Harold F Hughes

This book was published in 1940 and is for a middle-grade audience. I purchased it for 25 or 50 cents as a discard from the Kings County Library system in the early 1990s, and this is the first time I've reread the entire book since I procured it. Books on the San Joaquin Valley are uncommon, whether for children or for adults, and that makes this book extra special.

To tell his story, Hughes uses the same family to illustrate how the valley has drastically changed for a century. Dave and his father arrive in the unsettled, wide valley in 1850 as they search for gold. After the father is bitten by a rattlesnake, Dave is taken in by a nearby tribe of Yokuts and spends years thriving in their village. He watches the growth of Fort Miller and is upset when the Indians are pushed into the mountains to leave the fertile land for the white settlers. Dave eventually returns to his father and they leave the state. Dave returns to California in 1883 with his own family, and is awed by how Fresno has grown. They leave again in the 1890s after they invest in a proposed railroad line that went nowhere, but the son stays. Dave returns a final time in 1940, the "modern era" for this book. It gets rather preachy at the end and turns the total focus to the growing need for electricity and "modern steam plants."

It's really a nonfiction book that is forcing itself to be fiction to be palatable to young readers. The fiction elements are heavy-handed and rather stupid, especially in the part about young Dave with the Indians. The non-fiction parts are really where the book is most interesting. I liked reading about the endless fields of jackrabbits, the evening sandstorms, and the development of nearby communities. I loved the illustrations, too, because it's hard to imagine my home region unsettled and unspoiled. Even for children in 1940, this book would have been unbalanced and contrived, but at least it would have taught them something about the San Joaquin Valley.… (mehr)