California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History

by Richard White, Jesse Amble White (Photographer)

Overview

Winner of the 2021 California Book Award (Californiana category)

A brilliant California history, in word and image, from an award-winning historian and a documentary photographer.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to “print the legend,” collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California’s landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing.

Jesse White’s evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard’s historical investigations. A vista of Drakes Estero conjures the darkly amusing story of the Drake Navigators Guild and its dubious efforts to establish an Anglo-Saxon heritage for California. The restored Spanish missions of Los Angeles frame another origin story in which California’s native inhabitants, civilized through contact with friars, gift their territories to white settlers. But the history is not so placid. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back—the only question is when.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780594291541
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	512,975
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Richard White is the author of many acclaimed histories, including the groundbreaking study of the transcontinentals, Railroaded, winner of the LA Times Book Prize and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is Margaret Byrne Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Jesse Amble White is a landscape and documentary photographer.

Table of Contents

Maps xi

Preface xii

Part 1 Drake's Dream 1

Chapter 1 Is Seeing Believing? 2

Chapter 2 What Drake Meant 14

Chapter 3 Drake's Plate: Finding Drake 20

Chapter 4 Drake Stories 24

Part 2 The Mission Myth 33

Chapter 5 Walls and Palms 34

Chapter 6 The Virgin and the Gabrieleños 42

Chapter 7 Huertas 50

Part 3 Coyote and the Tachis 58

Chapter 8 Wild Horses and New Worlds 60

Chapter 9 When the Legend Becomes Fact 70

Chapter 10 Genocide 80

Part 4 Property 91

Chapter 11 Cadastral Landscapes 94

Chapter 12 The Shatters: A Point Reyes Genealogy 100

Chapter 13 Braided Rivers, Braided Lives 106

Part 5 Capital 114

Chapter 14 Carquinez Strait 116

Chapter 15 Mussel Slough Country 124

Chapter 16 Tenants 136

Part 6 URBS in Horto 149

Chapter 17 Citrus 150

Chapter 18 Allensworth 158

Chapter 19 Corcoran 166

Part 7 World Wars and their Aftermaths 174

Chapter 20 Cotton 176

Chapter 21 World War II 186

Chapter 22 Peopling the Darkness: Abandoned Houses and the Stories They Tell 194

Chapter 23 Bob Hope and the Indians 202

Part 8 Moving Through Time and Space 211

Chapter 24 Moving Water: The Crisis of the San Joaquin Valley 212

Chapter 25 Restoring the Past 226

Chapter 26 San Gabriel River 236

Conclusion 246

Epilogue 257

Acknowledgments 263

Notes 265

Illustration Credits 309

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

"A work of art that brings an evocative intimacy and lucidity to California’s past."

Jack E. Davis

"A deeply original work. No one who reads this book will see the state’s landscape in the same way again."

Claudio Saunt

"In this ingenious, entertaining book, Richard White, the preeminent chronicler of the American West, alters our understanding of how the Golden State came to be."

Geoffrey C. Ward

"Richard White’s California history is brilliant and dark."

Anne Hyde

"A highly original, important rumination on myth and history, images and words, memories and meaning. This is a beautiful book."

William Deverell

"Every page of this book displays history as surprising, confounding, unsettling, and—more often than the cynical might expect—spirit lifting."

Patty Limerick

"White tells his stories with economy, but nevertheless with considerable nuance, subtlety, wry humor, and in fierce confrontation with the unvarnished truth. As its title puns, California Exposures is a powerfully muckraking work, in the great California tradition of Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, and Mike Davis. If one has time for only one book on the history of California, this one stakes a strong claim to being it."

Santa Barbara Independent - Wade Graham

"Richard White’s brilliance is his ability to excavate history from myth. With wit, grace, and wisdom, he has written an inimitable, indispensable history."

Miriam Pawel

"A master class in how to interpret California landscapes past and present."

William Cronon

★ 2019-12-22
Masterful explorations of the Golden State by a leading historian of the American West.

White (American History/Stanford Univ.; The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, 2017, etc.) teams with his photographer son, Jesse, in a fruitful, highly illuminating collaboration born of a dare to shape a historical text out of an assemblage of images. The result is, the author admits, incomplete: The story of Watts is absent, that of Silicon Valley hinted at, and "the state's frequently peculiar politics sometimes enter the story, but more often do not." Nonetheless, White dismantles and builds at the same time, interrogating the well-worn story of Sir Francis Drake's landing at Point Reyes and complicating the subsequent enshrinement by Episcopalian monument builders with the fact that their hero was a pirate, which "made the celebration of his religious faith incongruous." The author returns to Point Reyes to recount the working-class immigrants who made a living there, a narrative of Japanese and Italian households that picnicked together but were subjected to different fates when World War II arrived; that narrative is braced by historical photographs and Jesse's sweeping landscapes. White's principal interest lies precisely with those working people who made California, among them the Native peoples who labored in the irrigated orchards and vegetable beds outside the main mission compound at San Fernando: "Gardens were for contemplation and relaxation; in the huertas, people worked." At Point Reyes again, he examines the lives of the men, women, and children at the "alphabet ranches" (named D Ranch, F Ranch, and so on) who worked as tenants in places where the ranchers hoped "that good years would outnumber bad." Sometimes they were right, a fact that has kept people coming to California in endless numbers for generations. White gives them voice, writing thoughtfully of the many cultures and ethnicities that have contributed to building the state.

Necessary reading for students of California history and a model for place-based historical studies to come.

Kirkus Reviews