Didion shares an excerpt from a speech she made at her 8th-grade graduation in 1948 titled “Our California Heritage.” In the speech, Didion declares that the early Californians who built their great state were different from other settlers, as they were more ambitious and adventurous. She implores her classmates to continue in their tradition, to not become complacent, and to always keep seeking something more. Didion concedes that she didn’t recognize the speech’s irony until much later: Most of her classmates’ families were recent transplants with little connection to the state’s past. As she matured, Didion researched questions she had about Californian identity, and she claims this book is her means of sorting out her confusions.

Beginning her investigation into California’s self-identity, Didion examines the Sacramento River. This immensely long and wide river floods its valley annually, making the surrounding lands almost uninhabitable, but this didn’t stop people, like her great-great-grandfather William Kilgore, from settling in the region. 

Didion remembers seeing lithographs of “high water” during the 1850s and 1860s, which showed citizens travelling to and from their homes and businesses by raft and boat. She quotes historian Charles Nordhoff, who explains that this unproductive land was sold by the state for $1 an acre on the condition that the owners would reclaim the land within a year, and at that point, the state would reimburse them. Though this endeavor made the Sacramento Valley a thriving community, concerns over water levels remained constant throughout Didion’s life. Statistics show the sheer amount of infrastructure erected by the federal government to deal with the River, including miles of levees and canals, and countless pumping plants, dams, bridges, and gauging stations.

Didion notes the irony of California’s perception of itself as self-sufficient when coupled with its dependence on the government to help develop it. California as a place, even when it was a Spanish state, attracted entrepreneurial people who sought quick money rather than patient labor. As an example, Didion describes how four astute men dreamed up the railroad that connected the state to the rest of the country, but it was federal taxes that paid for the construction and the land. California’s agriculture sector is also heavily subsidized. Farmers plant crops that aren’t profitable using astronomical quantities of water because the state and federal governments shoulder most of the cost. One exemplary case is farmers who plant Japonica rice, whose plants require extended underwater submersion during California’s drought months. This rice isn’t popular in the United States, and Japan has banned its imports, making the effort and expenditure virtually pointless.

Didion quotes Josiah Royce, a key member of Harvard philosophy department’s “golden period,” on his reflections about being from Sacramento. Royce was always told that his community was “new,” but everywhere he looked, there were signs of people who had lived there before him. Rather than examine these contradictions, Royce’s eventual conception of California was founded on the abstract moral of “loyalty,” despite his other conjectures that Californians were those who shrugged off their homes for adventures out west.

Didion sees that this reinvention of California is especially present in stories of the crossing to the West. For travelers, this crossing was a kind of death and rebirth—a complete rejection of one’s previous life, a confrontation with the wilderness, and a birth into a new, prosperous land. Didion quotes Royce’s mother’s recollection of their crossing, which echoes this sentiment. Didion finds that “the crossing story” is a genre with its own standard conventions. One prominent element is the strange, omniscient perspective from which the stories are told. She quotes a story of Josephus Cornwall’s departure, where at one moment the story follows Josephus, at another it follows his mother, and at no point is there a third person witnessing this interaction to acquire such details. In another example from Josephus’s infancy, a story relates how baby Josephus was spared from a mad dog’s attack, though no one saw this happen. Didion observes that Californian children hold onto these stories as their cultural heritage, but these unverifiable and colorful stories lead to a skewed self-perception.

The names of places along the crossing also became common in California’s lexicon. Items from the crossings, like the Cornwall family potato masher, came to be viewed like relics. Didion explains this veneration with an excerpt from Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon, where Saxon Brown holds her mother’s corset and senses in its fabric her mother’s journey and hardships. Despite this reverence, Didion notes that, for travelers, there was a necessary lack of sentimentality about getting rid of one’s personal items—no matter how precious—to keep moving forward. This was due to the strict timelines of the crossing, as the daunting Sierra Nevada mountains had to be crossed before the winter snow came. The Royces, for example, had to abandon their wagon to make it through the mountains before snowfall.

Like belongings, the sick and dead were also “jettisoned” with a similar lack of emotion. Didion quotes William Kilgore’s diary about crossing the Sierra Nevada, which quickly details the burial of a traveler amid extensive data on a mountain’s elevation. In another story, Nancy Cornwall’s son Joseph recalls how a young woman, whose mother died earlier on the crossing, was buried in the middle of a road; the party then drove over her grave with their wagons to conceal it. Didion also relates a more harrowing tale from Bernard J. Reid about those parties who were less willing to keep the weak among their ranks. Reid recalls finding a 17-year-old girl and her sick brother abandoned along the trail in their oxen-less wagon. Their parents died two days earlier, and the party was too scared to wait for the brother to recover lest they couldn’t reach the Sierra Nevada before snowfall. Didion asks whether such sacrifices of one’s humanity complicate the “redeeming” quality of the crossing.

Despite growing up in Sacramento, Didion claims that, like many Californians, she had trouble understanding her place in the state, and the state’s larger place in the country. She quotes Josiah Royce’s similar sentiments, a conundrum of identity that moved him away from the West to Harvard. 

Novelist and journalist Frank Norris tried to tackle these questions through an epic literary trilogy which followed the trail of wheat from California across the country. Norris published the first book, The Octopus, in 1901 after having spent the summer on a wheat farm in San Benito County. He drew on several historical events from the region, including the 1893 capture of a rogue brakeman and an 1880 shootout between ranchers and federal agents over eviction orders.

As inspiration for the novel’s protagonist, Presley, Norris recreated a popular newspaper poem from 1899 about worker exploitation. In The Octopus, the poem makes Presley famous, and he receives an invitation to dine with “the Railroad King.” At the same time as Presley’s rise, a widow and her daughter—victims of the railroad’s evictions—descend into poverty. Presley meets the destitute daughter, and his lavish dinner becomes tainted by premonitions of riots. Later in the novel, a railroad agent dies in the cargo hold of a ship, drowned in wheat. Didion explains that the titular octopus is at once the Southern Pacific Railway and “indifferent nature” (45), which Norris characterizes as similarly monstrous and unstoppable forces.

However, Didion argues that The Octopus is not a straightforward anti-corporate tale. The ranchers, who see themselves as fighting against exploitation by corporate overlords, are all recent transplants who migrated to the region precisely because the new railroad created a flourishing market for wheat. The farmers don’t care about the land; they care about how much profit they can get out of it before moving onto their next project. Didion suspects that these characters would’ve easily joined the corporate side of the railway given the opportunity. Thus, she sees that the conflict in the book is actually between members of the same class who cannot perceive this sameness because of their individualist self-perceptions.

Didion closes the chapter with passages from the United States Bureau of Reclamation’s website concerning the San Joaquin valley. The Bureau quotes Norris’s desolate depiction of the region in The Octopus and claims that the state simply added water to make it a flourishing area. In one lengthy passage, however, Didion exposes just how much infrastructure, government money, and time has been dedicated to land reclamation. Much of this infrastructure, Didion explains, was taxpayer-funded, but serves primarily corporate growers.