A Sea of Green
Blink twice as you speed east bound on the 10 and you will miss Banning, California, situated in San Gorgonio Pass about half-an-hour west of Palm Springs. Under the white-hot, summer sun the Pass shimmers like golden velvet. Shrubbery and trees inhabit only the high mountain slopes and the bottoms of the storm washed ravines. Rock, sand, and brown weeds occupy every other vacant space, stretching away to the eastern and western horizons.
It is hard to believe, looking at the sun-scalded landscape, that once the Pass was green all summer, the terraces of land north and south of the freeway covered with a sea of trees. Tens of thousands of trees annually produced hundreds of thousands of pounds of stone fruits, mostly apricots. The Pass was ideal for fruit orchards, cold enough in the winter to sufficiently chill the trees and warm enough in the summer to ripen the crop. It had a seemingly endless supply of clear mountain water for irrigation.
Unlikely as it may seem, the orchardists who produced the sweet harvest were the people of Morongo Indian Reservation. Records of the harvest are available in the files of the Mission Indian Agency housed at the National Archives in Laguna Nigel. In 1922, at the height of the period, thirty-four Indian men and women growers produced more than 622,000 pounds of apricots, with one grower producing 66,000 pounds. The sale of the fruit at three cents per pound brought $19,000 onto the reservation that year, no small sum in 1922.
Elders from the Reservation remember the olden days when the fragrance of fruit blossoms floated on the warm spring air as blooms blanketed the orchards in pink and white. In summer the reservation would fill with relatives arriving from the mountains and desert; they stayed two or three weeks to help with the picking. Every night of the harvest each family would gather around a blazing fire to eat, sing, laugh, tell stories, play games, and catch up on recent events. It was a magical time of gaiety and plenty, warmth and family closeness. It was a time that everyone looked forward to, especially the children, the center and joy of every Cahuilla and Serrano family.
The trees are mostly gone now, succumbed to drought as irrigation water was diverted for use by urban consumers. Across the burnt landscape you can still spot a few lone survivors. They are twisted and misshapen, broken and stunted, clinging to life where a little water seeps below ground. Even so, each spring they persist in producing a few hopeful blossoms to serve as a remembrance of a bygone time.