History of the Panoramavista Preserve

HISTORY:
CHANGING LAND USES

1910

The Panorama Vista Preserve lies north and south of the Kern River and runs east-west from Gordon's Ferry to near Manor Street. Oil fields and some housing border it on the north and to the south rise the Panorama Bluffs; in fact, the Preserve includes some of the steep slopes of the Bluffs.

The Kern River is easily seen from the top of the Bluffs; it meanders along in a series of lazy curves, edged with willows and other trees. Fish still swim in the river, water birds wade, and beavers occasionally build dams. Slightly distant from the river, the land is rich in elderberries, California sycamores, cottonwoods, bright yellow-flowered bladderpods, and native California roses. The farther one walks from the river, the more arid the terrain becomes and the predominant plant is salt bush and other dry-land plants. A few willows, sycamores, cottonwoods and other plants with deep roots hang on from a time a half-century ago when the river regularly flooded high up on the land. This region was once hunted, fished and gathered by the Yowlumne Yokuts.

Courtesy Buena Vista Museum

Although their main village of Woilu was located miles away in what today is downtown Bakersfield, the Yowlumne's territory extended along the Kern River several miles up the Kern Canyon past Panorama Vista. While no major Yokuts settlement seems to have been on the present Preserve, it is likely that there were seasonal encampments.

The eastern edge of the Preserve is near the present Gordon's Ferry bridge. In 1853, Aneas B. Gordon established a ferry here, a flat-bottomed boat and overhead cable arrangement. American settlers were beginning to arrive in the Bakersfield region and travel between southern California and the north was picking up significantly. Stage and wagon travelers needed a way to get across the Kern, but most access points were blocked by the thick tule swamps that were still a major natural feature along the river. Gordon, however, found a ford at the place that still bears his name.

The critical location of Gordon's Ferry secured its inclusion on the Butterfield Stage route. In 1857 the Butterfield Overland Mail system was established by businessman John W. Butterfield to connect St. Louis, Missouri to booming San Francisco, a distance of more than 2700 miles; the line went into operation the next year. It was more practical to enter California by the snow-free, relatively flat southern route rather than over the Sierra Nevada, and so the stages crossed the Colorado at Fort Yuma, sped on to Los Angeles, headed north via Tejon Pass and crossed the Kern, as we have seen, at Gordon's Ferry.The Los Angeles to San Francisco leg (Division One in the Butterfield organization) was was one of the longer stretches in terms of mileage and hours needed to traverse it (462 miles and 80 hours). Butterfield set up stations every ten miles or slightly more over this route and six stations were located in Kern County. In the mountains, the stage stopped at Fort Tejon, descended to the valley floor and went east of the Kern River Slough along part of the route of the later East Side Canal. From the Sinks of Tejon, travelers passed northeast, went east of the present Lamont and, eight miles north, curved west to near where Fairfax School is now located, and then headed north to the river bluffs. There a steep road led down to the river. Here they crossed the Kern at Gordon's Ferry, also know as the Kern River Station.

The main priority of the Butterfield Stage was to get the mail through, and the comfort and convenience of passengers was secondary. Few attempted the 25 day non-stop journey from St.Louis, but one who did was Eastern journalist Waterman L. Ormsby, who wrote this of his crossing at Gordon's Ferry:

The Kern River is a rapid running stream and has to be crossed on boats. A man named Gordon keeps the ferry and has a large flatboat which being out of order, at this time, the stages could not cross and we had to cross in a small boat propelled stern first, with a shovel… The company have [sic] a station here and no detention is experienced as horses and another wagon are waiting on the other side. The land along the river bottom is good. (Ormsby, 118)

The Butterfield Overland Mail Company ceased operation in 1861 although significant traffic through Gordon's Ferry continued at least until 1877 when the Jewett Avenue bridge was built several miles to the west. (KRPP Technical Appendix, p. 30). No physical evidence of the old ferry operation remains.

The tule swamps that once hugged the Kern River are no longer, either. The paradox of the Bakersfield area is that it is naturally a desert—except near the river and, once upon a time, the lakes that dotted the southern San Joaquin Valley. Would-be early farmers realized that canals would have to be built to drain the swamps and irrigate the desert.

Two of the area's earliest, the Kern Island/Carrier Canal (1870) and the Beardsley Canal (1873), run through the Panorama Vista Preserve and are visible from a vantage point on top of the Bluffs. The closest to the base of the Bluffs is the Kern Island Canal, while the Beardsley is on the north side of the river.

The Kern Island Canal runs from Rocky Point weir, now on Preserve property, though downtown Bakersfield (e.g. bordering the Beale Memorial Library), and ends at Kern Lake. In addition to providing irrigation water to pioneering farmers, it also once powered a flour mill located at a site across Truxtun Avenue from the library. The Beardsley Canal taps into the Kern River not far east from Gordon's Ferry and so its headgate is not included within the Preserve. (Watkins photo ca. 1888)

Agriculture developed rapidly in our end of the Valley because of the construction not only of these two canals but many others, so many in fact that Bakersfield was once referred to as a "Venice." Eventually most, including the Kern Island Canal, became the property of Haggin and Tevis's Kern County Land Company.

In May 1899, oil was found north of the Kern River approximately three quarters of a mile east of Gordon’s Ferry on land leased by the Elwood brothers James and Jonathan. Using hand tools, the driller found oil sand 43 feet down; a plaque on Round Mountain Road commemorates the"Discovery Well." Very soon, only a short distance away, a commercial well was drilled and went into production. (Robinson, 41)

Nearby Gordon's Ferry came to life again when a wooden bridge was built there in 1901 for the convenience of teamsters hauling the oil away in wagons.

By this time, an oil boom was well underway in the region, so big that by 1903 the Kern River Oilfield made California the nation's #1 oil-producing state (and pumpjacks

Bakersfield gained a reputation as a rough, tough, but up-and-coming city.) Nearby Southern Pacific track carried the oil to market; this inexpensive means of transportation played a large role in making the Kern River Field spectacularly profitable. From 1899 to 2000, the Kern River Field produced 1,760 million barrels of oil, according to the San Joaquin Geological Society, and today (2007), visitors to the Panorama Vista Preserve can see pumpjacks bobbing up and down, still extracting oil from the field. In petroleum industry language, the Kern River Oil Field is a "supergiant" in terms of overall productiveness from 1899 to the present.

Rusted remnants of old operations dot the landscape, some of them looking like ancient cannons or periscopes coming up from the earth rather than antique oil equipment.

The major portion of Panorama Vista Preserve land was purchased in 1997 from ARCO; previously property it belonged to the Kern County Land Company (KCL) and then Tenneco West. Today Chevron owns mineral rights and runs operations on the property.

Additional Photos

In the late 1880s, photographer Carleton Watkins of San Francisco was hired by the Kern County Land Company (KCL) to take photos of its properties. Among them was the Kern Island Canal:

The canal is to the left in the photo above. Note heavy vegetation that fringed the river and the canal in these late 19th century photos.

The canal flows along the base of the Bluffs and can be glimpsed today to the west of Union Avenue near Bernard and also between the Beale Memorial Library parking lot and the library entrance.

As the decades have passed, the amount of vegetation along the river and canal has significantly decreased due to agricultural and petroleum industry development, as can be seen in these photos from 1937 and 1956:

Sources:

Beck, Warren A. and Ynez D. Haase, Historical Atlas of California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1974.

Boyd, W. Harland, John Ludeke, and Marjorie Rump, eds. Inside Historic Kern. Selections from the Kern County Historical Society's Quarterly. Bakersfield: Kern County Historical Society, Inc. 1982

The Kern River Parkway Environmental Impact Report, 1988.

Ormsby, Waterman L. The Butterfield Overland Mail. Eds. Lyle H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum. San Marino: The Huntington Library. 1955.

Pisani, Donald J. From the Family Farm to Agribusiness. The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West 1850-1931.

Robinson, W. W. The Story of Kern County. Bakersfield: Title Insurance and Trust Company, 1961.

Rudy, Lynn Hay. Old Bakersfield: Sites & Landmarks, 1875-1915. Jenner: Privately printed. 2000.

http://www.sjgs.com/oilfacts.html
Giant Oil Fields of Kern County.

http://wwwstatic.kern.org/gems/historicalSociety/HistoricChronologyofKernCoun.doc
Kern County Historic Chronology

http://www.calarchives4u.com/history/kern/1892-227.htm
Kern County History

--Sasha Honig, 2007.

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28 Dec. 2010