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John Guthrie McCallum
They Can’t Tear Down the Mountain!
written by Dana Forline Skolfield
Early History
of the McCallum family
in Palm Springs , California
“Water is the matrix from which the dream was born”
from the Palm Springs
Yearbook, 1952, “History of Palm
Springs Water”
The modern city of Palm
Springs owes its wealth, beauty, and very life to one
thing—water. Without water, this beautiful city would be nothing more than so
many acres of sagebrush and cactus on the great Colorado
Desert . The Palm Springs
water supply did not just happen. It came about through foresight and great
effort. It is one of the dramatic stories of the West. . .
Plans were made to plant fruit trees in the area [by John
Guthrie McCallum] and more water would be needed. The most likely source was
across the desert in the Whitewater
River
White Water ditch, 1884
What if, in 1901, four
years after McCallum’s death, his descendents had lost their ownership of the
Palm Valley Water Company along with the McCallum Ranch, and other land through
threatened foreclosures by the First Security Bank of Los Angeles
It’s impossible to separate the history of Palm Springs from the
personal lives of the McCallum family from 1884 to 1914, the early years of the
city’s development. The dogged determination of, first John Guthrie McCallum,
then his son Harry and his sister May (my grandmother), to hold onto the eighty
acres stretching from the foot of San Jacinto to the center of the village,
known as the McCallum Ranch, along with land for possible future development spreading
across the desert community, was to foreshadow the future of Palm Springs
itself. The history reveals how all
members of McCallum’s family worked together to preserve their father’s legacy
in Palm Springs .
The author is the only living great-grandson of John
Guthrie McCallum, among more than fifty plus of direct descendents now living. All
imagined conversations and events are based in fact, uncovered in 1967-69 by
John Guthrie’s great granddaughters, my sister, the late Alice Skolfield, who
called herself Millie McCallum.
The author at Tahquitz
Falls
another source tapped by John Guthrie
to bring water to McCallum Ranch
They Can’t Tear Down the Mountain!
by Dana Forline Skolfield
FORWARD
[Notes from a hillside in Temecula , California
This morning’s rain clouds, white and gray, tumbling over
distant mountains, have dispersed; at last I can see their mantles of
snow: Wilshire and Snow Peaks and little
San Gorgonio, and farther south—towering San Jacinto, perhaps more than fifty
miles from where I’m standing—as a hawk would fly—its snow-capped peak rising
10,831 feet. On the other side at the
foot of San Jacinto lies the city of Palm Springs and again I’m reminded
of a promise made: always to remember that the gift of water
from these mountains, a long time ago, turned my great grandfather’s dream
into lush orchards and green fields, and a city. Water is the matrix from which his dream was
born—John Guthrie McCallum’s dream of an “Eden
in the Wilderness.”
The hawk is an apt reference, for as I stand at the edge
of the sloping hill above the houses below, one suddenly flies over my right
shoulder and perches at the top of an iron-wrought fence, not more than a
foot away. He cocks his head in my direction, one large
inquisitive eye staring at me; then quickly flies off toward San Jacinto . For a
moment, I’m spellbound. Words from Walt
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” taunt me – The
spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
. . a message perhaps from John Guthrie for
me to stop gaping at the mountain and get on with telling his story—his
transformation of a desert wilderness into a paradise.
This year’s rain season in Southern California, 2004-2005
(figured from July 1 to June 30) is approaching the all-time record rainfall of
one hundred and twenty-one years ago, 1883-1884, and what a deluge that must
have been! Today, snow gracing the
summit of San Jacinto and to the south and west, the heavier pack on the slopes
of Snow and Wilshire peaks, and Little San Gorgonio, still feed the White Water
River northwest of Palm Springs. I can
see it all from here as they must have appeared the other side of San Jacinto one hundred and twenty years ago during a
record rainfall. How this must have inspired my great-grandfather to
create a city out of the native village, Aqua Caliente.
To contemplate these mountains is to relive history—the
story of how the city of Palm Springs
came to be. It’s told by these mountains,
the San Gorgonio watershed, for from these resources John Guthrie initially
brought water into the small Native American village with his stone-lined
ditch. Most years the Agua Calientes,
belonging to the larger Cahuilla tribes of Southern
California , roamed the mountain forests for food. There was
never any question in John Guthrie’s mind that these Native Americans
would have free use of the water as it coursed through the village, but they
seldom took advantage of it.
Today the Agua Calientes are perhaps the richest Native
Americans in the country—rich in land; but their contemporary leaders choose
to ignore their historical link to McCallum who almost single-handedly created
the city through his vision of an agricultural community in a region that
produced two to eight inches of rain in a season—seven inches were unusual, as
in February, 1891 when 7.44 inches fell in Palm Springs, “the year of the seven
waterfalls” and in 1895 with 7.8 inches.
Each almost mystical moment, gazing at the distant
mountains, I wonder what it must have been like for John Guthrie to see these
mountains in the rain season of 1883-1884 when the heaviest rainfall fell in Southern California regions, both coastal and inland
since records had been kept, and until the present day; the record still not
surpassed. In San Bernardino where John Guthrie and family
took up residence in 1883-84, north and west of Agua Caliente, the season
rainfall totaled 37.51 inches in an area where the annual rainfall averaged
only 16 inches.
He certainly was aware of the eruption and explosion of
Krakatoa the previous summer, on August 27, 1883 in the Sunda Straight between
Sumatra and Java in the Dutch East Indies—affecting weather world wide and
producing glorious sunsets everywhere—especially in January, 1884, all along
the Southern California coast. Had he been a man more philosophical than
rigidly practical—and had he been able to foresee that this ‘83-‘84 rainfall
was to become the heaviest in the history of the region—he might have mused
that the City of Palm Springs never would have come into existence had not a
volcano the other side of the world exploded and disappeared from the face of
the earth, its remnants scattered around the globe, affecting weather patterns—Southern
California, no exception.
It was in the last months of 1883 that John Guthrie, then
fifty-seven years old, got himself appointed Indian Agent for the inland
regions of Southern California . He had friends in Washington , D.C. village
of Agua Caliente , not far from San Bernardino and
traveled by rail to meet with Will Pablo, Chief of the Agua Calientes.
John Guthrie is here with me now—or rather I am with him
in 1884, the other side of the mountain, as he departs, far out in the desert,
from the Southern Pacific railway car at
Seven Palms station, climbing onto a buckboard wagon with Chief Pablo to behold
towering San Jacinto rising in the distance
from the desert floor. What a sight that
must have been! I remember my first time
seeing the mountain, but I had just stepped off a Greyhound Bus and was too close
to see its ragged peak.
How John Guthrie must have been overwhelmed to see the
mountain’s gracious mantle of snow as the buckboard clattered across the
desert, its peak gradually disappearing as they got closer to the village, soon
too close to see the top of the mountain, as I had been—only a wall of bronze
granite rolling upward into the sky. I
can imagine how he must have been encouraged to tap White Water
River
Why here? Why did
John Guthrie McCallum spend sixty thousand dollars to bring water into this
dry, desert wasteland? Simply this:
because of a desire to settle into small subsistence farming, for this indeed
was the result of his enterprise; something he’d dreamed of as a young man in Indiana , growing up along the Ohio
River at Vevay. He got his
degree in law from Indiana University, and came to California in 1850 when he
was twenty-four years old, searching for two brothers who had left for the gold
fields. He arrived too late. Both of them had died of influenza.
He became a distinguished attorney in the north, State Senator in 1855, publisher of a
newspaper in Placerville , California
(in gold-mining country), a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1879
for the complete overhaul of the State of California
Constitution , and continued to practice law in Sacramento , the State Capitol.
We shall never know all his reasons for risking so much
so late in life in an arid desert village.
He owned property in Los Angeles as well—a rambling, five bedroom Victorian
on West Adams Boulevard and later another Victorian on Grand Avenue on Bunker
Hill; parcels of land on Fort Hill near Temple and Broadway in downtown
L.A. Why not live out his later years in
Los Angeles ?
Perhaps this history will in part answer the
question.
Dana Forline Skolfield, October, 2015
Next – Harry McCallum’s story
