Vineland Echoes--the Yurok Ghosts?

[Richard Romeo]

from today's NY Times:

Spun and Unspun Tales of a California Cotton King
By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: January 8, 2004

ORCORAN, Calif. — When the fog descends on this part
of the San Joaquin Valley in winter, the limitless
horizon of summer disappears. The lush cotton and bean
fields whose harvests clothe and feed America become
no more than a memory, and a hope.

Legend has it that the fog is a curse visited by the
spirits of the Yokut Indians who made their home
around Tulare Lake until white men stole their land
and drained the lake to plant the bottom in cotton.
Tulare Lake was once the largest body of fresh water
west of the Mississippi, home to thousands of
migratory birds that nested among the tall tule reeds
that encircled its shores.

Today the dry lake bed forms the core of the vast land
holdings of the J. G. Boswell Company, whose 150,000
acres make it the largest private landowner in
California. The company and its agricultural empire
are the legacy of Col. J. G. Boswell, a Georgia cotton
planter who fled the boll weevil blight of the 1920's
to make his fortune in the West. Colonel Boswell and
his descendants, who control the company to this day,
amassed their empire through clever dealings, astute
lobbying in Sacramento and Washington and, most
important, control of the flow of water through
California's arid Central Valley. The federal
government generously aided them in the monumental
task of harnessing the water of four rivers that carry
the snowmelt of the Sierra Nevada in the spring. Those
rivers once nourished Tulare Lake; now they irrigate
the lands of Boswell and the other giant
agribusinesses that dominate the valley....

.......


rich


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