Category: CLIR-CCEPS

Hiya, folks! This week in the exciting world of Willis Jones field notebook scanning: A photograph! Of a person!

This particular human is one John C. Ralphs (1852-1931), who as the card notes ran for San Bernardino County sheriff in 1910. I take it he won, because according to a San Bernardino County Sun article about local civic leaders, Ralphs served as sheriff from 1903 to 1915. The article also describes Ralphs as a “big, powerful man, standing well over six feet tall in his boots, weighing better than 200 pounds and sporting a big handlebar mustache.” It was, as the photograph clearly attests, a mustache worthy of note.

My five minutes of Internet research also found that Ralphs instituted a policy known as the “hobo rock pile.” According to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, “all misdemeanor prisoners — mostly itinerant visitors to the county — were assigned to work on the county’s rock pile, making little rocks out of big ones.” And make little rocks they did, because eventually the county ran out of rocks for prisoners to smash (what’d the county do with all those rocks?). Chairman J.B. Glover was then authorized by the Board of Supervisors “to purchase 100 tons of rocks to keep the county’s prisoners from being idle.”

So, okay.

I’m not sure what Jones made of any of this, or why Ralphs’s election card was in his notebook. Maybe Jones used the photo as an impromptu bookmark. Maybe he had an interest in tiny rocks. Truth be told, I have a difficult time reading Jones’s handwriting, so for all I know these notebooks could be filled with all sorts of commentary about small rocks and the larger rocks whence they came. I’ll close this meandering post with one more loose end: the backside of the photograph.

Not sure what it says, dunno what it means.

Citations:

Joe Blackstock, “Weird news has been going on for years in Inland Valley,” Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. January 02, 2017. http://www.dailybulletin.com/general-news/20170102/weird-news-has-been-going-on-for-years-in-inland-valley

Nick Cataldo, “A great city like San Bernardino needs great leaders.” San Bernardino County Sun. November 11, 2013. http://www.sbsun.com/20131111/a-great-city-like-san-bernardino-needs-great-leaders

Hello! This week I accomplished a very impressive task – I successfully took photos of documents, and I am now a budding photographer. Typically photos are taken when documents are too large to be scanned, and this week a folder of newspaper articles and a few maps fell into that category. The first step of taking these photos is going to the camera room, a room on the first floor of the library with all the equipment we need – lights, a tripod, a whiteboard, a computer, and for good measure, the camera. The first decision that needs to be made after going into the room is how the item should be photographed, specifically whether it should be attached to the whiteboard with magnets and then be taken photos of, or whether it must be laid out on a flat surface with the camera lowered or raised depending on the size of the picture. Items that are more fragile are usually laid out, while those that can be hung without being damaged are usually photographed on the whiteboard. Then the distance between the camera is adjusted so the item is captured in its entirety, and the camera itself adjusted to make sure that the item is clear. Once a photo is taken, a software on the computer lets us see what it looks like. We usually zoom into the photo at 100 and 200%, and adjust the lens again if writing can’t be seen clearly at those zoom in percentages. The image is then cropped and rotated if necessary in Photoshop, where its color may also be adjusted to more clearly reflect the actual item. It’s a long process, but the end results speak for themselves. Until next time readers, and remain hydrated!

Hello again!

This week, I’m going to share some fun finds I’ve come across while scanning Box 3 of the Imperial Valley Records.

Hi folks! This week I’m happy to report that I’ve scanned ten Willis S. Jones field notebooks. Only five more in the box!

And not a moment too soon, because the binding on some of these notebooks is in rough shape. The most fragile so far is from 1914 and looks about ready to fall apart:

Once this box is done, there are additional boxes of field notebooks to scan! I don’t know how many! Aficionados of well water levels during the early 1900s in Chino and Riverside, rejoice!

Update: Turns out this was my tenth blog entry. Coincidence? I think… yeah, probably.

Greetings! As I was scanning documents this week, I came across a particularly amusing newspaper clipping about a report done by C.N. Perry on the practicability of plans to build light and power plants in the Imperial Valley. Perry is a name I’ve come across quite often the past few weeks. There are letters to him, letters from him, and he seems to have played a large and active role in California’s water history as an engineer and general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District. This particular newspaper article was about a report Perry had done about the feasibility and effectiveness of Earl S. Casey’s plans to build these plants and provide the people of the valley with light and power. Casey, it seems, did not take the report well, and in turn wrote a newspaper article that contains brilliant instances of snark towards Perry. Casey, in the article, asks Perry who the report is addressed to, who paid for it, and questions the accuracy of his tables. This is passive aggressive communication through newspaper articles, and it is brilliant. In another jewel, Casey tells Perry that he will “enlighten” him regarding his report. Yet my favorite line in the article is this – after asserting that Perry’s report was unnecessary because he has complied with the conditions set forth by the Water Commission, Casey says “So you see Mr. Perry your report is of no value.” Water history drips with scandal, and I for one cannot wait to discover more of it.

Continue reading “A Watery Feud”

Hello all!

In a newspaper clipping entitled “Capital Paper Endorses All-American Canal,” the author provides the text of an editorial published in The Washington Times which endorses the construction of the All-American Canal, a water project of the Imperial Irrigation District. Thus, in the subsequent editorial
“Anything that Mexico Controls is Not All-American,” the author
encourages congress to move forward with the Kettner Bill, which would
finance the canal. Pay attention to the rhetoric of the canal’s name. All-American.

The author describes how the Imperial Valley, though beautiful, needs more water to support its $40,000,000 farming industry with over 60,000 residents. Access to water without the canal, according to the author, relied upon the people of Mexico, who if they chose, “or if in the case of international disagreement it was thought desirable, could in a single day wipe out the great investments in the Imperial Valley and return it to its former desolate and waterless condition.” An “All-American” canal would remove this threat by establishing “water control where it should be–on the American side of the boundary.”

At the end of the editorial, the author explains the penultimate reason for constructing an “All-American Canal”: “It means making one more thing in America all-American.” Sound familiar at all?

Given the geographic context of the Imperial Valley on the borderlands between California and Mexico, this editorial illustrates racial tensions in southern California that had carried over from the 1800s and continued on through the twentieth century. As a historian, this document blew me away. Not only does it shed light on the time period’s xenophobic fears and isolationist discourses, it reveals something both frustrating and illuminating as a historian: history often repeats itself in unexpected ways. 

Hi folks! A few weeks back I mentioned the ephemera tucked away in the Willis Jones field notes and figured I’d highlight some findings this week. Some of these artifacts may provide crucial insight into Jones’s life and the time and place he occupied. Some of it could be random garbage. Let’s have a look!

A slip of paper with C S Hutson & Co letterhead noting that something had been checked.

Symbol or meaningless doodle? No one in CCEPS could identify what was drawn on the back of this envelope.

Arithmetic scratch paper. From the past!

A receipt from a map company.

Notation on the backside of the map receipt.

A tiny map.

More scratch paper! Why did I post this?

And there you have it. I’m about halfway through the box and can only wonder what strange treasures await.

Hello! My name is Elika and I graduated from Pomona in May. I started working on the project last week, and this is my first blog post! So far I’ve done a lot of taking staples out of documents to scan them, and then subsequently scanning them, which brings me to what I’m going to talk about today: flower-shaped staples. 

In order to scan the documents, the flower staples have to be taken out. The only problem is that they’re very unwilling to move, and prying them off of the documents takes a bit of effort. I’ve found the best way of doing this is flipping the document over so the petals are visible. Then I approach each petal with a slightly frightening level of determination, and slide the staple remover under it to make the petals fold over. After all the petals have been folded, the flower is now a crumpled circle, and can be pushed through the other side. Voila. I haven’t been able to find any history about these staples, but it does seem that they were used many decades ago, according to the vintage scrap booking blogs I visited. Enjoy!