family’s ranch, proceeding as she did from within what amounts to a fable of confusion, concerned what she called the “debatable” questions: “whether land can belong to anyone, or whether one belongs to the land.” She concluded, unsurprisingly, that land belonged to no one. Yet it did: at the time the Hollister ranch was sold, in the late 1960s, according to a Ralph Nader Study Group report on land use in California, roughly two and a half million acres of California still belonged to the Southern Pacific. Almost half a million acres belonged to the Shasta Forest Company. A third of a million acres belonged to Tenneco, another third of a million each to the Tejon Ranch Company, Standard Oil, and Boise Cascade. Two hundred seventy-eight thousand acres belonged to Georgia Pacific. Two hundred and fifty thousand belonged to Pacific Gas & Electric. Two hundred thousand belonged to Occidental Petroleum, 192,000 to Sunkist, 171,062 to Pacific Lumber, 155,000 to Fibreboard Incorporated, and 152,000 to the Newhall Land and Farming Company. Another 1,350,045 acres belonged to, among them, American Forest Products, Times Mirror, the Penn Central, Hammond Lumber, Kaiser Industries, the Masonite Corporation, J. G. Boswell, International Paper, Diamond International Corporation, Vail, Miller & Lux, and the Irvine Ranch Company. Some of these were California companies; some were not. All played a role in determining which of California’s possibilities would be realized and which limited. Most were diversified, no more interested in what grew or grazed on their land than Jane Hollister had been, to another point, in what grew or grazed on hers, but quicker players, all of them, than the Hollisters had proved to be.
J ane Hollisters mother, Lottie Steffens Hollister, was the sister of Lincoln Steffens, who wrote The Shame of the Cities and later said of the Soviet Union that he had seen the future and it worked. Lincoln Steffens was Jane Hollisters “Uncle Steffie,” and she his “Lady Jane.” The Steffens children had grown up in a house in Sacramento a few blocks from the house in which, in 1908, my father was born. The Steffens house later became the Governor’s Mansion, in which both Jerry Brown and his sister Kathleen lived during the years their father, Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, was the thirty-second governor of California. Jerry Brown was himself the thirty-fourth governor of California. Kathleen Brown, in 1994, tried and failed to become the thirty-seventh. I went to Berkeley with their sister Barbara. There are many connections in California life, and yet, like Charles Crocker’s Millet as the source for Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” not much connects: my mother’s father, who lived in Sacramento but grew up on the Georgetown Divide in El Dorado County, remained convinced to his death that Edwin Markham, who had been superintendent of schools in El Dorado County from 1882 until 1886, did not himself write “The Man with the Hoe,” but was given the poem by, in my grandfathers words, “an emigrant wayfarer from whom Markham purchased it for a small amount of money, and thereby helped the traveler along his way.” My grandfather seemed to have in his memory bank a fairly complete dossier on Edwin Markham (the names of his three wives, the dates of his and their arrivals in California, even the houses in which they had lived), and could be quite insistent about what he believed to be the true provenance of “The Man with the Hoe,” but his attitude toward the alleged appropriation was sufficiently opaque to encourage me, as a child, to ask my mother if my grandfather had in fact been the emigrant wayfarer. “He wasn’t an emigrant,” my mother said, settling at least that question.
J ane Hollister Wheelwright, who was herself born in Sacramento, saw as a kind of death the intrusion onto the Hollister ranch of two Chevron pipelines (“I can only believe that their appearance on the ranch
J ane Hollisters mother, Lottie Steffens Hollister, was the sister of Lincoln Steffens, who wrote The Shame of the Cities and later said of the Soviet Union that he had seen the future and it worked. Lincoln Steffens was Jane Hollisters “Uncle Steffie,” and she his “Lady Jane.” The Steffens children had grown up in a house in Sacramento a few blocks from the house in which, in 1908, my father was born. The Steffens house later became the Governor’s Mansion, in which both Jerry Brown and his sister Kathleen lived during the years their father, Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, was the thirty-second governor of California. Jerry Brown was himself the thirty-fourth governor of California. Kathleen Brown, in 1994, tried and failed to become the thirty-seventh. I went to Berkeley with their sister Barbara. There are many connections in California life, and yet, like Charles Crocker’s Millet as the source for Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” not much connects: my mother’s father, who lived in Sacramento but grew up on the Georgetown Divide in El Dorado County, remained convinced to his death that Edwin Markham, who had been superintendent of schools in El Dorado County from 1882 until 1886, did not himself write “The Man with the Hoe,” but was given the poem by, in my grandfathers words, “an emigrant wayfarer from whom Markham purchased it for a small amount of money, and thereby helped the traveler along his way.” My grandfather seemed to have in his memory bank a fairly complete dossier on Edwin Markham (the names of his three wives, the dates of his and their arrivals in California, even the houses in which they had lived), and could be quite insistent about what he believed to be the true provenance of “The Man with the Hoe,” but his attitude toward the alleged appropriation was sufficiently opaque to encourage me, as a child, to ask my mother if my grandfather had in fact been the emigrant wayfarer. “He wasn’t an emigrant,” my mother said, settling at least that question.
J ane Hollister Wheelwright, who was herself born in Sacramento, saw as a kind of death the intrusion onto the Hollister ranch of two Chevron pipelines (“I can only believe that their appearance on the ranch
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