As a native son of the Golden West, I’ve occasionally taken
umbrage when our eastern cousins have tried to pull historical
rank. You know what I mean
– all that talk about how the East Coast has more history than
we have.
As a native son of the Golden West, I’ve occasionally taken umbrage when our eastern cousins have tried to pull historical rank. You know what I mean – all that talk about how the East Coast has more history than we have.
It has always seemed to me that every human being and place on Earth has about as much history as every other. It’s all in how you count it.
One thing I do concede: Californians don’t have a good sense of their own history. Maybe we have all those easterners who’ve move here and diluted the population to thank for that.
Whatever the reason, California history is poorly understood. Our state historian, Kevin Starr, put it best in his book, “Americans and the California Dream.” In it, Starr describes how Californians have managed to ignore the unsavory details of their past. Few are aware that the greatest extermination of American Indians in North America in the 19th century took place in California, not on the Great Plains. Here’s Starr:
“California concealed its sins and all but banished the tragic sense. Crimes remained unacknowledged or were sentimentalized and, as if by common consent, responsibility was forgotten in the sunshine.”
The larger point imbued by that quote is that becoming a Californian has for many been an act of forgetting, of putting history itself in, well, the past. Faulkner’s admonition that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” met its match in the ethos of California.
A recent article drove home for me how careless Californians can be about the historical record.
The summer issue of California Country, a publication of the California Farm Bureau Federation, came across my desk last week. In it was a story about a dude ranch, which normally wouldn’t have interested me. But this one was in the small town of Piru, in Ventura County’s Santa Clara Valley.
I was born in that valley. My great grandfather owned a home in Piru. Six generations of my family have lived there. And I’m working on an historical novel about life there in the early 20th century.
He probably never stood a chance with me, but still, the author of “Dude ranch treats city folk to country life” was very sloppy with his historical information. Here’s an example:
A picture on page 13 purports to show Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. staying together at Piru’s Heritage Valley Inn in 1917 while filming “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
The film was indeed made in 1917, and Mary Pickford starred in it, but almost nothing else of his information is true.
“Rebecca” was not filmed there, but in Alameda County. The photo in question was actually taken in April, 1910, when D.W. Griffith brought Mary Pickford to Piru to film “Ramona,” his adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel of the same name, at nearby Rancho Camulos, where much of the novel was set.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was four months old in 1910.
The man in the photo with Pickford is her “Ramona” co-star, Henry Walthall. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. did meet, but in 1917, not 1910, and not in Piru. They were married three years later, when Doug Jr. was 10.
There’s more, but perhaps you already think I’m quibbling. The point is that minimal Web surfing would have cleared up many of these things. The writer did not try or, worse, did not care.
And that’s the problem. Californians don’t care about history, outside of the Gold Rush. It’s dismaying when that attitude extends to writers, who are paid to sweat the details. The author of “Dude ranch” wasn’t more careful, I suspect, because he didn’t expect to be checked.
If he’d been writing about an incident in East Coast history involving similarly well-known people, the guardians of historical veracity there might have banished him from writing about history for credible journals.
We need more of that intellectual rigor in California, because when it comes to history, we’ve been reiterating misinformation, making things up on the fly, or repeating cherished legends for so long we no longer care about the truth.
Here in California, we prefer our history light. No strong beer for us. What are a few casual factual errors among friends?
But this is a cautionary tale, so here’s the caution: a casual attitude towards history bespeaks a casual attitude toward truth. It allows us, as Starr notes, to overlook more important things – such as Indian massacres.
John Yewell is the city editor of the Hollister Free Lance.
