Didion briefly recounts painter Thomas Kinkade’s rise to being one of California’s most popular and profitable artists. Kinkade painted quaint, fairytale-like scenes of cottages in landscapes, and he became famous for his use of light, known as the “Kinkade glow.” Didion compares this glow to the kind of misty illumination found in Albert Bierstadt’s grand paintings of the California landscape. Kinkade too was moved by the divine grandeur of California’s mountains, and he painted Yosemite National Park after visiting with his family. 

Didion argues that Kinkade and Bierstadt’s paintings are more alike than they first appear, as they both sentimentalize and revise California into a place without moral ambiguity. For example, Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit is a triumphant depiction of a landscape completely devoid of the suffering it caused. Didion contrasts this inspirational, bloodless painting with a quotation from Virginia Reed, a member of the Donner-Reed party, who wrote about how grateful she was to not be one of the people who ate human flesh to survive.

Didion moves to an analysis of Californian and American identity in Jack London’s 1913 novel The Valley of the Moon, which follows a young orphan, Saxon Brown, who befriends another orphan, Billy Roberts, in Oakland. Both Saxon and Billy see themselves as descendants of “true” Americans. In a passage Didion quotes, Billy and Saxon discuss their parents’ crossings to the West. Billy explains that his father was taken by Indigenous Americans as a child and then rescued and adopted by a miner. He finished the crossing with the miner’s party. 



The pair bond over their mothers making the crossing as infants, and they are elated to be from such “old American stock” (78). They later express grievances about immigrants who seem to be crowding out “real” Americans. Didion explains that this disdain for “foreigners” was extreme in the early days of California, and according to scholars like Carey McWilliams, xenophobia was the white settlers’ method of solidifying their communities. Didion lists several of the laws from the period that applied only to “foreigners.”

Later in the novel, Saxon and Billy seek out government land which they understand as their due and repayment for the suffering their parents endured on their crossings. When they finally receive land in Sonoma County, their vision of the place is tinged with the Kinkade glow. Didion quotes a passage of the characters’ first sight of the seemingly magical land and the mysterious but benevolent old couple who welcome them. Much like in London’s own life, Saxon and Billy determine to make the land flourish through scientific agriculture. However, despite his experiments and grand vision of leaving behind a better land than he found, London’s farming efforts were a failure, and he died in 1916.

In 1872, a group of the working press and free-spirited artists founded the San Francisco Bohemian Club. Members met regularly in town and at their out-of-town retreat, the Bohemian Grove. Though it was against their edict, the Bohemian Club eventually invited the wealthy men of Californian society to join, and by 1970 a large majority of club members came from the largest corporations in America. The club became a gathering for America’s elite, with high-ranking government officials like Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, and both George Bushes visiting the annual retreat. At these retreats, members held informal talks, sang old university songs, and enacted traditional tableaux.

Didion views the transformation of the Bohemian Club into a gathering of state and corporate powers as a case study of California’s larger political and economic changes. Henry George, one of the club’s founding members, once described Californians as a people uniquely self-reliant and optimistic about their ability to enrich themselves. Didion quotes George’s essay “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” in which he warns his readers that the railroads—and with it, new swaths of people, growing industry, and rapid urbanization—will not encourage greater independence but rather will stratify the classes further. George was one of the few people asking questions about the impacts of the railroad’s corporate monopoly. 

The essay, Didion proposes, came too late in a process already well underway of the state selling off its land to outside entities for quick enrichment. Josiah Royce noted that Californians’ major flaw was a “general sense of social irresponsibility” (89) when there was money to be made, and Didion suggests that this feeling of speculative individualism persists.