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Stevens-Duryea automobile corporation in Springfield. There Ruth met Marvel H. Parsons, a man’s man two years her senior, who loved the great outdoors and whose family had founded the town of Springfield in the early seventeenth century. His unusual first name had come from his mother, Addie M. Marvel, but he was known to all by the less awkward name of “Tad” or “Teddy.” The marriage had seemed a good match, a consolidation of middle-class fortunes: Marvel’s father was a real estate developer who had codeveloped the Colony Hills neighborhood just outside Springfield. He was also president of the Eastern States Refrigeration Company, which owned warehouses extending along the Grand Junction Wharves in Boston. Yet for all its financial sense, Ruth and Marvel’s union was ill-starred.
    Within less than a year of the wedding, Ruth gave birth to their first child. It was stillborn. The young couple was devastated, particularly Ruth. With her health fragile and their home in Springfield clouded by tragedy, a move away from the East was thought best. It did not take long to choose a destination. Nowhere were the surroundings more propitious, the opportunities more abundant, or the boosters more feverish than in Los Angeles, the ecstatic beating heart of the Land of Sunshine.
    It had not always been so. Founded as a Mexican colony in 1781, Los Angeles was a stagnant pueblo for nearly a century. By 1850 the city housed little more than 8,000 inhabitants and was known as the “Queen of the Cow Counties” from its role as the trading center of the southern Californian beef industry. Under American occupation it had transformed itself from a sleepy settlement into a violent border town. A motley assortment of “cowboys, gamblers, bandits and desperadoes” drawn both by the cattle and the possibility of gold ensured that one murder was committed for every day of the year. The Reverend James Woods, a visiting missionary, was shocked by the lawlessness, drunkenness, and low regard for human life he saw. “The name of this city is in Spanish the city of angels,” he wrote in his diary, “but with much more truth might it be called at present the city of Demons.”
    But in the decades that followed, unprecedented floods and drought saw the cattle industry falter. With the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the city’s shift from cow town to farming center, more and more well-heeled immigrants began to arrive. By the end of the nineteenth century the hell that the Reverend Woods had set eyes on had been transformed into its exact opposite.
    â€œWe have a tradition,” wrote one Californian journalist, “which points, indeed, to the vicinity of Los Angeles, the City of the Angels, as the site of the very Paradise, and the graves are actually shown of Adam and Eve, father and mother of man and (through some error, doubtless, since it is disputed that he died) of the serpent also.”
    Boosterism on the biblical scale became common and reinforced what the gold and health rushes had already proven: that here was a place to redeem oneself, to return to the garden before the Fall, to sever all connections with the past and, hopefully, to make a wondrous new beginning.
    In 1910, Los Angeles had 319,198 residents, a sixfold increase from twenty years before. But that growth would be dwarfed by what was to follow. When Ruth and Marvel arrived three years later, William Mulholland, the city’s chief engineer, had just opened the first aqueduct into the desert city. As the water poured through it, ensuring the city’s urban destiny, Mulholland spoke as if he had co-opted divinity into his scheme. “There it is,” he proclaimed, “take it.” And the people did. More and more took it each year. The Californian dream was the belief that fantasy just might be made into reality, the dream that people, like the resources of California itself,