The Gold Coast

43

… Under the Spanish and then the Mexicans, Orange County was a land of ranchos. To the north were Ranchos Los Coyotes, Los Alamitos, Los Bolsas, La Habra, Los Cerritos, Cañon de Santa Ana, and Santiago de Santa Ana. Midcounty were Ranchos Bolsa Chica, Trabuco, Cañada de Los Alisos, and San Joaquín. In the south were Ranchos Niguel, Misión Vieja, Boca de La Playa, and Lomas de Santiago.

To give an idea of their size: Rancho San Joaquín was made up of two parts; first Rancho Ciénega de las Ranas, “Swamp of the Frogs,” which extended from Newport Bay to Red Hill—second Rancho Bolsa de San Joaquín, which contained much of the land that later became the Irvine Ranch. Say 140,000 acres.

These huge land grants were surveyed on horseback, with lengths of rope about a hundred yards long. They used landmarks like patches of cactus, or the skull of a steer. More precise than that they didn’t need to be; the land remained open, and cattle roamed over it freely.

In the spring, after the calving, the roundups took place. Horsemen, reputed to be among the best who ever lived, and including among them a good number of the rapidly disappearing Indians, rounded up the cattle and led them to the branding stations, several for each rancho, as they were all so large. The stations became festival centers, with tables set out and decorated, and great feasts of meat, beans, tortillas, and spicy sauces spread out on them. After the new calves were branded, and strays sent back to their correct ranchos, the celebrating began. The most important events were the horse races; many took place over a nine-mile course.

Other games were more bloody: trying to grab the head from a rooster buried to the neck, while galloping by it at full speed, for instance. Or the various forms of bull-baiting.

Then in the evenings there were dances, using forms invented at San Juan Capistrano, which throughout this period remained the biggest settlement in the area.

Houses were one story, adobe, with simple furnishings made in the area. Clothing fashions were those of Europe some fifty to eighty years before, transformed by local manufacture and custom. There was no glass. They were rich only in cattle, and in open land.

It was a life lived so far away from the rest of the world that it might as well have been alone on the planet: backed by empty mountains and desert, facing an empty sea.

When Jedediah Smith traveled overland from Missouri in 1826, the Mexican governor of California tried to kick him out of the state. But ten years later, when other Americans arrived to trade, they were welcomed. They brought with them various goods of modern Europe, and took away tallow and hides.

Some of the Americans who came to trade liked the look of the land, and stayed. They were welcomed in this as well. Learn Spanish, become a Catholic, marry a local girl, buy some land: more than one American and Englishman did just that, and became respected members of the community. Don Abel Stearns and Don John Forster (known better as “San Juan Capistrano” for his obsession with the old mission, which he bought after its secularization) did even better than that, and became rich.

All the Americans who came in contact with the Californians, even the most anti-Papist among them, came away impressed by their honesty, dignity, generosity, hospitality. When Edward Vischer visited Don Tomás Yorba, head of the most distinguished family in the area, he complimented Don Tomás on a horse that the don rode while seeing Vischer off his rancho; and as Vischer boarded his ship in San Diego the horse was ridden up to the dock and given to him, along with a message from Don Tomás asking him “to accept his beautiful bay as a present and a remembrance of California.”

Cut off from the world, existing in the slow rhythms of cattle raising, the ranchos of Orange County gave their people a slow, pastoral, feudal life, dreamlike in its disconnection from Europe, from history, from time. For four generations the cycle of ranch existence made its simple round, from branding to branding. Little changed, and the dominant realities were the adobe homes, the hot sun in the clear blue sky, the beautiful horses, the cattle out on the open hillsides, on the great broad coastal plain. The few foreigners who arrived to stay were welcomed, taken in; the traders brought glass. They didn’t make any difference to the Californians.

But then the United States declared war on Mexico, and conquered California along with the rest of the great Southwest. And then gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada, and Americans flocked to San Francisco, crazed by a gold rush that has never stopped. History returned.

The cattle of the south were driven north to feed these people, and Los Angeles grew on the business. As Americans poured into southern California, the immensity of the Spanish and Mexican land grants gained immediate attention; they were rich prizes to be captured. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, guaranteed the property rights of Mexican citizens in California; but that was just a treaty. Like the treaties the United States made with the Indian tribes, it didn’t mean a thing. Two years later Congress passed a law that forced the rancheros to prove their titles, and the hunt was on.

The old rancheros were asked to provide documentation that there had never been any need for, in earlier times, and court cases concerning the ownership of the land took up to twenty years to settle. The rancheros’ only assets were their land and their cattle, and most of the cattle died in the great drought of 1863–64. To pay their lawyers and their debts, in the fight for their land, the rancheros had to sell parcels of it off. And so win or lose the court fights, they lost the land.

By the 1870s all the land was owned by Americans, and was being rapidly subdivided to sell to the waves of new settlers.

And so all that—the cattle roaming the open land, the horsemen rounding them up, the adobe homes, the huge ranchos, and the archaic, provincial dignity of the lives of the people on them—

all that went away.