CHAPTER FOURTEEN: JOURNEY OF DEATH
Old San Diego was entering its final phase. Nature and war added their blows to the mistakes and the poor foresight of the ranchers. The Franklin House, now in possession of George Tebbetts, the Colorado House and two boarding houses were open but the Gila House had been dismantled. Louis Strauss and Hyman Mannasse, a nephew of Joseph Mannasse, sold off the goods in their large stores and closed up. Bad debt suits filled the court calendar and the Grand Jury noted that the town was filled with idlers and vagrants.
The Herald published complaints that the town had no tailor, no watchmaker, no gunsmith, and was in need of mechanics of every description. It said:
San Diego is now the largest and thinnest populated county in the state, yet it could be made the richest, most populous. A little wise statesmanship and masterly activity is all that is necessary to make everybody rich, happy and contented.
The Herald ceased publication on April 7, 1860, and Editor Ames removed to San Bernardino to start another newspaper. In a year, with the admonishments of his father that he should "shun wine and women" long forgotten, Ames was dead of over-drinking.
Though the population of the county increased from 798 to 4324 in the decade from 1850 to 1860, most of the people did not reside in town but had taken up farming or ranching in the public domain, the open lands that had not been granted away in the Spanish and Mexican days, or operated mills or stores of one kind or another in the hills and mountain valleys. Trade was concentrated in Old Town but the bustling frontier days were over. The vibrant tide that had swirled across the continent had been slowed or diverted, and the Civil War was to cut it off completely. The war also would see the seizure of a large part of the whaling fleet.
The national census of 1860 indicated that the number of cattle in California had risen to more than a million, far above the needs of the state, and there were no alternative markets. The cattle drives over the Gila Trail had dropped away. Once again, as in days gone by, cattle would be killed for the money that could be realized by selling the hides for leather and the tallow for soap and candles. The wool of thousands of sheep would go uncut. Many of the rancheros still enjoyed a life of ease and plenty. Others had lost their land and lived in the past. The Spanish dress of the pastoral days of the Dons had become incongruous and the rich mantas, the gold embroidered vests and the ornamented breeches laid aside. The silver trappings for their horses had eaten up much of the money that was needed as times became bad. The money lenders were always on hand with quick credit or loans -- sometimes at ten per cent a month.
Some glimpses of the changes of life on the ranchos, not related in time, have come down from the Notes made by Benjamin Hayes as he rode the trails as a circuit judge. He found that Couts had made Guajome Rancho into what he described as a paradise. "In summer especially, when all the country is dry, one feels that Guajome is like an 'oasis in the desert.' The twenty miles leading to it, from Temecula, present no cultivation at all . . . through the thirty-eight miles toward the town of San Diego, there are two small vineyards -- Buena Vista and Encinitas -- nothing more. All is to the eye 'a dreary waste' save where nature has sown the grass and wild oak and chance flower."
In Soledad Valley, formerly the town commons of the old pueblo, he stopped to water his mule, and the young widow of Don Bonifacio López who, as the owner of large numbers of horses had been known in Old Town as "The King," came out of her garden to greet him, her eyes smiling under a man's hat. Opposite her dwelling, he said, there was a narrow trail up the side of a steep hill ". . . up which Don Bonifacio used to gallop his horse, full speed, wheeling in an instant, down again at the same time . . . to the infinite admiration of his countrymen at the rodeo, themselves no inferior horsemen. He weighed near 300 pounds. If I lived there . . . it seems it might haunt me in my sleep."
He rode to Rincón del Diablo Rancho, now the site of Escondido, to call upon Henry Clayton and his wife, the widow of Capt. Snook, whose father had been granted the ranch in 1843, and wrote, "it is bad to wake up some men out of the siesta; nevertheless, we had a pleasant chat . . . Nothing can surpass the uniform kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Clayton. One leaves them with regret." The Claytons sold their interest in the property to Oliver S. Witherby and he eventually came into sole possession.
At Monserrate, a rancho of more than 13,000 acres on the upper San Luis Rey River Hayes found the original owner, Don Ysidro María Alvarado: "I do not know why he has not prospered more. He lives almost in Indian style, on the banks of the river San Luis Rey; seems to have few cattle; nor has there been much ground in cultivation."
The Southerners who had come to California had exchanged cotton for cattle and Negroes for Indians, and resenting domination by the more heavily-populated North, hoped to bring about a secession of the "cow counties," including San Diego, and form the Territory of Colorado. A bill authorizing this legislation was submitted by Andrés Pico in 1859 and approved by the California Legislature by a two-thirds vote and sent to Washington for approval. It died in the confusion of events leading up to the Civil War.
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln, the candidate for the new Republican Party, was elected President. On December 20th of that year South Carolina seceded from the Union. By the summer of the next year, ten other Southern states had voted to follow the lead of South Carolina. The first battle of Bull Run was fought on July 21. San Diego was at the end of the most southerly trail, and though the battles were being waged a long distance away, there were relatives and friends on both sides, and the division in San Diego, as elsewhere, was sharp and bitter. The sympathy of the majority of its citizens, however, remained with the South throughout the war. The Bear Flag once raised for an independent California was flown again as the banner of State's Rights. The Butterfield Stage Line's southern service by way of Warner's, which had connected Southern California with the East, came to a halt on July 1, 1861, and Butterfield began running from St. Joseph, Mo., to Central California, by way of Salt Lake City.
California as a whole remained loyal and furnished more than 15,000 volunteers, most of them from the North, for Union service which consisted largely of duty within the state. Southern sympathizers, however, who included many of the leading state officials, organized the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Knights of the Columbia Star and the Committee of Thirty. They are believed to have numbered more than 30,000, in large part Californios who had been persuaded that a new government would speed up their land claims and that squatters and other lawless trespassers would be dispossessed. Arms were kept ready and ammunition stolen from Union depots in the expectation of guerrilla warfare. The loaded wagons from the gold fields disappeared. Cave Couts, the native of Tennessee and a graduate of West Point, respected but hot-tempered, became an acknowledged leader of Southern sympathizers, and it was indicated in correspondence that if he so chose he could have led a regiment from Southern California to join the Rebel cause. Many were willing to follow his leadership. Many Democrats voted Republican throughout the state, however, in the hope of averting disorder or any attempt to organize a new Pacific Republic.
Brig. Gen. George Wright, who succeeded to the command of Union forces in California, seized all boats and ferries on the Colorado River and gave orders that no one was to be permitted to cross the river without a special permit, and that all persons approaching the frontier were to be arrested for questioning.
Gen. Wright expressed the fear that a French fleet, acting in sympathy with the South, might seize the West Coast ports of Mexico, and he repeatedly urged that he be permitted to invade Sonora and capture the port of Guaymas, to keep open the Gulf of California for ferrying supplies up the Colorado. Two infantry companies were at Fort Yuma. His request went unheeded.
A request for two twenty-four-pounders, to control "as much as possible the harbor of San Diego," was made by Brev. Maj. L. A. Armistead, of the 6th Infantry stationed at New San Diego, and with a small force he went to "Oti" or Otay, near the border, to send warning to Indians not to take part in any troubles developing in Lower California. On June 18, 1861, Capt. G. A. Haller, another officer and fifty-two men of the 4th Infantry, arrived after a march of 387 miles in eighteen days from Fort Mojave, New Mexico, to relieve Armistead and his company.
In a letter, Whaley reported that secessionists were being arrested in San Diego "and there is no telling how soon there may be a row of some sort down here."
Continuing his efforts to halt the steady flight of Southern sympathizers into Confederate territory, Gen. Wright sent units of the new California Volunteers to reinforce Fort Yuma and established a military prison there. He also established a camp at Warner's on the route the secessionists were using through the mountains. This was on October 18, 1861, with Maj. Edwin A. Rigg in command. A month later it was moved about a dozen miles north to the Oak Grove area, and it was named Camp Wright.
Fleeing California at the same time was Daniel Showalter, an assemblyman of Mariposa County, who had just shot to death the assemblyman of San Bernardino, Charles W. Piercy, in a political duel fought with rifles. Showalter and seventeen well-armed and well-mounted men took the trail toward the Colorado, but when they reached Temecula, in order to avoid Camp Wright, they dropped down into San Luis Rey Valley and took a southeasterly course through the mountains toward San Jose Valley. Maj. Rigg intercepted two advance men and then, acting on reports received from Indians, encountered the rest of the party at the ranch of John Minter at Mesa Grande, about two and a half miles southwest of Lake Henshaw. They were taken to Camp Wright, and Maj. Rigg made the following report:
They now regret that they did not resist. If they had they would have given us a hard fight. There is no doubt but every one of them is a rank secessionist, and are on their way to lend aid and comfort to the enemy.
While not denying Southern sympathies, and though incriminating letters on them indicated they were going into Mexico only to avoid seizure and questioning at Fort Yuma, they insisted they were on their way to Sonora to engage in mining, and all signed oaths of allegiance to the United States. However, they were ordered taken to the prison at Fort Yuma. After a few months they were released. Showalter became a lieutenant colonel and fought with the Confederates in a number of major engagements.
About the time of the capture of the Showalter party, John J. Warner, as a member of the Home Guard of Los Angeles, and in spite of all the unfriendly treatment he had received at the hands of the U.S. military, made a reconnaissance for the Union command, to check on reports of other bands of armed men, one of which was reported heading for Jacumba Pass, but he reported he found only prospectors carrying guns for protection against the Indians. The regular Army infantry was withdrawn from San Diego and replaced for the rest of the war by various units of the California Volunteers. As the winter was a cold one, and with a heavy rainfall of more than fifteen inches, the Volunteers tore down Davis' old warehouse at New Town and ripped wood from his wharf to be used as firewood. At one time the Volunteers at Camp Wright were in a state of mutiny, with twelve in the guardhouse and others refusing to drill with packed knapsacks. The flight of Confederate sympathizers across the Colorado continued for the duration of the war.
The Bars and Stars were raised in late February of 1862 over Tucson by a Confederate force which succeeded in capturing an advance force of California Volunteers. When the main companies of Volunteers from Camp Drum at Wilmington and Camp Wright in San Diego County moved across the Colorado River and advanced toward Tucson, and with the news of a Union victory in New Mexico, the Rebels left Arizona for El Paso.
Grand warnings were issued for the Confederates to keep their ships out of the Pacific, and a fleet of six small wooden vessels, with less than 100 guns and 1000 men, patrolled the coast from Alaska to Panama, to protect the whaling fleet centered in Hawaiian waters, and American ships engaged in trade off China and Japan. The sloops of war were the Lancaster, Saranac, Wyoming, Narragansett, St. Mary's and once more, the Cyane. One ship was replaced and two were added in 1863. A privateer being outfitted at San Francisco was seized and the crew arrested.
The war deepened the depression in San Diego. In a letter written to Whaley on March 5, 1861, A. S. Ensworth wrote:
The fact is, there is literally & truly no money in this country . . . The Mexicans have nearly all got rid of their cattle . . . Mannasse (Jo) during the last month, has been riding about the county collecting cattle for old debts, which he intends to start with up the country about the 1st of April. Hinton is now at work getting his cattle off of the mountain & bringing them down to Agua Hideunda. The Estudillos will start nearly all their cattle up the country this spring, & sell them to pay debts. As a specimen of the way these people are in debt (those who have any cattle left) I will observe, Antonito Serrano owes Jo. M. & Co. $2800 & Jesus Machado owes them about $1500. Neither of them could pay these debts with all their property. Bill Williams is flat, & is living in town. B. Lopez's estate will not pay the debts. Sylvester Marron owes Jo. M. & Co. more than he can pay. Soto is the only one that holds his own, & his wife was in here the other day asking for credit, & because I would not give it to her got into a great passion. The fact is, things down this way, have come to a head.
By the end of the year he was commenting that the rancheros so lacked money even for sacks of flour that "many is the time they have come after dark for it, for fear of being seen by some man whom they were owing..."
San Diego also was facing competition from San Pedro as a port for Southern California, and a report from a correspondent, "Selden" in a San Francisco newspaper, belittled the future prospects of San Diego and stated facts which Ensworth, in a letter to Whaley, charged were inaccurate:
They are thrown out for the purpose of retaining troops, Gov't transportation and depot, in the vicinity of that place, and to build that humbug town, San Pedro, about which more gass has been expended, & more ink wasted, than relative to any other point in the state . . . Vive Humbug!
The correspondent "Selden" was J. J. Warner, the former state senator from San Diego, who also was publishing a pro-Democrat, but anti-slavery newspaper in Los Angeles and earning the enmity of many of his former friends.
A divided and disturbed little town was lashed by a storm in January, 1862, that for a time threatened to wash away the adobe walls of the mansions which had stood for more than thirty years. A letter written by A. S. Ensworth and addressed to Thomas Whaley reads:
It was not only a flood of waters falling from the Heavens, but such a South-Easter I have never known, the tide backing up the waters of the bay which was running in from the river to a hight (sic) never before witnessed by Americans . . . all the old walls around town, which were not well protected, have gone down to rise no more.
The waters washed away the walls of the corrals at the rear of the Bandini and Estudillo houses, and in back of the Franklin House, and damaged many of the business structures. All the rivers of the county ran full, from hill to hill, and Hayes said that a George P. Abbotts thought a good-sized vessel might have gone a mile or more up the San Luis Rey River. A coffin from the old Catholic burial ground was swept down the river and into the bay. Late in the month Capt. T. L. Roberts, in command of the California Volunteers stationed at San Diego, was ordered to march his company to Warner's but he reported it would be impossible to move wagons over any roads for at least two months. They were able to make the trip in February, however. Roads were washed out over all Southern California, and there are reports that perhaps several hundred persons were drowned and that at least 200,000 head of cattle were lost either by drowning or starvation.
The river was still running heavily in May when at noon on Tuesday the 26th an earthquake, which was described as the worst since the one of 1811 that destroyed the San Juan Capistrano Mission, rocked the town and caused the river to wash over its banks. The entire population, Benjamin Hayes wrote, rushed into the streets and the public square, in terror, and for many nights thereafter many did not sleep in their homes, and some experienced nauseating sensations. Adobe homes were cracked or otherwise damaged. In many sections of La Playa the steep bank of Point Loma fell in, and the waters of the bay were reported considerably agitated, the tide rising several feet above normal. Between noon and 8 o'clock that night there were six lighter shocks. On Thursday morning there was a shock as severe as the one of Tuesday. Other slight shocks occurred on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The reports from Vallecito indicated the quake had been very severe in the desert.
The heavy rains of 1861-62 produced bountiful grazing which caused the cattle and sheep to grow fat and multiply. Droughts followed the rains and destroyed the ranges. Smallpox brought death and a fear greater than that caused by the earthquake. The countryside dried out in one of the worst disasters ever to sweep California. Only 3.87 inches of rain fell in San Diego in the winter of 1862-63, and only 5.14 inches in the following winter.
In November of 1862 Couts, in letters to Abel Stearns, wrote:
Small pox is quite prevalent -- six to eight per day are being buried in S. Juan Capistrano -- Indians generally. One case in San Dieguito and two in San Mateo is (sic) the nearest to us. I vaccinated the whole rancheria at San Luis some six weeks since, & hope they may escape, thus saving our community of the terrible disease.
Hard times were upon them. Couts commented that "I am badly in want of money. I have some debts, taxes on hand, no goods in my shop & no money." Many of the settlers as well as the old rancheros were deserting California for newly-discovered gold fields in the Colorado River country of Arizona. The grass that appeared on the ranges in October was drying up by November. The nights were cold and frosty. By late November cattle were being sent into Lower California, Couts reporting that probably 10,000 head had been taken there and thousands more were to be put on the trail within a short time.
In January a police force was organized for San Diego City to be under the sheriff, and all "Indians and Cholos" were ordered to leave the town. A frame building at the San Diego Mission was converted into a receiving hospital for smallpox victims, and funds were requested from the state to hire nurses and attendants.
Sentinels were posted at the ranchos to keep anyone from approaching without notice. Henry Clayton returned to San Diego from Los Angeles at night by stage and no door was open to him. The Ysidro Alvarado family was stricken. Both he and his wife succumbed. Mexicans who were to have buried the body of Don Ysidro, had instead left it on the road, gotten drunk and one of them tried to break into Couts' ranch house. The victims of smallpox in the vicinity of Couts' rancho were being buried in the San Luis Rey Mission and he commented, a "grave cannot be dug without striking human bones . . . they were digging little holes, barely deep enough to cover the coffins . . ." He sent his brother, Blounts, to remonstrate against it, and he was attacked by a Sonoran with a knife, Blounts killed him.
One of those who died of the smallpox was Juan Antonio, the captain-general of the Cahuillas, who had ambushed the leaders of the Indians who had threatened to ravage the white settlements. A correspondent writing for the Los Angeles Star, reported on Feb. 28, 1863:
Old Juan Antonio and four other Indian chiefs have died of smallpox and I have been informed that the bodies have not been buried and that they are being mutilated by hogs and dogs. Of course it is a matter of much annoyance to the whites in the neighborhood.
The smallpox ran its course by late spring, but the ranchos were sick with the loss of cattle and beset by the frantic efforts of squatters to feed their own stock at any cost. John Forster, who had acquired possession of Santa Margarita Rancho from Pío and Andrés Pico, indicated in a letter that he had "been under arrest . . . until today, when I was released, arrested again, and am now at liberty de nuevo, the charges are killing and slaying fifteen squatters, tearing down fences and playing the dickens generally. In both cases the plaintiffs have not gotten farther than entering very lamed omplaints . . ."
The Explorers /
Time of the Bells /
The Silver Dons /
The Glory Years
Gold in the Sun /
The Rising Tide /
City of the Dream
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