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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, whose waters originated high in the San Gorgonio water­shed. [In 1884] McCallum spent over $60,000 to build a sixteen-mile rock-lined flume to carry the water . . . with nothing but hand labor to rely upon. [He was 58 years old at the time] This was the beginning of the Palm Valley Water Company.

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, and other creditors? This in fact very nearly happened, and if they had lost the land, where were those with John Guthrie McCallum’s vision who would continue his development of an “Eden in the Wilderness,” no matter that a long drought had tarnished his hope for an agricultural community? Certainly not the First Security Bank of 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 (1940)

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, Spring, 2005]

  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., where in 1864 as an elector of the California Union Party, he cast his vote for Abraham Lincoln.  Soon after his appointment he heard of the small Indian 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 to bring water in.  Snow Peak, as well as San Jacinto would have been covered with snow for a long period of time that rain season, as they are now; the river itself a rushing torrent—spilling into sand.

  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