The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire

By Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. Public Affairs, 558 pages, $30.

"Tulare Lake was once the most dominant feature on the California map, with the exception of Mount Whitney," Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman note at the outset of their new book, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. Although no more than 40 feet at its deepest, the lake was so vast that entire families of Yokut Indians would sail it on tule rafts, catching fish for days on end. That was before the gold rush. By 1905 the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tulare Lake was gone: "The largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi is now a grain field."

J.G. Boswell, the king of the book's title, developed his Boswell Company not just into Tulare Lake's biggest grower but also the largest farm operator in the world. "To my knowledge, we are the largest producer of each of the four major crops that we grow [cotton, wheat, safflower and alfalfa]," a company official once wrote. "We could cut our agricultural holdings in half and still be the largest producer of at least three of these crops." At times the book can make you want to jump in your car to get a look at this unfamiliar California of the San Joaquin Valley where Boswell farms 200,000 acres in a landscape that's become so strange that maps show the remains of Tulare Lake as rectangular in shape.

But the authors also make it clear that, as the area's farms have grown larger and the farmers fewer, it's become a far less interesting place. Corcoran, the Tulare Lake region's main city, no longer contains even a single restaurant and is now known less for its annual Cotton Day Parade – where you may see kids riding trains fashioned from giant insecticide containers – than as home to Corcoran State Prison, where Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, and Juan Corona live and where more inmates were killed during the 1990s than at any other prison in the country.

Perhaps the largest question this book poses is whether it really made sense to dam the Kern, Kings, Kaweah, and Tule Rivers for the benefit of the cotton industry – which requires 257 gallons of water to produce a single T-shirt – and in the process create an ecosystem so heavily polluted that a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist found corkscrewed beaks, missing eyes, shriveled limbs, and other deformities in nine species of birds. (Tom Gallagher)