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 15

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 15

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"Did you have any thought in your mind, Mr. Carr," said the Napa lawyer who appeared for Houghton, "that you might profit by the delay you were causing?"

"Not in the least," said Carr.

"Of course not," said the Napa lawyer with fine sarcasm.

The Napa judge let Carr and James off with a mild admonition. but Judge Hunt was more obdurate. He declared that no court had any authority to set aside his injunction, and that all the time the five hundred men were

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rushing sand bags into the break they were in contempt. "The defendants are fined $1000 each."

Supreme Court Decides for Riparianists

Another victory was coming to the Miller forces. The same issue.of the Haggin & Carr paper that contained the short paragraph about the Cole break and the San Francisco injunction carried an equally short paragraph stating that the great water suit had been resubmitted. It took until October 27, 1884, for the supreme court to reach a final decision, and the remittitur was not filed in this county until May 28, 1886, but not to make the story long, the supreme justices, or a majority of them, found that Judge Brundage had committed an error in not allowing certain testimony on the part of the defense that would have made but little difference, probably, in the main issue. But accompanying their order was a most important expression of opinion to the effect that the English common law respecting riparian rights governed the use of water in the state of California. In other words, as the Chester and Hudnut literary bureaus soon after made the whole state aware. the owner of land on the banks of a natural water course was entitled to have all the waters of the stream flow over and through his land, undiminished in quantity and unimpaired in quality. That meant that nobody could take water out of a stream in an irrigating ditch and spread it over his land, for if he did so, certainly he could not restore it again to its natural channel, un- diminished and unimpaired, or either.

Of course every irrigator in the state sat up and howled, and it was not very long before an active and able politician like Billy Carr had them organized and holding big irrigation conventions, first at Riverside and then at Fresno, and drafting laws for submission to the state legislature that were calculated to send the doctrine of riparian rights back to England on the first tramp steamer that left the Golden Gate.

Carr did more. He went to work quietly among the members of the state legislature and before Miller's men knew what was going on he had the signatures of about two-thirds of them appended to a petition asking the governor to call a special session of the legislature and virtually pledging themselves to enact into law the measures framed at the two irrigation con- ventions.

Governor Calls Legislature Together

Armed with this petition and reinforced by a stalwart bunch of his friends from Kern county and elsewhere, Carr met Governor Stoneman at a hotel in San Francisco. Everybody had a good time, and the governor, who was a veteran of the Union army, distinguished and endeared himself in the eyes of Carr's southern followers by consuming without a quiver more mint julips than any man in the crowd from below the Mason and Dixon line could carry off. Before the evening was over the call for the special session of the legislature was signed.

This was in July, 1886, but meantime Kern county had gone through another political campaign (the hottest and most vindictive, perhaps, which was ever waged in the valley) in which the issue turned on the election of the superior judge before whom the great water suit should come for re-trial. Brundage, of course, was supported by the Haggin & Carr forces, and all of Miller's strength was thrown behind Judge Arick. The latter was victorious by the scant majority of four votes.

Meantime, too, the whole state was being flooded with the fruits of the

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labors of Chester and Hudnut and other writers of the Miller & Lux and Carr & Haggin literary bureaus. Supplements treating the water question from Miller's side were furnished free to every paper of importance in the state that would handle them. The next week an equally copious flood of Haggin supplements descended on the readers. Plain print was seconded by whole page, colored cartoons, and these in addition to being sent to the papers were posted on the dead walls about the towns like circus announce- ments.

The extra session of the legislature convened in August, 1886, and with the din of a state-wide battle in their ears, the members of the assembly passed the irrigation bills as per schedule. But the senate balked. It would not defeat the bills nor would it pass them, and on September 11, 1886, the legislature adjourned with the question of water legislation immersed a thousand fathoms deep in statu quo.

It was sometime during the events recorded in this chapter that Henry Miller made the important discovery and confided it to a friend that "plenty of money makes a good politician."

How much money it took to make the very high grade politicians that fought each other to a stand still in the legislature of 1886, the author has not been able, even approximately, to ascertain, but battles like the one over the judgeship and battles like that at Cole's levee were evidently so immensely expensive that both Haggin & Carr and Miller & Lux wished for peace. The big suit fell to Judge Arick to try, but he granted a petition for a change of venue to Tulare county, which the supreme court sustained, and there the case lay until all the points involved in the contest were settled to the satis- faction of both parties by the celebrated Miller-Haggin agreement.

Miller-Haggin Agreement Ends Litigation

This agreement, which was signed on July 28, 1888, and which bears the signatures of thirty-one corporations and fifty-eight individuals owning water rights at the time on Kern river, practically divided the waters of the stream between Miller & Lux and Haggin and the different canal companies that were represented by them. The length of the document is fully commensurate with its importance and the number of parties interested, but as it was later incorporated into the findings of the Shaw decree, issued by Judge Lucien Shaw of Los Angeles sitting in the superior court of Kern county in 1895, and has been made a part of every deed executed by either of the two great land owners of the county since then, a scant summary of its provisions here is justifiable.

The agreement begins by recognizing that certain of the parties have riparian rights, and d that certain other of the parties have vested rights by appropriation against all the world except the aforesaid riparian owners. This point settled, the agreement provides that the parties of the first part, represented by Miller, shall have one-third of all the waters of the river during the months of March, April, May, June, July, and August of each year, and that the parties of the second part, represented by Haggin, shall have all the remainder.

It provides for the measurement and delivery of the water, and for the construction of the Buena Vista Lake reservoir, covering approximately thirty-six sections of land. The two parties join in this undertaking, sharing equally the expense of construction, repair and maintenance. The two parties also share equally the expense of building the levees necessary to carry the

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water of the river from the second point of measurement to the reservoir, and of building an outlet canal from Buena Vista lake to the Kern Valley Water Company's canal. Both parties agree to join in suit against any person or persons who attempt to divert any water from the river above the second point of measurement, and each is to bear half the expense of such litigation. All pending suits between the two parties were to be dismissed. The agree- ment is made a perpetual covenant, running with all the land owned or claimed by any of the parties within the territory described in the contract.

CHAPTER XII First Attempt at Colonization

The first effects of the settlement of the contests over water rights by means of the Miller-Haggin agreement were to stiffen land values in all the irrigated portion of the county, and to bring to a head the plans of Haggin and his associates for subdividing their lands and placing them on the market. The inevitable great expense of developing water rights, building canals and improving large ranches had been increased enormously by the outlays con- nected with the water contests with Livermore and Chester and then with Miller & Lux and by the expensive political campaigns incident thereto, and by the summer of 1888 the expenditures of Haggin and Tevis in their Kern county ventures had reached a huge aggregate. Meantime the growing of cotton and hops had not proven remunerative on account of the large labor cost and the failure of the attempts to secure low-priced workmen, and the same difficulty seemed to place a bar across other avenues to profit through agricultural activities on a vast scale. Lloyd Tevis, it is remembered, was a banker, and from the viewpoint of a banker who keeps tab on the amount of money invested and the amount of interest which it should bring in at current rates, the Kern county property of Haggin & Carr certainly did not look very hopeful.

Hence the decision to colonize the Haggin lands. But from the start differences arose between the parties interested as to the exact methods of procedure. According to seemingly reliable statements, it appears that Carr was skeptical about the wisdom of beginning the land sales at all just at that time, and he interposed strenuous objections to parting with any of the lands which had been planted to alfalfa or otherwise brought into a revenue producing condition. He objected, also, it is said, to selling the most desir- able of the lands, which generally were those south of Bakersfield under the Kern Island canal. L. C. McAfee and C. Brower, managers of the sales de- partment under the name of the Land Department of J. B. Haggin, proposed making certain improvements on the lands before offering them for sale. and employing a superintendent to advise and instruct the colonists in the management of their farms and orchards so that fewer mistakes would be made through inexperience. But all this involved more expenditures, and the plan did not meet with favor from those who had to sign the checks.

Still other points of difference arose. S. W. Fergusson, who had estab- lished a reputation as a boomer of real estate subdivisions, was sent to take charge of the Haggin colonization, and clashes of authority arose between him and Carr. For example. Carr and Fergusson differed as to the proper size for the irrigation ditches that were built through the colonies. Gradually

BUSINESS SECTION OF BAKERSFIELD AFTER THE BIG FIRE OF JULY, 1889

FOURTH AND CENTER STREETS, TAFT, IN 1910

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Fergusson superseded Carr in the control of different departments of the Haggin activities, and it was not in Carr's nature to like a second place. In the end Carr sold out his interest, and the Kern County Land Company succeeded to Haggin & Carr. But these initial elements of failure in the colonization project were under the surface, and the people of Bakersfield rejoiced over the prospect that at last the great land holdings that had hedged the town about and impeded its growth and development were to be broken up. It was like opening the throttle to the pent up energies of the community, and new enterprises began to spring into life as the restraint was removed. There were other incentives to hope and progress. At a banquet tendered him by the citizens of Bakersfield, General Beale announced that he had plans for the colonization of the Tejon ranch; the Southern Pacific was grading the Porterville branch railroad; the railroad shops were being moved to Sumner, and more and more confidence was being placed in the constant report that the Valley railroad was soon to be built.

Many Plans for Progress

Under the influence of all these better prospects the Southern Hotel Association began the construction of its first building at the corner of Nineteenth street and Chester avenue; L. P. St. Clair and O. O. Mattson undertook the construction of a gas and electric lighting system; H. H. Fish, H. A. Blodget and T. J. Packard launched their plans for building a street railway system, and citizens of the town and land owners of the sur- rounding country subscribed a fund of $3000 for advertising the county at Los Angeles, then as now the distributing point for the Eastern home-seekers. In the spring of 1899 the Postal Telegraph Company completed its line to Bakersfield, the people of the county voted by 852 to 381 to bond the county for $250,000 for public improvements including an addition to the court house, a new jail, a county hospital and the grading and improving of many roads in different parts of the county.

Fire Wipes Out Business Section

In the midst of all these evidences of progress and while Bakersfield was looking forward with greater hope and expectancy than ever before in its history, came the fire of July 7, 1889, and wiped the business part of the little city clean. The business section of Bakersfield was confined in those days to the area bounded on the west by I street, on the south by Seven- teenth, on the east by M, and on the north by Twentieth. Practically every- thing within these limits was destroyed.

The fire started in or near N. E. Kelsey's residence on Twentieth street about midway between Chester and I street, just back of where the Bank of Bakersfield now stands, or about on the spot where the rear quarter of the bank building is located. Mrs. Kelsey was getting the Sunday dinner on a gasoline stove, but as to further details of how the building caught fire reports differ widely. The volunteer fire department responded to the alarm with ordinary promptness, and hitched the suction hose of the Silsby steam fire engine to the old cast iron hydrant that still stands in front of the Southern Hotel at Nineteenth and Chester. This hydrant connected with the old Scrib- ner water system, which was supplied by pumps and wells located at the southeast corner of Seventeenth street and Chester avenne. The small mains and the light engine, however, were insufficient to provide a stream that would check the flames. There was no wind, and the smoke and flames for a time

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mounted straight upward. In a very little time the fire spread to the Kelsey furniture and undertaking establishment on the corner where the Bank of Bakersfield is, and to the store of Hayden & White and the Echo office, all of which were on the same half block with Kelsey's residence and faced on Chester avenue. From these the Southern Hotel Association's new building at Nineteenth and Chester was ignited. By that time the heat from the flames had driven the firemen east on Nineteenth street, where the hose was dropped into one of the cisterns built at the street intersections on purpose to supply water for fighting fire. These cisterns were connected with the Town ditch by redwood conduits six inches square, but the conduits had grown full of roots and the cisterns were soon exhausted. Meantime burning shingles carried high in the air by the draft from the fire, had fallen on the roof of the Union stable, on the south side of Nineteenth street between K and L, and a new center of conflagration had been started. Also the fire had leaped across Nineteenth street to the south from the Southern hotel and was eating out the line of buildings on the west side of Chester avenue. Everything was burned along this street as far south as Seventeenth street, where the skating rink, standing where the new Morgan building now is, was the last building consumed. The water tower, diagonally across the avenue, was saved by the man in charge, who climbed to the roof and kept it wet down.

For a long time the Arlington, almost in the center of the fire, was saved by two means. The roof and veranda were covered with wet blankets and a small hose was used to keep them wet, and after the fire was well under way a breeze seemed to suck around the Southern hotel corner in such a way as to keep the heat from the Arlington. The building finally succumbed to the backfire from the east, but it was one of the last to go down in the central part of town.

The Episcopal church at Seventeenth and I streets, the Catholic church at Seventeenth and K, and the Baptist church at I and Twenty-second were mentioned roughly as the limits of the burned district, although the fire did not reach really so far as the Baptist church. How completely the business houses were wiped out is illustrated by the fact that it was impossible to buy a plug of tobacco in Bakersfield after the fire.

The fire occasioned a staggering property loss to the people of Bakers- field, but none went hungry or unsheltered for a night. Very few residences were destroyed, comparatively, and probably not over a hundred people were made homeless. These were speedily cared for by the more fortunate. For provisions there were the stores of Sumner, a mile away, including the well- stocked general merchandise establishment of Ardizzi-Olcese Company, and Haggin & Carr at once hauled in a large stock of provisions of all kinds from the company store at Bellvue. Carr also had many beeves slaughtered, and everyone had meat in abundance, whether he had money to pay or not.

So soon as the news of the disaster reached San Francisco an offer of aid was tendered by that city. Bakersfield was able to answer that no aid was needed, but the people of this city remembered the prompt offer years after when San Francisco was stricken, and few communities responded more promptly or liberally to the bay city's need than did Bakersfield.

Bakersfield Quickly Rebuilds

Before the embers were cool on the lots in the burned district new offices and business houses were being established in hastily built shacks in streets. Every newspaper office in the city was destroyed, but George Wear of the

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Gazette managed to save an old hand press and some cases of type, and the usual editions were gotten out with these meagre facilities, or copy was for- warded to San Francisco and the papers printed there until new plants could be obtained. The Southern Hotel Association rebuilt better and larger than before, and almost every other burned building was replaced at once by a better one. In a year's time all the temporary buildings had disappeared from the streets, and the city was bigger and better than it had been before the fire. During the rebuilding time, of course, the town was very active. The colonists were coming then in large numbers, extensions were being made in the canal systems, and there was great activity in locating desert lands, home- steads and pre-emptions.

A little more than a year after the fire the Bank of Bakersfield was founded, engineers were surveying in the vicinity of Bakersfield for the new valley railroad, the Kern County Land Company had been organized to take over the Haggin & Carr holdings, and S. W. Fergusson was placed in charge of the Rosedale and other colony lands, including Greenfield and Lerdo.

Colonization on a Large Scale

Fergusson at once organized a large office force in Bakersfield, estab- lished branch agencies in the east and in England, and prepared to do a colonization business on a very large scale. His advertising and the activities of his agents soon had a stream of immigrants and prospective land buyers flowing into Bakersfield from all points of the compass. Rosedale, situated six or eight miles due west of Bakersfield, was the principal scene of the colon- ization operations, although numbers of tracts of land were sold at Greenfield and elsewhere. The Rosedale lands lie under the Calloway canal, and are chiefly light, sandy soils, easily tilled, well suited to irrigation and quite pro- ductive. Most of the newcomers were well satisfied with the propositions offered them, and sales were reasonably brisk. The arrival of the English colonists was a great event in Bakersfield. They were of all sorts and con- ditions from market gardeners of experience who had saved small sums of money in years of industry and thrift, to scions of nobility who were shipped abroad by their relatives as a last despairing means for their moral and industrial redemption. It was a vain hope so far as the latter was con- cerned.

The few farmers among the English colonists got to work in their own fashion to the amazement and mirth of the California ranchers. The latter, used to driving six to ten horses attached to a gang plow, made great sport of the English farmers who went to their fields with a boy to lead the single horse while a man held the plow handles. But the little orchards and vine- yards that the Englishmen planted grew and throve, and so did the peanuts, corn and other vegetables that they planted between the rows.

Scions of Nobility Make Things Hum

The scions of nobility for the most part disdained to toil. There were neither orchards, vineyards nor vegetables to show for their labors, but they certainly made lively times about the Southern bar and lobby and in many other parts of the city less approved by good society. Nearly all the idlers were remittance men, and they ran uniformly successful races with time to dissipate their monthly allowances before the next batch of checks came from home. If they were sent out here to be clear of the temptations of English city life they were thrown from the frying pan into the fire, for if the

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slums of Bakersfield lacked anything that the young British bloods were used to they speedily arranged to supply the deficiency and to give all vice a Western air and relish that the most artistic panderers to depravity in Euro- pean capitals could not put to blush. It was profitable to cater to the pleas- ures and follies of the remittance men, and in those days a dollar that was not in visible circulation was counted a dollar lost in Bakersfield. To illustrate how cheerfully and enthusiastically the sports from across the seas put their money into circulation while it lasted it is related that on one occasion when the birthday of the queen was being celebrated with a banquet at the South- ern, the loyalty rose to such a height that not only was her majesty's health drunk copiously in the Southern's best champagne but the cheering crowd came storming out of the dining room and tried to pour champagne down the throats of the ponies tied at the rail beside the curb.

An International Romance

With this story of the Rosedale remittance men belongs the romantic tale of the wooing of Loretta Addis by Lord Sholto Douglas, third son of the Marquis of Queensbury. Loretta Addis was Miss Maggie Mooney's stage name, and Miss Maggie Mooney was a pretty and piquant little Irish girl who made an honest if not conventional living for herself by doing a turn on the stage of big Frank Carson's place on Twentieth street.

Lord Sholto and many others were captivated by Miss Mooney's charms, and Sholto proposed on every appropriate and inappropriate occasion he could find or manufacture. But Loretta was suspicious of alliances with the nobil- ity, and she did not lack friends who told her that the marquis and marchion- ess never would sanction the match and that if she married their son she certainly would be cast off and renounced but a little later. Being cast off and renounced did not suit the fancy of this spunky Irish girl, and she set her face sternly against the tender appeals of Sholto. Finally the young lord's friends interfered to break up the languishing match, and failing in persuasive tactics they had Sholto arrested on a charge of insanity. Then they set to work to get Miss Mooney out of Bakersfield.

Undoubtedly this would have been accomplished had it not been for the exigencies of journalism, which include the fostering of a good story and the making of a sequel to a good story when the good story plays out. The love affairs of Lord Sholto and Loretta Addis made a good story, or at least the stories that the Bakersfield correspondents sent out looked good to the San Francisco city editors, and they gave the Bakersfield correspondents carte blanc, printed their stuff on the front page and clamored for more. C. P. Fox and W. D. Young, both familiar figures in Kern county journalism, were local correspondents for the Chronicle and the Examiner and were working the story together. Five dollars a column and full space rates for pictures was like a gold mine while it lasted, but it did not last sufficiently long. When Sholto was locked up in one of the private rooms at the sheriff's quar- ters and Sholto's friends were about to succeed in persuading or hiring Miss Mooney to move to another city, Young and Fox saw the end of their pay streak. They held a solemn consultation and decided that the only way to save the story was to complete Sholto's wooing for him. So they hired a hack and drove in all state to Miss Mooney's lodgings. She received them graciously, but turned a deaf ear to the eloquent words in which they pictured Sholto's double despair, spurned by his heart's desire and charged with madness, for nothing more than that he loved the fair Loretta.

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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 15

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