Point of View
Getting there first: Does it really matter?
By Carl Heintze
When I was a child I thought my grandfather had crossed the plains in a covered wagon. I'm not sure how I got this impression, probably because my mother told me he was a "pioneer."
I wasn't sure what a pioneer was--I'm still not--but my grandmother used to tell me that Indians sometimes rode up to the house in which she grew up and slept under the porch.
That cinched it. I figured my grandfather must have, as W.C. Fields once said, "carved his way through a wall of human flesh, bearing his canoe behind him."
Actually, I discovered sometime later, my grandfather never crossed the plains nor rode in a covered wagon. He sailed to Panama in the 1860's from New England, took the new railroad across the isthmus and then another ship up through the Pacific to San Francisco.
Still I suppose that he was a "pioneer." When he got to California, there weren't many people here, whether Europeans, Mexicans or Native Californians. The Europeans were just beginning to arrive, the Mexicans were being pushed out and most of the Native Americans were dead, having been felled by diseases the Spanish and the Mexicans brought with them.
He had the place pretty much to himself.
So he did carve a farm from soil unbroken by a plow, sort of "the plow that broke the plains," only it wasn't a plain, just a fertile California valley.
Farming, however, didn't last long. He became a clerk in a grocery store. Then he opened his own grocery. It was a success. He ran it the rest of his long life.
But the impression I got was that he and my grandmother--whom he met in California, for she had come over the same isthmus after crossing the Atlantic from Norway--were the first people in what was virgin country.
(It really wasn't all that virgin, but it also wasn't all that settled, either.)
The other thing I learned from my grandparents was that because they got there first they assumed the land belonged to them. They had "settled it."
But there was more to it than that. Social standing in their day depended on when you arrived. My mother used to give people rank, depending on when they arrived in the Golden State. Since she was a native, she considered herself fairly well up on the list. And she thought the same way about everyone in her very large family, most of whom were in one way or another related to New England.
Indeed, the town in which they all lived was a lot like a New England town. As often happens with immigrants, the first settlers brought other members of their family to join them until there was a much larger family, all related and all in the same place.
In time I came to think of them as the Vortrekkers, the Boers who immigrated to South Africa from Holland, and who, over the generations, became the white tribe of Africa.
The Vortrekkers were pioneers, too, and they traveled in covered wagons.
They trekked. They were pushed inland by the British when they got to the Cape of Good Hope and they, in turn, pushed the Bantus, Zulus and other tribes of native peoples inland as they trekked to a new homeland.
In doing so they managed to retain their identity and to develop their own language, not quite Dutch and certainly not English. The Vortrekkers were a stolid bunch. They resisted change. They didn't want to be assimilated and they didn't want to assimilate. Eventually, to ensure this, alas, they developed apartheid.
But, of course, Africa changed, and so slowly have the Vortrekkers. And so has California.
I sometimes wonder what my grandparents would think of it now, of the valley in which they lived most of their lives, not the Silicon Valley, but another farther north where vineyards now cover both hills and the valley floor, where wine is both a kind of religion and big business.
My grandfather, who was one of the two last members of the Prohibitionist party in his county, might well be appalled by what's happened to his valley.
I know my grandmother would be. But more than that they would be surprised at the diversity that has come to a place, where they were the only residents, where almost everyone was white, Protestant and European in ancestry.
Like the Vortrekkers neither of them liked change much, but even as they lived, it was happening. Although the most dramatic changes in California didn't take place until after World War II when they were both dead, change had begun.
The trek was over for them, but so was the isolation that made them so secure and set in their town. The world had begun its rush in.
Both of them now rest on the hill above the town they helped to found, and I sometimes wonder what they hear, sleeping up there in the old cemetery and what they would say, if they could talk.
But then again maybe I wouldn't.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
