The Most Impossible Rise of a City Ever: Bakersfield

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1877, James Ben Ali Haggin used the Desert Land Act to take nearly 187,000 acres of Kern County, California at fifty cents an acre. Then he and cattle baron Henry Miller divided the Kern River between themselves in a private room — and the city of Bakersfield, sitting right on that river, received nothing. This is the story of how a city in a near-desert kept rising for over 160 years on land it didn’t choose, water it didn’t own, oil that enriched men who lived elsewhere, and Dust Bowl migrants the county tried to erase from its own libraries. From Colonel Thomas Baker’s alfalfa field in 1863 through the Lux v. Haggin water war, the Kern River oil boom, the banning of The Grapes of Wrath, Buck Owens and the Bakersfield Sound, and a $17.9 million deal to buy its own river back — all the way to a record population of 422,853 in 2026. Sources: Haggin, J.B.A., pamphlet on Kern County land entries (1877), cited in California State Assembly proceedings on desert land claims Lux v. Haggin, 69 Cal. 255 (1886), California Supreme Court San Francisco Chronicle, coverage of Kern County desert land entries (1877–1883) Kern County Land Company papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA Kern County Board of Supervisors minutes, August 21, 1939 (resolution banning The Grapes of Wrath) Kern County Land Co. v. Occidental Petroleum Corp., 411 U.S. 582 (1973), United States Supreme Court