# Adobe Days/Chapter 12

Chapter XII
The Back Country and the Admiral
For seventy years after its founding in 1781 Los Angeles was the only pueblo, as distinguished from presidio or mission, in the southern part of this state; and until the sudden growth of San Francisco during the gold excitement, it was the largest city in California, boasting about twenty-five hundred inhabitants when it came under American rule. Of the three neighboring missions, San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano antedate Los Angeles by a few years, while San Fernando was founded about twelve years later.
During the Spanish and Mexican regimes California’s population was largely scattered upon the ranchos, and this condition remained for nearly a generation after the settlement of the northern counties. The story of the life in this grazing land is familiar,—the story of its leisureliness and hospitality; of its life on horseback, of the great herds of black, lean, long-horned cattle, the offspring of the few animals brought in by the padres; of the devotion of the founders of the missions, of their prosperity and then of their decline under the secularization of the Mexican law. Even as late as the time of my childhood the country was still very empty and Los Angeles was a little city set in gardens and orchards, a ​narrow border of cultivated lands separating it from the wide, almost treeless, valley.
An exception to this general condition was the district to the East, centering about the San Gabriel; this mission early won the title Queen of the Missions, not because of the size or beauty of church or location, but because of the large number of Indians under its care, and the extent of its herds, orchards, vineyards and grainfields. Its cattle, estimated variously from 75,000 to a 100,000, roamed the great valley even to the foot of the mountains San Gorgonio and San Jacinto; for convenience in administration a branch, or asistencia, was established at San Bernardino in 1810.
The San Gabriel vineyard numbered a hundred and fifty thousand vines, from cuttings brought from Spain, and the making of wine and brandy (aguadiente) became an important industry. Its orchards, at their peak, contained over twenty-three hundred trees, most of them oranges, which the padres introduced, together with olives, pomegranates, and lemons. The gardens were surrounded with adobe walls or cactus hedges as a protection against marauding cattle or people, who, as one padre once quaintly said, “put out the hand too often.”
The first San Gabriel oranges were planted in 1804 by Padre Tomas Sanchez. Thirty years afterward the earliest grove in Los Angeles was set out by Don Luis Vignes, to be followed in 1841 by that of William Wolfskill, whose orchard later became famous as the largest in the United States. He was instrumental in ​bringing in many new plants to this country, and the beauty of his home place was great. His gardens gave way for the Southern Pacific Arcade Station, his orchard ground is covered by the city’s business, and no one thinks of Los Angeles as once the actual center of California’s orange growing industry.
And as these groves have been supplanted by the houses of trade, the Mission’s orchards have been transformed into homes. But when I was a little girl they still remained, had even been extended by those who came into possession after the secularization of San Gabriel.
Many of the names now familiar around Pasadena were the names of these estates. For instance, San Marino and Oak Knoll were the properties of Don Benito (Benjamin) Wilson, and his son-in-law, J. De Barth Shorb. Don Wilson was one of those Americans who came here during the Mexican rule, married into an old California family, and became identified with the land. It is for him that the astronomical peak is named, because it was he who at the expense of much money and labor built the trail to the top of the ridge. He had hopes of finding timber suitable for making of casks for his wine, but although he failed in this there was some lumber brought down on burro back.
Another familiar name is El Molino, the old mill which the mission built. It fell into disrepair, but was rescued by Col. Kewen, who made of it a charming home, while developing an estate about it. The story of Mrs. Kewen’s five hundred callas for an ​Easter at the Episcopal Church has come down. Callas were in better repute then than now.
Mrs. Albert Sidney Johnson called her new home in California Fair Oaks, the name of her Virginian birthplace. Los Robles (The Oaks), was the home of Governor Stoneman.
Old timers will recall the estate of L. J. Rose, Sunny Slope, famous both for its wines and brandies and for its stables of fine horses. Major Truman in his book, Semi-tropic California, dating from 1874, speaks of this district as a “fruit belt, two miles wide and ten miles long,” and calls it the California Lombardy.
It was just next door to this region of wine and brandy that the temperance people from Indiana started their colony on a portion of the old San Pasqual grant, the ranch where Flint, Bixby & Co. had pastured their sheep after the desert crossing in 1854. This colony devoted itself to oranges, not so intoxicating as grapes, and gave the name of the chief industry to the fashionable avenue. After a time they began to call themselves Pasadena, an imported name, and after a little more time we in Los Angeles began to know about the new settlement which was getting big enough to maintain a modest daily stage to the city,—a spring wagon. The road followed much the same route as is used today, down across the unbridged Arroyo Seco and over the flowery field that later became Garvanza, a field filled in spring with great masses of wild blossoms, poppies, and lupine, larkspur, tidy-tips, and pink owl-clover,—pink tassels we chil ​dren called them; past the Sycamores, the popular country beer-garden, through the little settlement known as East Los Angeles, along Buena Vista street (North Broadway), so called because of its attractive outlook across the early gardens and orchards of Los Angeles, and on into the Plaza. The earliest name for this street was Calle de Eternidad—Eternity Street—because it was the road to the cemetery.
One of the places reached by this road was the hill near the point on the brink of the Arroyo where ostriches now congregate, which was a favorite place for the city picnickers,—far away when measured by hay-wagon speed and untouched by any “improvements.” It was there one spring day that my schoolmates and I, of that grade which studies American colonial history, acted out a recent lesson, “storming the heights of Abraham” up the steep hillside, pushing our way under the oaks, through brush, past great clumps of maiden-hair fern to the mesa atop where we found a million seeming butterflies, the mariposa lilies, hovering over the grass.
While Pasadena was growing up to the west of the old district, “Lucky” Baldwin was developing on the east that loveliest of all oak-clad ranches, the Santa Anita, and making of it a show place sought by the few hardy and intrepid tourists who were beginning to find their way into Southern California, making a name for it far and wide not only because of its beauty but because of his famous racing stables.
Beyond that there wasn’t much that a child would ​even hear of,—there was a ranch at Duarte and another called Azusa, and then far to the east, across foothills covered with sage and cactus, and mighty “washes” filled with granite boulders was Cucamonga Ranch with its old winery and vineyard, planted sometime in the forties by members of the Lugo family from the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, across the valley. I understand that Chino means curly and relates to the character of the locks of an early owner. This ranch was under the management of Isaac Williams, a son-in-law of old Don Antonio Maria Lugo, the man who at one time held leagues and leagues of land all the way from San Pedro to San Bernardino. For many years it was a most hospitable way-station for all travelers from over the plains to Los Angeles. At the time when my father came through the Chino supported ten thousand head of cattle, half as many horses and thirty-five thousand New Mexican sheep. What it was twenty-five years later I do not know, but the hey-day of the ranches was over and the new town had not yet come.
In the far eastern end of the valley was the old town of San Bernardino, so named probably because it was on that Saint’s day that the padres established their asistencia. With the downfall of the missions this early development was stopped, moreover the troubles with “wild” Indians were greater here than in localities further from the mountain passes. The present town dates from 1851 when a company of Mormons, about four hundred strong, came across the deserts ​and mountains from Salt Lake City, and purchasing a portion of the San Bernardino Ranch from the Lugos, rapidly put a large acreage under cultivation.
This ranch was owned by three young Lugos and their cousin, Diego Sepulveda, whose grand-daughter, Mrs. Florence Schoneman, tells me that they were delighted to sell and get a chance to move nearer the center of life at Los Angeles and consequently made the easiest terms with the colonists—something like $500 down and the balance to be paid after crops began to bring in returns.
Before long these thrifty settlers were shipping vegetables, flour and dairy products into Arizona and to Los Angeles, a three-day haul away. Their flour was ground in the mill built by Louis Rubidoux, who had purchased a portion of the neighboring Jurupa grant from Don Juan Bandidi, to whom the grant had been made a year or two after the time he was traveling down the coast aboard the sail ship whereon Richard H. Dana was spending his two years before the mast. Louis Rubidoux, whose name is kept in mind by the mountain that guards the entrance to the modern Riverside, was a Frenchman, a native of St. Louis, who had come into California in 1840 by way of New Mexico. He was a cultivated man and a successful rancher who later became interested in cutting up his land into smaller holdings and has the name of being the first “sub-divider” of Southern California, the one who set the fashion that has of late grown to such appalling proportions.
The beginnings of Riverside were made in 1870 ​when a colony of people from various places in the East bought some of this bench land above the Santa Ana River. Although the first plan was to go into the cultivation of the silk-worm for which there was a great enthusiasm for a year or two even to the extent of general bounties offered by the State legislature, it was not long before the town was in its characteristic groove; by the time we had moved to Los Angeles the first naval orange had fruited and the first Glenwood Inn offered a setting for hospitality,—Riverside, oranges, tourists! But I knew nothing about it. Why should I? It was far away and very small, so far in fact that its inhabitants, according to a local history, allowed a week for a trip to Los Angeles and return. At first they had to drive all the way but after a few years there was a railroad extending toward them as far as Uncle Billy Rubottom’s. And who now knows where that was? It wasn’t Pomona, which then was barely in embryo, being represented by the few settlers under the San Jose Hills on the properties belonging to the Palomares and the Vejars, and later to the Phillips. “Uncle Billy” came from Spadra Bluffs in Arkansas, and maintained a very popular way station for the Butterfield stages to which ultimately he gave the old home name, Spadra. Going on toward the city one crossed the Puente Ranch and came to El Monte, which doesn’t mean anything about mountains, but refers to the thickets of willow that even today are characteristic of the place. “The Monte” it used to be called when first it was founded, a little later than San Bernardino, by people who came in from Texas. ​Although now this town retains characteristics that might make it seem of Mexican origin it was in its beginnings entirely an American settlement. It was chosen for its good farm lands, and soon its citizens were making a success raising corn, melons, pumpkins, and hogs, and judging from the records of early chroniclers, rather strenuous boys who seemed ever ready to join with Los Angeles in the wild doings that marked those days after the gold excitement had brought to California multitudes of the bad as well as of the good.
Anaheim was the next town to be founded, following in 1857, the Los Angeles of 1781, and the two of 1851, San Bernardino and El Monte. After that the impulse for the starting of new communities gained headway, not so fast during the sixties, but the seventies marked the beginning of many now prosperous places and the booming eighties brought to birth many a city (some of them still-born).
Anaheim was projected by a group of San Francisco Germans who went about its making in a characteristically methodical and thrifty way. So far as I can discover it never went through the agonies of hope and despair that so often mark the course of utopian schemes for co-operative settlement.
The method adopted for its beginning was to purchase upward of eleven hundred acres, send an agent ahead who attended to the clearing off of the sage and cactus, the division of the land into twenty acre portions, ten acres of each being set out to vines, and to the laying out of lots in the center for the necessary ​shops, school, post-office, etc. When all was ready the colonists came in a body, finding everything prepared for them.
Two of the inhabitants of this town at a little later period were of great renown,—the Polish actress, Madame Helena Modjeska, who made her home at a neighboring ranch, and Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis, who spent a year or two in Anaheim.
One of the first things that had been done was the development of an intricate irrigation system, tapping the Santa Ana river for water. This made an oasis of the colony during the terrible droughts that came a few years later. The edges of the zanjas had been planted with willows and cottonwoods and all about the settlement was a palisade of willow stakes, which, set in the damp soil, speedily sprouted and formed a leafy barrier to the thousands of desperate, starving cattle, which but for this defence, would have overrun the one green spot in all the country round.
Speaking of sprouting willows recalls the story that the first settlers in El Monte made rough bedsteads in their dirt floored houses from the native wood and that shortly the posts put forth branches and made of each bed a bower.
The people of Anaheim were able almost at once to ship grapes to the San Francisco market, and also were soon making a very good wine for similar export. They made use of a neighboring small harbor which soon came to be known as Anaheim Landing. Recently my Aunt Margaret told me that the first wool ​that they sent to San Francisco from the Cerritos went from this place instead of from San Pedro as it did later.
The success of Anaheim led to the founding in following years of other colonies and towns. Westminster, Santa Ana, Tustin were small centers to which I occasionally had the privilege of driving with my elders on business bent.
Downey, named for the popular governor, was nearer by and even in those days attracted visitors by an agricultural fair. I recall a dusty trip over there to observe my only namesake, a Holstein bossy, winning a blue ribbon,—Sally, and her twin brother, who bore the name of my beloved cousin, Harry.
Compton to me was an established fact but to the ranch dwellers it was a new Methodist place offering them the conveniences of a nearby post office, church and physician. How well I remember Dr. Whaley, whose practices had not been tempered by a breath of homœpathy. When I had so bad a cold I couldn’t celebrate getting to be seven years old by the promised picnic at the beach nor wear my bulky new bathing suit made of heavy navy blue flannel and trimmed with three rows of white tape, he was called to cure me, which he proceeded to do by swabbing my throat with thick yellow stuff with iron in it, by giving a black dose that necessitated the immediate cleaning of my teeth lest it rot them, and by ordering the application of a strong, large mustard plaster, first to my front, then to my back, then to each side, thus making a complete red jacket of burns about my body. ​Apparently it cured me. It is strange how popular mustard was in those days, not only the terrible plasters but the torturing foot baths for colds—boiling water reinforced by that awful stinging powder that came out of yellow covered cans bearing the lion and unicorn of old England. I wonder if doctors and parents applied the cure to themselves as well as to children.
Compton was the second stop beyond Cerritos on the wonderful railroad from Wilmington to Los Angeles; the first was Dominguez and the third was Florence and that was all until one reached Alameda Street, and the “depot” which was on a corner by a flour mill. What fun it was to go to the city. We got into the carriage in the court yard, and drove out through the gates and down the hill to the river, where sometimes the fording was very exciting,—water might come into the buggy if it was winter and had been raining a long time; then there were two separate “willows” to go through, only a half mile ride in all. Either we were always very prompt or the train was not, for there was time and permission to put our ears down on the rail to listen for the coming train, and there was a low trestle over the “slew” where we might walk the ties.
I was amused to read recently in an old book the boast that Los Angeles was a railroad center, the focus for four roads! This one that I knew was the first, twenty-three miles in length; next was the one to Spadra, longest of all, thirty miles; then one to San Fernando, reaching out through the grain fields of the ​valley twenty-two miles toward San Francisco, and the Anaheim road, twenty-eight miles. Progress had arrived.
From the beginnings of Los Angeles and San Gabriel, San Pedro was the port, but for very many years it remained the desolate spot that is described in “Two Years Before the Mast.” There was one hide house to which, when a boat came into port, the accumulated stores of hides and tallow were hauled. These products which the inhabitants exchanged with Yankee traders for everything they needed or wanted in the way of manufactured goods, did not require very elaborate facilities, and it was the custom to roll the bundles over the cliffs to the rocks below where the sailors must gather them up and carry on their heads out to their boats. The sailors also must carry over the rough trail to the top of the bluff the boxes and bales containing their merchandise. San Pedro was not a popular port. But conditions must have improved very soon after the visits of Dana, for there is extant a letter from the Angeleno of Boston origin, Abel Stearns, in which he tells of his notion to improve the situation. He took up a collection among his friends, to the amount of one hundred and fifty dollars, secured the services of some mission Indians and in a few weeks had made the first road down to water level.
After the admission of California as a state, travel to and from Los Angeles increased and before long stages between San Pedro and the city became necessary. Don David Alexander and General Phineas ​Banning were the prime movers who developed this. Gen. Banning is one of the most picturesque figures of the early American period and was very active in every field of the development of transportation. At one time he was doing a large business freighting supplies over the Mormon trail to Salt Lake City and the territory beyond. And he was largely responsible for the building of that first railway, the San Pedro-Los Angeles, an improvement which put an end to the exciting stage races that introduced to their future home both those chroniclers of early days, Harris Newmark and Horace Bell, wild rides to a wilder community. People today sometimes deplore a “crime wave,” but to live up to the proportions set in 1853 Los Angeles should stage about four hundred murders a day every day in the year, for that year there was an average of more than one killing a day in a population of about twenty-five hundred.
It was in 1858, I believe, that Gen. Banning promoted the town New San Pedro, later naming it for his birthplace in Delaware, Wilmington. Here he built his home and planted the garden that remains today. I remember calling there once with my mother and seeing a most lovely little girl out among the flowers.
During the time of the Civil War the Government established Drum Barracks in Wilmington, thus adding to its importance, and it was one of the government warehouses, later abandoned, which was purchased by the Alamitos Co., taken down, moved the ten miles over to the ranch and rebuilt, where it can ​still be seen by motorists passing over the Anaheim Road, a great red barn with white trimmings.
A forgotten fact about Wilmington is that it was the home of Wilson College, the gift of Don Benito to the Southern Methodists, and though short-lived, was the fore-runner of such institutions as the University of Southern California, Occidental, and Pomona. This college was housed in two of the buildings of the deserted Drum Barracks.
I have numerous memories of Wilmington, for it was there that my Uncle John and Aunt Susan set up housekeeping, and lived until they moved over to the Alamitos. From this port I once took steamer with my parents for San Francisco, and received one of the most unexpected experiences of my life, the sudden onset of sea-sickness as the steamer rounded Point Firmin. I was at dinner with father, enjoying an ear of corn.
I also remember a Christmas tree at the church from which Santa Claus handed me a little covered sewing box. This must have been the church which in its beginnings had so few attendants that there was only one member who could sing at all, (Aunt Margaret told me), “Prophet” Potts, and as he knew but one hymn every Sunday the service contained “Coronation.”
Aunt Margaret used to tell another church story also. Soon after she first came to Cerritos there was an attempt to organize a Congregational church in Los Angeles. The community approved, and although ​there were but six actual members, the minister and his wife, the deacon and his wife, Mrs. Mary Scott and Mrs. Jotham Bixby, many other citizens contributed towards it and a lot was secured on the west side of New High Street near Temple and a building was put up. Everything now was complete and the day of dedication approached. The visiting minister from San Francisco came down by boat to Wilmington and was met by the Bixbys and taken over to the Cerritos for the night. The next day they all drove the sixteen miles to the city to go to church. Aunt Margaret noticed a certain constraint in the air and a black eye on the minister. After service she discovered that the afternoon before the minister and the deacon had gotten into a fist fight in the furniture store over a red carpet for the church that the deacon had purchased without authority. Poor minister, he was red-headed. He was so mortified that he resigned and the little church went into a period of inanition. Sometime later the present First Congregational Church was organized and the firster one gave it the church property plus the debt for the red carpet. And I think the debt still existed when I began attending that Sunday School several years later. It was during the interval of non-activity that the Wilmington church was organized and the Cerritos people wended their way thither on Sundays until the Methodist church in Compton, much nearer home, was organized.
The road to Wilmington from the Cerritos Ranch went southwest over the mesa and down across bot ​tom lands where corn grew amazingly, so tall that a man could stand on the seat of the spring wagon and not be able to see over the tops of the waving stalks.
And Long Beach? There was none. Where it now stands was a grain field and its only buildings were a shed for the horses during threshing times, and the small house occupied during the grain season by Archibald Borden and his four sons from Downey who raised wheat and barley on shares. After the harvest the Bixby sheep were turned in upon the stubble fields.
People were coming into Southern California more and more, especially after rail connection with San Francisco came in 1877. The chorus of rapturous praise singers was swelling, and enterprising people began plotting new settlements. The time for the subdividing of the large holdings came on apace.
I tramped over the level lands on the north end of the ranch, trailing the surveyors who were marking off the acres that were going to the making of Clearwater, and saw it severed from the ranch without a pang, but when Harry and I learned about Mr. Willmore and the American Colony, who wanted Cerritos (Signal) Hill and the bluff and our beach we resented it greatly. There was a seaside town at Santa Monica,—what need of disturbing things as they were for the sake of another? Why should conditions that we had always known, that were as much a part of living as day and night be rudely changed? But the grief of a little boy and little girl could not stay the march of the world and soon we were insulted by ​fences and gates where before we had ridden unchecked. It wasn’t so very long, however, before we became resigned to the town that had first called itself Willmore City and then Long Beach, though we did think it might have kept its own old name, Cerritos Beach. We liked the new hotel bath house which made dressing for a swim much easier than when we had had to run far down the beach to find a projection of bluff large enough to provide modest shelter. And we didn’t mind the Methodist Tabernacle with its summer Chautauqua, or the little shop where we could buy fruit, for we seemed to be getting over being children almost as fast as the new town was growing.
But whatever changes have come there has always been the sky, sunny or starry, or hidden by fog or passing cloud; the same mountains with their wonder of changing color guarded the valley. The old carpet of gorgeous wild flowers is gone; cities creep over the plain and a network of roads covers the earth; there is scarcely a place where one cannot see against the sky the fretted tower that means oil. One beauty goes and perhaps another comes for those who have eyes to see,—especially if they have a fair sized blind spot, which I find sometimes is a most satisfying possession.
The “old timers” wore just as powerful magnifying glasses when they looked at the future as do certain boosters today. They saw the possibilities of the development of this Southern California and prophesied in the face of vacant fields and an unprotected ​harbor all the things that have come to pass, and more. It would be pleasant to know that Heaven afforded peep-holes in its walls through which these dreamers might look down to see what is now happening to their adored “land of sunshine.” I am sure that Admiral Henry Knox Thatcher, who commanded the Pacific Squadron from 1866 to 1868, says “I told you so,” to grandfather when they meet on some golden street corner. Wouldn’t you, if you had written this letter to him in the old days on earth?
Nahant, Mass. Sept. 25th, 1879.
My dear friend Hathaway,
... During my various visits do the port of San Pedro I observed the facility with which that Bay could be made a perfectly secure harbor for ships in all weather by simply building a mole of stone with which the shore is lined for miles. And then blasting “Dead Man’s Island” close at hand for the foundation of said mole and using the millions of tons of smaller rocks to be found all along shore for the filling in. At present the anchorage of S. P. is perfectly safe so long as the wind remains north,—but when from the south no ship could escape destruction at that anchorage unless supplied with steam power. I foresaw that San Francisco would strongly oppose any attempt to make S. P. a port of entry because it would deprive them of the power of plundering that fair and fertile portion of California as they now do. And all the products of that (best) portion of the ​state must now be carried at great cost to the only exporting custom house, S. F., whereas if they could be shipped directly from S. P. the producers would save tens of thousands annually even now. But now is as nothing, for the day is not far distant when Los Angeles and adjoining counties will become the greatest producing counties on the face of the globe; everything points to it, a soil of unsurpassed fertility, and a climate as perfect as is to be found upon earth. It is but for the people themselves to wake up and insist upon aid from government in accomplishing this noble work. With my feeble efforts I did what I could to bring this about during my command of the Pacific Squadron and secured the aid of the Republican member of Congress from C. to induce Govm’t. to send out an able engineer to survey the Port of S. P. with this object in view. I wrote articles for the S. F. newspapers and had hopes of success but my term of command expired and my successor felt no interest in the matter and the few producers at that time appeared quite indifferent except Mr. Banning of Wilmington, who seemed to be a man of enlarged views and was then in public life and exerting considerable influence. But I think the S. F. element was too strong for him to contend with. Yet I am satisfied that this scheme will one day be accomplished, though I may not live to see it. I felt at the time not a little sorry that friend Jotham (who was as deeply interested as any) did not take more thought on the subject of building up that lovely country; of course the R. R. will aid in developing that lower section of California ​but it will be found a very expensive mode of transportation compared with the floating process. These are all crude ideas of mine you will say perhaps, but they have taken firm possession of my mind and will hardly be eradicated....
Affectionate friend, H. K. Thatcher.
It is interesting to note that the prediction in this letter that the country about Los Angeles would become the greatest producing country in the world has been fulfilled so far as the United States is concerned, for in the 1920 Census it is ranked first in agricultural production. The present development of San Pedro Harbor, now generally called Los Angeles Harbor, reads like a fairy story.
Admiral Thatcher was the grandson of Gen. Henry Knox, Washington’s first Secretary of War. The period of his command of the Pacific Squadron was from 1866 to 1868. Before the time of the writing of the letter quoted work was begun and a considerable break-water built, following in general the lines he had suggested.