Category: History

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Might as Well Charge the Most

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A few years ago, I was looking for a particular item of apparel as a Christmas gift: a heavy wool red-and-black-check jacket. When I started looking around online, I quickly found what I wanted: a Mackinaw Cruiser made by a Seattle company called Filson. Looking at this article, even on a computer screen, there was no doubt that it was the real thing: heavy and well-made and beautifully detailed. The price: a lot, given that what we’re talking about is a fairly straightforward piece of clothing. But I paid gladly and the jacket turned out to be everything I and the recipient expected.

Because of that purchase, the Filson catalogue still comes in the mail. It’s a demystified version of the retail literature once published by the late J. Peterman Company. It’s full of items made from “Tin Cloth” and “Oil Finish Tin Cloth” and “Shelter Cloth” and “Cover Cloth,” and it employs the trademark phrase “Might as Well Have the Best” (first used in 1930, registered as a mark in 2001). The “have the best” idea supplies its own mythos and offers an explanation for the prices (you can pay better than a hundred bucks for a thermal undershirt, two hundred for a pair of wool trousers, and as much as four hundred for one of the heavy-duty wool coats). The rest of the Filson romance is supplied in the catalogue by apparently genuine period pictures from the turn of the last century depicting rugged men in rugged clothes doing rugged things. Surely, the old-timers didn’t flinch when it came time to have the best. (According to the generally loving local coverage of the company provided over the years by the Seattle Times–see, for instance, “The Genuine Article,” published in 2005– the company was founded to outfit men traveling to Alaska and the Canadian northwest during the Klondike rush in the late 1890s.)

By coincidence, the catalogue description of a sweater I was looking at noted that the item was imported. Which of course clashes a little with the old-timey “have the best” image. A quick count of merchandise in the catalogue found about 265 items, of which 83 are imports. Virtually all the higher-end products–the heavy coats, the Tin Cloth outerwear, a line of twill luggage–are made in Seattle. A lot of the shirts, sweaters, and slacks come from overseas (according to another Seattle Times article, the offshore locations are in China and Portugal).

Who in Seattle makes the pricy items Filson sells? Again, according to press accounts, the company employs maybe 80 people in its plant–unionized, mostly women, mostly Asian, paid by the piece and making about ten dollars an hour on average. That wage figure tells you nothing about how many hours goes into making one of the Filson garments, but the company’s revenue figures–generally put at just $25 million to $30 million a year–would suggest that this is a low-volume business relative to an apparel company like Patagonia, which has more than ten times the revenue. I’d love to see how Filson’s stuff pencils out–their costs for the high-end items and the margins they’re charging. But it would seem the high prices are largely a factory of what is, for today, practically a boutique approach to production.

A couple of other interesting Filson finds:

—A slideshow of its factory floor, shot by photographer Charles Peterson.

—A small collection of items on Filson from men’s fashion site Selectism.

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Donner Land

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The Dog and I made a quick trip (I drove) this weekend up to the Donner Summit area in the Sierra Nevada. We went to see my friends Linda and Dave (The Dog got to hang out with their dogs, Dolly and Hannah). Sunday morning, we drove up to what I see referred to on maps as Donner Ridge–on the eastern/southern boundary of the Tahoe-Donner mega-development. We walked a fire trail for an hour and a half or so in actual sunshine (as opposed to the thick gray blanket of overcast still clinging this morning to the coast). Anyway, here’s a shot southeast from the ridge. Interstate 80, descending from Donner Pass, is in the center foreground. On the ridge opposite, you can see the snow sheds of the old Union Pacific line that trains used to take over the pass; I think they now run through a tunnel a little further south.

The first rocky peak in the center is Donner Peak, elevation 8203; and the friendlier-looking flat summit directly behind it is Mount Judah, elevation 8,243. Donner Summit, the heights the 1846 party tried to scale in the snow, with wagons, livestock, families, and various domestic accouterments, is to the right.

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East Bay Local History: Rainbow Trout

We wanted a local outing Sunday afternoon, and Kate wanted something that fit into her current interest in local watersheds. So we drove up to Redwood Regional Park in the Oakland Hills, and drove down the east side of the ridge to where Redwood Creek heads down to Upper San Leandro Reservoir. Kate had read about a fishway there–an aid to migrating rainbow trout. I had no idea that the Oakland Hills had any fish populations that would benefit from something like a fish ladder, so I was curious to see what was up there.

And what was up there was a little piece of history. Specimens from the watershed were the first to be identified as “rainbow trout,” back in the 1850s. And then later, fish biologists came to realize that these trout were the same species as steelhead found elsewhere on the West Coast and first collected by European biologists on Russia’s Pacific Coast in the 1730s (for more on that tale, consult Peter B. Moyle, “Inland Fishes of California.” See his discussion of the rainbow trout’s name.

Here’s a little album of the afternoon’s expotition (and if it’s not visible below, check it out here).

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Lifestyle Critique

“Robbers of the world, they have exhausted the land and now scour the sea. If their victims are rich, they despoil them; if they are poor, they subjugate them; and neither East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal greed both poverty and riches. To robbery, murder, and pillage they give the false name of empire, and when they make a desolation, they call it peace.”

–Part of a speech attributed to the Caledonian chieftain Galgacus in Tacitus’s history “Agricola,” vol. 32, p. 29. Quoted in Gray Brechin’s “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.”

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Annals of American Music: Stephen Foster

A ditty found in a recently discovered notebook kept by the beloved 19th century American composer:

Poop’s in the dirt patch,
‘Possum pot pie,
Mammy’s in the nuthatch
My oh my.

Popular music scholars say it’s from Foster’s “formative” period–possibly from the time he spent peddling Bibles by subscription across the South during his late teen years.

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Today’s Top Find: ‘Man and the Future’

Here’s a nugget that Kate unearthed while digging through an accumulation of papers. It’s a column-filling blurb from a 1976 issue of The New Yorker. Here’s the item in its entirety:

THE CLOUDED CRYSTAL BALL
[“Man and the World Community the Century Ahead,” by Arthur Larson, in “Man and the Future,” University Press of Kansas, 1968]

I suppose the area outside of the physical sciences where the authentic scientific approach has been most successfully applied is that of economics, particularly in the prevention of severe recessions and the reconciling of free enterprise with orderly growth. One reason is that economists now have an impressive array of reliable current facts on which to act, in the form of economic indicators, touching investment, savings and spending, income, sales, inventories, employment, prices, and dozens of other categories of facts and data. Careful study of past experience now enables economists to watch these dials, notice the need for some adjustment, turn a knob here, tighten a valve there, on discount rates, taxes, government purchase policies, social insurance, fiscal measures, and the trouble is righted.

Thanks to the the miracle of the World Wide Web, which has made the world an even more rational place than Larson found it, here’s the Google Books link to the volume (and here’s a copy for sale on eBay). And the knob-turning, valve tightening Arthur Larson? He was a well-known moderate Republican legal scholar who served in both the FDR and Eisenhower administrations. Here’s an obituary, from 1993.

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‘Land Logic’

When I turned 18, one of the birthday presents I got was a book-length poem called “The Donner Party.” I sold the book during a no-income period in my mid-20s, but as soon as I had some cash I went back to the used-book store that had taken it off my hands. It was still on the shelves, along with another book I’d sold, a picture biography of Yeats. I bought them back, though I was unable to find a third book I’d parted with–“Twenty Years A-Growing,” by Maurice O’Sullivan, which my Uncle Dick had given me. I found a copy of that eventually, but not mine. I still look for it.

Back to “The Donner Party,” which is right here beside me. It’s a retelling of a story of which everyone knows the shorthand version: pioneers, wagons, mountains, snow, death, cannibals. The book’s by a California poet named George Keithley, who taught (maybe still teaches) up at Chico State. The poetry is mostly blank-verse. It feels plain and authentic and sounds like it was transcribed by firelight.

Here’s one passage that has always stayed with me from a chapter called “Land Logic.” It takes place after the party’s disastrous crossing of Utah, with all of Nevada to cross before the ascent of the Sierra Nevada and hoped-for arrival in California’s Sacramento Valley

We wanted only to rest, at this juncture.
Seeing the snows, no one wished to look back
on our bad luck or talk of it anymore.

Reflection only led us to deplore
the sudden end of summer and lament
the time we wasted in this trap. Whole days

spent unloading. Stupid disputes. Delays
caused by the cattle roaming or Hastings’ wrong
advice … We were warned that to survive

we must lay up grass and water for a dry drive
of two days. Which means at worst we might
travel a day and a night—where we instead

wandered a week in the desert and left dead
a third of our herd of cattle. Add a third
of the wagons abandoned, still it doesn’t explain

all the destruction done. We could never regain
the time taken, or our goods or livestock left
on the salt. But this was not the only cost.

There is a land logic which we lost …
A sense of the likelihood of new terrain
to sustain us. The same logic that lives

in our blood, telling us that bottomland gives
promise for planting. Or for example
the simple certainty that we would find

spring water among rocks when the sun reclined
on green slopes gleaming like good pasture.
But we hurried out only to discover

a prickly patch of greasewood growing over
the dry soil, white with alkali…
Nothing in nature was what it might seem!

The promise of finding forage by a stream
proved false as well—both banks were bare
although the current there cut swift and deep.

We lost the last advantage which could keep
our company from harm. It was this sense
of the land that had departed in a dream
while we went on like souls that are still asleep.

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Guest Observation: Edward Thomas

We went up to see our friends Larry and Ursula up in Fair Oaks on Saturday night and participate in their quarterly poem-reading evening. We read poems out of books, not our own poems. I brought nothing to read, but Larry has a whole shelf of poetry books, including several anthologies. I happened across a short poem in a collection of “modern” poets, a poem called “The Owl,” by an Englishman named Edward Thomas, and read it aloud. Here it is:

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

And for good measure, here’s Dylan Thomas reading “The Owl.”

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Thought for the Day

One that cuts in many directions:

David Lloyd George: “All down history nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.” Quoted here: “As War Loomed, Three Leaders Wandered Lost” (New York Times).

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California Water: ‘The Way of Seizure and Exploitation’

A snippet from “American Places,” a 1981 book of essays by Wallace Stegner, novelist and chronicler of the West, and his like-styled son, Page. This is from a chapter Page Stegner wrote called “Here It Is: Take It.” It describes how Los Angeles siphoned off a rich, remote supply of water from the Owens Valley and details the valley’s ongoing disputes with the city. (The chapter title is taken from the words spoken in 1913 by William Mulholland, the principal architect of the Los Angeles water system, when he opened the valve that brought the first Owens Valley water to the L.A.) I can’t help but think of the current court and legislative disputes over California water when I read this. s

“…The American Way of seizure and exploitation has a long history but a dubious future. It has produced ghost towns before this when the resource ran out and the frenzy cooled and the fortune-hunters drifted away. Without suggesting that Los Angeles will become a ghost town, one knows that in the arid West there are many communities whose growth is strictly limited by the available water. To promote the growth of any community beyond its legitimate and predictable water resources is to risk one of two things: eventual slowdown or collapse and retrenchment to more realistic levels, or a continuing and often piratical engrossment of the water of other communities, at the expense of their prosperity and perhaps life.

Man, the great creator and destroyer of environments, is also part of what he creates or destroys, and rises and falls with it. In the West, water is life. From the very beginning, when people killed each other with shovels over the flow of a primitive ditch, down to the present, when cities kill each other for precisely the same reasons and with the same self-justification, water is the basis for western growth, western industry, western communities, Eventually, some larger authority, state or federal will have to play Solomon in these disputes. …”

We’ve got a Solomon of sorts–at least one of them–working on the problem now: U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger of Fresno. But more on that later.