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.