LUTHER BURBANK'S SPINELESS CACTUS: BOOM TIMES IN THE ... · 1916, Burbank's spineless cactus was...

LUTHLtp BUR BANK'S

SPINELESS CACTUS:

BOOM TIMES IN THE

CALIFORNIA DESERT

By Jane S. Smith

ere's a way to end world hunger and make the desert bloom: take

the common prickly pear cactus

that grows wild throughout the Southwest, use

hybridization and selection to "persuade" it to

relinquish its sharp spines, plant the improved version across the arid regions of the world, and

open up the range to grazing cattle.

That was the plan of Luther Burbank, California's

most celebrated plant breeder in the early years of the twentieth century, and it captured the

imagination?and the dollars?of a surprising number of people the world over. From 1905 to

1916, Burbank's spineless cactus was the center

of an agricultural bubble held aloft by the com

bined winds of genuine need, popular science,

the eternal pursuit of quick profits, and, most of

all, the extraordinary fame of Burbank himself.

The story of the spineless cactus craze is a

tragicomedy in several acts, with many prickly

repercussions, but at the turn of the last century

it was hardly an isolated example of California's

pursuit of new and better crops. From grapes and olives in the Napa Valley to cotton in Kern

County and dates in Indio, California was being transformed by agricultural innovation. All over

the state, optimistic growers were busy draining,

irrigating, terracing, tilling, and doing whatever

else seemed necessary to transform the largely uncultivated Pacific paradise into a functioning commercial garden.

Luther Burbank (i84g-ig26) was the most famous plant breeder of his day. By his own successful exam

ple?well publicized by myriad writers and reporters? he popularized the idea that plants can be shaped to

fit human needs. Credited with advancing the science

of plant breeding, he was an early and major contribu tor to the state's growing agricultural industry. This

photograph of Burbank at leisure circa 1895 belies his

indefatigable efforts, for more than fifty years, to cre ate new plants, including the spineless cactus?one of approximately 800 Burbank varieties of trees, flowers,

fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, and grains.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

26 California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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Burbank's spineless cactus plan never quite worked, as either cattle feed or instant riches, and

its decade-long burst of promotion, cultivation,

speculation, and exploitation is now almost lost

in the crowded annals of financial miscalculation.

Specimens still grow in many parts of Califor

nia, often as unnamed components of the home

garden, but both the man and his contribution

to desert agriculture have faded from popular

memory.1 Like the eucalyptus tree, widely pro moted during the same period as a fast-growing source of timber and now tolerated as a fragrant fire hazard of little or no commercial value, the

spineless cactus, with its aura of easy profits, is a

reminder of the race to riches that has character

ized California history from the Gold Rush to the

dot.com bubbles of the late twentieth century.

THE WIZARD OF SANTA ROSA

Excitement about the spineless cactus?a thorn

free variety of the Opuntia?had been building for several years when Burbank launched his

newest plant wonder on the open market with

a special twenty-eight-page catalog, The New

Agricultural-Horticultural Opuntias: Plant Cre

ations for Arid Regions, on June i, 1907. In the

timeless tradition of nursery catalogs, the publi cation featured enticing descriptions, testimonial

letters, and optimistic projects of potential yields, here combined with laboratory analyses of the

cactus's nutritional value and clear photographic evidence of the product's existence. In part, the

catalog's simplistic style seemed more appropri ate for young readers. "Everybody knows that

Baldwin apples, Bartlett pears and our favorite

peaches, plums and cherries cannot be raised

from seeds," Burbank wrote. "The same laws

hold true with the improved Opuntias, but for

tunately they can be raised from cuttings in any

quantity with the utmost ease. More truly they raise themselves, for when broken from the par

ent plant, the cuttings attend to the rooting with

out further attention, whether planted right end

up, bottom up, sideways or not at all."2

Such simplicity did not come cheap, however.

The marvelous new cacti were well beyond the

reach of child and almost every adult; the price for complete possession of one of Burbank's

eight new varieties ranged from one to ten thou

sand dollars. The New Agricultural-Horticultural

Opuntias was aimed at professional plant dealers

who would buy the prototypes, multiply them

on their own grounds, and sell the results to

the retail trade. This was Burbank's preferred method for disseminating his work, and both

his extraordinary products and his eye-popping

prices ensured huge publicity for the new spine less cactus, as it had for his other introductions

in the past.

By 1907, Burbank was already an international

celebrity unique in the annals of plant breeding. As a young man, he had read Charles Darwin's

Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestica

tion and had been inspired to seek out and foster

the innate variability of all living things. While

still in his early twenties and living in Massachu

setts, he developed an admirably large, produc tive, tasty, blight-resistant potato. After exhibiting his new potato at agricultural fairs, Burbank sold

the rights to a local seed merchant and used the

profit?the grand sum of $150?to emigrate in 1875 t0 Santa Rosa, the small but booming town north of San Francisco where his younger brother Alfred lived.

Today, over a century later, the Burbank potato?

usually seen in its russet-skinned variation

and now known as the Idaho potato, the russet

potato, or simply the baking potato?remains the

most widely grown potato in the world. But for

Burbank, it was only the beginning of his life's

work in California: the development of at least

eight hundred new varieties of agricultural and

horticultural wonders for farm and garden.3

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Burbank considered the rich and fertile soil of Sonoma County ideal for conducting his plant-breeding experiments. In 1885, he

purchased ten acres west of Sebastopol and established the Gold Ridge Experiment Farm as an open-air laboratory for his large scale investigations. There he planted his creations, usually several hundred at a time, in long rows?sometimes more than 700

feet?running north and south. Though he did not develop the spineless cactus at Gold Ridge, Burbank demonstrated that the cli mate of Sonoma County was favorable for growing numerous varieties of the specimen.

Courtesy of the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa, California, lutherburbank.org

For more than thirty years since his arrival in

Santa Rosa, Burbank had produced a steady stream of new products?fruits, vegetables, flowers, nuts, berries, trees, and grains. Catalogs

advertising his "new creations," bred behind the

picket fence of his large garden in Santa Rosa

or at his experiment farm in nearby Sebastopol, were distributed to growers throughout Califor

nia and the United States and to every continent

except Antarctica.

Hybrid plums, giant cherries, freestone peaches, exotic lilies, the enormously popular Shasta

daisy, and a winter rhubarb so profitable grow

ers called it "the mortgage lifter" all helped to

generate large commercial markets in a period of agricultural expansion that amounted to a sec

ond gold rush for Burbank's adopted state. For

years, reporters and photographers hovered about

his grounds, waiting for the latest report of this

season's dazzling new improvements on the raw

material of nature.

Burbank was lauded by growers, processors, and

shippers for the new businesses built from his

products, but he was even more celebrated for

his almost magical ability to transform plants by

removing what would seem to be their defining

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Among Burbank's creations was a gigantic white evening primrose. In his posthumously published book The Harvest

of the Years, Burbank called the effect of afield of his primroses "handkerchiefs spread on a lawn." This photograph, made circa 1909 behind his Santa Rosa home, shows beds of poppies beyond the primroses and several varieties of cactus against the fence.


California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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characteristic. Since publication of his first New

Creations in Fruits and Flowers catalog in 1893,

reporters had gleefully called him the Wizard of

Santa Rosa, filling their columns with descrip tions of paradoxical varieties like the white

blackberry, the stoneless plum, the "everlasting" flower, a bright red version of the golden Califor

nia poppy, and the Paradox walnut tree that pro vided valuable hardwood lumber but grew as fast

as a pine or other soft wood.

In the context of these earlier triumphs, the

spineless cactus was only the latest demonstra

tion of Burbank's uncanny ability to bend nature

to his will. In the words of Governor George C.

Pardee, "Working quietly and modestly among his trees and vines, our friend Burbank has

worked what, to our lay minds, appear almost

like miracles. He has changed the characters

and appearances of fruits and flowers, turned

pigmies into giants, sweetened the bitter and the

sour, transformed noxious weeds into valuable

plants, and verily set the seal of his disapproval

upon much that to him and us seems wrong in

Nature's handiwork. For us he has done much;

and to him the whole world is indebted."4

Governor Pardee, like California's commercial

leaders, recognized how much Burbank had con

tributed to the state's highly profitable shift from

fertile promise to actual production. In the search

for a man of genius who could embody both the

aspirations and achievements of California as

the major supplier of the world's food, no single individual rivaled Luther Burbank, and no praise seemed too excessive.

A SELF-MADE INVENTOR

To many of his admirers, Burbank's life was as

appealing as his garden inventions. First there

was his New England lineage, a fact that Bur

bank himself did not consider very important but which other people honored as a link to the

nation's very beginnings. When Burbank was

A Man of Genius

Edward j. Wickson, professor of agriculture at the University of California, joined notables such as Thomas A. Edison and Theodore Roosevelt in

voicing his admiration of Luther Burbank. Wick son dedicated his book The California Fruits and How to Crow Them (1900) to the imaginative and

productive plant breeder:

TO LUTHER BURBANK, OF TANTA

ROfA, WHOTE CREATIVE HOR

TICULTURAL GENlUr HAf, BY

NEW COINAGE OF "BLOOMING,

AMBROXIAL FRUIT OF VEGETA

BLE GOLD," AMPLY REQUITED

THE WORLDT GIFT OF THE

CHOICErT FLOWER! AND FRUITT

FOR THE ADVANCEMENT AND

ADORNMENT OF CALIFORNIA?

THUr BErTOWING NEW HON

ORS UPON THE TTATE AND NEW

RICHEJ UPON MANKIND?THir

WORK If CORDIALLY INTCRIBED

Ar AN EXPONENT OF EITEEM

AND APPRECIATION.

Edward J. Wickson, The California Fruits and How to Grow Them:

A Manual of Methods Which Have Yielded Greatest Success; With

Lists of Varieties Best Adapted to the Different Districts of the State

(San Francisco: Pacific Rural Press, igoo); California Historical Society

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born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1849, me

family already had lived in New England for

over two centuries and could claim a long line of

teachers, clergymen, craftsmen, and manufactur

ers. At a time when Massachusetts dominated

the cultural scene, such contemporary literary lions as Longfellow, Alcott, Emerson, and Tho

reau were familiar names in the house, and

Emerson and Thoreau, along with Alexander von

Humboldt, remained Burbank's favorite authors

throughout his life.

Burbank's second appeal was that he had left

New England. Luther was Samuel Burbank's thir

teenth child by his third wife, and two older half

brothers had joined the surge of migrants to Cali

fornia in the 1850s, settling in Marin County. A

true child of the Gold Rush years, Luther grew up

reading his brothers' letters about the wonders

of their adopted state. That he followed them

west made him a perfect representative of the

transcontinental transfer of power and influence

that has long been a point of pride for California

boosters.

Finally, there was Burbank's status as a self

taught genius, always a form of popular hero.

The Burbank brickyard in Lancaster had provided a comfortable living, but the family was far from

rich. When Samuel's death ended Luther's stud

ies at the Lancaster Academy and foreclosed

any prospect of college, the fatherless young man escaped his factory job by going to the

Lancaster Public Library, where he read natural

history, including Darwin. Thirty years later, he

was recognized as a practical inventor on a par with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, two other

giants who had skipped the lecture hall to create

the transformational products that formed the

modern world.5

Despite the lack of any sort of advanced education

in biology, botany, horticulture, or agriculture, Burbank won great respect from the expand

ing profession of science. Beginning in the late

1890s, there had been a rising tide of professional interest in his achievements from those working in both the laboratory and the field. Scientific

groups invited him to deliver papers, and federal

agents from the newly formed Agricultural Exper iment Stations made pilgrimages to Santa Rosa to

meet the master and observe his work. Hugo de

Vries, the Dutch geneticist who was a celebrated

leader in the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel and

the inventor of the word "mutation," accepted an

invitation to lecture at the University of California

at Berkeley because, he admitted, he wanted to

visit Burbank; afterward, he took back photo

graphs and samples of Burbank products to use

in his lectures in Europe. Liberty Hyde Bailey, the

Cornell University professor widely regarded as

the dean of American horticulture, also came to

Berkeley largely because of its proximity to Santa

Rosa; dazzled by the range of experiments he saw

in Burbank's small garden in the middle of the

city, he praised the self-educated plant breeder as

"a painstaking, conscientious investigator of the

best type."6

Local boosters were even more enthusiastic about

Burbank's achievements. In 1903, the California

Academy of Sciences celebrated its fiftieth anni

versary by awarding Burbank a gold medal "for

meritorious work in developing new forms of

plant life," calling him the most important sci

entist of the past half century.7 Edward Wickson, soon to be dean of the College of Agriculture at

the University of California, declared that "Mr.

Burbank's thought and work have passed beyond even the highest levels of horticulture, known

as horticultural science, into the domain of sci

ence itself."8 David Starr Jordan, president of

Stanford University and himself a noted biolo

gist, appointed Burbank Special Lecturer on

Evolution; Jordan later collaborated with Vernon

Kellogg, professor of entomology at Stanford, on a series of articles known collectively as The

Scientific Aspects of Luther Burbank's And

^2, California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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in 1905, as though bestowing a special seal of

scientific approval, the Carnegie Institution of

Washington, D.C., granted Burbank the enor

mous sum of ten thousand dollars per year to

support his experiments in plant evolution and

hired a young geneticist, complete with the Ph.D.

Burbank lacked, to record his methods.

THE MIRACULOUS OPUNTIA

By the time Burbank had introduced his spine less cactus, then, he was a star whose name and

face were familiar around the world, a darling of the business community whose products and

reputation elevated every phase of California

commerce, and a plant "evoluter" (his own pre ferred title) whose abilities had been certified by leaders of academic science. And now he was

offering a new crop from which a great many

people hoped to make a lot of money.

In September 1907, three months after the New

Opuntias catalog appeared, the National Irriga tion Congress held its fifteenth annual meeting in Sacramento. As the main speaker, Luther Bur

bank repeated his prediction that the spineless cactus would solve the problem of what to feed

livestock in the parched regions of the world.

"Of course my first object was to get a thornless

[cactus]," Burbank told the assembly. "Then next

to get an individual which would produce a great

weight of forage to the acre. That has been very well accomplished. I have now a cactus that will

produce 200 tons of food per acre ... as safe to

handle and as safe to feed as beets, potatoes, car

rots or pumpkins."10 Warning his listeners that

much remained to be done, Burbank concluded

his speech with a bit of boastful hyperbole that

would become the gospel of his many promoters:

"My object is to combine this great production with great nutrition. Then, my opinion is, the

cactus will be the most important plant on earth

for arid regions and I have not the least doubt of

securing that."11

Other presenters addressed such important issues as grazing rights, timber sales in U.S.

forests, federal support for irrigation programs, and the development of inland waterways, but

it was Burbank's spineless cactus that received

the most extensive coverage in the press. The

Los Angeles Times, among many other papers,

printed the Associated Press's report on the con

ference on its front page the following day under

the headline "Wizard's Wisdom." Other reports noted that the cactus fruit, no longer a "prickly"

pear, would now become a delectable treat on the

family table. Already, Burbank's cautions that his

spineless cactus was still a work in progress were

forgotten under the dazzling prospect of succu

lent fruits and nourishing fodder newly available

for painless consumption.

Indeed, miraculous crop introductions could and

did happen. In 1873, Eliza Tibbets, a resident

of the struggling three-year-old city of River

side, California, received two bud stocks from

the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),

"sports" that were derived from a seedless orange discovered in Bahia, Brazil. The fruit proved to

be hearty, delicious, and conveniently free of

seeds. The new navel orange, as it was called, did very well in southern California's dry climate

and soon other growers were planting cuttings from the Tibbets tree. By 1880, local grower Thomas W. Cover had employed Chinese and

Native American workers to bud seven hundred

trees to navels; a few years later, profits from the

Riverside navels had allowed the community to

survive the 1888 collapse in land values (another

frequent event in California history). By 1895, Riverside boasted the highest per capita income

in the state. There was no reason at all to think

that lightning couldn't strike twice.

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You can Laugh

at Dry Seasons

If you have even a

small patch of the

TRUE

Burbank Cactus A single acre

will easily carry

One Thousand Tons of Feed The FRUIT, also is produced in

Enormous Quantities New 26 Page Illutrated Catalogue

LUTHER BURBANK SANTA ROSA, CAL.

Numerous catalogs and flyers advertised the spineless cactus. "Dry seasons, which are certain to come," Burbank wrote, "have been and will continue to be the

source of irreparable loss to stock raisers." Burbank promoted the advantages of his thornless Opuntia?represented by this specimen (right)?to food producers throughout the country and worldwide as fodder for animals, for its medicinal

properties, and in the production of juice, jams and preserves, drinks, candy, and candles.

Flyer, Courtesy of Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa, California,

lutherburbank.org; Cactus specimen, California Historical Society,

USC Special Collections


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THE WIZARD HYBRIDIZER

Today, planting the desert with an experimental breed of spineless cactus seems a very compli cated way to solve a not-too-pressing problem. Since the middle of the twentieth century, a

combination of high-yield varieties and govern ment subsidies has made corn so plentiful and

inexpensive that it now supplies up to 40 percent of cattle feed in the United States. Grass-fed

beef?like the analog clock, the acoustic guitar, or

the gin martini?was a descriptive name coined

after World War II to distinguish it from earlier

products; today the term "corn-fed"?like digital, electric, or vodka?has become the new norm.

But a hundred years ago, things were different.

In those days, cattle grazed, brought to pasture

by ranchers during the summer months. As

cattle ranches expanded into the deserts of the

American West, where grass did not grow?and into the arid stretches of South America, Spain,

India, New Zealand, and Africa?the question of

what the animals would eat loomed large.

Burbank was not by any means the first person to look to the Opuntia for food or profit. In Mex

ico, prickly pears (tunas) and paddles (nopales) had been eaten long before the Spanish con

quest, and the cactus plant had been cultivated

for just as long as a host for the cochineal insect, a parasite that provided a valuable red dye. The

prickly pear cactus also was used as emergency livestock feed in the desert, though it required a laborious process of singeing or rubbing with

abrasives to remove the spines that would other

wise injure or even kill cattle. During the drought

To cattle ranchers in the dry regions of the Southwest, news of forage that would thrive in the desert and safely nourish

their livestock was especially welcome. "Millions have died from the thorns of the prickly pear cactus," Burbank noted.

"How would you enjoy being fed on needles, fish-hooks, toothpicks, barbed wire fence, nettles, and chestnut burrs?" he

asked would-be buyers in a catalog. "The wild, thorny cactus is and always must be more or less of a pest."

California Historical Society, USC Special Collections

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year of 1903-4, ranchers had turned to modern

gasoline torches to burn off the spines, and the

US DA had conducted extensive analyses of the

nutritional content of the cactus paddles. What

was missing was a way to make the process easy,

attractive, and profitable. That was where the

wizard hybridizer came in, at least according to

the many people who regarded Burbank as a fool

proof source of lucrative products.

The research had been going on for years. When

Burbank first arrived in California, he was

entranced by the many local varieties of cactus,

some of which grew very large, and particularly

by the Opuntia, which has edible fruit and is

relatively tolerant of cold. He began working with

the prickly pears in earnest around 1892, follow

ing his usual method: massive hybridization, the

ruthless selection from thousands of specimens of a few promising seedlings, and repetition of

the process over multiple generations.

The first step of Burbank's experiment was

to amass a large collection of cacti, primarily

Opuntia. Working with professional plant hunt

ers and building on his worldwide fame, he

imported specimens from all over California;

from states as unlikely as Maine and as close as

Arizona; and from Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Sic

ily, South Africa, Mexico, South America, and

Central America. Admirers, knowledgeable about

Burbank's interest in cacti from the vast number

of newspaper accounts that spread his fame, sent

additional specimens.

The federal government also supported his

efforts. David Fairchild, who worked for the

USDA in a position with the wonderful title of

Plant Explorer, arranged for Burbank to receive

samples from Italy, France, and North Africa, sev

eral of which became direct ancestors of Burbank

varieties. The USDA greenhouse in Washington, D.C., provided other specimens. The city of San

Diego offered a section of the city park as an

Agricultural Experiment Station for the spine

less cactus,12 and cactus experiment stations were

established in Chico, California, and in San Anto

nio, Texas, among other locations.

Burbank, meanwhile, rented land in Livermore,

Alameda County, as his own experimental

ground, and contracted with ranchers in other

regions both to test the viability of different

breeds and to grow the quantities of spineless cactus he would need if he were to have enough to market. He also sent samples to the head of

the University of California's Department of

Nutrition and Foods at Berkeley, who tested them

and declared them "to have nutritive powers three-fourths of alfalfa."^

MARKETING THE NEW CACTUS

The first sales of spineless cactus were to dealers

who planned to take them overseas to propagate for foreign markets. John Rutland, a nurseryman from Australia who had moved to Sebastopol to be closer to Burbank's work, bought the first

slabs of spineless cactus in 1905, a transaction

Burbank publicized by telling reporters he had

made enough on the sale to pay for a new house

in Santa Rosa.14

Accounts of the new desert crop began to appear in popular magazines and books, making exag

gerated promises that Burbank claimed forced

him to issue a catalog that would at least be

an accurate description of what was available.

William S. Harwood, a prolific though highly unreliable reporter who had already written

several ecstatic articles about Burbank when he

published New Creations in Plant Life in 1905/5

greatly exaggerated all the marvels of Burbank's

work. In April of the same year, The World Today

published "The Spineless Cactus: The Latest

Plant Marvel Originated by Luther Burbank," by Hamilton Wright, who was identified as secretary of the California Promotion Committee.

^6 California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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Burbank conducted extensive experiments in the development of his spineless cactus. Here, Opuntia grow in planters and fields at Bur bank's experiment grounds in Santa Rosa. David Starr Jordon, president of Stanford University, described Burbank's process in a 1905 article: "... the original stock, prickly; the second generation, slightly prickly; the third, without thorns_This will have very great value in the arid regions." Despite Burbank's lack of formal scientific training, he was inducted into the Agricultural, National Inventors, and

Horticultural halls of fame.

California Historical Society, USC Special Collections

Wright was paid to boost California's reputation as a source of spectacular new products. A less

partisan reporter, George Wharton James, also

succumbed to the excitement of the spineless cac

tus in his 1906 paean to the beauty and romance

of the Southwest, The Wonders of the Colorado Des

ert (Southern California). Describing the desperate efforts to rescue livestock during recent drought

years by feeding them cactus paddles from which

the injurious spines had been burned, James was

relieved to report: "Luther Burbank, the wizard of

plant life, has solved the spine problem without

singeing. He has developed a species of spineless cactus which has high nutritive and water value.

This cactus will undoubtedly, in time, be planted in large areas of the Colorado and other deserts

and thus aid cattle, if not man, in solving that

most difficult of desert problems,?the perma nent and well-distributed supply of water in the

driest areas."16

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The plant that would rescue cattle also pro vided fodder for little minds. Excerpts from

"The Spineless Cactus: The Latest Wonder from

Luther Burbank" appeared in the Texas School

Journal in 1905?the same year Burbank's own

"The Training of the Human Plant" appeared in

Century magazine, bringing his theories of edu

cation to a wide audience.17 By December 1907, three months after his appearance at the National

Irrigation Conference, Burbank seemed a natural

choice to speak at the Southern California Teach

ers' Association meeting in Los Angeles, where

he once again described his work with the spine less cactus.

As Burbank was careful to note in his catalogs and many speeches, cactus is a slow-growing

plant and his best varieties were still under

development. Apart from the early sales to Rut

land, what he offered was a promise?for future

delivery, future profits, and future salvation of

the starving peoples of the world. Marketing was

not something that interested Burbank, and he

wasn't very good at it. Whenever possible, he

licensed or sold his plant prototypes to large, well-established companies like Burpee Seeds in

Pennsylvania, Stark Bro's Nurseries in Missouri, or Child's Nurseries, whose establishment was so

large it became the city of Floral Park, New York.

The spineless cactus had little appeal for north

ern or eastern dealers, but a number of Cali

fornians were eager to relieve Burbank of the

burden of taking his promising new product to

the retail level. The first of these entrepreneurs was Charles fay Welch, a well-established rancher

in Merced County. Sometime in 1907, before

Burbank issued his New Opuntias catalog, Welch

had formed the Thornless Cactus Farming Com

pany in Los Angeles with several partners and

paid Burbank twenty-seven thousand dollars for

the right to grow and market seven varieties of

his new cactus, the biggest single sale Burbank

would ever make.

By spring 1908, Welch boasted the production of

1,000 new plants each week at Copa de Oro, his

cactus farm in the Coachella Valley.18 Later that

summer, he advertised that "Burbank's Thornless

Cactus will produce as high as 200 or 300 tons

of rich, succulent fodder to the acre. Burbank's

Improved Fruiting Varieties (for Semi-Thornless) Cactus will produce as much as 100 tons of deli

cious fruit to the acre_The Burbank Cactus

has just started its first distribution of these won

derful plants. Hundreds of people cheerfully paid their money for plants two years ago and waited

till June, 1909, for delivery." The Thornless Cac

tus Farming Company asserted that it had taken

requests for 50,000 starter slabs of spineless cac

tus from customers around the world, before a

single plant had been shipped. Customers order

ing now, however, would receive theirs at once.19

The prospect of all these far-flung buyers?and the even more enticing vision of ongoing trade

in both cactus paddles as cattle feed and cactus

fruit as a grocery item?caught the attention of

shipping companies. Railroads wanted new crops that would appeal to distant markets, and many carriers already had profited handsomely from

Burbank's earlier introductions. From potatoes to

prunes, Burbank products were a significant part of the tons of specialty crops that filled cars head

ing east from California.20 Hoping to be both

producer and shipper, the Southern Pacific Rail

road worked from 190810191210 bring value to

its barren acreage in southern California and the

Great Basin by growing Burbank's spineless cac

tus.21 During the same period, the Union Pacific

Railroad sponsored promotions of Burbank prod ucts around the country, with particular empha sis on the spineless cactus.22

Meanwhile, Burbank had new varieties ready for production. Apparently dissatisfied with his

contract with the Thornless Cactus Farming

Company, which was having trouble meeting scheduled payments, in February 1909 he began

negotiating with Herbert and Hartland Law, who

^8 California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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had made a good deal of money in the patent medicine business and were the current own

ers of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. The Law

brothers established Luther Burbank Products,

Incorporated, to market all of Burbank's cre

ations, including the spineless cactus, but at the

last minute the man whose name and fame were

vital to the operation got cold feet and pulled out

of the agreement. For the time being, Burbank

would continue to sell spineless cactus through his own catalogs and the Thornless Cactus Farm

ing Company.

ATTRACTING BUYERS

While trying to find someone else to handle the

sales of his spineless cactus, Burbank entered

into a separate agreement to market himself

through the publication of a multivolume work

that would provide practical information to bud

ding farmers and gardeners. The numerous

efforts to write about Luther Burbank are too

vast and complicated to be described here, but

the spineless cactus also figured prominendy in

efforts to sell books.23

Starting in 1911, potential subscribers around

the country received elaborate brochures from a

new organization, the Luther Burbank Publish

ing Company, which would soon form a Luther

Burbank Society of subscribers and supporters. The goal was a multivolume work, with lavish

color photographs, that would be at once a practi cal guide, a scientific record, and an inspiration to gardeners and farmers around the world. The

1911 brochure summarized Burbank's career in

glowing terms and focused on his latest creation,

noting: "There are three billion acres of desert

in the world_It took the imagination of a Bur

bank to conceive a way to transform these three

billion acres into productivity." Using a tense that

might be called "future superlative," the prospec tus described the amazing values to be expected of the fruit harvest from the prickly pear without

roof Aook ^ ""^ dumber 1

TOT

As a member of the Luther Burbank Society from 1912 to 1917, the phi lanthropist Phoebe A. Hearst received this 1913 proof book as the first installment of the society's plans for publication of the 12-volume Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Appli cation. The chapter on the spineless cactus explained how "in a dozen

years, Mr. Burbank carried the cactus back ages in its ancestry, how he

proved beyond question by planting a thousand cactus seeds that the

spiny cactus descended from a smooth slabbed line of forefathers?how he brought forth a new race without the suspicion of a spine, and with a

velvet skin, and how he so re-established these old characteristics that the result was fixed and permanent."

California Historical Society

its prickles and the forage value of the spineless cactus after the pears were gathered. In an eerie

foreshadowing of the ethanol controversies of

recent years, the booksellers also predicted that

spineless cactus "can produce $1200 of Dena

tured Alcohol per acre as against $35 from an

acre of Indian corn."24

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The director of the Luther Burbank Publishing

Company was a tireless enthusiast named Oscar

Binner, who also had helped assemble and pub licize a traveling exhibit of Burbank's marvels, a large glass-sided display case in which some

two hundred glass jars held pickled specimens of Burbank fruits and vegetables. A large paddle of spineless cactus, flanked by luscious spineless

prickly pears, occupied the central shelf, directly under a bust of Burbank.

The Luther Burbank traveling display was a

huge attraction. In January 1911, the cabinet of

botanical curiosities was featured at the Western

Land Products Exposition in Omaha, where it

warranted a large photograph in the Omaha Bee.

In March, it was declared the premier feature of

the Pacific Lands and Products Exposition in Los

Angeles, where the Los Angeles Times reported on the entire show under the headline "Plant

Freaks to Be Shown" and the subhead "Wizard

Burbank Will Exhibit Some Queer Ones."2* By

November, the exhibit had made its way to New

York's Madison Square Garden, where it attracted

considerable interest at the Land and Irrigation

Exposition despite such distractions as the Mor

mon Tabernacle Choir singing "Ode to Irriga tion" under the sponsorship of the state of Utah.

Even skeptics were enthralled when several speci mens of spineless cactus were taken to the cows

in the New York State display and enthusiastically consumed.26

Many were gawking, but who was buying? Jack London, for one. The writer, adventurer, and

rancher lived close enough to Burbank to ride

over to Santa Rosa for agricultural advice while

he was trying to make his new Sonoma County

enterprise a model of modern farm management, and he placed his orders directly with the cactus's

creator. On June 26,1911, while traveling in

Hawaii, London sent his sister Eliza (who served

as his farm manager) an order for 130 cuttings of sixteen different varieties of spineless cactus

to be purchased directly from Burbank in Santa

Rosa. He also included detailed instructions on

dynamiting holes for planting, separating forage cactus from ones that would be grown for their

fruit, and asking Burbank himself about whether

the drainage conditions of the site he had in mind

made it suitable for growing the cactus.27

There is no record of London's success, but the

signs are not good. Among the many brochures,

clippings, and scribbled notes the writer kept for

his farm experiments is a set of four sheets of yel low foolscap paper, stapled together. The sheets

are blank except for the word "cactus" penciled at the top in London's handwriting. Four years after the first planting, Eliza wrote to her brother, "On the one sore patch just northerly from your

dwelling, in fork of the roads, I have permitted Mr. Lawson to plant cactus. He is furnishing the plants and keeping ground in condition at

no expense to us and is to give us 25% of cactus

raised. I thought this a good chance for us to try out the cactus proposition without expense."28

Unfortunately, the nearly empty ledger of Lon

don's spineless cactus experiment seems to have

been typical. As often happens with investment

bubbles, the spineless cactus had its greatest value as something to be sold, not used, and

records of anyone using it for cattle feed or fruit

production in the United States are far scarcer

than evidence of the multiple ways people hoped to profit by supplying those end users.

From the beginning, there had been warn

ings that the spineless cactus was not an easy or instant panacea for the problems of desert

ranches. For several years, David Griffiths, a

cactus expert at the USDA's Bureau of Plant

Industry, had been mounting a campaign against Burbank and those who promoted him. In 1905, before the boom began, the bureau had issued

Griffiths' booklet, The Prickly Pear and Other

Cacti as Food for Stock, which investigated singe

ing, steaming, chopping, disjointing, and other


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means of preparing cacti as feed for cows, sheep,

goats, and hogs. In 1907, Griffiths' The Tuna as

Food for Man, which explored the nutritive quali ties of the prickly pear fruit, was prefaced by a

distinctly grumpy acknowledgment that "inter

est in cacti in general, from both a food and a

forage standpoint, has been greatly stimulated

by popular writers during the past two or three

years." In 1909, Griffiths felt compelled to issue

"The 'Spineless' Prickly Pears," stressing "limita

tions ... placed upon the growing of the plants as

farm crops which ought to be of service to those

who may be misled by ill-advised stories of the

phenomenal adaptability of this class of prickly

pears in the agriculture of our arid States."29

By 1912, Griffiths had risen from assistant agros

tologist to agriculturalist at the USDA, all the

while continuing to criticize Luther Burbank. On

February 29,1912, Representative Everis Anson

Hayes from Los Angeles rose to the defense of

his state's favorite agricultural hero. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, "Mr. Hayes delivered in

the House a speech deploring that recently an

employee of the Department of Agriculture had

seen fit to assail Burbank and even ridicule his

genius and the great work he has done and is

still doing." Noting that 95 percent of the plums

shipped from California were Burbank varieties, as well as almost all the state's potatoes, Hayes declared the spineless cactus Burbank's great est triumph and insisted that a photograph of

Burbank's cactus field be inserted in the Con

gressional Record, possibly the first such pictorial introduction.30

Many more spineless cactus photographs

appeared the following July in the Pacific Dairy Review, which devoted its first four pages to the

"immense possibilities" of fodder from the cactus

before concluding, "Later we may take up some

of the problems of cactus, or opuntia, culture, if

in fact there shall be any problems in connection

with it. From our present state of knowledge it

looks so simple that it may not even leave room

for the agricultural or dairy editor to do anything but say 'plant opuntias.'"31

Like so many others, the editors of the Pacific

Dairy Review were overly optimistic. The prob lems Griffiths cited were ones that Burbank

had always acknowledged, though his various

promoters tended to downplay any difficulties

in their own accounts. A careful reader who

could penetrate the thicket of adjectives in the

New Opuntias catalog might have lingered on

the conclusion of the following sentence when

considering a purchase: "Systematic work for

their improvement has shown how pliable and

readily molded is this unique, hardy denizen of

rocky, drought-cursed, wind-swept, sun-blistered

districts and how readily it adapts itself to more

fertile soils and how rapidly it improves under

cultivation and improved conditions."32

SPINELESS SCHEMES

As it happened, fertile soil, cultivation, and

improved conditions were precisely what the

desert lacked, along with water for irrigation and cheap labor to install the fencing needed to

protect the defenseless plants from hungry rab

bits and other predators. Growers in India or

North Africa sent Burbank testimonial letters,

but American ranchers were looking for a fast,

easy solution to their feed problems. Growing

spineless cactus took too long, required too much

work, and needed more water than nature pro vided in truly arid areas with much less rainfall

than Sonoma or Riverside. If ranchers in the

California desert could provide such ideal condi

tions, they would be raising alfalfa, which was, in

fact, a better feed.

But if the cactus wasn't flourishing as hoped, the enthusiasm of those who wanted to sell it

remained as fresh and green as the grass the

Opuntia was supposed to replace. And since this

was California, it is no surprise that the spineless cactus boom inspired a side bubble in real estate.

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By the second decade of the twentieth century,

corporate agriculture had already replaced the

small family farm as an economic force in

California.33 The vision of moving to the Golden

State and living off the products of the land

of sunshine continued to lure many migrants from other regions, however, and they were the

target of real estate vendors who embraced the

spineless cactus as a way to sell barren land

previously considered undesirable for cultivation.

In 1912, for example, a former cattle ranch in

the San Joaquin Valley was divided into twenty acre lots and renamed Oro Loma, the Spineless Cactus Land. The developers advertised that

buyers could turn virgin desert into profitable farms by planting spineless cactus, whose

paddles would be provided with every purchase. If the buyer didn't initiate cactus cultivation right

away, the sellers would still allow them to get into

the market on the ground floor by providing, for

the paltry additional price of $125, a quarter-acre

plot that was fenced and planted with "100 cac

tus plants of several varieties." "A small charge for superintendence" would bring management and sales of the resulting product "until the pur chaser is ready to occupy his farm."34

For some time, similar schemes had filled mail

boxes and crowded the advertising pages of

newspapers and popular magazines. Two typical advertisers from the pages of Sunset Magazine were the Terra Bella Development Company, which offered "fortunes in fruit," and the Con

servative Rubber Production Company, which

projected "$1500 A Year for Life."35 The Oro

Loma Company, however, offered the special reassurance that came with the name of Luther

Burbank, whose photograph occupied the first

page of its brochure; on page 2 was another

photograph captioned "Young Spineless Cactus

on Luther Burbank's Experimental Grounds," which appears to be a reproduction of a 1908

postcard.36

Inside pages featured more photographs of cac

tus fields, as well as other crops that might be

used to supplement income while waiting for

the cactus profits to roll in. Describing what they called "the spineless cactus industry," the Oro

Loma sellers noted that "during the next five

years the people that now have a spineless cactus

nursery started, or that quickly establish one,

on ORO LOMA LANDS, should realize a hand

some independence out of the sale of leaves and

cuttings" by selling them to other growers and

ranchers who did not have the foresight to get into the market early.3?

Lest the buyer be unwilling to do the math, the

numbers were provided: "Each acre of the spine less cactus should supply, during the third and

later years ... at least 150,000 leaves per annum.

The selling price of the leaves ranges from 20c

to $2.50 each, at present. It is not likely they will

sell below 20c. each for at least five years_ That means $30,000 per acre, per year. If sold at

10 cents each, it means $15,000. Even at 5 cents

each, it amounts to $7,500." Finally, readers were

encouraged to organize a colony of friends to buy Oro Loma lands where together they could "enjoy the comforts and luxuries that are common to

the people who live in this region."38

If twenty acres seemed too much, smaller parcels also were available for those eager to enter

the surefire business of becoming a spineless cactus supplier. In the fall of 1913, the Magazine

of Wall Street printed a comic response to an

unnamed spineless cactus brochure, which the

author claimed had inspired him to form his

own company, Tailless Jackrabbit (Ltd.): "Today I

have a letter in my mail enclosing a prospectus. This well-printed document sets forth that the

next great killing in the financial world will be

made by the Spineless Cactus, the one invented

by Luther Burbank. The salesman who sends

me this letter asks me to take an acre or two

and interest a few of my personal friends at so

much commission per friend. I shall not buy

j^-Z California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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The Spineless Cactus Nursery <sf Land Co. grew hundreds of acres of thornless cacti?including these of the Melrose variety?in southern California. In a 1913 interview, William L. Wilson, the company's secretary and treasurer, known as the "King of the

Spineless Cactus Growers," predicted: "When the value of spineless cactus is fully realized and appreciated, Southern California will have an industry that will loom larger than anything yet attempted in the land of sunshine and flowers."


Spineless Cactus Incorporated, today; but when

I get my Tailless Jackrabbit (Ltd.), listed on the

Stock Exchange, I shall expect all my friends to

bite_Kind reader, may I not put you down for a

few shares in Tailless Jackrabbit (Ltd.)? If the door

is locked when you call, throw your money over

the transom at the sign of the Rabbit's Foot."39

Eager to discourage pirates and profiteers and

to escape from the cumbersome details of sales, Burbank tried again to acquire an "official" dealer

for his spineless cactus. Not far from the Oro

Loma Company offices in San Francisco, in the

Exposition Building at the corner of Pine and

Battery streets, a much larger entity called the

Luther Burbank Company appeared in 1913 to

make yet another attempt to handle the sale of

spineless cactus for the harried inventor. The

founders, who had no experience in the plant trade, paid Burbank $30,000 for the exclusive

rights to market his creations and sold shares in

the company worth well over $300,000.4?

Interest in the spineless cactus was high in

northern California, where Burbank was most

famous for his work with orchard fruit, but it was

even greater in Los Angeles, the gateway to the

desert. The Luther Burbank Company opened a branch office in Los Angeles, managed by a

recent arrival from Brooklyn named Bingham Thoburn Wilson, author of The Cat's Paw, The

Tale of the Phantom Yacht, The Village of Hide and

Seek, and other novels whose very tides should

have constituted fair warning.

It appears that Wilson was a good salesman, however. In the fall of 1913, a group of Los Ange les investors, many of them recent arrivals from

Canada, formed the El Campo Investment &

Land Co. with one hundred thousand plants pur chased from the Luther Burbank Company. The

company already had bought land in Arlington, south of Riverside, where it planned to cultivate

cactus as a prelude to entering the hog and cattle

business. Wilson landed another big order from

Texas and proudly announced a request from

Don Dante Cusi of Mexico City for enough cac

tus cuttings to plant one thousand acres.

Like the El Campo company, Cusi envisioned

the cultivation of the spineless cactus as part of a larger agricultural empire. In 1903, he had

acquired over two hundred and forty square miles of property in the dry, hot area of Michoa

can and eagerly adopted the latest farming prod ucts and technologies. In later years, he would

import a German railroad, an English steam

43

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During the years of the spineless cactus craze, investors formed the Luther Burbank Company to manage sales of Burbank products. As the corporation proclaimed in its 1913 catalog, Luther Burbank's

Spineless Cactus, "The Luther Burbank Company is the sole dis tributor of the Burbank Horticultural Productions, and from no

other source can one be positively assured of obtaining genuine Luther Burbank Productions."

HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA

engine, and enough irrigation equipment to turn

his land into an improbable center for rice grow

ing, but as the Los Angeles Times correctly noted

in 1913, his spineless cactus order "would take

more than the entire Burbank plantation could

supply at one time."41

Overexpansion and difficulties in product deliv

ery are classic problems of any new business, but

these perils did not seem to bother the managers of the Luther Burbank Company. For the next

two years, they continued to spend a fortune on

advertising and told their salesmen to accept

every order that came their way. When they didn't

have enough stock to fill the orders, they bought

ordinary Opuntia, singed off the spines with

blowtorches or rubbed them off with pads, and

sent out the doctored slabs for planting.

Buyers discovered the fraud once the cactus had

been planted, of course, but by then it was too

late. The Luther Burbank Company collapsed into bankruptcy on February 8,1916, wiping out many Santa Rosa investors who had bought what seemed a sure road to wealth: a share

in marketing their famous neighbor's plants.

Although Burbank had little or nothing to do

with the company's sales tactics or its fraudulent

deliveries and was himself suing the managers for nonpayment of almost ten thousand dollars

due on his original contract, the failure of the

Luther Burbank Company halted sales and tar

nished Burbank's name, at least among scientific

researchers who recoiled at the entire attempt to

commercialize his product.

Burbank's critics might have taken comfort in

comparing his profits, such as they were, to the

enormous cost of nurturing his cactus experi ments for several decades. Records are scarce,

but it seems that none of the many companies formed to exploit Luther Burbank's name or sell

his creations ever did more than cover expenses and few managed to get that far. But commercial

failure did not mean an end to general interest.

^j-^j- California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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BURBANKIAN INFLUENCE

The spineless cactus lived on after the marketing bubble burst, and not only in the scattered

gardens and farm plots of early growers. Bur

bank remained a popular hero, and high school

biology textbooks throughout the 1920s featured

him and cited his spineless cactus as an example of the careful application of Mendelian and

Darwinian principles to the improvement of

agricultural products.42 Children posed in various

"Burbankian" costumes at events organized to

celebrate the great plant breeder, who was now

revered as much as a spiritual model as he was

as a commercial inventor.

As such celebrations show, many people still

wanted to learn about Burbank's life and cre

ations. In December 1907, when he had spoken about his new spineless cactus to the Southern

California Teachers' Association, Burbank had

met its president, Henry Augustus Adrian, who

also was Santa Barbara's superintendent of

schools. Not long after, Adrian left that post to

become a regular performer on the Chautauqua circuit, making a successful career of explaining Burbank's creations to eager crowds who came to

the traveling lecture halls for uplift and education.

Known as the "Luther Burbank Man," Adrian

toured the country for the next sixteen years before returning to Santa Barbara in 1925, where

he was promptly elected mayor.

While Adrian was drawing throngs to the big brown tents that were a Chautauqua trademark,

Burbank remained in Santa Rosa, where he

continued to attract his own horde of visitors

until his death in 1926. His hundreds of

guests included Helen Keller, Thomas Edison,

Henry Ford, the football hero Red Grange, and the Polish statesman and musician Ignace Paderewski. In the 1920s, Burbank hosted

Swami Paramahansa Yogananda, who toured the

United States and made several visits to the San

Francisco area before settling in Los Angeles and

To protect against the fraudulent use of Burbank's name, the Luther Burbank Company trademarked its corporate identity. Proof of authenticity also was available to those who bought from the compa ny's local representatives, who, as depicted on the back cover of the

1914 Burbank Seed Book, received an official certificate of appoint ment, as well as an official Burbank dealer seed case.

California Historical Society

45

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HENRY A ADRIAN

In the years following World War I, the public embraced Burbank as both an embodiment of the values of the natu ral world and an innovative businessman. (Below) Luther

posed with his wife, Elizabeth, and schoolchildren dressed as flowers in Santa Rosa, circa 1920. With a great interest in education, he urged parents and educators to nurture

children as richly and carefully as precious plants. (Left) Henry Augustus Adrian, the "Luther Burbank Man," toured the country, lecturing on Burbank's life and work and his spineless cactus as a speaker on the Chautauqua lecture circuit?one of many well-known performers and lecturers from the worlds of entertainment, politics, reli

gion, and culture.

Henry Augustus Adrian, Records of the Redpath Chautauqua

Collection, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa;

The Burbanks with children, courtesy of the Luther Burbank

Home & Gardens, Santa Rosa, California, lutherburbank.org.

2^.6 California History volume 87 / number 4 / 2010

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buying the former Mount Washington Hotel,

which became the headquarters of his Self

Realization Fellowship.

Yogananda's visit left a lasting impression on

the young swami. Twenty years later, in 1946, he

dedicated his Autobiography of a Yogi "to Luther

Burbank?An American Saint." In the chapter "A Saint Amid the Roses," he described his first

visit to Santa Rosa. It began with a lesson from

Burbank: "The secret of improved plant breeding,

apart from scientific knowledge, is love." Stop

ping near a bed of spineless cactus, Burbank had

described to Yogananda his method of talking to

the cacti and how it was instrumental in success

ful hybridization: "Tou have nothing to fear,' I

would tell them. Tou don't need your defensive

thorns. I will protect you/" Gradually "the use

ful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless

variety." To Yogananda's request for a few cactus

leaves to plant in his own garden, Burbank

had insisted, "T myself will pluck them for the

swami.' He handed me three leaves, which later

I planted, rejoicing as they grew to huge estate,"

the yogi wrote.43 The original cactus, or a very

early offspring, can still be seen at the Mount

Washington site today.

Spineless cactus will never be the answer to

world hunger, but it was not an absurd idea. Free

of overpromotion, the Burbank varieties are still a

respected, if modest, agricultural introduction. In

recent years, commercial ranchers and academic

researchers have demonstrated renewed interest

in prickly pear cultivation in Argentina, Chile,

South Africa, southern Texas, and Tunisia, with

a strong preference for the spineless varieties.44

The Food and Agriculture Organization, a branch

of the United Nations, calls spineless cactus "an

important crop for the subsistence agriculture of

the semi-arid and arid-regions," serving as feed

for livestock and also controlling desertification

and restoring depleted natural rangelands. Com

mercial plantations of spineless cactus for nopali

tos, which have been cultivated for centuries in

Mexico, are moving north across the border,

along with the burgeoning interest in Mexican

cooking.45

None of these modern efforts matches the enthu

siasm for grand agricultural experiments that

made Luther Burbank such an idol a century ago. In 1916, the same year the Luther Burbank Com

pany failed, Congress passed the Stock Raising Homestead Act, increasing the land homestead

ers could claim in the arid parts of western states

from 160 to 640 acres on the grounds that it was

impossible for livestock to survive on less land,

given the sparseness of fodder. The Southern

Pacific Land Company had already abandoned

its efforts to turn its desert holdings into spine less cactus farms and returned its attention to

fostering orchard crops in more fertile areas. And

in 1922, the Santa Fe Railroad concluded that

eucalyptus timber was unsuitable for railroad

ties and converted its tree farm into a pricey real

estate development, Rancho Santa Fe. But that's

another story.

Jane S. Smith is the author of The Garden of Invention:

Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants (Penguin

Press, 2009), from which portions of this essay are adapted. Her history of the first polio vaccine, Patenting the Sun: Polio

and the Salk Vaccine, received the Los Angeles Times Book

Prize for Science and Technology. A member of the History

Department at Northwestern University, she writes about the

intersection of science, business, and popular taste.

47

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NOTES

Cover caption sources: (front cover) Compli

mentary Banquet in Honor of Luther Burbank

Given by the California State Board of Trade

at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco: California

State Board of Trade Bulletin No. 14, Sept.

14, 1905; (back cover) Luther Burbank with

Wilbur Hall, The Harvest of the Years (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,

1927).

JAMES D. HOUSTON, CALIFORNIAN, BY

FORREST G. ROBINSON, PP 6-25

Caption sources: Carolyn Kellogg, "Jacket

Copy: James D. Houston Dies at 75," Los

Angeles Times, Apr. 18, 2009; James D.

Houston, Where the Light Takes Its Color from the Sea: A California Notebook (Berkeley:

Heyday, 2008), www.heyday-books.com;

James D. Houston, Snow Mountain Passage

(New York: Knopf, 2001).

1 Interview with Morton Marcus, "Always

on the Brink: Facing West from California," The Bloomsbury Review (Nov./Dec. 2007);

www.jamesdhouston.com/pdfs/Always-on

the%2oBrink.pdf. 2

"A Writers Sense of Place," in The True

Subject: Writers on Life and Craft, ed. Kurt

Brown (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1993),

92. 3 Ben R. Finney and fames D. Houston,

Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian

Sport, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996), 78. 4 Houston, Between Battles (New York: Dial

Press, 1968), 54, 78. 5

Ibid., 121, 124, 221.

6 Houston, Gig (New York: Dial Press,

1969), 13. 7

Ibid., 20, 90. 8 Ibid, 77.

q Houston, A Native Son of the Golden West

(New York: Dial Press, 1971), Prologue. 10

Ibid., 146-47. 11

Ibid., 163. 12

Houston, The Adventures of Charlie Bates

(Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1973), 13, 44. 13

Houston, Continental Drift (New York:

Knopf, 1978), 138. 14

Ibid., 10.

15 Ibid., 166,301.

16 Houston, Love Life (New York: Knopf,

1985)* 52, 57 17

Ibid., 198, 260.

18 Houston, The Last Paradise (Norman: Uni

versity of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 34. 19

Ibid., 25. 20

Ibid., 364. 21

Houston, "Where Does History Live?"

Rethinking History 11 (2007): 57-58, 60.

Also in Where the Light Takes Its Color from the Sea: A California Notebook (Berkeley, CA:

Heyday, 2008), 189-201. 22

Houston, Snow Mountain Passage (New York: Knopf, 2001), 5. 23

Ibid., 3, 304. 24

Ibid., 35. 25

Ibid., 65, 217. 26

Houston, "Where Does History Live?", 59. 27

Houston, Snow Mountain Passage, 149. 28

Ibid., 215. 29

'bid., 312-13. 30

Ibid., 316. 31

Houston, Bird of Another Heaven (New York: Knopf, 2007), 334. 32

Ibid., 309. 33

Special thanks to Jeanne Wakatsuki Hous

ton for her permission to read the manu

script of A Queen's Journey, to be published

by Heyday in 2011.

SIDEBAR: FAREWELL TO MANZANAR, PP 17-19

1 Morton Marcus, "Always on the Brink:

Facing West from California," The Blooms

bury Review (Nov./Dec. 2007), www.

jamesdhouston.com / pdfs / Always-on

the%2oBrink.pdf. 2 Ibid.

LUTHER BURBANK'S SPINELESS CACTUS: BOOM TIMES IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT, BY JANE S. SMITH, PP 26-47

Portions of this essay are adapted from The

Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the

Business of Breeding Plants (New York: Pen

guin Press, 2009). The editors and author

would like to thank horticultural historian

Bob Hornback and Rebecca Baker and the

staff of the Luther Burbank Home & Gar

dens, Santa Rosa, California, for assistance

with research; Sue Hodson and Melanie

Thorpe of the Huntington Library, San

Marino, California, for help locating fugitive documents; and Adam Shapiro, for access to

his collection of biology textbooks.

Caption sources: Luther Burbank with Wil

bur Hall, The Harvest of the Years (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,

1927); Luther Burbank's Spineless Cactus (San Francisco: The Luther Burbank Company); David Starr Jordan, "Some Experiments of

Luther Burbank," Popular Science Monthly 66 (January 1905); Proof Book Number 1

(Santa Rosa, CA: The Luther Burbank

Society, 1913); The Burbank Seed Book (San Francisco: The Luther Burbank Company,

1914); "The Planting of the Largest Spine less Cactus Nursery in the World," Out West, New Series 6, no. 3 (Sept. 1913). 1 See Roy Wiersma, Luther Burbank Spineless

Cactus Identification Project (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008). 2 Luther Burbank, "Of Easy Culture

and Rapid Growth," New Agricultural Horticultural Opuntias (Los Angeles:

Kruckeberg Press, 1907), 5. See also: http://

plantanswers.tamu.edu/publications/cactus /

cactuscatalog/. 3 Burbank often sold complete control over

his plant inventions, including naming

rights, so it is impossible to trace his com

plete work. The best inventory is Walter L.

Howard, Luther Burbank's Plant Contribu

tions, University of California College of

Agriculture, Agricultural Experiment Sta

tion, Berkeley, CA, Bulletin 691, Mar. 1945. 4 Honorable George C. Pardee, Governor of

California, Complimentary Banquet in Honor

of Luther Burbank Given by the California State Board of Trade at the Palace Hotel, San

Francisco: California State Board of Trade

Bulletin No. 14, Sept. 14,1905, 15-16. 5 When Edison and Ford came to Santa

Rosa in 1915, the well-publicized visit was

regarded as a meeting of the masters of

invention. It was the start of a long friend

ship and, for Ford, the inspiration for

what would become a large collection of

Burbankiana at The Henry Ford Museum

and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, MI.

Among many other items, the collection

includes the building where Burbank was

born, transported from Massachusetts, and

Burbank's garden spade set in cement at the museum entry.


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6 Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Stoneless Prunes, the

Latest Wonder," Sunset Magazine 7, nos. 2-3

(June-July 1901): 81.

7 The medal, so inscribed, is in the collec

tion of the Luther Burbank Home & Gar

dens, Santa Rosa, CA.

8E. J. Wickson, "Luther Burbank: Man, Methods and Achievements, Part III," Sun

set Magazine 8, no. 6 (April 1902): 277. 9 David Starr Jordan and Vernon Lyman

Kellogg, Scientific Aspects of Luther Burhank's Work (San Francisco: Philopolis Press,

1909). 10

"Wizard's Wisdom," Los Angeles Times,

Sept. 6,1907.

"ibid.

Minutes of the Board of Park Commis

sioners, July 25, 1905: Moved by Mr. Moran,

seconded by Mr. White, that the Park Com

missioners offer to Dr. David Griffiths of

the Department of Agriculture the use of

about five acres of land near the southeast

corner of city park for a government forage

experimental station for a length of time

as may be required, not to exceed 15 years, Balboa Park History, 1905; http://www.

sandiegohistory.org/amero/notes-1905.htm. 13

Burbank, "Voices of the Press and Pub

lic," New Agricultural-Horticultural Opuntias,

14 Rutland also bought rights to an early

variety of Burbank's plumcot, a plum

apricot hybrid that many breeders discred

ited because they thought the cross was

impossible. The plumcot is the ancestor of

the modern pluot, which has the distinction

of being patented, a protection not available

to Burbank. Over the next five years, official

delegations from India, Tunisia, and Aus

tralia came to Santa Rosa to meet Burbank

and examine his newest creation; in letters

to his friend Samuel Leib, Burbank also

reported that the governments of Brazil,

Mexico, and Argentina had invited him to

visit and advise them on starting spineless cactus plantations.

15W. S. Harwood, New Creations in Plant

Life: An Authoritative Account of the Life and Work of Luther Burbank (New York: Macmil

lan, 1905). 16

George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (Southern California), vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,

1906), 224. In a footnote, James noted

that after meeting Burbank he realized the

cactus would require fencing to survive

predators that would no longer be repelled

by spines. 17

Burbank, The Training of the Human

Plant (New York: The Century Co., 1907).

By 1908, the Mothers Clubs of California

had begun a successful effort to declare

Burbank's birthday, Mar. 7, Bird and Arbor

Day in California and designate it as a time

for schoolchildren to learn about Luther

Burbank's works.

18 "Greatest Opportunity of the Age," [Spo

kane] Spokesman-Review, Apr. 26, 1908. 19

The Venice Vanguard, July 14, 1909. 20

According to Norton Parker Chipman, head of the California State Board of Trade,

exports had risen from some 16,194 car

loads of fruits and vegetables in 1890, each

carload holding ten tons of produce, to over

80,000 carloads in 1904; Pardee, Compli

mentary Banquet, 3. 21

See Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The

Southern Pacific Railroad and the Develop ment of the American West, iS^o-ig}0 (Berke

ley: University of California Press, 2005),

289. 22

See Oscar Binner, Luther Burbank: How

His Discoveries Are to Be Put into Practical

Use (Chicago: Oscar E. Binner Co., 1911), 16.

23 By 1911, several books about Burbank

and his work had already been published,

including Jordan and Kellogg's Scientific Aspects of Luther Burbank's Work and mul

tiple editions of Harwood's New Creations in

Plant Life. The Carnegie Institution of Wash

ington, DC, still expected to publish a schol

arly volume on Burbank's methods, written

by George Shull, and the directors were

shocked to learn that Burbank had signed a contract with Dugall Cree, a Minneapolis

publisher, for an illustrated 10-volume set

about his work to be aimed at a popular audience and sold by subscription. At least

two ghostwriters had already begun work on

these books when Cree sold the contract to

Oscar Binner, who moved his family from

Chicago to Santa Rosa and hired a stable

of researchers, photographers, and writers

to complete what he felt would be a great contribution to world knowledge. Cobbled

together from the work of five to ten ghost writers, including some material that seems

to have been left in Santa Rosa by Shull, the

Binner project finally appeared in twelve

volumes under the title Luther Burbank: His

Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical

Applications (New York and London: Luther

Burbank Press, 1914). Shull never finished

his book for the Carnegie Institution, but

he kept his notes for decades, planning to

return to the project some day. 24

Binner, Luther Burbank.

25 "Plant Freaks to Be Shown," Los Angeles

Times, Mar. 16, 1911. 26

George Willoughby, "The Gathering of

the Clans," National Magazine 35 (Oct.

1911-Mar. 1912). 27

Jack London letters to Eliza Shepherd, Box 300, Jack London Collection, Manu

scripts Department, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (hereafter cited as London

Collection). 28

Eliza London to Jack London, May 8,1915, box 372 (30), London Collection.

29 David Griffiths, The Prickly Pear and

Other Cacti as Food for Stock, U.S. Depart ment of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Indus

try, bulletin no. 74 (Washington, DC: GPO,

1905); Griffiths, The Tuna as Food for Man, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau

of Plant Industry, bulletin no. 116 (Wash

ington, DC: GPO, 1907), 3; Griffiths, The

"Spineless" Prickly Pears, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry, bulletin no. 140 (Washington, DC: GPO,

1909), 3. 30

"An Innovation in Washington: To Run

Pictures in the Congressional Record," Los

Angeles Times, Mar. 1, 1912. 31

"Fodder from the Cactus," Pacific Dairy Review 16, no. 26 (July 1912): 1.

32 Burbank, "Hardy Spineless Opuntia

Ready for the Hybridizer," New Agricultural Horticultural Opuntias, 2. See also: http://

plantanswers .tamu.edu / publications / cactus /

cactuscatalog. 33

See Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell,

"The Citrus Industry and the Revolution of

Corporate Capitalism in Southern Califor

nia, 1887-1944," California History 74, no. 1

(Spring 1995), 6-21; and H. Vincent Moses,

"'The Orange-Grower Is Not a Farmer': G.

Harold Powell, Riverside Orchardists, and

the Coming of Industrial Agriculture, 1893

1930," California History 74, no. 1 (Spring

1995), 22-37. 34

Heisner & Shanklin, Oro Loma: Spineless Cactus Lands (Oakland, CA: Horwinski Co., ca. 1912), 17. All quotations from Heisner

& Shanklin, Oro Loma, Huntington Library Rare Book Collection, San Marino, CA.

67

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NOTES

Sunset Magazine 20, no. 3 (January 1908).

Heisner & Shanklin, Oro Loma, 2.

37 Ibid, 13.

38 Ibid, 19.

39 "The Sharpshooter," Magazine of Wall

Street 12 (May-Oct. 1913): 387. 40

See Peter Dreyer, A Gardener Touched with

Genius (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1985) for a fuller account of the many businesses that sought to capitalize on Bur

bank and his creations.

41 "Big Ranch in Cactus," Los Angeles Times,

Oct. 4, 1913. 42

See George W. Hunter, A Civic Biology

(New York: American Book Company, 1914) and A New Civic Biology (1926); Benjamin Gruenberg, Elementary Biology (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1919) and Biology and

Human Life (1925); Arthur G. Clement, Liv

ing Things: An Elementary Biology (Syracuse, NY: Iroquois Publishing Company, 1925); Alfred Kinsey, An Introduction to Biology

(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co, 1926); W. M. Smallwood, Ida L. Reveley, and Guy A. Bailey, New General Biology (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1929); Frank M. Wheat and Eliz

abeth T. Fitzpatrick, Advanced Biology (New York: American Book Company, 1929); S. J. Holmes, Life and Evolution (London: A. &.

C. Black, 1931). 43

Paramahansa Yogananda, The Autobiog

raphy of a Yogi (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 396. 44

See Peter Felker, "Commercializing Mes

quite, Leucaena, and Cactus in Texas," in

Progress in New Crops, ed. J. Janick (Alex andria, VA: ASHS Press, 1996): 133-37;

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/pro

ceedingsi996/v3-i33.html. See also Salah

Chouki, Spineless Cactus Plantation for

Forage, http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/

doc/PUBLICAT/cactusnt/cactus3.htm; Felker, Utilization of Opuntiafor Forage in

the United States of America, http://www.

fao.org/docrep/005/y28o8e/y28o8eoa.htm; Gerhard C. De Kock, The Use of Opuntia as a Fodder Source in Arid Areas of Southern

Africa, http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/

y28o8e/y28o8eof.htm; Juan C. Guevara and

Oscar R. Estevez, Opuntia Spp. [spineless]

for Fodder and Forage Production in Argen tina: Experiences and Prospects, http://www.

fao.org/docrep/005/y2808e/y2808eoc. htm; Patricio Azocar, Opuntia as Feed for Ruminants in Chile, http://www.fao.org/

docrep/oo5/y28o8e/y28o8eob.htm.

45 Felker, "Commercializing Mesquite, Leu

caena, and Cactus in Texas."

A LIFE REMEMBERED: THE VOICE AND

PASSIONS OF FEMINIST WRITER AND

COMMUNITY ACTIVIST FLORA KIMBALL, BY MATTHEW NYE, PP 48-66

Caption sources: "Mrs. Kimball Dead," San Diego Union, July 3, 1898; Ida Hus

ted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B.

Anthony, vol. 2 (Indianapolis and Kansas

City: The Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898). 1 Flora Kimball, "Suffragette," California

Patron, Apr. 5, 1879. 2

Lucretia Mott is a good example of those

who influenced Flora Kimball's writing; see

Dana Greene, ed., Lucretia Mott: Her Com

plete Speeches and Sermons (New York: Edwin

Mellen Press, 1980). 3 For a variety of reasons, during the late

nineteenth century, many white suffragists turned their backs on African American

women; see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, "African

American Women and the Woman Suf

frage Movement," in One Woman, One Vote,

Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR:

NewSage Press, 1995): 135. 4 From its beginnings in 1846, Congrega

tionalism was the major support for the

Association Missionary Society, an interde

nominational missionary society devoted to abolitionist principles. The intellectual,

political, and moral influence of Congrega tionalism could easily account for the activ

ist nature of Flora and her sister Hannah T Brown. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis

Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slav

ery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Robert C. Senior, "The New

England Congregationalist and the Antislave

Movement, 1830-1860," PhD diss., Yale

University, 1954; Clifford S. Griffin, "The

Abolitionist and the Benevolent Societies,

1831-1861," in The History of the American

Abolitionist Movement: A Bibliography of Scholarly Articles, ed. John. R. McKivigan

(Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1999), 101. While there is minimal religious refer ence in Flora's writing, she did express her

views on occasion: "Religious belief is a

strong sentiment in human nature valued

by its possessor above pride, but while we

cling so tenaciously to our own, we are too

apt to stand voluntary guardians over that

of our neighbors" (California Patron, July 2,

1881).

5 Flora's sister Hannah (1817-1881) was

married to John G. Brown. The couple moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Hannah

started the abolitionist paper The Agitator, which she edited and published herself. The

paper covered issues of race and gender

equality. She also wrote The False and True

Marriage; the Reason and Results (Cleveland: Viets & Savage, 1861), a radical treatise

critiquing the institution. She later helped found the United States Spiritual Associa

tion and served as its president. In 1870, she joined Flora in National City, where she

bought land from Warren and Frank Kim

ball for $2,300. The property is now the site

of Sweetwater High School. After an active

life as a writer and lecturer in the Spiritu alist movement in National City and San

Diego, Hannah Brown died of consumption in 1881; San Diego Union, July 3, 1898. 6

Irene Phillips, "Flora Kimball Campaigned Here for Women's Rights," The Star News, Feb. 23,1961; San Diego Union, July 3,1898. 7

"First Kimball Reunion, Golden Gate Park,

August 7, 1897," collection of the California

Historical Society, San Francisco. Brothers

Levi and Charles Kimball initially came out

to California in i860 by way of the Horn.

Warren and Frank opted for the train ser

vice across the Isthmus of Panama, which

began operating in February 1855, just six

years prior to their journey. The 47-mile train ride, at a cost of $25, took four and a

half hours. But the Transcontinental Rail

road, completed in 1869, quickly became

the favored means of travel to California.

Ann Graham Gaines, The Panama Canal

in American History (Berkeley Heights, NJ.: Enslow Publishers, Inc. 1999), 47. 8 The Kimball Brothers were responsible for

construction of the Green Street Church at

the corner of Stockton Street, the Tehama

Street School in 1866, and most notably the city's Aims-House in 1867. Bill Roddy,

American Hurrah, http://americahurrah.

com/SanFrancisco/MunicipalReports/Aims

House/History.htm. 9

Frank Kimball, Diary, Oct. 1, 1861, National City Public Library, Morgan Local

History Room (hereafter cited as Kimball

Diary). Many of Frank's 52 diaries, span

ning the years 1854 to 1912, were donated to the National City Public Library in 1958 by Gordon Stanley Kimball, Flora's great

grandnephew. The brief entries describe

historical events, modes of travel, business

experience, and the hardships of daily life,

including the progress of National City as


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