Remembering historian Louise Pubols

Louise Pubols and Bill Deverell at the Huntington Library in February 2017.

By Bill Deverell

The field of western American history lost a true talent and a wonderful human being with the recent death of Louise Pubols. Trained as an historian at the University of Wisconsin, Louise had been the historian at the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West and, following that, was Chief Curator of the History Department of the Oakland Museum of California. Funny, smart, kind, unflappable, and ever so curious about the history of early California, Louise was a shining member of our community of scholars, as clever as she was kind. ICW was privileged to publish her superb, award-winning book – The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California – as the inaugural contribution to our Western Histories Series. We recently had Louise join us to talk about new research, tracing the mysterious arc of a mysterious woman in early 19th century California, and we will cherish the experience of being with her as she expressed her fascination with the elusive seductions of history. So many people in the academy and aligned worlds of archives and museums have been touched by Louise, her warmth and her scholarship, and she will be missed terribly.

Revisiting the 2008 Sunbelt Rising Conference

By Michelle Nickerson

When Darren Dochuk and I convened the Sunbelt Rising conference in 2008, it was because we thought that the Bush-era political economic climate and recent scholarly developments demanded that we bring people together to rethink the importance of the Sunbelt as a twentieth- and twenty-first century region. In fact, the success of the conservative movement and our own research on the American right originally inspired a conference on “Sunbelt Conservatism,” but the burgeoning research on growth liberalism, civil rights reform, and the Global South caused us to expand the political scope while reaching intentionally towards economic themes. For the same reasons it made sense to be interdisciplinary, so four of our thirteen writers are political scientists: Sylvia Manzano, Daniel HoSang, Lyman Kellstedt, and James Guth.

For the presentations (which would ultimately be published) we wanted work that represented much needed updates on the region, so we chose authors who addressed the following: expansion of prisons and state power, the Latinoization of politics and economic life, the advancement of private and commercial property interests, migration of people and capital across the borderlands, growth of the energy sector and its impact on the Navajo, frostbelt to sunbelt migration, and the nexus of evangelical Christianity and capitalism.

We had two gatherings that year—at the Huntington in the Fall of 2008 and at Southern Methodist University in the Spring of 2009. In addition to generous funding and hospitality from ICW, we were part of an annual conference series sponsored by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU that develops presentations into essay volumes.

Our first meeting on that Friday in September assembled us into one of the Huntington’s Ahmanson classrooms for the first round of workshopping. Having read the first draft of each other’s essays in preparation for the event, we subjected them to sustained forty-five minute critiques. On Saturday, the scholars gave presentations to a lively audience in the Overseers’ Room. I have memories of a fantastic crowd—professors and students from the region sharing space with the curious public that often turns out for Huntington scholarly events. Our plan was to keep the presentations short, with four in one panel, which turned out to be perfect since it invited substantial audience participation. There were great discussions; and we left Pasadena energized and brimming with notes for our revisions.

Seven months later we reconvened in Dallas for the repeat conference at SMU. Looking back, I realize that Darren and I demanded a lot from our scholars to make them meet twice, but the intensity of our September Huntington meeting made the Texas work session fun. I remember watching presentations by historians, bleary-eyed from margaritas the late night before. The multiple drafts forced by these gatherings, moreover, pushed our project swiftly along its schedule.

We are very proud of the volume it generated, ultimately published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011, called Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region.

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Michelle Nickerson is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.

West Work: Rethinking Manifest Destiny

This 1836 map by James Webster comes from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

By Thomas Richards, Jr.

This past June the Huntington Library generously provided me a fellowship to research its vast manuscript holdings in the history of the American West. The research was meant to provide additional sources for my book manuscript, tentatively titled The North America that Almost Was: Breakaway Republics and Contested Sovereignty in the Era of Manifest Destiny, which is based upon a dissertation I defended at Temple University in the fall of 2016.

My study examines the motivations and subsequent actions of Americans who left U.S. borders between 1836 and 1846, for places as diverse as the Republic of Texas, Upper Canada, Indian Territory, Oregon Country, and Mexican California. Historians have often defined these American migrants as harbingers of the United States’ “Manifest Destiny,” who longed to expand U.S. borders. However, a closer reading of their letters and diaries at the time reveals a much more complicated story, one in which most migrants left U.S. borders because the United States no longer facilitated their economic and social ambitions. Thus, once beyond these borders, migrants cared little whether the United States would expand in the near future, but instead sought to assert local sovereignty that would further their own goals. Indeed, for several years in the late 1830s and early 1840s, migrants (and many other Americans) imagined that the United States would never expand, but rather North America would be composed of several Anglo-American republics. My study concludes with a reinterpretation of the politics surrounding the Mexican War and the Oregon Treaty. I argue that one overlooked reason for Polk’s aggression was because he reached a similar conclusion as many migrants; for him, however, any independent Anglo-American republic would be a distinct threat to U.S. expansion, and thus the independent political actions of Americans beyond U.S. borders needed to be promptly curbed.

While at the Huntington, I have been primarily examining the library’s rich sources on Mexican California, including both the papers of Californios and Americans who already resided in the territory, as well as the diaries and letters of American overlanders traveling to the region. These include prominent collections like the Abel Stearns Papers, and also lesser known holdings such as “Affidavits of Americans in Mexico, 1840,” in which Americans captured during the infamous Graham Affair provided statements of what their lives were like in California prior to their arrests. In addition, I have also explored collections on Oregon Country, particularly the Elkanah Walker papers, as well the Huntington’s substantial holdings of overland trail diaries and travelogues detailing the journey to Oregon. The Huntington’s Mormon File has likewise been immensely helpful to my research, especially the Mormon Battalion diaries in the collection. Remarkably, I have even found several useful items in areas that the Huntington is not known for – on Indian Territory in the 1830s (most are located in the American Indian File) and even Upper Canada (found in disperse items like the Gilbert Belnap Autobiography and the Edmund Kirby Papers).

In the coming months I will start a postdoctoral fellowship at Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU, where I will integrate these sources into my manuscript. I thank the Huntington for its generosity, its librarians and archivists for their kindness and immense help with my research, and its other fellows for the many interesting discussions over lunch and coffee.

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After receiving his PhD from Temple University, Thomas Richards, Jr. will start his postdoctoral fellowship at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in the Fall.

West Work is ICW’s blog series highlighting Western History scholars’ findings based on their research in local archives.

 

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Studio portrait of Aldous Leonard Huxley (circa 1942) from the Edwin Hubble Papers archived at the Huntington Library.

By Peter Richardson

On this day in 1894, Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a prominent family of writers, scientists, and physicians. He studied literature at Oxford and established himself as a successful novelist, poet, and journalist. A member of the Bloomsbury Set, he also befriended D.H. Lawrence and later edited his letters.

Huxley’s fifth novel, the dystopian Brave New World, appeared in 1932. It was both a jab at the earlier utopian works of H.G. Wells and a complex response to the fast-paced, unreflective, and technology-obsessed mass society that Huxley saw around him. Brave New World brought him even more notoriety, but his outspoken pacifism alienated him from his British peers, and he decided to move to the United States.

In 1937, Huxley and his family arrived in Hollywood. Like many established writers, he considered the film industry a reliable source of cash. As David King Dunaway documents in Huxley in Hollywood (1989), he and his wife Maria led a busy social life that included Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Grace and Edwin Hubble, Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood, Igor Stravinsky, J. Krishnamurti, Jake Zeitlin, Anita Loos, and Greta Garbo. Huxley’s film credits included Pride and Prejudice (1940), but he also worked on Madame Curie (1943) and Jane Eyre (1944). His film career collapsed in 1952 after a cover story in Counterattack, a right-wing magazine, described him as a Communist dupe.

Intrigued by the links amongst drugs, consciousness, and art, Huxley persuaded British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond to dose him with mescaline in 1953. The Doors of Perception (1954) recounted Huxley’s experience on that day. Reviewers panned the book, whose title echoed a passage from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Huxley was unfazed. He continued to trip several times a year for the rest of his life, and his book spread the word about the virtues of psychedelic drugs.

After Maria Huxley died in 1955, Aldous invited therapist Laura Archera to his home to guide a mescaline experience. Their relationship flourished—in part over their shared interest in hypnotism, psychedelics, and spirituality—and they married in 1956. Like Maria, Laura had romantic relationships with women, and the newly married couple bought a home in the Hollywood Hills close to Virginia Pfeiffer, her longtime friend.

In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with cancer, but he managed to finish Island the following year. Frank Kermode called it “one of the worst novels ever written,” but along with Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Huxley’s fiction chimed well with the rebellious spirit of that decade, especially on college campuses.

In 1962, Huxley accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, but his health declined quickly the following year. He died in Los Angeles the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. His former daughter-in-law noted, “As he got older, I think he became more and more available … By the time he died, he was very young.”

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Peter Richardson coordinates the American Studies and California Studies programs at San Francisco State University.

Exploring Wyoming’s Murie Center

 

Postcard of Jackson, Wyoming (circa 1924) courtesy of the University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center.

By Bill Deverell

 

My mother always said, “it’s good to go away, and it’s good to come home.” Our last few days in Wyoming were magnificent. John and I met up with our friends Sage and Sassy, from the ranch, on Thursday in Jackson. That was fun, just hanging out. Sage is, well, a sage. She knows Wyoming, she knows the fissures of class and tourism and tectonic economic change, and she has a way with words. Sassy — she of the new purple hair — is fun and ever lively, a great Wyoming pal for my city-boy son. The town is more crowded this summer than I’ve ever seen it. Lots of factors to explain that. Cheap gas. Stock market up. Eclipse coming. National Parks inundated. European and Asian tourism looks (and sounds) to be up. The little town struggles with it all. Housing is a mess: anyone not really wealthy struggles to find places to live within reasonable distance. Many workers in town live well south of Jackson or up and over Teton Pass in Idaho. I grew up in Colorado, and I recognize the “Aspen Syndrome” or the “Vail Paradox.” Tourists come and keep coming. Fine dining and shopping pops up to cater to them 12 months a year. But where do the workers who stock those shelves or cook those lamb chops or make those lattes live? And how much must you pay them to give them even a faint shot at reasonable housing? This isn’t a new set of challenges to Jackson, to be sure, but the pressure and the scale of the challenges only seems to be more pressing each time I go there.

On our last day in Wyoming, John went off to camp and the high-ropes course at Teton Science School. After my last day at the gym (if you go to Jackson, if you like gyms and gym rats, and if you don’t mind getting intelligently beat on in a training-session hour, go to Wright Training and tell Crystal Wright I sent you), I had the distinct pleasure of spending mid-day with folks from Teton Science School as they showed me the Murie Center, inside Grand Teton National Park. I knew of it, but I had never been there. What a revelation. The Center, which is a former dude ranch from the early 20th century, later became the home of two pairs of husband and wife conservationists: Olaus Murie and his wife Margaret (Mardy) Murie, and Olaus’s half-brother Adolph Murie and his wife, Louise, who was Mardy’s half-sister, if you can believe it.

Olaus and Mardy Murie. Photo courtesy of the Murie Center.

These folks belong in the same hushed sentences, and in similar legacy lore, as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, David Brower, Wallace Stegner, Ansel Adams, and lots of Udalls. They are heroes and heroines of the latter-day conservationist movement in America. Because of Olaus and Mardy, the Wilderness Society was headquartered here in the years after World War II, and it was here, in these cabins and on the Muries’ very front porch, that the Wilderness Act (1964) was imagined and conceived. That Act made law and landscapes out of a simple, profound declaration: that there exists, and ought to always exist, places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

The Muries, their ranch, their ideas, and their courage made that happen. In honoring their legacy, the Murie Ranch was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006. More recently, Teton Science Schools has forged an innovative relationship with the Murie Center to keep those intellectual flames burning. As TSS states, “The Murie Center is dedicated to bringing people together to inspire action that protects nature – an opportunity and obligation passed on through the legacy of the Muries. The Murie Center continues to play an important role in ensuring the betterment of the future for all life, because when nature thrives, people thrive.”

My few hours there were inspiring beyond measure. Plenty of “history happened here” feelings to keep an historian happy. But — more than that — a spiritual feeling about the place, too. Commitment to work, commitment to nature, commitment to a beloved partner (what a love affair Olaus and Mardy had!), commitment to leaving this world just bit better off — here’s a place to breathe all that in and be renewed by it. My new friends from TSS and I are thinking about what we might do together there at the Murie Center. How I would love to bring students there — graduate students doing western history doctoral work, undergraduates, or even a freshman seminar. Stay tuned, I think we’ll find a way, and I want especially to thank Josh from TSS for his warmth and hospitality in making my visit happen with such decency and kindness.

John and I soon departed. Off to Salt Lake by way of up and over Teton Pass (glorious), on through Idaho (same), and to downtown Salt Lake to stay where we always stay. Dinner at Red Rock, and the great Farmer’s Market in Pioneer Park the next morning before heading out again. On to St. George, arriving in plenty of time for dinner (again!) at Painted Pony, which is uniformly, always superb. Up this morning, point the car south on I-15, and, by early afternoon, home in Pasadena.

A glorious trip.

Just thinking in Wyoming. Photo by Bill Deverell.

Los Angeles City Water Company Anniversary

The Los Angeles City Water Company headquarters sits just above the Plaza in this photo (circa 1890s). Photo courtesy of the Historical Photo Collection of the Department of Water and Power, City of Los Angeles.

By Tom Sitton

Here we are on July 20, the 149th anniversary of an important date in the history of supplying many of us with the necessary wet resource that kept Los Angeles growing. For on that date in 1868 the Los Angeles City Water Company received its thirty-year lease to provide the city’s residents with nature’s gift by operating its water system.

That event followed a number of years in the mid-1800s, when early water providers faced many difficulties in building crude infrastructure to distribute water from the Los Angeles River and other sources to thirsty Angelenos. By 1868 city officials were desperate for help, and three entrepreneurs offered to solve their problem. Although there were many critics of the final lease agreement, the city leaders saw no other solution to their dilemma and a majority of the common council agreed to a thirty year lease for distribution of the city’s water.

Conflicts between the city and the company began soon after the firm took over, as its directors fought to reduce their annual rent payments to the city, reneged on building promised infrastructure, and even challenged the city’s ownership of the water. While the company amassed generous profits from the business, residents complained of bad service, high rates, slimy water and low pressure. As the Los Angeles population boomed in spurts in the 1870s and 1880s, the protests became louder with the transformation of the area from primarily agricultural to commercial and residential.

By the time the lease period was ending in 1898, public outcry against a renewal of the lease had crystalized with a demand for the city to take over its water system. The lease became a major issue in the 1896 city election in which opposition candidates were successful. The new council members began negotiating, but the sales prices demanded by the company and the city were far apart and ended up in arbitration that still did not solve the problem. The council decided to build the city’s own infrastructure for distribution instead of purchasing the company’s system, which would leave the firm with pipes, pumps and such, but without water. Several lawsuits ensued and a compromise was finally worked out — the city took over the company’s property in 1902, almost four years after the lease had expired.

The transfer of ownership of the city’s water system from private entrepreneurs to the city was an example of the early reform sentiment in Los Angeles that would increase during the early Progressive era movement that was sweeping the nation at this time. The municipal ownership drive of urban reformers was a key ingredient in progressivism, particularly in owning natural resources and other necessities for residents. Los Angeles would soon have full control of its water supply and eventually its electrical, harbor, and airport services as it does today.

So Happy Anniversary, Los Angeles City Water Company, and thanks for your contribution to the early history of Los Angeles growth and its environmental and political history.

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Tom Sitton is History Curator, Emeritus of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. For more on the Los Angeles City Water Company see books by Ostrom, Fogelson, Hundley, Karhl, Mulholland, and Soifer.

Fur Trapping History in Wyoming’s Hoback Canyon

The Tetons as a summer storm rolls through. Photo by Bill Deverell.

By Bill Deverell

Up through Hoback Canyon and on to Jackson Hole. Sometimes the West challenges conventional ways of thinking about time and space in American history. A case in point is the landscape John and I drove through yesterday on our way to Jackson Hole. From outside Daniel, we drove through Bondurant, a crossroads town on either side of the state highway. A year ago, we had driven through here just as a lightning strike caused a fire in the National Forest. Within hours, the road to Jackson was closed, and the fire eventually grew to more than 30,000 acres. Firefighters fought it near buildings and campsites, and they allowed it to burn in unpopulated areas as part of the ecological management of the forest. It did not go out until precipitation knocked it down completely in September.

As we dropped into Hoback Canyon, we could see the burn; it looked like it had gone through yesterday, not a full year ago. Beetle kill of the pines makes them especially susceptible to fire, and this one of 2016 clearly was opportunistic in that way. Hoback Canyon, alongside the Hoback River, is one of the prettiest drives I know in the West. The Hoback is a tributary of the mighty Snake, and once we run into the Snake, I know we are getting close to Jackson.

The Hoback is named for John Hoback, a trapper and mountain man who wandered through this area more than 200 years ago. He was, like many a mountain man of his time, from Kentucky. In 1811, Hoback and two other mountain men guided a group of trappers headed to the mouth of the Columbia River through this landscape. The group headed to the Pacific Coast was the Astorians — men sent by John Jacob Astor to establish a fur-trapping and fur-trading entrepôt at the far end of the continent by way of Astor’s Pacific Fur Company. These men were one-half of a two-pronged scheme; the other group left for the Pacific Northwest coast by sea, carrying the material needed to build the operation. The overlanders were tasked with establishing fur trading and trapping operations in the Rockies and west from the Snake to the Columbia.

Hoback and his companions guided the Astorians (led by wilderness novice Wilson Price Hunt of Trenton, New Jersey) across this landscape we drove through yesterday, from the river now bearing Hoback’s name to its confluence with the Snake. The group went on up into Jackson Hole (the “hole” is the valley between the Teton and Gros Ventre ranges), climbed up and over the Tetons, and made it to a fort in Idaho. On the way back east in 1812, a remnant party of Astorians found South Pass in the Wind River mountains, a relatively easy crossing of the Continental Divide, thus marking the landscape for the Oregon Trail migrants who would come a generation later. We could probably say that was their greatest success; the fur trading empire Astor envisioned fell apart for any number of reasons: mismanagement, squabbling, poor relations with native peoples, the coming of the War of 1812. John Hoback left his mark, too, in this canyon and on this river. That carries his name forward, well beyond his own 1813 death by Indians near what is now Boise.

The time bending aspect of this story comes from just thinking about these continental ambitions way out here, so early in the history of the Republic. When Kentuckian John Hoback guided the Astorians through this landscape, another Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln, was a two-year old toddler. James Madison was President of the United States, all fifteen of them. John Marshall was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Battle of Tippecanoe took place that year. The nation was thirty-five years old.

We made Jackson by dinnertime. As dusk came, so, too, did a big thunderstorm and lightning display. We sat on the deck of the house, huddled under the eaves, and watched as the lightning lit up the sky and everything around us through the pounding, cold rain. My son starts camp tomorrow at the wonderful Teton Science School, where he’s been a summer student each of the last four summers. I’ll go to the Teton County Public Library — a special place in my heart — to get some work done. At night, rain or not, we’ll sit on the deck some more and just watch mountains.