Planted when the river fell

In 1604 a Spanish party under Juan de Oñate, looking for the "southern sea," heard of a nation on the Colorado above the Gila junction. Oñate sent Captain Gerónimo Márquez and four soldiers upriver. Two days later a Mojave leader named Curraca came in with forty others, bringing corn, beans, and gourds. They gave directions toward the gulf, kept feeding the visitors, and went with them as far as the people Bolton's edition identifies, with a probably, as Quechan. Bean and Vane take this from Bolton's pages 268 to 273. It is the first written meeting, and it is a meeting organized around food the visitors did not grow.

The overview is careful about the long gap after that. For 165 years the Mojave have no further recorded direct contact with Spaniards. Wheat still reached their fields, through Quechan neighbors, and a few horses came the same way. Sherer and Stewart are the citations Bean and Vane print. Wheat in the eighteenth-century fields is not a guess from the novel. It is a plant moving along a river that already had farmers on it.

The season Kroeber described

Alfred Kroeber's Handbook, as the overview uses it, puts the agricultural year on the flood. The Mojave planted corn, beans, pumpkins, and cantaloupes in May or June, after the annual rise, then left for hunting and gathering and came back for the harvest. By the eighteenth century they were growing wheat. Corn was dried and stored in huge granaries woven of unstripped arrowweed. Houses were large and usually rectangular, thatched with arrowweed and covered with sand. Pottery was coiled, painted with yellow ochre that fired to a dull red, and used for water jars, cook pots, and platters. The bow was willow, about as tall as a man, with an arrowweed arrow. Fish were taken in fiber seines or basketry scoops and used in stews. Grain was ground on a lava metate with a cylindrical muller. Kroeber's page numbers, as Bean and Vane cite them, run through the low 730s of the 1925 handbook. This essay has not re-opened the handbook. It has used the overview's citations, and it says so, because a page number invented to look precise would be worse than a citation honestly borrowed.

Those details are a technology, not a costume. Arrowweed is building material, granary wall, and arrow shaft. Cottonwood, which Rose would later call "plenty" for an emigrant camp, sits in the same vegetation. The overview's reading of the 1858 fight, drawn from Sherer, is that the grass the cattle ate was field and the trees were property. You do not need a sermon to see it. You need the planting calendar and Rose's pleasure at the wood, which the letter essay already quoted.

Garcés, February 1776

Father Francisco Garcés split from Anza's second expedition on December 4, 1775, and spent two months on the lower river. The Halchidhoma were at war with the Mojave to their north, so on February 14, 1776, he set out toward the Mojave with a Mojave man he had met at the Yuma settlements. On February 21 he met eighty Mojave traveling downriver. On the way north along the west bank he met forty Chemehuevi, who gave him mescal and, he wrote, a good deal of information. Galvin's edition is what Bean and Vane cite.

On February 28 he was across the river from the Mojave villages. The man who had come with him from Yuma crossed and brought people back. The overview says some two thousand visited during the stay. Garcés was impressed, reported enthusiasm for baptism, and noted three captains, one of them "foremost of the nation; without him nothing is decided," and a large number of children compared with other river groups. When he wanted to go toward the priests on the coast, the Mojave offered guides. The two thousand is Garcés's crowd, through Galvin, through Bean and Vane. It is not a census. Ives, eighty years later, would warn that crowds on the bank followed his boat and that chiefs borrowed recruits from neighbors to look more numerous. Both cautions can be true. A priest counting visitors and a lieutenant watching the same faces reappear are not measuring the same thing.

What Ives watched them eat

Ives, in February 1858, is the last detailed look before the emigrant year. He says there is no game in the valley, that the fish are scarce and poor, and that the people subsist almost exclusively on beans and corn, with occasional watermelons and pumpkins, and are as fine a race physically as any he knows. He had brought vegetable and fruit seeds at the suggestion of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and he gave them to chiefs who promised to try them. The annual overflow, he writes, lets them raise a year's food with little labor, which they then eat without storing against a bad year. One season a few years before his visit, the river did not overflow, there were no crops, and great numbers died of starvation. He offers that famine as possibly periodic, a natural check on population. That last idea is his theory. The report of a hunger year is his report. He does not give a count of the dead, and this page will not invent one.

He also says the same fields would be a poor bet for white settlers even with irrigation, because the riverbed shifts. Comparing the valley with what he had seen four years earlier, with Whipple, he thought few places in the bottoms might not be overrun in any season. For the Mojave, who in his phrase had a community of property, a moved channel was an inconvenience. For a settler with a fixed improvement it would be a disaster. He is arguing against the plantation future Whipple had sketched. He is not asking the farmers whether they experience the river as a shared inconvenience. The phrase "community of property" is his explanation. It is not a land title.

Whipple's list and Ives's list agree on the crops and disagree on the water. Whipple, seeing cultivation without ditches, inferred extra rain. Ives, seeing the same fields, named the overflow. The overflow is the mechanism Kroeber described and the mechanism Mojave farmers at the school mesa would still be using in 1890, when a superintendent refused to use it. Three documents, three generations, one calendar: plant after the water drops.

What an emigrant diary cannot see

Rose's letter, written in October 1858, is happy about grass and cottonwood and silent about granaries. He did not have Kroeber. He did not have Bolton. He had a guide, a tired herd, and a chief who asked whether the train meant to settle. The farming system explains why that question was not small talk. A herd of the size Rose counted, turned onto bottomland in late summer, is on ground that has either just been harvested or is about to matter again when the river falls. This essay does not reconstruct which fields were in crop on August 30. Nobody opened a plot map. It does say the valley was not empty bottom, and that the emptiness is an emigrant impression, not an agricultural fact.

The novel's farmers, including the ones who are not historical persons, can kneel in those fields. Kwaya, Hokano, and Yara are invented. Curraca is a name in Bolton. The planting month is Kroeber's. A scene that needs a ditch and a plow in 1858, before the flood recedes, has chosen a different agriculture from the one these sources describe.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• Bean and Vane (2002), Mojave chapter, citing Herbert Eugene Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (1925), pp. 268-273, for the Oñate expedition; John Galvin, ed., A Record of Travels in Arizona and California, 1775-1776 (1967), for Garcés; A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (1925), for planting, granaries, houses, and tools; Sherer, Bitterness Road (1994), p. 3, and Kenneth M. Stewart in the Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 10 (1983), p. 56, for wheat and horses moving through the Quechan. NPS history copy.
• Joseph C. Ives, Report upon the Colorado River of the West (1861), Mojave Valley chapter on diet, the annual overflow, and a year when the river did not rise. Internet Archive text.
• A. W. Whipple, preliminary report, Pacific Railroad Surveys, vol. 3, for maize, wheat, beans, and melons grown without irrigation, and for his separate inference that the country therefore got more rain than New Mexico.

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