Was Dwight Whiting A Huckster?

Last weekend I spoke with a family friend who is a fourth-generation Californian. The circumstances of her family’s immigration from Great Britain, however, were not exactly storybook.

“My great-grandfather, his wife and their three young children came here after a promoter informed them—and others—about the magnificent orchards growing in Lancaster,” she said.

To an Englishman looking to support his wife and family, the idea of moving to a place of year-round sunshine and row upon row of fruit trees must have seemed like the answer to prayers. Not to mention that Lancaster would've sounded comforting—an echo of the Lancaster in Lancashire County, England.

But anyone who can picture the Antelope Valley circa 1886 is guessing what they found, right?

“He and his family arrived,” said my friend, "and there was nothing. No orchards. Nothing.”

Well, not unless you count Joshua trees. Plus a railroad and the rudiments of a town.

“Within three months, he was dead,” my friend continued. “Fortunately, my great-grandfather had been a Mason, and the Masons in Los Angeles helped his widow financially until she could establish a restaurant and support herself and her children.”

SEVEN YEARS LATER

By 1893, Dwight Whiting was in the midst of a promotional blitz of his own as he distributed his London-published 111-page booklet, Fruit Farming for Profit in California. His target audience? Upper-class Englishmen who, unlike their older brothers, would not be inheriting property.   

But Whiting realized previous promoters had muddied the waters. So in the midst of addressing growing conditions in El Toro and the surrounding “Aliso Valley,” he also addressed naysayers by including a letter from Mr. A.G.C. of San Jose, dated Aug. 30, 1892, and subsequently published in the London Times.

The letter begins by proclaiming that any profits from California fruit ranching are “wholly overdone ... Another drawback is that the Britisher out here is at great disadvantage [and] is looked on rather as an interloper by his American neighbours, and fair sport for all they can get out of him.”

Adding that the “intense heat and malaria of the interior valleys ... is never mentioned in California reports,” A.G.C. allowed that “along the coast, and in many of the valleys near the same, the climate is as perfect as it can be, and life made as pleasant as it can, when one has some money over and above what his ranche may bring him.”

But, A.G.C. added, “When he has to depend solely on the latter, and fondly believes he is going to make a small fortune, he will find that a California fruit ranche is hardly the thing.”

The disgruntled A.G.C. closed by stating he had worked for a year “in every valley where fruit is the industry ... but I am at last obliged to say that the fruit industry as depicted by California Boards of Trade is a totally different thing to the reality.”

WHITING’S REBUTTAL 

In response, Whiting quoted The San Francisco Chronicle’s assertion that fruit growers were “prospering in spite of the pessimistic declaration that the fruit business is overdone.”

As for charges that “an Englishman is at a disadvantage”?

“All bosh,” said The Chronicle.

Next, Whiting himself stepped into the fray. “As one who has travelled generally through the Colonies and the United States of America, I proclaim it their own fault in every instance that they do not get on ... I am convinced that there are many more openings to success in the United States of America than in old crowded England.”

Whiting then included more than 20 letters of commendation from various dignitaries—including Bishop William Ford Nicholls, head of California’s Episcopal Diocese in San Francisco—all attesting to the Aliso Valley’s fine climate and growing conditions.  

Still not impressed? Well, Whiting also listed some neighbors who “lent their names as references.” Maybe you’ll recognize a few:

• Mr. Richard O’Neil, Santa Margarita Rancho, 275,000 acres
• Don Marco Forster, San Juan Capistrano, 24,000 acres
• Mr. L. F. Moulton, Rancho Neguel [sic], El Toro, 26,000 acres
• Mr. James Irvine, San Joaquin Ranche, Tustin, 102,000 acres
• Madame Modjeska, El Toro, 2,500 acres

In next week's column, we'll continue our look at Dwight Whiting's El Toro, with a visit to his "ranche" by a reporter from the Santa Ana Daily Blade.