After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley

8 “As Good As Wheat”

c h a p t e r e i g h t “As Good As Wheat” William Dresbach’s general store buzzed with activity throughout the summer of 1869. The twenty-sixth of June was a particularly busy day. Needing cash to pay harvest expenses and to begin settling the year’s accounts, George W. Pierce, Charles E. Greene, James C. Campbell, Francis E. Russell, Bartlett Guthrie, and R. S. Carey all hauled in their first wheat of the season. While workers unloaded the 125-pound sacks (nearly 3,000 total) from the long line of wagons into Dresbach ’s huge warehouse, these six prominent citizens gathered out front for a lively conversation. Though disappointed with the $1.50 per cental (hundredweight ) that Dresbach o¤ered them, they were encouraged that the price had gone up 10 cents from the previous week. That was a sign, they told each other, that as the year wore on, the market for the rest of their crop would reach the $1.75 to $2.25 range to which they had become accustomed.1 “Big crops and high prices,” they believed, were the order of the day. The large surplus from the previous season that accounted for the current glut was temporary , they assumed. There would always be markets, and profitable ones, for all that they would raise. “The high price brought by California wheat in Liverpool,” Greene had insisted a few months earlier, “is an assurance that it will always find sale, however full the market may be stocked.” They counseled one another to hold on to as much of their wheat as they could; with the impending war in Europe and a lighter crop in California predicted for the year, prices were sure to rebound. Their unbridled optimism stemmed not only from their newfound expertise in world a¤airs, which they gleaned from conversations among themselves , from the local newspapers, and from their own direct participation in the emerging global economy. They took immense pride in the knowledge that the wheat they grew on their farms moved in greater volume over greater distances than any product ever before in human history.2 As the conversation moved to more local matters, the tone and substance remained equally high-minded. How their community had “advanced in prosper- ity,” they boasted. Dresbach’s store now o¤ered them a full line of high-quality goods, from tools and implements, to expensive fabrics and ready-made clothing, to imported spices and plugs of the finest tobacco. Olive Street in Davisville had become the center of a thriving business district, which catered to the needs of farm families, townspeople, and visitors. Three churches and a public schoolhouse were either under construction or in various stages of planning. Three fraternal organizations o¤ered men new means of fellowship and conviviality. Balls, dances, and “base ball matches” were held seemingly every week. The town would soon have its own newspaper to keep readers abreast of “local intelligence and improvements” (though it would last only a few months), and an ambitious canal project promised to reroute the volatile waters of Putah Creek away from the town, reclaim thousands of acres of swampland, and enhance the “air of business and prosperity” about the region.3 They owed it all to wheat, and they knew it. Putah Creek farmers resurrected the old proverb “as good as wheat”—the same spine-tingling phrase that had captured the imagination of Pierce and his fellow Kenoshans in the 1840s. Wheat, they preached, “was as good and even better than money.” It was better, even, than gold.4 “Farming new land at two cents a pound for wheat is about as good an enterprise as a man can go into,” wrote an early chronicler of California agriculture. Putah Creek farmers agreed wholeheartedly. From 1867 to 1877, they received that magical price more often than not.5 So profitable was wheat during this time that farmers rarely concerned themselves with calculating the exact cost of production , though $1.50 per cental was widely perceived as the price they needed to break even. All they knew for sure was that the two-dollar benchmark allowed them not only to cover the expenses of producing their crop but also to clear their mortgage debts, pay their taxes, buy supplies, and still have something left over for themselves and their families. Wheat, they insisted, “ought to command $2.00 per cental.” After two decades of struggle, they firmly...