In February 1905, a new contraption floated out into San Pedro Bay, the shallow estuary at the mouth of the Los Angeles River. San Pedro was a steam-powered hydraulic dredge, and over the next three years, it would suck up nearly 3,000,000 cubic yards of sand and mud, deepening the bay and helping to transform it into a working harbor capable of hosting the ever-larger steamships plying the world’s oceans.
Where did Los Angeles come from? The city’s improbable trajectory to global economic powerhouse runs through this muddy estuary, argues James Tejani in his detailed recapitulation of how Americans remodeled San Pedro Bay into the Port of Los Angeles. A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth uncovers the layered history of human ambitions and environmental transformations that shaped both this curl of coastline and the larger nineteenth-century United States. The dredge, though, was a late-arriving star character in this drama. Spanning the aftermath of the U.S.–Mexico War to the eve of World War I, this book traces the interplay of mapping, property disputes, infrastructure development, and environmental impacts within larger stories of national expansion, imperialism, and the rise of corporate capitalism. Tejani tells this story through thirty short chapters and an additional ten unnumbered, even shorter passages, which are grouped into five larger sections.
The first section, “Borderlands,” describes American expansion to the Pacific Coast during the 1840s and early 1850s. Manuel Domínguez, whose family’s Spanish land grant bordered San Pedro Bay, saw an opportunity to solidify his landholdings under the new U.S. government. The U.S. Coast Survey began eagerly mapping the Southern California coast but struggled elsewhere along the Pacific Coast against a daunting landscape, resource shortages, and Indigenous resistance. The Gold Rush brought new urgency to questions of how the United States would map space and define property. The second section, “Railroads,” details how the world briefly shared by Anglos and Californios began to dissolve during the 1850s. The prospect of rail links changed how Americans saw Pacific geography. Government scientists searched for railroad routes through the Sierra Nevada mountains, then sought to link those corridors with coastal harbors. One Army engineer’s stark observation – “San Pedro has no harbor” – is central to Tejani’s argument: since there was no harbor, Americans decided to create one (138). In the third section, “Rebellions,” Tejani examines how the Civil War both interrupted the Coast Survey’s work and accelerated San Pedro Bay’s development. The war elevated the bay’s strategic importance, with the U.S. Army relying on a new wharf built by Phineas Banning to supply Union forces in the Southwest. After the Civil War, flows of people, freight, and money through San Pedro Bay would only increase. Section four, “Capital,” runs from the end of the Civil War to the 1890s. Although a second Army officer reported in 1867 that San Pedro Bay “is really no harbor at all,” the U.S. government found itself caught among private investors who wanted desperately to make something out of nothing – and who aggressively lobbied federal officials to help make their speculative visions a reality, in part by linking San Pedro Bay to the nation’s rail network (253). The final section, “Empire,” argues that the rising tide of American imperialism in the 1890s provided new justifications for developing San Pedro Bay. Suddenly, this not-quite-a-harbor was key to America’s Pacific commercial ambitions.
By focusing on the estuary’s transformation into an artificial harbor, Tejani shows readers how urban development is fundamentally an environmental story. Meanwhile, his exploration of how infrastructural projects served both economic and imperial ambitions offers valuable insights into the interplay between local development and national expansion. Tejani’s meticulous recounting of San Pedro Bay’s transformation is one of the book’s strengths. His attention to detail – whether describing the intricacies of coastal surveying or the bureaucratic machinations that shaped property lines – provides a granular understanding of how the landscape was physically and politically reshaped. Yet even though Americans’ pursuit of profits is a constant theme, Tejani rarely probes the ideological or cultural frameworks that underpinned their projects.
Tejani presents this book as filling a gap in the historical literature, arguing that San Pedro Bay is a place that “has been left out of American historical narratives” (4). Fair enough. A detailed selected bibliography demonstrates Tejani’s command of the historiography, but he never directly connects his arguments to historiographic debates – perhaps because this is a trade book, published by Norton. And for a book in which spatial transformation is central, more maps (printed larger) would have made it easier to understand the many waves of change that shaped the bay. Most perplexing is Tejani’s omission of the Port of Long Beach, which shares San Pedro Bay and Terminal Island with the Port of Los Angeles. Despite the Port of Long Beach’s critical role in Southern California’s economy and its physical proximity to the Port of Los Angeles – the two ports are practically intertwined – the Port of Long Beach receives only a fleeting mention in a footnote. This oversight is striking, as these ports’ shared histories are essential to understanding the region’s development.
A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth offers a detailed recounting of San Pedro Bay’s transformation, but it leaves larger questions unanswered. While rich in detail, the book’s limited engagement with historiographic debates may leave some readers wanting more analytical depth. Even so, the book’s central achievement is its insistence that the history of Los Angeles cannot be divorced from environmental manipulation – even (or especially) where the city meets the sea.
