CALIFORNIA WAS NAMED after the Isle of California, an imaginary place that appears in a sixteenth-century Spanish fantasy novel, The Adventures of Esplandián. In the book, an Amazonian-style warrior queen named Calafia rules over a nation of independent, griffin-riding black women. There were no men on the island at all, and no metal besides gold, which the fierce women fastened into harnesses for their mythical beasts. California is just a made-up word, like Rivendell, Narnia or Oz. However the inspiration for both it and the name of its ruler likely came from the Arabic word caliph, as in caliphate, the office held by the spiritual successors of the prophet Mohammad. The Isle of California is a treacherous place for the male protagonists in the story, and so the decision of the Spanish conquistadors to give the region that name, which came after Cortez suffered a particularly humbling defeat there, was a little like saying, This place didn’t really work out so well for us. Perhaps it is a little like naming a place Skull Island or Jurassic Park.
California has always been a little fantastical. As a place it is a generator of legends, whether they spring from the Gold Rush, from Hollywood, from Silicon Valley, or the sun-drenched places in between. Myth takes hold especially in the accounts of pre-European California: The sky was blackened by a multitude of birds when they took flight; the beaches were blackened by crowds of sea lions. Everywhere, it seemed, life was teeming and abundant. A dark fecundity pervaded, in sea and sky and in the as-yet-untouched cathedrals of the redwood groves. Before the loggers came, when only something as godly as the lightning and wind and time could take those soft-barked giants down. Before an army of Chinese workers was hired and coerced to turn great tracts of the state’s marshes into farmland. Before the men and women who had been living on the land for thousands of years were almost all killed off by the diseases that the Spanish monks came bearing, the most virulent having been syphilis. The most prevalent sentiment about these times was of a nature that beguiled the senses, of flocks and congregations that obscured, blocked out, deafened, and overwhelmed.
As beautiful as Point Reyes is and as much as is there, still bountiful and unspoiled, it seems impossible to talk too long about the place without also invoking loss: what was and now is not. Maybe this is true for all of California, and maybe this is true of everywhere, especially to anyone with a long enough memory stretching back more than a few decades. The trouble, of course, comes in parsing out the reality from the myth, the truth from hyperbole. In speaking with old-timers about the time before the establishment of the Point Reyes National Seashore, or in reading the accounts of those who have already passed on and left us, there is something of a rosy glow of the kind usually cast over the beloved past.
I don’t think the stories of aboriginal California are false. Or at least, they are not entirely fabricated. There are wide swaths of truth sewn in among the myths, at least. All storytelling is subjective. We remember the past like this, as larger than life, the days somehow brighter than days now. But of course that is not the only thing going on. It’s been shown that our forests are growing quieter, with birds fewer and insect orchestras less. Half of the open fields I was driven past when I was a child on the way to school through Marin County’s Lucas Valley are housing developments now.
Boyd Stewart passed away some years ago, but in July of 1990 at the age of eighty-seven he was interviewed by a woman named Ann Lage for the archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Boyd had spent his life ranching near Point Reyes. A reluctant interviewee, he was in something of a special position when it came to the establishment of the park. Though a farmer and rancher, his wife had been involved in the Marin Conservation League since the 1930s, and he ended up as something of a spokesperson for the Point Reyes ranchers once negotiations began on the land sale to create the National Seashore. It was in Boyd’s kitchen that the ranching patriarchs all gathered one spring night in 1969 and decided, as a group, to sell their land to the government.
For Boyd, no longer a young man even then, the decision came down to wanting to stop the destruction of the land he’d loved his whole life. Farmland along the San Francisco Bay was rapidly disappearing to the point that almost no character of the original landscape remained. Stunning fields were turned into shopping centers and parking lots. Boyd had gone to college at Stanford in the 1920s, in what he called “the fruit basket of California.”
“Right on the university grounds, there was close to a hundred-acre field of strawberries,” he told his interviewer. He recalled the once-agricultural land between San Jose and San Francisco.
“Well, now it’s houses,” he said sadly. “All of the orchards were plowed up. It’s a long time since the Southern Pacific ran tourist trains into the Santa Clara Valley from the east during blossom time.”
Just like autumn leaf-peepers in New England today, Boyd reminisced about the springtime visitors, the petals of flowering peach and cherry and apple trees sailing down on tranquil picnic scenes among the orchard rows.
That was all gone by the time the talk of developing Point Reyes grew serious, and Boyd was having none of it. Some ranchers may have seen it as a windfall: an excuse to take a large cash handout and escape the grueling life of early mornings, mud and fog. But that wasn’t what Boyd wanted, and thankfully for those who also love Point Reyes, he was not alone.
But before I go any further or get into the story of the ranchers in Point Reyes and what they have lost and saved, I should start by telling you about Joseph Mendoza Jr.—“Little Joey,” for short, though there isn’t much about him that’s little these days. He is in his seventies and almost perfectly square, with a large black cowboy hat that I’ve only seen him take off once when he used his bald head to illustrate the barrenness of an overgrazed summer pasture. He and I are friends, or at least I thought of him as my friend while I was living and working as a reporter in Point Reyes. We used to run into each other morning and night, it seemed, at the Pine Cone Diner, or Vladimir’s, or the Station House Café, or the Old Western Saloon, where I would be in search of story leads and/or carbohydrates, and where Joey would invariably turn up to talk to people. He’s been a rancher for longer than I’ve been alive, has raised two kids, and at the time that I met him, still lived with his wife on the Point Reyes dairy farm that’s been in his family for generations.
When we met over breakfast at the Pine Cone Diner, as we frequently did and sometimes still do when I’m in town, we’d sit at the counter and both order oatmeal. As Joey talked, he carefully covered his oatmeal’s smooth surface with a perfectly distributed layer of cinnamon, added an equally perfect upper mantle of crushed walnuts, and then stirred everything in. He takes his coffee black and when, from behind the counter, Gina asked me if I wanted some coffee too, I’d say yes—even though I don’t normally drink it. Joey told me stories about agriculture—about drought, his decision to go organic, and about his Portuguese ancestors who sailed over from the Azores on the eve of the twentieth century.
At sixteen, Joseph Vera Mendoza, Joey’s grandfather, found himself orphaned on the Azorean island of São Jorge. Interestingly, that island has a rugged coastline topped with green that stretches thinly to a dagger’s tip, not entirely unlike Point Reyes. Rock formations stand sentinel in the waves a little apart from the cliffs in much the same way, too. So when the young man arrived in that part of California, quick-witted but illiterate, it must have looked a little like home to him. The rolling hills of São Jorge are still checkered by pasture. Hydrangeas grow wild there, and local delicacies include limpets—fresh, grilled or fried and served breaded, buttered and sizzling in their shallow, starry-edged shells.
Joseph’s older brother was already in America when their parents died, and Joseph endeavored to join him in California. He arrived in San Francisco in 1899 and started working in a creamery. People called him “J.V.” He was a little man with a big man’s aura, a quick thinker despite his lack of schooling. Then in April of 1906 the city was awoken by the largest earthquake in its history. After the quake came the fires, and San Francisco was all but consumed, losing some twenty-eight thousand buildings and five hundred city blocks to the blaze. More than two-hundred thousand people would be left homeless. J.V. knew he needed to get out of there, and fast. While the fire was still raging, he managed to talk his way onto a boat with some Portuguese fisherman, and watched the city burn from across the bay in Tiburon.
If J.V. remarked on the similarities between his ancestral home in the Azores and the rolling green of Point Reyes, there is no record of it. He took a job as a butter maker on Pierce Point Ranch on Tomales Point, the northernmost homestead on the peninsula. It is one of the foggiest and windiest parts of one of the country’s foggiest and windiest areas. The hills slope down gently towards Tomales Bay on the eastern side, and end rather more ruggedly before plunging into the Pacific to the west. By the time J.V. got there, the non-native wild radish was already flourishing along the cliffside paths, sown there by the Spanish. Mixing in with the native yellow lupine, it grows as high as a man and sometimes higher. It was most certainly higher than J.V., who despite his larger-than-life demeanor was not a big person—but I’ve already mentioned that before. As for the wild radish, it’s most commonly purple, but can be white and pink or even blue. In June when it blooms the most and reaches the highest, the flowers almost form a tunnel over the trail to Pierce Point, their fragrance subtle, sweet and spicy. The yellow lupine smells like honey and the combination is intoxicating.
(The last time I was out at Pierce Point in June, I didn’t mean to walk so far down the path. I thought I’ll only go a little ways, but there was something about walking down that avenue of flowers that was like falling, with the wind soft and the reassuring hush of the ocean below. Before I knew it I’d gone a mile.)
It isn’t likely that J.V. had much time for flower-gazing, though. The milkers rose well before dawn, at three or even two in the morning. They had little one-legged stools strapped to their behinds, ready to sit and milk at any time. The butter makers were not required to begin work at quite so ungodly an hour, but no doubt the days were long and began early. Milking took place outdoors for the most part, but as a butter maker J.V. worked in the big barn. There were two ways he could have separated out the cream from the buttermilk, either by letting it rise naturally, the milk sitting in shallow pans on a creamery shelf for a day or two; or else he could use a steam separator, which began to make appearances on the peninsula about twenty years before J.V. arrived. Once he got the cream, whichever way he got it, he put it in an industrial churn powered by a horse on a treadmill. The resulting butter was turned out onto a table, where J.V. worked out the rest of the buttermilk and added salt. The leftover skim was fed to the pigs. The end product was shipped out to San Francisco via schooner, packed in wooden boxes with the trademark Point Reyes star stamped on the lid. This was the famous logo of the Shafter brothers, a pair of lawyers originally from Vermont, who became the area’s notorious “butter barons.” Their product was considered superior to any around, and was no doubt served in the finest hotels in the city alongside John Morgan’s imported eastern oysters, which, by the time J.V. was installed in Point Reyes as a butter maker, had already started to die out.
The Shafters were more landlords than dairymen. They won most of their Point Reyes land as the result of a lawsuit, and at somebody else’s misfortune. The Spanish were already running cattle on the open moors out there, and much of the herd belonged to the struggling Spanish missions nearby. The grasslands were perfect grazing pasture because the Miwok Indians had made them that way, in order to entice the tule elk out so they could hunt them. Or that is how the stories go, anyway. The mission cattle operations were beefed up (if you will) by the Mexican land grantees, faithful soldiers and European supporters of the new Mexican government. Much of the Point went to two Irishmen, who continued to raise longhorns in the Spanish tradition, more for hides and fat than meat. For food they hunted the elk, and did this so successfully that by the 1860s one could find no trace of the once plentiful animals. A man named Andrew Randall bought the majority of the Point Reyes cattle lands in 1852. But he did this on borrowed money, and a mere four years later he was shot in the head and killed in a San Francisco hotel by one of his creditors. The shooter was lynched, but Randall’s remaining creditors sought recourse in the courts. After a rather chaotic legal adventure, the lands wound up being owned by the lawyers representing the wealthiest claimant—the law firm of Shafter, Shafter, Park & Heydenfeldt.
It was only after the Shafters took over that dairying came to Point Reyes in earnest. They leased out parcels of land to enterprising farmers, usually men newly arrived from either the East Coast or Europe. Being neither particularly poetic nor sentimental, the Shafter brothers named the parcels, and the subsequent ranches, after the letters of the alphabet: “A” Ranch was closest to the lighthouse, while “Z” Ranch sat atop Mount Wittenberg, above a serrated skirt of bishop pine.
When J.V. was thirty years old, he accepted an arranged marriage with the daughter of the Portuguese cook on the ranch where he worked. The young girl—just sixteen at the time—was sent over from Portugal to begin her new life. Her name was Zena.
Zena was strong willed, and though illiterate as J.V. was upon arrival, she would eventually learn to read and write alongside her children in the one-room schoolhouse financed by her husband. She didn’t want to be a tenant farmer, even though by then J.V. was leasing the entire enterprise. She encouraged him to buy them their own ranch further south from Tomales Point. At her urging they bought not just one ranch, but two, and began their own dairy operation on the A and B ranches that lay alongside Drakes Estero. Not long after, she gave birth to their first child, a son they named Joseph—Little Joey’s father.
Life on the Point in those days was hard, but in many ways it was also idyllic. The Mendozas’ existence was remote, separated from even the nearby villages of Inverness and Point Reyes Station by a series of fourteen cattle gates along a winding stretch of unpaved and often muddy road. There were no public roads to the lighthouse. But the community of ranchers formed bonds with one another, meeting in social halls they built, and throwing lively dances. Barns were gaily decorated with lights, flowers and paper streamers, with music and dancing that went on all night and into the next day. People would nap for a time in the middle of things, maybe in the soft grasses if the weather was fine, and then return to the dance floor again. Men would leave in the middle of the night to do the early milking, with fiddle music pursuing them in the dark as they trudged up and down hillsides or even rowed across the estero, before returning to rejoin the festivities. The landscape was dramatic but dreary when the weather was gray, like the setting of a tragic romance. Wuthering Heights, maybe. But the land was also plentiful. Besides the hogs and cattle and chickens they raised, for hunting there were deer and quail and rabbits, and they knew the best spots for gathering clams and abalone. There were no oysters in the soft-bottomed estero then. Far more populous than the area is now, the ranches were lively communities, almost like villages themselves; bright islands of warmth and human effort adrift in the billowing fog.
The Mendoza men are social animals, and as Joey’s father Joseph was growing up he was known never to miss a party. He liked “the swish of skirts and the sound of music,” as his son would later say in an interview. J.V. was known to ride a horse all the way to Bolinas if that’s where the party was, despite it being more than twenty-five miles away. His son Joseph—who would later be called Joe Sr.—was much the same. There was a family with seven daughters living across the estero, and he could frequently be seen in his little rowboat on the calm waters, on his way to visit them.
By the 1930s, things were starting to change fast for the coastal farmlands north of San Francisco. The Shafter family lost their fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, and whatever Point Reyes properties had not already changed hands were then sold. The lands were frequently purchased by their longtime tenants, but absentee landlords snatched up other parcels. Some went to the Radio Corporation of America, while others would eventually fall into the hands of a lumber company. Even before the crash, some of the ranches had fallen on seedier times. U Ranch, near the coast, was used as headquarters for illicit rumrunners throughout Prohibition, though the place was abandoned in 1933 when the laws changed and the rumrunners’ income vanished. Other ranches were closing as well. Z Ranch, on Mount Wittenberg, was abandoned in 1930. The rest of California was being developed at a fantastic rate, and Point Reyes was no longer the only place to get good butter. With refrigeration, fresh milk and other dairy could travel further distances, and other parts of the state were proving more successful.
In the wide valley between the Inverness and Bolinas ridges—which is actually the rift between tectonic plates—there had once been a prestigious resort, the Pacific-Union Country Club, for city gentlemen to get away from it all. It was built in the 1880s. Wives were permitted to visit only on certain days of the week. There, club members could enjoy the scenery and go hunting in the surrounding woods and meadows. The club rooms were full of their taxidermied trophies. There was even a racetrack built at one point, but by the end of the 1920s the club’s luster had waned and it was soon abandoned.
Though the ranches had always grown their own vegetables to feed their families and workers, during the Depression years many of the ranchers rented out portions of their land to Japanese pea farmers and newly arrived Italians growing artichokes. Aerial photos from the 1930s show artichoke fields covering Drakes Head. During this time, although most ranch children were not educated past high school, and many of the girls did not even attend beyond the eighth grade, Joseph went to study agriculture at the University of California at Davis and one of his sisters went on to Dominican College in Marin.
The 1930s were also when people began talking seriously about conservation in the area. A group of women founded the Marin Conservation League, and their first action was to ban the placement of advertising signs and billboards along the roads out to the beaches. Even then, there was starting to be talk of a park at Point Reyes. But the advancing encroachment of civilization was still slow, and the plight did not yet seem so urgent.
Then came the Second World War. The pea and artichoke farms vanished from the peninsula. The Japanese were sent inland to internment camps and the Italians were banned from the coast. Ranchers were instructed to black out their windows at night so as not to be seen by advancing enemy ships. Military barracks were built on the RCA’s property. Closer to San Francisco, the sleepy little towns of Sausalito, Tiburon and Mill Valley experienced a massive influx of labor; men but also many women who had come to work in the new shipbuilding industry. Many of them were African American, coming in from the southern states in search of work. Photos from the time show rows of African-American women in coveralls and welder’s helmets, their visors pushed back, laughing in the sunshine. Soldiers, too, poured in from other parts of the country, awaiting deployment in the Pacific theater of war. When the war ended, many of these workers and soldiers didn’t want to return to where they’d come from. The Bay Area was gorgeous, temperate, and still largely undeveloped. They wanted to stay.
Thus began the great California suburban boom of the 1950s. Orchards and fields and farmlands were razed and turned into housing development after housing development. Shopping centers and schools and movie theaters and sports tracks. The land prices had not quite skyrocketed yet and the concrete poured freely. Now was when the lovers of Point Reyes’s nature and pastoral character began to get worried. As Boyd would later point out, all of the Santa Clara Valley had already been transformed from a paradise of blossoming orchards into suburbia.
Enter Clement Woodnutt Miller—or Clem, as he was called—a Democratic House representative from up the coast. He was elected to Congress in 1959 with a plan already mapped out: He would turn the Point Reyes peninsula into a national park. Clem wrote and introduced a bill to establish it in 1962. Sadly, not long after it was passed he was killed in a small plane crash not far from his childhood home in Eureka. The clock was ticking, since some parcels of land had already been sold to developers. Trees were falling on the ridge and homes were already being erected close to Limantour Beach along Drakes Bay. More than 3,500 homes were set to be built there, along with country clubs and other amenities. Popular sentiment was increasingly in favor of conservation, so it wasn’t difficult to rally support. Clem’s plan would stop and even undo the developments that had already started, plus preserve the rest of the area.
The trouble was, no one had really consulted the ranchers whose properties fell within the boundaries of the proposed conservation.
“Now, they didn’t plan too well,” Boyd said of the conservationists. “They wanted the park. Everybody they talked to was in favor of the park. They didn’t talk to the ranchers because they didn’t have much contact with them, these city people didn’t.”
Belatedly, the ranchers found out what was going on and immediately tried to stop it.
Here’s how this kind of thing usually works: If the government decides to build a highway or a park or something where your house is, your property is “condemned” and you’re given a chunk of money for what your property is worth, based on the estimate of an appraiser. Then you move. It isn’t really up to you. The ranchers were concerned that a similar fate awaited them. As soon as they got word of the proposed park, they organized, pooled their money and hired a lawyer to send to Washington to advocate on their behalf. Most had been ranching the area for fifty, sixty years or even longer, and were just seeing the next generation take over.
J.V. had died in 1950, but had been involved in earlier efforts to preserve the area. He was good at partnerships, a talent that was passed on to his son Joe. But it would be his widow Zena who perhaps made the strongest impact.
It turned out that the government would not be able to condemn large segments of the pastoral zone within the proposed park boundaries, but a different pressure was mounting. Though the Depression was long over, times were still hard for the Point Reyes ranchers. Milk prices had plummeted, leaving some of them in dire straits and making a buyout from developers look ever more appealing. Nobody wanted to see the Point destroyed in its entirety, but neither could they say who would be allowed to sell to developers and who would not. Besides, without enough land acquisitions, the park could not go forward.
The best option that emerged was for the park to buy the land from the ranchers and then lease it back to them, so that they could continue ranching and the pastoral character of the land could be preserved, free from service stations, parking lots and strip malls. But in order to accomplish that, it needed to be done in bulk. The government needed to set aside enough money to buy up all of the land, and as the plans shifted throughout the 1960s, it looked like maybe what they were allocated would not be enough. Property prices were going up in the area like crazy, and Point Reyes’s ranches were no exception. Now it seemed that if Congress abandoned the plan for the park, the ranches would be doomed to fall under the wheel of so-called progress anyway.
The ranchers realized that the park wasn’t going anywhere. Dramatic changes were coming to their beloved peninsula whether they liked it or not, and the status quo would not and could not continue. Some realized that even if they declined to sell to either the park or to developers, they’d lose their properties anyway due to inheritance taxes that were so high as to be nearly unpayable. This is a problem for ranchers even now, although many properties outside the seashore have since been saved through the work of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust—or MALT, as it’s known locally. However MALT was not established until 1980, and in 1969 the Point Reyes ranchers saw no better alternative than to sell to the government, as it increasingly looked like it would be the park or nothing. They could either enter old age knowing that inheritance taxes would financially cripple their children, or else watch their beloved pastures get paved over. The problem was then whether or not the government would be able to allocate the necessary funds, and as the 1960s wore on this was starting to look less and less likely. As the sales were delayed, the danger grew that ranchers would cave and take the seemingly easy money from developers. If too much of the land went into development, the park would no longer be viable and the whole project would collapse.
The boundaries of Point Reyes National Seashore were drawn in 1962. On September 13, President John F. Kennedy signed the legislation, with a crowd of the park’s supporters gathered behind him in the Oval Office. Among them was Clem Miller, who less than a month later would go down in that tiny plane on the California coast. He was buried atop a hillock within the Seashore boundary, near the ocean at the end of Bear Valley Trail, marked with a simple flat stone bearing his name and the years he lived. There were five hundred people in attendance at his burial, despite the remote location and the rainstorm that raged that day. Nowadays, the grave is often decorated with stones, feathers or fallen antlers—signs of respect from passing hikers who are grateful to be enjoying the park that Clem made possible.
The 1962 Point Reyes National Seashore Act states, “The government may not acquire land in the pastoral zone without the consent of the owner so long as it remains in its natural state, or is used exclusively for ranching and dairying purposes.” The first land the park acquired was Bear Valley, in the summer of 1963, site of the former Pacific Union Country Club, sold by owners Bruce and Grace Kelham. The National Park Service began construction of their headquarters there, and started drawing up plans for the rest of the area. The ideologies of conservation and land preservation were still somewhat fluid. Of course, they still are, but this was especially true in the 1960s. The common assumption of the time, and one that is still popular today, is that a park is primarily for people. This is quite different from the Deep Ecology ideals held by activists like Fred Smith, who would end up working to protect the natural character of Point Reyes too, more focused on wilderness for wilderness’s sake, and regardless of its benefits to humans. When the National Seashore was first created however, a park was for people, and its first duty was to provide opportunities to recreate. Hence the proposal to turn an estuary of remarkable biodiversity into a lake with rented paddleboats and stocked trout.
But plans for the park soon stalled. Not long after the first parkland was purchased in 1963, the country was pitched headlong into turmoil. Kennedy was assassinated in November, and by the end of that same month there would be sixteen thousand American military personnel stationed in South Vietnam, up more than 1,700 percent from Eisenhower’s nine hundred “advisors.” The federal Wilderness Act was passed the following year, on September 3, 1964, declaring over nine million acres of land as wilderness where, according to the act, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
In 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines were dispatched to Southeast Asia, marking the true start to the American ground war in Vietnam. Forty men assembled to burn their draft cards on the UC Berkeley campus before marching a coffin to the Berkeley draft board. The Watts riots shook Los Angeles, two days before Jefferson Airplane debuted at the Matrix club on Fillmore in San Francisco. The following fall in 1966, Lady Bird Johnson traveled to Point Reyes to dedicate the Point Reyes National Seashore. Photos from the day show her wearing a pillbox hat and T-strap shoes, leaning on Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in the surf at Drakes Beach. She said that “the growing needs of an urban America are quickening the tick of the conservation clock.” She called Point Reyes “a bright star in the galaxy of conservation achievements of the 1960s.”
But as the sixties passed, it looked like Clem’s plan was in danger of falling through. Originally, $14 million was appropriated for the purchase of parklands. This was augmented in 1966 with an additional $5 million, bringing the total budget up to $19 million. But land prices were going up, and it looked like what the park was going to be able to offer the ranchers would be laughably low.
“Meanwhile, the speculators were circling,” Boyd said. “They were here. They pointed out to us that we could divide this ranch into three pieces. We could get a lot of money for it. They came to us. They came to everybody.”
Along with Clem Miller’s widow Katy, State Senator Peter Behr created the Save Our Seashore campaign in 1969, with a handy acronym of “SOS.” Aware that her late husband’s legacy was in jeopardy, Katy became a letter-writing machine, sending missives to anyone who could possibly help get the park back on track. She wrote to environmentalists and journalists and congressmen. She wrote to their wives. There was a momentum building now. California congressman Pete McCloskey became an active advocate for the park as well. He’d been a lawyer working on property condemnation, and wanted to make sure that the land was preserved while also taking care of the resident ranchers. But it didn’t look like the pro-park team would be able to raise the money. A Marin County appraiser surveyed the properties and determined that the cost to buy all of the ranches would in fact be $37 million in total. Now it was just a matter of convincing Congress that the purchase was worth it.
Boyd flew to Washington in May of 1969 with a number of large-scale color photographs of the coast, so that the members of Congress could see the beauty of the area they hoped to preserve. It was on the eve of that trip that seventeen or eighteen ranchers had all gathered in his farmhouse kitchen and agreed what to do. Still, Boyd worried that this solidarity might crack and wouldn’t last for long. Some ranchers already had doubts, knowing that the longer they held out, the more their property values would rise and the more they’d get. But the government didn’t even have enough to purchase the lands at the current price, let alone at an inflated one. So off Boyd went with the photos, hoping to get Congress to strike while the iron was hot.
Fearing that they’d be forced out, Zena Mendoza also flew to Washington to testify before the congressional hearings. It had been fifty years since she first arrived in Point Reyes, as the sixteen-year-old bride of a man she’d never met. But she grew to love both him and the pastures they made their own. Wearing a modest dress and speaking in halting English, she tried to say as much as she could to the packed chamber before emotion got the better of her, and she burst into tears.
“I was not born in this country,” she began. “Since I was a child I wanted to come to America, to the land where there was respect for human dignity, the land of the free . . . where the minorities would not be trampled on, where there would be no dictators . . . now I am faced with the possibility of losing everything that I have worked for.”
Afterwards, collecting herself in the hallway, she was mortified. She thought that by becoming emotional she had let her family down. Then a lawyer came up to her and said the following:
“Ma’am, I think you just did more for the preservation of those ranches than you can ever know.”
Of course, there were a number of factors contributing to the park’s eventual success. Pete McCloskey had been classmates at Stanford with John Ehrlichman, then one of Nixon’s chief advisors, and was able to call in a favor to his old friend. The two men lived near to each other in D.C., and even shared a car to the Capitol some mornings. He managed to convince Ehrlichman to get Nixon on board, even at the expense of other parks-in-progress. At one point in the White House correspondence, Ehrlichman even says that to afford Point Reyes, the Nixon administration could “cancel a space shot.”
In 1969, the New York Times called Point Reyes “a patchwork park in trouble.”
“I think it absolutely certain that land values in Point Reyes area will continue to escalate at a rate rapid enough to make even the $37,500,000 figure inadequate unless the property is taken by condemnation during the calendar year 1969,” McCloskey testified that May. “There are few areas in the world which compare with the rugged grandeur of California’s coastline, and in a world where we spend equivalent sums for a few days’ expenditure of ammunition eight thousand miles away in Vietnam, we would be derelict indeed not to recognize the national priority here involved.”
Indeed, by June some 4,500 Americans had been killed in Vietnam that year alone. In July, a hush fell over the world as Americans put a man on the moon. In September, McCloskey heard that Nixon’s budget director had announced that even if Congress appropriated funds to complete the land acquisition at Point Reyes National Seashore, the funds would not be released by the Nixon administration. He immediately called Ehrlichman.
“The only man who can save the Point Reyes National Seashore is the President,” McCloskey told him in a letter dated September 16, 1969. He instructed Ehrlichman on how to get the funds from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and White House aides began to rapidly correspond about how to make that happen—with one remarking to another that Point Reyes had received a high priority in their thinking, and it was necessary to “do something dramatic.”
In October, Congressman Jeffrey Cohelan wrote to McCloskey saying that as far as he knew, the Nixon administration would not release the funds needed to buy Point Reyes.
As Ehrlichman later put it in an interview, Nixon was “not your natural, birds, bees and bunnies man.”
However, Cohelan said he intended to introduce a bill designed to release the trust funds for the land acquisition by extending the Land and Water Conservation Act of 1967. It had already been amended to authorize the use of funds derived from oil leases on the outer continental shelf. The fund had $288.5 million in it, but the Bureau of the Budget only intended to release $124 million—leaving $164.5 million unexpended “unless we act soon,” Cohelan said.
McCloskey wrote to Ehrlichman again, along with White House staff assistant Tod Hullin, on October 10, urging them to persuade Nixon to increase funding to Point Reyes. Still he didn’t budge, but there were other priorities. That same day, Nixon ordered a squadron of eighteen B-52s, packed with nuclear weapons, to race to the edge of Russian airspace as a show of force against the Soviets. Then in early November, Katy Miller’s Save Our Seashore petitions began arriving at the White House en masse. I imagine it like the courtroom scene in Miracle On 34th Street. They all began: “Mr. President: Only you can save Point Reyes . . .”
The trouble was, Point Reyes would have to get funded over other park projects in Cape Cod and Padre Island. Ehrlichman managed to convince Nixon that Point Reyes was not only in a uniquely vulnerable position, but perhaps more importantly as far as the administration was concerned, saving it would be politically advantageous by appealing to an important California voter base.
Finally, in December, the House voted in favor of the Point Reyes bill. Only John Saylor of Pennsylvania vowed to fight it, saying his exception was to saving one park while others remained vulnerable. Nixon signed the bill to approve the funds in early 1970, and over the next several years the ranchers of Point Reyes sold their land and began operating on short-term leases.
In 1972, Charlie Johnson of Johnson Oyster Company sold his few land-based acres to the federal government, after nearly a decade of negotiations. He wasn’t invited to attend the meeting of ranching patriarchs in Boyd’s kitchen that spring night in 1969. He wasn’t much of a player, having so little land to sell. After all, he didn’t own Drakes Estero, and had only a lease agreement from the Department of Fish and Game to use parts of it. In all of the testimony, the oyster farm was always spoken of separately from the cattle and dairy ranches. Prior to the Point Reyes Wilderness Act of 1976, there wasn’t a clear message of whether an oyster farm could continue operating in a National Park or a wilderness area. For many, what a “wilderness” area was exactly wasn’t entirely clear. There were other factors to delay the full wilderness protection of the Point Reyes estuaries, and so the whole area was labeled “potential wilderness” and would be sorted out later. Mariculture wasn’t explicitly discussed in the legal proceedings, and the forty years still left on the oyster farm’s meter must have seemed like a very long time.