The European invaders of California were put off by the land. Though the native peoples had been drawing generous sustenance from the great oaks, the game, and other foodstuffs of California's many environments, the new settlers saw much of it going to waste. Everything was not, for one thing, green like it had been back in Europe or the East. Great plains awaited for wheat, alfalfa, citrus and market vegetables. Timber could be chopped. Some arrable stakes verged on deserts. So the pioneers cleared the plains of the native bunch grasses, shrubs, and peoples. The ax, the mattock, and the gun helped them "civilize" the wild acres; concrete, drills, dynamite, and ditches aided them in bringing water to the places where they desired verdant fields and emerald parks. Water spreading out from artesian wells and great canals defined the areas which could be given over to agriculture. Every flat, grassy piece of good soil was cleared, ploughed, watered, and sown with the crops of the Mother Countries. The Europeans brought not only their yellow mustards and their golden wild oats: they also brought weeds such as the tumbleweed, crabgrass, and the thistle which throve in the imitative region the pioneers created. Summertime California grew brown, as the seeds of Spain and southern Europe slipped past the edges of the irrigated lands and intruded into the wilderness.
Much of this consisted of an olive-green, prickly scrub that covered the backs and spines of the foothills like wool clings to the back of sheep. One in every twelve acres of temperate California was occupied by plants which could tolerate heat, aridity, high winds, and poor soils. Plant life here evolved to suit special conditions, found in few other places. Successful species waited out the long, hot summer and autumn months, getting little or no water. They folded up their leaves, dropped them, sprouted fine moisture-conserving hairs, made their chlorophyl in green wood instead of leaves, or just died, dropping their seeds for the next interval of rain. They could live in meager soils and cracks in the rocks. Scrub-brush and grasses grew and slept by the seasons of which the unobservant said didn't exist in the far Southwest.
The low understory of the brushy tracts harbored deer, quails, mountain lions, small cats, millions of rodents, and the California Grizzly. Poison oak and greasewood grew well. Native Californians knew of many edible scrub plants or ones they could use for medicines, clothing, or raw material for their construction projects and industries. Settlers, however, were farmers not hunter-gatherers. They hated the prickly scrub-land and dealt with it violently. They chopped it back, clobbered it with their weapons. It resisted them. Not only did it grow back, but it chided the temerarious with hundreds of tiny but annoying scratches and scrapes. The Spanish called it "the place of the chaparro or scrub-oak", that is, the "chaparral"; to guard themselves while riding through it, they invented the heavy leather coverings known as "chaps". The bristly hills were never to be the Little Europe of the settler's dreams.
The chaparral was and is a wilderness almost without parallel in the rest of the world. It cannot be merely cleared because the soil is often poor and mineralized. Fire matters as much as rain. Both rejuvenate the low forest cover, each in its season. Knobcones, digger pines, and other evergreen species release their seeds only when great heat causes their cones to open. Greasewood or chamise burns like gasoline. Extensive roots soon sprout new growth after a conflagration. Buried mazanita berries burst and send shoots from the ground as soon as there is sunshine and water enough to support new growth. Ancient forests take centuries to recover from a burn; the equally-old chaparral revives in two or three years, climaxes in twenty to thirty. When there is no cover due to wildfire or overgrazing, rains wash the soil off the steep hillsides. Streams shoot out of the canyons and bury the farmers' irrigation works and the city-dweller's streets in mud. It is best to leave these brushlands alone, to allow the dry scrub to hold back the silt.
Beginning early in this century, some celebrated the chaparral. Forest rangers compelled to work in one of the first national forests (or brush-reserves as they were derisively called by lowlanders) and curious hikers grew to love the fragrant, dwarf wood. They studied it and shared their understandings with others. This section of the California Reader shares some of the revelations experienced by those naturalists who came to explore and live in that obstinate land which, despite the flames, the steel tools, the explosives, and the weeds, was forever, naturally, California.
Pictures and text copyright 1999 by Joel GAzis-SAx. All rights reserved.
Pictures, clockwise from upper left:
Poison oak; prickly pear blossom; oak gall; needle grass
Photos taken at Whiting Ranch Wilderness, Trabuco Canyon, CA.