but everyone was too busy to hear. It was an intense moment, for many months of work, tens of thousands of dollars, and (what was almost more than either for the men of fighting blood who were ranged on either side) victory or defeat in the contest depended on a few more minutes of time.
Sheriff Coons handed the injunction to Carr and explained its purport, but Carr had to read the document, and his glasses were over in the tent. He went to the tent, got his glasses, sat down and read the injunction and the complaint which accompanied it. All the while Wible was enjoining haste. When Carr finished studying the order of the court he desired James to read it, and James read it, quite as slowly and carefully as Carr had done. Wible stormed over to where Dave Coffee was rushing in the sand bags with redoubled haste and energy, and commanded him to desist in the name of the law. But Coffee knew nothing of law or injunctions and he kept right on shoving the sand bags down to the men who were building them, now, just above the surface of the yellow water. Finally Carr sauntered back from the tent, saw that the gap in the levee was closed and the bags of sand rose clear and dry above the surface, and held up his hand as a signal of submission to the court's decree.
But one thing had not been done. James had buried logs, or "dead men" on the upper side of the levee and had attached to them loops of cable ready to slip over the tops of the piling to help them carry the great weight of the water pressing on the narrow dam. But these loops of cable had not been adjusted, and the upper ends of the piling were without support. For a little while the piles and the wall of sand bags stood, and then, as the water low- ered on the outer side, they leaned and swayed; the sand-bag wall splashed out of sight, the broken piles bobbed merrily to the surface, and the yellow flood leaped through the breech once more to spread over section after section of Haggin's reclaimed swamp land, and "undiminished in quantity and unim- paired in quality," flowed over, through and upon Miller's forty acres of Buena Vista lake bottom until it was covered a dozen or fifteen feet in depth, and it remained covered until the wild geese came and went and went and came again.
On July 5th, more than a month after the wall of sand bags washed out, the water was still pouring through the Cole levee upon Haggin's land at the rate of 3000 cubic feet per second.
But R. E. Houghton never overlooked anything. On July 26th he had W. B. Carr and Walter James haled before the court of Napa county to show cause why they should not be punished for contempt of court for consuming a quarter of an hour in reading the court's injunction.
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