Four families gained control of the Tulare Lake Basin productive landscape by the end of World War I (Preston 1981; Weber 1994; Mitchell 1996). The Boswell, Salyer, Hansen, and Guiberson clans achieved the transformation “from family farm to agribusiness” (Pisani 1984) by mixing private capital with social and political power. State intervention was crucial to guar- antee the basin’s geography of accumulation. Indeed, under federal, state, and railroad land ownership schemes and public and private irrigation projects, the geography into which they introduced cotton had already been extensively reworked by rural wage laborers into a region increasingly characterized by extensive holdings (Preston 1981; Mitchell 1996). The Jeffersonian ideal of white family farmers tending small, general-production farms, struggled against, but lost out to, the parallel development of large capitalist farms producing commodity crops (Preston 1981; Daniel 1981; Pisani 1984).