particularly those with a psychic investment in one or another heightened version of the founding period. The heroine of Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon , Saxon Brown, when hard times and union troubles come to Oakland, finds herself “dreaming of the arcadian days of her people, when they had not lived in cities nor been vexed with labor unions and employers’ associations. She would remember the old people’s tales of self-sufficingness, when they shot or raised their own meat, grew their own vegetables, were their own blacksmiths and carpenters, made their own shoes—yes, and spun the cloth of the clothes they wore.… A farmer’s life must be fine, she thought. Why was it that people had to live in cities? Why had times changed?” In fact almost no one in California speaks of “farmers,” in the sense the word is used in the rest of the country, and yet this persistent suggestion of constructive husbandry continues to cloud the retrospect. What amounted to the subsidized monopolization of California tends to be reinvented either as “settlement” (the settlers came, the desert bloomed) or, even more ideally, as a kind of foresighted commitment on the part of the acquisitors, a dedication to living at one with both the elemental wilderness and an improved patrician past.
“We had all shared in the glamour of immense, privately owned land,” one of William Welles Hollister’s seven grandchildren, Jane Hollister Wheelwright, wrote in The Ranch Papers: A California Memoir , the book she published in 1988, some twenty years after the sale of the Hollister ranch. “We lived in a fantastic but real world of our own discovery: square miles of impassable terrain, wild cattle threatening on the trail, single coyotes caterwauling like a pack, pumas screaming, storms felling giant oaks, washouts that marooned us for days, wildfires that lasted weeks and scorched whole mountain ranges.” Her father, she tells us, “rarely wore his chapaderos,” and did not use his silver-inlaid saddle, “but our Mexican ranch hands knew him for what he was. They called him ‘El Patrón.’ ” In 1961, after the death of the father, the daughter returns alone to the ranch, the point at which there appears in her memoir the first shadow on the glamour: “No one was there to meet me—not even the ranch hands,” she writes. “I had none of the honor and recognition given automatically to El Patrón. The ranch seemed deserted. I was being deliberately avoided. Wandering aimlessly, I found myself walking into the canyon that stretched in back of the old family home.… The disappointment at seeing no one quickly faded. At least the land was there to greet me.”
Jane Hollister Wheelwright’s sense of her entitlement seems, in The Ranch Papers , more layered than that of many inheritors, more complicated, even tortured. The Hollisters, she concludes, “had been given a chance to live a part of history, to experience an era virtually extinct elsewhere in California.” She remains reluctant to confront the contradictions in that history. Her idea of what the land meant remains heightened, and in the familiar way. She mentions in passing that the ranch supported “a large herd of white-faced Hereford cattle,” but offers no sense of a working cattle operation. She sees her father as “one of the last of the gentlemen cattlemen of the era of large family ranches in California.” She tells us that she and her twin brother “had grown up in a trance, like sleepwalkers, muffled by the land’s huge embrace,” and accompanies a photograph of herself at twenty with an apparently meaningful quotation from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac: “There are two kinds of people: those who can live without wild things and those who cannot.”
Yet she seems to have quite deliberately chosen, at age twenty-four, to live without wild things: she married a psychiatrist, Joseph Wheelwright, was herself analyzed by Carl Jung, became
“We had all shared in the glamour of immense, privately owned land,” one of William Welles Hollister’s seven grandchildren, Jane Hollister Wheelwright, wrote in The Ranch Papers: A California Memoir , the book she published in 1988, some twenty years after the sale of the Hollister ranch. “We lived in a fantastic but real world of our own discovery: square miles of impassable terrain, wild cattle threatening on the trail, single coyotes caterwauling like a pack, pumas screaming, storms felling giant oaks, washouts that marooned us for days, wildfires that lasted weeks and scorched whole mountain ranges.” Her father, she tells us, “rarely wore his chapaderos,” and did not use his silver-inlaid saddle, “but our Mexican ranch hands knew him for what he was. They called him ‘El Patrón.’ ” In 1961, after the death of the father, the daughter returns alone to the ranch, the point at which there appears in her memoir the first shadow on the glamour: “No one was there to meet me—not even the ranch hands,” she writes. “I had none of the honor and recognition given automatically to El Patrón. The ranch seemed deserted. I was being deliberately avoided. Wandering aimlessly, I found myself walking into the canyon that stretched in back of the old family home.… The disappointment at seeing no one quickly faded. At least the land was there to greet me.”
Jane Hollister Wheelwright’s sense of her entitlement seems, in The Ranch Papers , more layered than that of many inheritors, more complicated, even tortured. The Hollisters, she concludes, “had been given a chance to live a part of history, to experience an era virtually extinct elsewhere in California.” She remains reluctant to confront the contradictions in that history. Her idea of what the land meant remains heightened, and in the familiar way. She mentions in passing that the ranch supported “a large herd of white-faced Hereford cattle,” but offers no sense of a working cattle operation. She sees her father as “one of the last of the gentlemen cattlemen of the era of large family ranches in California.” She tells us that she and her twin brother “had grown up in a trance, like sleepwalkers, muffled by the land’s huge embrace,” and accompanies a photograph of herself at twenty with an apparently meaningful quotation from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac: “There are two kinds of people: those who can live without wild things and those who cannot.”
Yet she seems to have quite deliberately chosen, at age twenty-four, to live without wild things: she married a psychiatrist, Joseph Wheelwright, was herself analyzed by Carl Jung, became
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