Polecat Valley (No. 1): Booms and Blooms

Overlooked Corners of History No. 1: Carrisa Plains

Banner at Carrisa Plains Elementary School

WHEN bloom seekers in May drive past Carissa Plains Elementary School, they see a banner with an abominable mascot.

“Home of the Polecats.”

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The one less traveled by? No. The one least traveled by. “No services for 75 miles,” says a blue warning sign on State Highway 58 east from San Luis Obispo. The empty road to Carrisa Plains will curve east between two gnarled ranges with foreboding Spanish names, Caliente (hot) and Temblor (earthquake).

A grungy signboard, probably 64 years old, points the way to “California Valley, the Final Frontier!”

Polecats, known otherwise in parts of the U.S. as skunks, could also describe the Carrisa Plains’s long-gone developers or, to be more accurate, non-developers. In 1960 these hucksters from Los Angeles buy the old El Chicote Rancho and nearby properties. They concoct an artificial boom for “California Valley” – 18,000 acres of vacant promises, sales bonuses, and unpaved streets to nowhere.

For the Polecat kids and their one-room K-6 teacher, the lot-sales boom of the Sixties is ancient history. They have no shortage of contemporary topics for discussion, such as this year’s fair-to-middling bloom of once-a-year wildflowers. In most rainy seasons, millions of blossoms in March and April will bedazzle the region’s dreary fields and drab hills. The valley is quilted then with patchwork blankets of baby blue eyes, goldfields, desert primrose, owl’s clover, bush lupin, clusters of phacelia in luminous purple bouquets, and bright yellow-white swatches of tiny tips.

Older students still talk about the fabulous superbloom of seven springs past, a floral explosion that drew an estimated 80,000 enthusiasts to the roofless hothouse of Carrisa Plains.

“The great natural temple of Carrisa,” as described in 1883, looks like a great natural footprint on maps of eastern San Luis Obispo County. Often likened to East Africa’s Serengeti (“endless plains”), the Carrisa’s prairie and peripheral hills take up 1,948 square miles (1.2 million acres). Dry heat (up to110 degrees) is commonplace. Rain (averaging about 6 to 7 inches per year) is not.

The Carrisa Plains and “California Valley.” Two valleys, one inside the other. Overlooked. Isolated. Otherworldly.

“In some ways,” says county resources manager Neil Havlik, “this is the place where time has gone backward.”

The Names

Tribal coalitions known as the Chumash, coastal inhabitants for more than 10,000 years, had named the big inland valley “Tšɨłkukunɨtš” (Place of Rabbits), pronounced by outsiders as Tiskapunich. For three centuries, Spanish-speaking incomers name the valley Llano Estero (Flat Estuary). Their first settlement, named for a waist-high reed, is known as Rancho Carrizo. The first Anglo farmers and ranchers erode “Carrizo” into “Carrisa.” “Valley” must have seemed inadequate. They prefer “Plains.”

In 1981, the U.S. Geological Survey insults Carrisans. The official name is changed by decree to “Carrizo Plain.” No plural. No appeal. The change is confirmed 20 years later when President Bill Clinton proclaims a chunk of 246,812 acres as the Carrizo Plain National Monument.

The locals scoff. “Carrisa Plains” remains embedded in their conversations and in proper names of the Heritage Association, a power plant, and an outfitter business. Don’t forget the official name for the Home of the Polecats, a school with a sense of humor.

The One-Classroom School

With an alternate name as Blue Star Memorial Highway, Highway 58 goes right past the sole school in all of the 50 miles of Carrisa Plains. Only 17 pupils are enrolled these days in kindergarten to sixth grade, fewer than half the number in recent years. Older kids can board four days a week at homes in Atascadero, the nearest stomping ground for students in middle school and high school. Some commute by carpool, an hour’s drive (63 miles).

The Polecats miss out on the many resources in schools in town, but benefits of one-on-one tutelage go back to the one-room schools of the nation’s rural past. And city kids miss out on the gifts of nature in a unique valley. A field trip in Carrisa Plains would mix the contradictions of local history with the incongruities of Painted Rock, San Andreas Fault, and Soda Lake. It all begins with the First People.

Painted Rock

The Chumash communities from the coast and the Tachi-Yokut hunters from the San Joaquin Valley had visited the Plains since time out of mind. By 1850 they had been all but annihilated by European diseases, Franciscan subjugation, and White terrorists. In that year sheepman J. Garcia builds an adobe as the Plain’s first known non-Indigenous inhabitant. Not until 1865 does cattleman Chester D. Brumley dig a deep well and find potable water. Only then does he stake out his ranch as the first Anglo settler in an alkali-infused valley where a good well is gold.

Sketches of Pictographs at Painted Rock, 1870s, before vandalism. (Mary Brumley Noyes, 1857-1886)

Before a bucking bronco in 1888 cancels his life, Chet Brumley investigates two twinned sandstone blobs as big as apartment buildings (45 feet in height, 250 feet in girth). They seem frozen, like humpback whales in a half-breach vault from the bunchgrass. Inside, the curious settler discovers rock walls emblazoned with pictographs in red, black, and white.

Symbol for Rain: Pictographs at Painted Rock

Archaelogists will later attribute the works to Chumash, Yokut, and Salinian artists in separate currents starting at about the time of Socrates and ending about the time of Cleopatra. Early Carrisa ranchers unimaginatively name the vault as Painted Rock. It is now a spiritual treasure for the First Peoples.

In the 1920s and later, cowboys and tourists turn the art gallery into a shooting gallery. Vandals scribble. Taggers leave monograms. Reconstruction, the experts say, is almost impossible. (Painted Rock is now open to visitors at specified dates and times.)

“Seeing the site as it is today is still a mystical experience,” writes blogger David Stillman, “the paintings there so grand and complicated as to inspire those esoteric questions: Who were these people? How did they live? What were their beliefs and what gods held sway in their lives?”

Dislocation, San Andreas Fault in Carrisa Plains (Photo: Scott Haefner, U.S. Geological Service)

Wallace Creek

At the foot of the Temblors a young cowboy in 1857 has no way of knowing that the old round sheep corral stands above a still nameless rift in the earth at Wallace Creek. A few minutes past 8 a.m. on Jan. 9, 1857, the herd suddenly goes berserk. When the dust clears, he is flabbergasted. The whole corral – including posts, rails, and a few bewildered longhorns – has moved at least 24 feet. 

It’s not his fault. 

The temblor will be known as the Fort Tejon earthquake. At magnitude 7.9, it will be rated one of the strongest shakers in U.S. history. And one of the least damaging. A few clocks stop in San Luis Obispo. About 60 miles south of the epicenter in the hamlet of Parkfield, cows go crazy at Wallace Creek.

Earthquake scholars say the great fault, which bisects Carrisa Plains, marks the “tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.” That is probably news to the cowboy, identified only as “Mr. Bell.” In 1909 the ex-cowboy, now an elderly retiree in Bakersfield, is interviewed by geologist Harry R. Johnson. Mr. Bell tells him that the sheep corral “was dislocated in such a way that it made a rude S-shaped figure, which would apply a movement horizontally of several feet.”

Many years later, geologists from around the world come to the Carrisa Plains to observe the cowboy’s epiphany. Normally dry, the channel twists into a weird dogleg as it crosses the San Andreas Fault. Nowhere else is a rupture zone so visible as in this 30-foot separation of a once-straight channel.

A half-century later, the 800-mile fault shudders with the Big One (also with a magnitude of 7.9). Always described (imprecisely) as the San Francisco earthquake, it qualifies for a quote attributed to Mohammed Ali: “My only fault is that I don’t realize how great I really am.”

As in the Fort Tejon shaker, the two-plate smasher in 1906 comes from a subterranean scrunch. The epicenter is two miles west of the Cliff House at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The earthquake spreads destruction and carnage from San Jose to Santa Rosa. The fault will be named a year later for the San Andreas Valley rift zone just south of San Francisco. Spared directly above the fault are the San Andreas Lake and the Pilarcitos and Crystal Springs reservoirs, keys to San Francisco’s future Hetch Hetchy public water system. In the city itself, the earthquake and subsequent firestorms kill an estimated 4,000 people, turn 28,000 buildings into ruins, and incinerate most of what’s left.

At Carrisa Plains, the fault runs parallel for many miles with the underprivileged Soda Lake Road. Partially paved, it’s the only through way to the interior of the Plains. Traffic advisory: After rain, the unpaved sections become, as reporter Ann Fairbanks once put it in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, toothpaste.    

Soda Lake (Photo: Wikicommons)

Soda Lake

Like the no-outlet basins with streams feeding the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake, Carrisa Plains is an enormous sink with no drain. Not far from the fault line is Soda Lake, a 3,000-acre basin that in most years goes dry in the summer and fall. Its mud is black and sticky. The alkaline shallows are covered in May with a gleaming bedspread of bone-white gloop.

“At first you think it’s a snowfield,” says a local. “The snow is actually a layer of sulfate and carbonate salt, seemingly solid from a distance.”

Many a pilot, according to a file of newspaper clips, learns about the snowfield the hard way.

Wildlife

The Giant Kangaroo Rats stack grass seeds in circles of dust. Antelope squirrels like to stand up after being stooped in their burrows. The San Joaquin kit fox, in the words of one writer, “do their level best to turn both groups into lunch.” Pronghorn antelope and tule elk stay out of sight.

On the wing: long-billed curlews, golden eagles, harriers, red-tailed hawks, ferruginous hawks, and, if birders’ luck is in play, the California condor.

Outlaws

As late as the 1930s, visitors are told, Carrisa Plains is a refuge for lawbreakers.

Early on, robbers visit John Gilkey at the Comate Ranch and, after a friendly dinner, kill him, tie him to a horse, and drag his corpse to the barn. (Vigilantes track down the murderers and, ignoring the pretense of a trial, hang the ingrates.)

Jack Powers flees the Vigilante Committee in San Francisco for a blood-soaked career in banditry in Carrisa Plains, a bloody ground already shaken by murders attributed to Joaquin Murietta.

Drury James welcomes his nephews Frank and Jesse and puts them to work at La Panza Ranch in 1868. Drury, who prefers civic responsibilities to banditry, soon founds Paso Robles, now a cabernet-sipping getaway a few miles north. Frank and Jesse return to Missouri and their profession as celebrity bank robbers.)

Bill Dalton is still an upright citizen when at 20 he leaves Missouri and becomes a rancher a few miles north of Carrisa Plains. When he goes back, unjustly accused of joining his younger brothers in a botched train robbery, he joins the murderous Wild Bunch and Dalton gangs. A deputy marshal kills him. Thanks to his widow, Bill returns to the San Joaquin Valley. His bones rest unmarked in his widow’s family plot Turlock, a city oblivious to his fame.

Rusting Art, Carrisa Plains (Photo: Sarah Swenty, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Booms and Busts

The farm sculpture gallery: Over here, a spoke wheel. Over there, what looks like a mower, its cutter sticking upward. Down the road apiece: a cast iron seeder, a two-bottom gang plow, and a Caterpillar tractor without treads. Covered with the brown-rust hue of iron oxidation, these relics should be regarded solemnly as museum pieces from now-forgotten boom times in Carrisa Plains.

A one-year sampling:

• “Millions of tons of bicarbonate of soda, 35 percent pure, has been discovered in Lake Carissa (Soda Lake),” reports the San Francisco Call in 1904.

• “Several oil prospecting rigs are operating on the Carissa side of the coast range, some miles west of McKittrick,” says the Call in 1904.

• “The prospects (in Carrisa) for heavy grain and fruit crops have not been equalled in years,” declares the Engineering and Mining Journal in 1903.

Investors in soda, however, go to court to get their money back.

Oil explorers pack up their drills.

Dauntless dryland farmers and livestock ranchers arrive in waves. Most are dawn-to-dusk toilers in the fields. The women are burdened with isolation, dirt, and so many chores that social life is almost impossible.

“An indefatigable work ethic was a necessity,” says Peter Runge, archives boss at Cal Poly.

Four times the size of New York City, Carrisa Plains today embraces several ranches, a firehouse and a motel (frequently closed). No churches, restaurants, medical offices, drug stores, general stores, gas stations, beauty parlors, or taverns.

Pauper Alley, a newspaper metaphor of the time, awaits settlers with periodic droughts, preposterous distances to groceries, undrinkable water, voracious grasshoppers, pitiless bankers, gluts of rattlesnakes, brush fires, distant brokers, no railroad, unwelcome solitude, gooey mud, and temperatures usually associated with saunas and snowbanks.

“These are not the legends of western homesteaders that are portrayed in popular movies,” comments Craig Deutsche, the diligent recorder of dozens of oral histories for his book, Another Place & Time. “Their stories were not of dramatic struggles but were instead ones of sustained effort.”

He adds, "For one reason or another, these families all left their homes in the Carrisa Plains.”

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By the first weeks of May, alas, yellow daisies and fiddlenecks no longer shroud the gray-greenish tumbleweeds. These coils of spiny branches symbolize, at least for me, the most atrocious land fraud in California’s rich history of humbuggery.

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Next… Polecat Valley No. 2: Scams and Suckers

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Notes

An earlier version of this article included a great photograph by Alexander Kunz, a San Diego-based visual artist who specializes in nature and landscapes. I overlooked the copyright tag (no excuse). His complaint prompted Substack’s team, or machinery, or both, to delete the illustration. I have apologized to Alexander Kunz, whose extensive works are offered for sale in a virtual gallery: https://www.alex-kunz.com. (By chance, the next piece from True Yarns, Ltd., is a eulogy for the brilliant newspaper photographer, Fran Ortiz, and the fund in his name for photojournalism students at San Francisco State University.)

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Comments are encouraged. Too long, say friends. Too short, say others.

Recommended: Craig Deutsche with Jackie Czapla. Another Place & Time: Voices From the Carrisa Plains.

“Polecats”: Mostly spoken in the South and Midwest, the folkish term would apply to the Western Spotted Skunk or Striped Skunk – if ever spotted in Carrisa Plains. The smelly varmints are listed as “rare.” Which probably means “never.” More intriguing school mascots: Beetdiggers (Jordan, Utah), Fighting Artichokes (Scottsdale, Arizona), Banana Slugs (UC Santa Cruz), Trolls (Palos Heights, Illinois.

True Yarns, Ltd.: The managing partner has recovered from a month of badly needed slumber.

In the pipeline: Fran Ortiz, Photographer (Newspaper Portraits, a Series) … The Hill of Bones (Overlooked Corners of History, a Series) … An Interview with Eleanor Roosevelt … Hiccups … The Ding Dong Daddy … A Pulitzer for Norris Alfred (Newspaper Portraits) … The Scribbler or the Cougar?

Sources

Craig Deutsche with Jackie Czapla. Another Place & Time: Voices From the Carrisa Plains. Self-published, 2013. Available, Amazon.com.

Ray Ford (Outdoors Writer.) “Ray Ford: Carrizo Plain –A Land Where You Can Hear the Quiet.” Noozhawk (Santa Barbara, CA, May 7, 2017. Online: ray@soutdoor.com

Ann Fairbanks. “Land of Big Dreams.” 5-part series. March 21 and March 23 to 26, 1992, San Luis Obispo Tribune. Available: Newspapers.com by subscription.

“Mammals of the Carrizo Plain National Monument.” Brochure, 2008. Available from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management Field Office in Bakersfield, CA. Online: www.blm.gov/ca/bakersfield/carrizoplain.html.

Ted R. Fisher and Students of the Carrisa Plains School. “A History of the Carrisa Plains.” May 1959. [On file at the San Luis Obispo County Historical Society] Online: https://vredenburgh.org/carrizo/pdf/CarrisaPlains1959.pdf

“About the Carrizo Plain National Monument.” Brochure, Santa Barbara: Los Padres ForestWatch, 2024. Online: https://lpfw.org/our-region/carrizo-plain/

“Cal Poly yakʔityutyu Housing Complex | Pronunciations.” YouTube.

Dennis Gardner. “The Old and New Carriza Plains.” The California Traveler. May 1967. Jackson CA

Myron Angel. History of San Luis Obispo County, California. Oakland: Thompson & West, 1883.

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© Lynn Ludlow 2024