Our Rich and Famous

<figure id="attachment_27544" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-27544" style="width: 142px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://laprensa-sandiego.org/stories/our-rich-and-famous/attachment/arg…; rel="attachment wp-att-27544"><img loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-27544" src="http://laprensa-sandiego.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Arguello-211x30…; alt="Comandante Arguello" width="142" height="202" srcset="https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Arguell… 211w, https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Arguell… 449w" sizes="(max-width: 142px) 100vw, 142px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-27544" class="wp-caption-text">Comandante Arguello</figcaption></figure>
Don’t ever worry about having a long layover between trains at L.A.’s Union Station. If the neo-mission architecture doesn’t excite you, just walk uphill to Olvera Street, named for Cuyamaca’s first grantee. Just follow your nose uphill to good Mexican eats, blessedly unlike Spanish slops, in old L,A,’s historic heart. Check out the 1818 Avila adobe, oldest in L.A, and swishing skirts of folkloric dancing girls.
Judge Agustin Olvera held court at his house on the plaza where the L.A. river water ditch (zanja) fed into a reservoir.
To the side he could see the church, still standing today, Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Rio Porciúncula. A fun fiesta there is the “Blessing of the Animals,” a very Franciscan kind of get-together. Kids love it; critters of all kinds and even heathens are welcome.
Toward the end of the Mexican Republic period, Olvera was Secretary of the Departmental Assembly, wielding a grand official oval stamp with a broadwinged eagle. Being prominent in government, he obtained a land grant (similar to a large homestead) for Cuyamaca Rancho with just such a stamp.
His business plan was to start a timber empire at the only place where trees grew tall and straight enough to use as rafters for large buildings. Great idea, but this was 1845, when colonists considered any place east of Rancho El Cajon as perilously unchristian. These timber resources had been reported by Velasquez already in 1783, when he lamented the lack of roads adequate for timber transport.
It was gutsy of Olvera and a single Indian to ride up the “Camino de la Sierra” through Valle de Viejas and Cañada Verde (Green Valley). The mountain Indians were said by the imperious Comandante Arguello to be “savage,” beyond the civilizing influence of even the successful remote mission outpost at Santa Ysabel.
It was Arguello who had discovered Warner’s Pass in 1825 while in pursuit of native horse thieves. This then became the official mail route to Sonora and Mexico City, the capital of the republic and civilization.
Bad blood began in 1785 when thieves stole and lanced a few horses from Governor Fages at Vallecito. Musket fire won out over jaras (fire-hardened wooden spears) and atlatls [short spears launched from throwing-sticks]. When Fages asked who the instigator was, the surviving Indians all naturally pointed to the dead chief on the hill. His defiant last words, in response to a surrender demand, had been “I do not know how to die.” We live and learn, they say.
As for me, I never got the knack of atlatl throwing, and I will salute anyone who can hit an aged rabbit with one. Still, atlatls were used on every populated continent, and put food on the table. Further to my discredit, I have no famous last words at the ready.
In later skirmishes, the body count was tallied by a couple of dozen pairs of ears, conveniently detachable body parts, but lacking the utility and panache of scalps.
Sergeant Vicente Romero gave terse but adequate testimony of the 1837 Battle of Cuyamaca, where earlier soldiers had had cordial visits at Cuyamaca village. He was testifying in a case which settled the claims of Julian miners. He said the Indian village was at a pile of rocks just north of a sharp pointed peak around which the wagon road passed.
You will easily find this place along the Stonewall Mine road. The mountain peak, exalted above an ocean of white cloud cover, is a sweet place to feel lives and history become almost tangible.
Shielded by rocks where mounted leatherjacket presidio soldiers had little advantage of horses, muskets, and lances, only a few Indians were killed. Romero, too, considered them “savage,” a judgment not shared by anthropologists today. This large village had abundant water, oaks and wildlife. Life was good. Check it out.
As required by Mexican land grant law, Olvera submitted a preliminary map of Cuyamaca’s valleys, surrounding mountains, and the road leading up from the “portesuelo” (portal) by Viejas and Jamatayune (Samagatuma/Guatay), to Mesa de Huacupin, Rancheria Cuyamaca, the lake (then smaller) and Iguai on North Peak’s flank. It appears he sketched it all from Stonewall Mountain.
After the U.S. invasion, Olvera was signatory to the peace treaty, and served as judge, mayor, county supervisor and elector in a presidential election.
His first wife had been Concepcion, one of Arguello’s many children. After her death, Olvera married Maria del Refugio de Jesus Ortega, the widow of whaling captain Edward Stokes. Maria was one of 22 children of José Joaquin Ortega, and had grown up at the ranch house of Santa María de Pamo, in the low ground just north of Highway 67, west of Ramona and east of Rancho Maria Lane. We have an 1883 lithograph of the place, windmill and all. The Ortegas dealt in cattle, otter skins, wine, and lots of kids.
Ortegas were among the founders of the Santa Barbara Presidio and nearby Refugio ranch, a park which you can still visit. That ranch was burned by pirates. Generations of Ortega girls were famous for fair “Castilian” beauty, drawing suitors to Santa Maria from far away, including a general on the prowl.
Ortega and Stokes were owners of both Santa Maria and Santa Ysabel, with huge acreage. It was Stokes who met the invading US army at Warner’s on December 4, 1846 and arranged for Cockney Bill to prepare a hearty, wine-besotted, and humorously described mutton, grape, and tortilla supper at the Santa Ysabel chapel. He then carried invasion news to Gillespie’s force so they could bring a cannon and rendezvous around Ballena, where Old Julian Highway branches off from route 78.
They were wretchedly encamped in rain and cold, probably where the gasoline station and concrete bridge now are, east of Ramona by the Stokes place. The deadly Battle of San Pascual was two days later.
Unlike the bedraggled and soggy army, Stokes was sporty in his black English hunting coat and long white underwear mostly covered by black velvet trousers slit to the hips and cut off at the knees, with 6-inch long clattering spurs.
Above all this bloomed the broad, merry face of a seaman home from the sea.
The timber venture of Olvera never came to fruition. Mountain Indians “made a kind of revolution” and ran Olvera’s sawyers off. With our 20/20 hindsight, that would seem to have been a good thing, at least until the great fire took it all anyway.
You can search the web for these people because they are significant to history. Olvera landed nimbly on his feet with a new regime and a new wife.
Arguello, the haughty sire of important and abundant offspring, was granted a major chunk of what is now San Diego, along with almost all of Tijuana, appropriate to his “regal presence.” Olvera got a third of the San Diego pueblo lands, for legal fees.
Stokes died young, but son Adolfo and his half-sister Dolores, daughter of Maria del Refugio and Judge Olvera, built a large adobe in 1871 which you can still see, much remodeled, as you approach Ramona from the mountains. Judging from the seven English-looking kids in an 1887 family photo, he must have been closer to his sister than I was to mine. By that time, her Castilian beauty had filled out substantially. They ran a stage line to Julian in the 1870’s, providing dinner at Santa Maria and fresh horses at Ballena, where there is still a horse ranch.
So, lest you bewail and bemoan a lack of rich and famous celebrities among us, just imagine if you could have been here in the old forties.
We are well and truly living in a hotbed of history.

Our Rich and Famous

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