America's Secret Aristocracy (28 page)

The mellifluous old ancestral names are Avila, Alvarado, Carrillo, de la Guerra, Nieto, Ortega, Serrano, Sepulveda, Verdugo, Vallejo, Yorba, Cota y Asuna, Cordero, Dominguez, Osuna, and Amador. Many of these are descendants of the first party of white men who entered California overland from Mexico in 1769 with Father Junipero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá. Their mission was to discover the port of Monterey, about which fabulous reports had been heard, and to Christianize the Indians. One of the party's first encampments in “Alta California” was at the mouth of a creek that they christened Dos Pueblos—they found two Indian villages there—a few miles west of the present city of Santa Barbara. Of these original pioneers, fourteen men decided to remain and establish themselves, and their womenfolk were sent for. And of these first fourteen, at least nine have descendants scattered throughout California today.

One of these first fourteen was José Roberto Carrillo. Another was José' Francisco de Ortega, who married Maria Antonia Victoria Carrillo, José Carrillo's niece, one of the first of many dynastic marriages between California's founding Spanish families. Ortega was a man of particular stature in the group. With the rank of sergeant, he commanded the advance guard and was chief scout and pathfinder for the company in its search for Monterey Bay. His duty was to scout ahead of the company, then retrace his steps, and collect his soldiers for the next day's march. This probably meant that he was a man of education and could read and write, for he was expected to keep careful records. It also meant that he was expected to deal with the native Indians. This proved fairly easy, since the Canaliño Indians of Southern California were a docile and submissive group who quickly accepted the Spaniards as their masters. For one thing, the Spaniards had firearms, and it did not take long to demonstrate
to the Indians what a gun was capable of doing. The Indians were almost equally impressed with the Spaniards' horses, creatures the Canaliños had never seen before. Still, José de Ortega was considered the linchpin of the group. Father Serra himself wrote of him, “His soldiers would be replaced, but Ortega never.”

Meanwhile, the search for Monterey Bay proved frustrating. In 1542, the Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had sailed up the California coast in search of the Northwest Passage, the legendary navigable saltwater canal that imaginative mapmakers had assumed must stretch across North America to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Cabrillo had failed to find the alleged trans-American waterway, but he had reported glowingly of a magnificent bay and harbor he had entered, which he had named Monte Rey in honor of his king. But Cabrillo's navigational instruments had been primitive. And if the bay in question was where Cabrillo had said it was supposed to be, it was certainly a disappointment, not at all fitting Cabrillo's description when Ortega reached it. (Monterey Bay is more a roadstead, a gentle indentation in the shoreline, than a protected bay.)

Though there is no way of knowing, it is more than likely that the bay Cabrillo was describing was San Francisco Bay, nearly a hundred miles north of Monterey. Almost forty years after Cabrillo, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake had sailed right past the entrance to San Francisco Bay and never noticed it, probably because the Golden Gate strait was shrouded in one of its famous fogs. But when, nearly two hundred years later, José Francisco de Ortega was exploring the coastline northward on horseback, he arrived at the Golden Gate and could go no farther. Though he reported finding, inside the harbor entrance, “a bay big enough to hold the ships of all the navies in the world” and would be credited with having discovered the Golden Gate along with one of the world's greatest seaports, he believed that his expedition had been a failure. He had been blocked from venturing farther northward by an impassable arm of water. And San Francisco Bay still did not fit the description of the bay Cabrillo had named Monte Rey.

In 1784, King Carlos III of Spain, through his viceroy in Mexico City, began handing out grants of land to the first soldier-settlers and their families who had come up from Mexico to help establish Spain's historic claim to the California
territory. In all, some twenty-three land grants were made between 1784 and 1821, and since California's land seemed limitless, the tracts bestowed on the pioneer families were truly princely in size. José Francisco de Ortega's grant, which he received in 1795, was—perhaps because of his failure to rediscover Cabrillo's bay—relatively small, a mere 26,000 acres. Others were considerably larger. Juan José Dominguez, one of the original fourteen, was given 76,000 acres, which he named Rancho San Pedro. It included thirty square miles of what is now Los Angeles County, most of Los Angeles Harbor and Terminal Island, Redondo Beach, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, part of what is now the city of Long Beach, and what are now the entire cities of Carson, Torrance, and Compton. There was a slight hitch to these royal grants of land, which no one paid much attention to at the time but which would become important later on: They were essentially just permission to graze livestock on the
ranchos
. Water rights and rights to minerals that might lurk underground were not included. Still, considering that this land today sells for as much as $100,000 an acre, the Spanish rancheros had been given some nice real estate, and even then, they were on their way to becoming very rich.

“Don José de la Guerra's house in Santa Barbara had forty rooms, all grand,” says one of his descendants, the splendidly named Dr. Juan de la Guerre y Noriega Barrett, whose other, non-Spanish grandmother was a Randolph of Virginia. “Whatever culture or stability California has, you have to attribute to these Spanish families. They brought their silver and crystal. Their sons were sent to Europe to be educated. They lived on their ranchos in a style that, outside of the South, was little enjoyed in early America.”

Actually, Dr. Barrett understates the situation. By 1850, when California became a state, its economy was based almost entirely on the raising of beef cattle, despite the gold rush. In fact, the gold rush only created a period of inflation, which caused the price of beef to rise, and besides, when a ranchero had forty thousand head of beef cattle grazing on permanent pasture, fluctuation in beef prices, upward or downward, meant little. Here is the way just one family, that of Don Nicolàs Den, and his wife, Doña Rosa Antonia Hill de Den, and their family lived on their Rancho Los Dos Pueblos, outside Santa Barbara, in that halcyon period between 1840 and 1860. It was quite typical.

Don Nicolàs was an educated, pre-Famine Irishman who had studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and come to America in 1834 to seek his fortune in the Land of Golden Opportunity. In California, he had met and married Rosa Antonia Hill, the daughter of Don Daniel Hill and Rafaela Louisa Sabrina de Ortega de Hill, who was a granddaughter of the original José Francisco de Ortega. (By the nineteenth century, it was commonplace for the daughters of the older Spanish families to marry later-arriving Irishmen, who had a reputation for being good and pious Catholics; as a result, many California descendants from the distaff side of land-grant families have names like McGettigan, Brady, Donohue, Donohoe, and FitzGerald.)

Doña Rosa and Don Nicolàs, like their peers and contemporaries, believed in large families and had produced ten healthy children out of eleven pregnancies. Despite all her childbearing, Doña Rosa had kept her trim, girlish figure, and since she had been married at sixteen, she was only in her early thirties when her last child was born. Doña Rosa was proud not only of her looks and figure but also of her reputation, throughout Southern California, as a hostess. In this career, her large family was absolutely no encumbrance to her. She had literally a legion of servants to attend to her every need.

Doña Rosa's personal household staff numbered fifty, and this of course did not include the
vaqueros
who did the range work—the rounding-up of cattle for branding or butchering, the breaking of horses, and the like—or the gardening staff. Her head cook was a California Indian named Jacobo, who was assisted by his half-breed wife Refugia and a crew of Chinese and Filipino kitchen assistants, all under the supervision of a Portuguese majordomo. Jacobo was locally famous for his culinary innovations. He invented potato chips long before George Crum of Saratoga Springs and was able to transform these paper-thin wafers of crisply fried potatoes into all manner of fanciful shapes—shamrocks, stars, crescents, rabbits, hearts—to amuse the children. He had a particularly magical way with roast fowl. A turkey, for example, might arrive at the table looking like a traditional Thanksgiving bird, plump and browned and basted. But when the carver cut into it, he would encounter not a single bone.

The
cocina
, or cookhouse, was in a separate building, to keep kitchen odors out of the main house, and so was the
laundry, which, considering the size of the household at Dos Pueblos, was one of the busiest places on the ranch. This was run by Simosa, an ample Mexican woman, and a crew of local Indian helpers. Pure white Castile soap was manufactured on the premises out of tallow, rendered with wood-ash lye in a hundred-gallon iron kettle that had been salvaged from the wreck of a whaling ship.

This is not to say that imported goods were in short supply. Jacobo's larder was supplied with curls of candied Chinese ginger, brought on ships from Cathay. Curry and chutneys came from India, and English traders brought rum-flavored coffees and Dutch bonbons filled with exotic liqueurs. There were
pâtés de foie gras
from France, smoked salmon from Sweden, kippered cod from Norway, peat-smoked O'Mara hams from Ireland, cashews from Brazil, pears in crème de menthe and peaches in brandy from England, and bars of maple sugar from Vermont. In the west wall of a canyon near the cookhouse, Don Nicolàs had ordered a deep cellar dug. Twice a year, freighters dropped anchor off Rancho Los Dos Pueblos to deliver huge cakes of ice that had been carved off living glaciers along the Alaskan coast. These were stored in the ice cellar, covered with sawdust and salt, and lasted even through the hottest summer months. Thus were Dos Pueblos and other ranchos like it provided with the ultimate luxury in Southern California at the time, refrigeration, as well as plenty of ice for mixed drinks. One of the lessons Doña Rosa taught her daughters was the technique by which a lady can avoid perspiring in hot weather: Hold an iced drink against the inner wrist and let the cooler blood circulate throughout the body.

The main house, or
casa grande
, at Dos Pueblos, was a long, rambling, one-story affair of white stucco with red-tiled roofs, surrounded by wide verandas. The principal rooms were large and high-ceilinged to accommodate the massive pieces of Spanish furniture—the long sofas, the tall mahogany chests and armoires that were favored by the rancheros and their wives. The larger pieces had been shipped from Spain around the Horn, and the smaller pieces had made their way across the Isthmus by mule train. The floors of the hacienda were of tightly packed earth, but they were covered with thick rugs from Persia. In the main dining room, fifty people could be seated in richly upholstered high-backed chairs to admire Doña Rosa's table settings. Her silverware—the pistol-handled
knives, the three-pronged forks—was of the heaviest available, and she was particularly proud of an Irish Georgian silver tea service, a family heirloom of her husband's that was polished daily by the bare, damp palms of her Indian servants. Doña Rosa's dinners were memorable for one special touch: Her china always matched the course being served. That is, if the course was pheasant, the dinner plates had a pheasant design; peaches would be served in bowls decorated with peaches, and so on. This seemingly endless collection of bone china had been custom-made for her in English kilns.

The hacienda at Dos Pueblos even had air-conditioning of sorts. To begin with, the adobe walls were more than two feet thick, and the terra-cotta roof tiles were designed to reflect, rather than absorb, the sun's heat. The encircling verandas of the house shaded the windows, and all around the house, tall stands of cypress, palms, and olive trees provided further shade. Finally, every room in the house contained an earthenware
olla
, or water jar, sitting on a japanned tray in one of the deeply recessed windows. These jars were filled every day with cold well water by the servants, and evaporation through the porous clay helped to cool the rooms.

One wing of the house was set aside for the Den children, and this was the domain of Nicholosa, the head of the nursery, and her retinue of Indian baby-sitters. Nicholosa, in turn, was under the supervision of Doña Rosa's personal maid, Maria de los Angeles.

Every Sunday morning, without fail, the entire family trooped off to mass, which was said either in the mission at Santa Barbara or in the family's private chapel at the ranch. Priests frequently visited Dos Pueblos, and even occasionally—a great honor—the
obispo
himself, Father Alemany, journeyed south to Dos Pueblos from faraway Monterey. Sunday afternoons were invariably given over to informal family fiestas, where a freshly killed bullock would be barbecued over a hardwood coal fire, the servants turning and basting the carcass on the huge spit as it roasted. And there would be games: horse races on the beach, roping calves against a time limit, bulldogging steers, and jousting with padded sticks. The cruel sports, such as bullfights and bear fights and cockfights, which the Anglos enjoyed, were never permitted.

Music was an important part of every Spanish don's family life, and after dinner Doña Rosa's family gathered around her concert grand piano while she played and sang. The rancho
also employed its own musicians—guitarists, cellists, mandolinists—who played during all family meals, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, seven days a week. Besides music, Doña Rosa's other great passion was her garden. Her favorite flower was the rose of Castile, after which she had been named, and these were planted in profusion outside the hacienda, along with hollyhocks, Matilija poppies, anise, and potted Italian cypresses. Her great-granddaughter, Katherine Den Cheney Hammond of Montecito, would recall Rosa as an old lady, moving slowly through her flower beds with Pedro, her Indian head gardener, in tow, pointing to a shrub that needed trimming here, a bud that should be nipped there, and to blossoms that should be picked for the flower arrangements in the house, which she mentally arranged as she moved along to be able to tell her maids precisely what she wanted done.