Back in the late 1880s, a man named Joshua Cowell set out from Nevada to seek his fortune in the Great Central Valley.

His crossing of the Range of Light on foot was greatly hampered by court injunctions filed by the Sierra Club. The environmental organization didn’t want men like Cowell to disturb the natural habitat as he would have to build fires to heat his food during his journey.

Cowell, in order to end litigation, offered not to cook meat or heat coffee. Instead, he would gather pine nuts and edible grasses. This enraged the “Save the Pine Nuts” folks from Greenpeace who picketed Cowell’s Nevada cabin.

Finally, Cowell was able to slip out of Nevada under cloak of darkness and make his way across the Sierra.

By the time he got to the sandy plains of South San Joaquin County, hewasout of the forest but not the woods.

The day after he bought hundreds of acres, environmentalists succeeded in getting President Theodore Roosevelt to impose a moratorium on farming the sandy plains while Congress debated whether they should be converted into a national monument.

This enraged Cowell, who argued all he wanted to do was farm the land and feed his family.

Roosevelt’s environmental supporters retorted it wasn’t a local issue, as the land should be under the stewardship of the federal government.

Fortunately, Roosevelt was up for re-election. He retracted his executive order since he was more concerned about staying in office than leaving a legacy.

Cowell started farming. Soon others joined him. He quickly realized that the soil was being rapidly exhausted and producing low yields because of the lack of surface water.

So Cowell got a few of his neighbors together and started planning a canal to divert water from the Stanislaus River.

Immediately, this drew harsh rebukes from the Save Our River coalition.

One overzealous Save Our River hippie type even chained himself to rocks hidden in brush in Tuolumne County because he had heard Cowell one day envisioned building a huge dam to store water.

Opponents demanded Cowell conduct a full-scale environmental report since critics feared the water system would be a growth inducing improvement.

Meanwhile, a small township was formed. The initial residents realized outhouses posed health problems for humans. So they drafted plans for a wastewater treatment plant.

This was met with howls of protest from the Delta Sports Fishermen’s Alliance, a group of barristers who claimed they were interested in preserving sports fishing on the San Joaquin Rover. But the truth is the only things they ever caught were hefty court settlements for legal fees even though the ammonia levels other villages released into the river were barely strong enough to kill a two-day old minnow larvae riddled with cancer.

While those battles were being fought, the fledgling Manteca township held a Board of Trustees election.

The mayor, who was elected a year later, turned out to be a card carrying member of the Sandy Loam Association of Manteca or SLAM for short.

About the same time, Claus Spreckels announced he was scouting the San Joaquin Valley to build a sugar factory.

Several town trustees and township leaders wanted Manteca to extend services to the site to entice the German sugar king to invest in the community to create upwards of 400 jobs.

SLAM members, though, succeeded in gumming up the proposal by sticking to their insistence that Manteca helping a profitable company such as Spreckels Sugar locate in the community to provide 400 jobs was nothing but corporate welfare.

By the time the 1920s arrived. Cowell was ready to give up on his dream.

The railroad had bypassed Manteca because there was no commerce here.

The sand storms whipped up by the wind turned off potential homesteaders. The underground water sources were too unreliable for them.

On his death bed, Cowell learned the courts had ruled to allow the construction of the canal to proceed for health and safety reasons but a Southern California water district had filed suit blocking Manteca’s use of water they believed rightfully belonged to the Chandler Family and the Los Angeles boosters.

Cowell ended up dying a broken man who had nothing to show for his lifetime’s work and visionary thinking except for a dust whipped farm.

And that, my friends, is a politically correct environmental fairy tale.