Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Page A

the greatest concentration of hazardous waste sites in the nation), divorce rate, drug consumption, episodes of violence, and lack of corporate philanthropy and organized labor.
    Certainly the orderly grid of fruit trees is more appealing than the jumble of mismatched corporations and assembly sheds, and certainly the most familiar storyabout California, even about America, is of a paradise that fell sometime not long ago, the story Mander tells. But the paradise of the orchards is partial at best: they are themselves workplaces for immigrant and migrant laborers, whose poor working conditions and exposure to pesticides foreshadowed the sweatshops of microchip manufacture. And the first of these fruit trees came with the Spanish missionaries in 1777, who established Mission Santa Clara as a slave labor camp for the Ohlone and nearby indigenous people. (Santa Clara County is named after the mission and includes San Jose and the southern half of Silicon Valley; the northern half extends up along the San Francisco peninsula into San Mateo County. The term
valley
is something of a misnomer for this sprawl.)
    When the missionaries came on their double mission for salvation and empire, the whole peninsula was a vast expanse of live oaks maintained by the Ohlone. As the explorer Sir George Vancouver wrote after a visit in 1792, “For almost twenty miles it could be compared to a park which had originally been planted with the true old English oak, the underwood . . . had the appearance of having been cleared away and had left the stately lords of the forest in complete possession of the soil, which was covered with luxuriant herbage and beautifully diversified with pleasing eminences and valleys.” The planting of the orchards represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler piecework of agricultural labor for surplus and export. It may be that the orchards even have something in common with the Winchester repeating rifle as symbols of frontiers of conquest and rules of order. But they also represent sustenance and continuity, two things hard to condemn out of hand, and I have been told that the sight of the valley in bloom was exquisite.
    By the 1820s, the slave population—which included members of tribes from farther away as well as locals—had begun to escape, raid their former prison, and liberate their comrades. One successful raider, Yoscolo, carried out many such missions until he was caught; his head was nailed to a post near the church as a disincentive to the remaining workers. This is the not very edifying early history of European civilization in Silicon Valley, and the anticolonial raiders here have their successors in contemporary Vietnamese gangs who steal vast quantities ofsilicon chips for the gray and black markets. Perhaps the missions, too, are prototypes of Silicon Valley, of information colonization. The neophytes, as the mission captives were called, were required to memorize and recite long lists of saints, prayers, and so forth, which they were unlikely to have understood; salvation was a matter of having the right information.
    In between the missions and the corporations, a golden age is hard to find and a fall is hard to postulate. Leland Stanford, one of the Big Four railroad barons whose government-subsidized rail monopoly made him a millionaire many times over, founded Stanford University in 1885 as a memorial to his dead son. The photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented high-speed stop-action photography here in 1877, often considered the crucial precursor of motion pictures, to confirm Stanford’s belief that all a horse’s feet were off the ground simultaneously at some point during a gallop. Around that time, the Bing cherry was bred here by Seth Lewelling, who named it after his Chinese cook—according to legend, in lieu of back wages. (It’s worth remembering that