America's Secret Aristocracy (29 page)

Dos Pueblos also contained a twelve-acre fruit orchard. The citrus fruits—limes, oranges, lemons, and grapefruit—were used primarily in the house for decoration. Only the peaches, apricots, pomegranates, pears, olives, figs, and apples made their way to the table.

If this style of life seems remote and dreamlike, even insular, it was really not. For one thing, it was more or less duplicated at every California rancho between Monterey and San Diego. For another, despite the seeming isolation of the ranchos, perched on the edge of the continent, before telephones, railroads, and even paved roads between the East Coast and the West, the rancheros were sophisticated people for their time. By 1860, the Dens' oldest son, Manuel, was at school in England, and in 1861 the Dens had just returned from a fourteen-month tour of Europe—and were planning a round-the-world tour—when the first cannon were fired over Fort Sumter, causing them to postpone any further travel.

Finally, the seemingly endless stream of visitors to ranchos like Dos Pueblos kept the rancheros from becoming out of touch. Because friends and relatives had to travel long distances on horseback to visit, when they came they stayed for weeks, even months. It was customary, furthermore, for a visitor—whose own horse was bound to be tired from the journey—to be presented with a new horse, as a gift, from the don. To give away a new Thoroughbred to a visitor was regarded as no more than a simple, welcoming expression of hospitality, a gesture no more important than a kiss or a handshake. The Spanish dons were notoriously indifferent to
the value of money, as, indeed, they could afford to be. But the Spaniards literally treated money as though it were a plaything. Another commonplace at ranchos such as Dos Pueblos was for a visiting guest, after being shown to his apartment, to find on his dressing table a large box filled with gold and silver coins. The guest was expected to help himself to this money, to take as much or as little as he might need during his stay for expenses. It was a custom that one might wish were still practiced in hosts' homes today, but to a nineteenth-century Spanish doña, seeing that her guests' quarters were supplied with boxes of money was as routine as a modern hostess seeing to it that her guest bathroom contains fresh soap and clean guest towels. This largesse was available to commercial guests as well: the dressmakers who periodically came to the rancho from Paris to measure the ladies of the house for their gowns, or the tailors and bootmakers who traveled halfway around the world from Bond Street to fit Don Nicolàs for his bespoke suits, tweeds, riding breeches, and boots.

In 1850, when California joined the Union, the dollar became the unit of currency, and paper its principal medium. The dons, whose traditional faith had been in gold and silver, found it difficult to take the new paper currency seriously at all. Outsiders were sometimes shocked to see Spanish dons light their imported Cuban cigars with ten- and twenty-dollar bills, as Don Nicolàs occasionally did. It was assumed that this was their way of flaunting their great wealth. More accurately, it was their way of showing their disdain for the new paper stuff, which they regarded as worthless anyway.

The only time that money was taken even halfway seriously was when it came to gambling. The Spanish dons, almost without exception, were great gamblers. Gambling was in their blood; it was a sport. They would bet on anything. At their great
ferias
, rodeos, and horse races, huge sums of money changed hands between dons—won and lost with equal cheerfulness.

Though Don Nicolàs had married a major heiress, he was by no means an idler. He was a dedicated rancher, and since their marriage in 1836, he had increased the value of Rancho Los Dos Pueblos enormously, adding to its herds of cattle, improving the quality of its beef and the price it could command at the marketplace, and adding to its stable of Thoroughbreds until they numbered more than 200, while his
cattle were virtually uncountable at more than 25,000 head. By the 1860s, he had acquired the 8,875-acre Canada del Corral Rancho from an improvident Ortega cousin of his wife's, as well as part of the 8,919-acre Tequepis grant, and was leasing 35,499 acres of the College Ranch from the Catholic Church. All told, Don Nicolàs controlled 114,000 acres of the finest ranch land in California. He had also been active in a civic sense—campaigning for better roads in California, underwriting a project to build a graded road from San Buenaventura to San Luis Obispo across the Gaviota Pass, and laying the groundwork for the famous Concord stagecoach, which would carry mail between Santa Barbara and Lompoc and other northern towns.

It was a strange and ironic twist of history, then, that the years of the Civil War, which would spell an end to the glorious age of plantations and gracious living in the South and would leave the Old South a civilization gone with the wind, should also have marked the end of the era of the rancheros in the California Southwest. But in the case of California, the villain was not a tragic war between the states. Instead, it was the farmer's greatest and most inscrutable adversary, the weather. If it had not been for a meteorological fluke, California today might be owned entirely by perhaps thirty Spanish-American families.

Water had never created much of a problem for the rancheros. In fact, at times, there had been almost too much of it. In the winter of 1861–1862, there had been what historians still refer to as the deluge—five straight weeks of pouring rain that came flooding down through the canyons to the sea. The normally sleepy Dos Pueblos Creek became a raging avalanche of churning white water, carrying with it huge boulders and the trunks of uprooted trees; here and there a miner's cabin, lifted from its foundation in the hills, bobbed crazily along the surface. Landslides and mudslides cascaded through the canyons and into the sea, and the sea turned brown for miles offshore. In the downpour, a number of adobe houses simply melted away, but the buildings of Rancho Los Dos Pueblos were made of sterner stuff and, fortunately, had been built on high ground. When the great rain ended, the damage to the ranch was minor. About two hundred head of cattle had been drowned, but this was a small loss to a rancher who had more cattle than he could count. The surrounding landscape, meanwhile, had gained a whole new shape. Landslides had
created new canyons, ravines, and gullies, and the great Goleta Estuary, and an island within it, had become so silted in that it was now nothing but a shallow swamp.

During the spring and summer of 1862, the hills around Dos Pueblos had never been greener. The rains had brought a new layer of rich and loamy topsoil into the valleys, and it was decided that the great deluge had been a blessing to the farmers.

But by January of 1863, the normal winter rains had not come, and the hills were brown again. As the month progressed, the many little streams that fed Dos Pueblos Creek began drying up, one by one, and waterfalls that had cascaded down the canyon walls disappeared. Soon Dos Pueblos Creek itself was nothing but a series of puddles, green with algae, and the estuary that had become a swamp was now a flatland of sun-baked mud strewn with the corpses of fish and waterfowl.

By May, there had still been no rain, and a kind of awesome hush began to settle over Southern California. The heat was merciless, and the hot, debilitating winds that Californians call the Santa Anas blew in from the Mojave Desert. There were dust storms now, whirling down from the parched hills, and a temperature inversion—of the same sort that causes Southern California's smog today—made the dust hang in the air for days, turning the sky yellow and the sun into an alien, dull-copper disk. The sunsets transformed the skies into strange, sickly colors of green and purple. The cattle moaned for food and water, and desperate ranchers went into the foothills to cut down oak trees to provide food for their starving animals. All through the summer no rains came.

Throughout Southern California, ranchers watched with dismay as one after another of their great beasts tottered forward, sank to its knees, then fell on its side and died. In the sun, their skins became dried husks of cowhide, stretched across the frameworks of their skeletons, and the dreadful stench of rotting flesh blew through the canyons on the dusty winds. Down from the mountains came the scavengers, the coyotes and the cougars and the grizzlies, and buzzards, which had never been sighted so close to the sea before. Soon the skeletons were picked clean, and the birds, too sated with carrion to fly, sat about their trophies like grim guardians of death. Next, late that summer, came an invasion of
chapules
,
or grasshoppers, millions upon millions of insects eager to devour whatever traces of greenery were left. And the chapules were quickly followed by an epidemic of smallpox that surged through the entire state and particularly ravaged the Indian population. In Santa Barbara alone, the Indian population was reduced from twelve thousand to a mere forty. There were no more string quartets playing at mealtimes at Rancho Los Dos Pueblos now. Beyond the hacienda, Doña Rosa's flower gardens were reduced to rows of chewed and withered stalks. The fruit and olive trees died, and even the desert-hardy palms turned brown, uprooted themselves in the dusty soil, and toppled. And what was happening at Dos Pueblos was not an isolated disaster. It was happening to every ranchero in the state. As one ranchero, Pedro Carrillo, wrote to a friend in Los Angeles about conditions in Santa Barbara County:

Everybody is broke, not a dollar to be seen, and God bless everyone if things do not change. Cattle can be bought at any price, Real Estate is not worth anything.

The chapules have taken possession of Santa Barbara, they have eat all the Barley wheat, &c., there is not a thing left by them, they cleaned me entirely out of everything and I expect if I do not move out of this Town soon, they will eat me also. Dam the Chapules.…

In a panic to sell what remained of their cattle, ranchers dropped their price to as low as $12 a head. Then it was $8 a head. Then it was $3 a head, and then it was zero. No one wanted the sick and half-starved animals. And meanwhile, in faraway Washington, the country was too busy fighting a Civil War to pay much attention to the plight of supposedly wealthy Spanish-American ranchers in Southern California.

If the year 1863 was disastrous, 1864 was even worse. Again, no rains fell that winter, and the heat during the summer was even more severe than it had been the year before. At Dos Pueblos, the herd that had numbered as high as twenty-five thousand head in 1862 had been reduced to just forty animals by mid-1864, and it was decided at Dos Pueblos and the other big ranches that there was only one practical—and humane—recourse: wholesale slaughter of the remaining animals. Their hides could be tanned and sold. Their bones could be boiled, and the tallow extracted could be sold for
glue. What remained of their flesh could be pressed into cakes called cracklings and sold for hog feed at a penny a pound. And so, with heavy hearts, this was what the ranchers set about doing, and what animals were left of their once mighty herds were systematically destroyed.

Some rains came in 1865, but it was far too late. The cattle business was dead, and never again would cattle form California's economic base. Without their cattle, of course, the rancheros had no livelihood and no source of income. With their aristocratic nonchalance about financial matters, few of them had any savings to speak of. All they had left was their land, but what was there to do with it? The experience of the Great Drought had left most Californians leery about any sort of agricultural endeavor in the southern part of the state. Even the land seemed worthless.

And now, into their midst descended another breed of scavenger. Down from San Francisco, the state's financial center, came the Anglo bankers. The Anglo bankers had a solution to the ranchers' problems. It was something that Spanish dons had never given much thought to, and it was called a mortgage. One by one, the dons began mortgaging their lands and, one by one, unable to meet their mortgage payments, they discovered that failure to pay meant foreclosure. Foreclosure, of course, could be put off by obtaining another mortgage on another land parcel. And so the inexorable process began by which the great landholdings of the Spanish families were steadily eroded and slipped out of Spanish hands into the hands of Anglos.

This, at least, is how the descendants of the old Spanish families prefer to explain the loss of their lands today—it was the doing of the villainous Anglo moneylenders. The early Spaniards, they point out, did not fully understand what the bankers were up to, since most of the Spaniards spoke no English. (Doña Rosa de Den, for one, had never learned English; by the time the Great Drought was over she was a widow, and, having led such a pampered life, she may not have had any comprehension of why her great fortune was suddenly disappearing.) The only flaw in this charge of victimization by Anglos is that one of the most notorious moneylending firms of the day was the Spanish company of Pioche & Bayerque, in San Francisco. Pioche & Bayerque charged an interest rate of 5 percent per month, compounded
monthly, and this steep charge quickly became the going rate at all the other banks.

At the same time, independent speculators who had made money in the gold rush heard that Southern California land was selling at dirt-cheap prices and that for loaning a rancher a few hundred dollars one could, through foreclosure, end up owning several hundred acres. Thus these men began acquiring land for speculative purposes. The land-poor Spanish families just didn't have the wherewithal to compete in this process.

After the Civil War, too, there arrived another group that would change the demographic profile of California. Santa Barbarans today call this the Eastern Black Sheep Era. To have produced a black sheep in one's family isn't of much concern today, but in the Victorian age it was a serious matter indeed. Black sheep were given a certain amount of money and told to remove themselves as far away from home as possible, which meant California. Thus it was that branches of a number of prominent eastern and middle western families were established on the West Coast during the 1870s and 1880s. These include, in Santa Barbara, the Mortons (salt), Fleischmans (yeast and distilleries), Armours (meat), Hammonds (organs), and Firestones (tires), and Forbeses of Boston. Farther north, in the Carmel Valley, can be found a descendant of New York and Newport's colorful Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish on his Palo Corona Ranch. San Francisco's prosperous Folger family (coffee) descends from the early Folgers of Nantucket, presumably from a black sheep.