The following article is from a biography being written about
Oliver S. Witherby, the first Judge of the San Diego-Los Angeles judicial
district; beginning early in 1850.
Witherby, an Ohio lawyer who had served in the war with
Mexico, came to San Diego in June, 1849 as a member of the Boundary Commission
that surveyed and established the international border. Later he was elected to
the first legislature which, in turn, appointed the state's first judges.
Visions Of Empire
 Oliver S. Witherby, judge,
businessman, legislator and one time
owner of Devil's Corner |
WHEN Oliver S. Witherby terminated his district judgeship
early in 1853 and entered upon his duties as collector of customs in one of the
old hide houses at San Diego's La Playa,1 some persons thought that his stature
in the community was deteriorating. Lieutenant George Horatio Derby, the
engineer-funster who temporarily was assigned by the Federal Government to
change the point of discharge of the San Diego River, spoofed the new Witherby
sinecure as one of insignificance at a port unknown to navigators.2
The ex-judge may have been in a position to have the last
laugh. His job was part of the policing agency of the government and even paid
dividends when the collector received his salary of $3000 per year.
There were foreign ships that entered the harbor, but
sufficiently interspaced in schedule so that the collector had most of his time
available for practicing law. Court records show that he was much in demand as
counsel, which would be expected of one who had just occupied the top judicial
office in southern California. The public assessor's estimates also established
him as one of the community's wealthiest men.3
For the better part of two decades Witherby specialized in
holding remunerative public positions that were undemanding of his time and
permitted him to pursue professional and business opportunities as he chose.
There were more reasons, however, than those just mentioned
for the Judge's decision not to run for a second term. Around the leading
citizens of San Diego the atmosphere was yeasty with excitement and expectation.
A man with vision knew that "manifest destiny" was more than a national concept
and that it applied to individuals as well.
As Witherby watched the ships come and go in 1853 in the
second finest harbor on California's coast, he knew that Federal authorities had
just authorized surveys for a transcontinental railroad.4 He had just been
appointed on the local committee to study routes that could bring such a
railroad to San Diego,5 where, by general state and national consensus, the
anticipated line was expected to terminate. What seemed an imminent linking of
rails and sails would make the silver gate city a metropolis, and Witherby's job
as customs collector a veritable bonanza.
Another wine-like ferment existed in the thinking of many
persons. It concerned proposed highways. Judge Witherby also held membership on
a committee to plan a good road to the north,6 through present-day Escondido to
San Bernardino. There it would connect with the Mormon-used road to Salt Lake
City and thus provide tidewater access to the whole Mormon "empire".
There was far more economic realism in such a road project
than would be apparent without an understanding of what had happened in and
around the San Diego-San Bernardino axis between 1847 and 1851.
The famous Mormon Battalion of several hundred men, recruited
in Illinois and Iowa for service in the war with Mexico, drove the first wagon
train to the Pacific coast, arriving in San Diego in January, 1847. Here they
made outstanding civic contributions. Some of them also served in the San Luis
Rey Valley and at the Cajon Pass above the Lugos' San Bernardino Rancho.7
Captain Jefferson Hunt of the Battalion's Company A had
returned to Utah in 1847 after his military duty. The Mormon leaders then
commissioned him and eighteen others to leave for the neighborhood of San
Bernardino Rancho in November, 1847 to obtain seed-grain, cattle and fruit
cuttings for use in the Great Salt Lake area.
Following the Hunt party as it returned homeward was another
group from the Mormon Battalion whose members previously had re-enlisted and had
just completed duty at San Diego. They left the latter city on March 21, 1848
with a wagon loaded with seed and fruit cuttings. It was the first wagon ever to
make the Southern California to Salt Lake journey. The Hunt party used pack
animals.8
Meanwhile the owners of the Lugo Ranch at San Bernardino were becoming
disenchanted with their holdings there and sold out
to the Mormons. On June 10,1851 Jefferson Hunt arrived with five hundred of his
people to settle permanently in that beautiful valley which, at the beginning of
California's statehood, was a part of San Diego County—about one hundred miles
north of San Diego bay.
The addition of five hundred white Americans to the
population of predominantly Mexican southern California not only triggered but
exploded the desire of San Diegans to link themselves with such an economic
potential. The project seemed particularly practical because of former
residential and transportational connections between citizens of San Diego and
many Mormon acquaintances who now permanently had moved south from Utah.
Witherby's plans encompassed not only the proposed San Diego
to Utah road but an equally important one to the east. Rumors and discussions
were rife about prospective stage lines to and from San Diego county. Some of
these soon materialized, such as the famous Butterfield operation.
The place the ex-judge envisioned for himself will be
mentioned shortly. First, however, two other portions of the canvas should be
unfolded to view. They involved capital—two different kinds of it.
The first of these concerned livestock. The wealth of
southern California always had been on the hoof. New stage lines and wagon
trains to San Bernardino and Salt Lake City would require thousands of horses.
The increase of population by railroad, stage and sea would demand the services
of thousands of animals for drays, buggies, agricultural power, and saddle
riding. A great ranch to produce horse flesh would be a gold mine, because
prices were bound to be high.
Furthermore, the very hide house in which the collector of
customs had his office brought reminiscences of fortunes from other
stock-raising enterprises, namely, the cattle business. For decades the clipper
ships had brought Atlantic coast products around Cape Horn, receiving payment in
hides and tallow. Some of that business still existed, but after 1850 the cow
counties of southern California grew rich by furnishing the meat and the tallow
candles for booming San Francisco, Sacramento, and innumerable mining camps of
the mother lode country. As one example, in 1852 Cave Couts left for the north
with eight hundred cattle and a hundred mares.9 The San Diego County Supervisors
later ordered deputy assessors sent "to the District of San Luis Rey
Township, to assess the animals or stock generally, now daily being driven from
this county."10 In 1853-54 profits from cattle raising were at an all-time high.
There also was excitement about gold mines. Some of them
materialized.
So much for one aspect of "capital". Even all of those
dreams, however, were less grandiose than were visions connected with the
spelling of the word another way—the Capitol.
Far more important than metalic gold, in the opinions of men
of carpetbagging characteristics, were whispered expectations of a strike of
riches in the hills and vales of politics.
"Divide the State!" the leaders of southern California were
urging.11 Most of them were copperheads, pro-Southern sympathizers who had little
in common with political views of the Northern supporters around San Francisco
bay. If the envisioned program could be successful there would be a new State's
capital and countless new offices to be filled in its Capitol Building. What
could prevent the first district judge from becoming Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of a new state? Or the Governor? Here were prospective riches
surpassing the jewels of Ophir!
The copperheads actually got those jewels into their hands
only to watch them slip through their fingers. In 1859, after the plan had
germinated successfully for a few years, Andres Pico introduced a bill in the
California legislature arranging for a division of the State with the southern
area forming the "Territory of Colorado".12 It was passed by a two-thirds vote
and sent to Washington for approval, but died there in the turmoil of events
leading up to the Civil War. More about that demise will be mentioned later.
In 1853-54, however, Witherby only knew that chances for a
new state were excellent. Where would its capital be? There were at least six
reasons for him to take action quickly, and in a big way.
He did.
Rancho Rincón Del Diablo
A survey map of Rancho Rincon
del Diablo made in 1884 |
After thorough inspection of possible railroad routes into
San Diego it appeared to earlier investigators that the logical and proper one
would be along the road long used by travelers between San Diego and Fort Yuma.
It was the route that had been followed by the Mormon Battalion, by General
Kearny's unit, and by other subsequent military journeys between the bay and the
desert. It also was the way almost all non-military travelers journeyed. Samuel
Warnock and Joseph Swycaffer used the route for carrying government dispatches
and mail between San Diego and Fort Yuma.13 Other routes had been surveyed—Jacumba,
Mission Valley, San Luis Rey River—but the long traveled way seemed the best.
Quite obviously any stage line and improved highway to the
east would follow the same course.
In the early 1850s travelers to the east from San Diego left
by way of Rose Canyon, Poway, Escondido, San Pasqual, Ramona, Santa Ysabel,
Warner's Ranch, and thence southeasterly through inner-mountain valleys to the desert.
The idea that Witherby grasped very quickly was that the
owner of a tract of many thousands of acres of fertile land, at comparatively
low altitude and through which the prospective railroad would
run, could well make its owner a multi-millionaire from stock raising alone.
If main highways to the north and east passed through such
property that would be icing on the cake. More particularly, if such an estate
could be far enough from San Diego to require a division point on the railroad
before it started up the mountain grades, there would be a town—a new town where
an owner's cheap land could be sold for town lots at city prices.
Fortunately for Witherby he knew of exactly such a tract of
land. Undoubtedly he knew of its availability before he decided not to run for a
second term of his judgeship because its owner had died a few years before and
the heirs were not carrying on with former activities on the property.
The land involved was a tract of some twenty square miles in
the area where the city of Escondido is now located.
Witherby envisioned his new city as being a couple of miles
south of the present Escondido site, where the west-bound railroad cars from
Georgia and Texas would glide down the valley from the hills, discharge their
freight and new residents, and sweep on south to the harbor of the sun.
It seemed that the mystical survey of that city had been
designed in heaven as the strategically placed capital of the anticipated new
State of Colorado. As with well located state capitals, the place was in a
somewhat central position between what then were the more major population areas.
San Bernardino with its five hundred Mormons was about
seventy-five miles to the north. And those people were truly "saints" compared
with their neighbors to the west—a hoodlum element that made Los Angeles the
toughest town west of Santa Fe in the 1850s. San Diego, thirty miles to the
south, actually had a population so small that its citizens were ashamed to
publicize election returns, although they believed their city would become the
metropolis of the south coast. The Fort Yuma area, on the other hand, in the
southeast corner of the State, was then the boom spot of southern California
with its Colorado River ferries and steamships, its well populated government
garrisons, its mining wealth, and thousands of argonauts coming and going each
year in connection with search for the riches of El Dorado.14
Escondido, which had picked up its name during the de Anza
visit there, would have been a principal rail center between the desert and the
coast. Considering its abundant water, fertile soil, exceptional climate, and
being in the geographical bull's eye, the ex-judge had good reason to build
there his castles in Spain in the form of an envisioned capitol building in Colorado.
In 1843 the Mexican Governor had granted three square leagues
in the present Escondido area to Juan Bautista Alvarado who built an adobe home
on the place. There were about thirteen thousand acres that had become known as
Rancho Rincón del Diablo—The Devil's Corner. The reason for the name is not
clear. Alvarado and his oldest son died before California became a state.
The balance of the heirs became scattered.
The San Diego-Fort Yuma road passed through the Rancho at a
point where it adjoined the Indian rancheria of San Pasqual. Any new wagon road
to Temecula and San Bernardino normally would go through The Devil's Corner,
just as Highway .395 did many years later.
In 1853, and possibly earlier, Witherby began to look up the Alvarado
heirs from whom he would need deeds to perfect a title. He
also started a movement to have an official government survey made to replace
the hit-and-miss type of boundaries the Rancho had known since 1843.
Although the official survey was not filed for record until
1858, the Judge began purchasing quitclaim deeds from Alvarado heirs in October
and December 1855, and in January 1857.15 These interests protected him so
sufficiently that he felt warranted in moving to the Rancho in 1857 after losing
his job as collector of customs. His protection lay in his legal right to
demand a partition-sale of the property if other heirs refused his offers to buy
them out. In fact he did file an action against the ones holding out, but
maneuvered an out-of-court settlement that gave him complete title.
The Judge paid $2,216.66 to obtain full ownership of some
thirteen thousand acres—about 17.5 cents per acre.16 For some reason he always
listed the Diablo acreage as 13,316.
In 1856, according to his assessment statements, the Judge
acquired over 2,200 additional acres of the adjoining Rancho San Marcos, on the
west. This whole magnificent domain of some 15,500 acres, with many hundreds of
head of livestock, certainly was one of the great San Diego County ranchos.
Witherby had many responsibilities in connection with the
ownership of so large an estate. But, before mentioning his ranch activities it
would be well to describe his remunerative government jobs.
As indicated previously, picking political plums was a
regular part of the Judge's know-how. In 1855 and 1856, while he still was
collector of customs, he was elected a member of the San Diego County Board of
Supervisors (also in 1858). This position was extremely influential, even if not
too lucrative. In 1857 he had lost the customs job because U.S. Senator
Broderick from California recommended appointment of another man in reprisal for
Witherby's earlier support of his long-time friend, J.B. Weller.17
The ex-district judge (and ex-customs collector) immediately
sought the job of Public Administrator, a real prize for an out-of-town man. The
records are contradictory as to who held that office in 1857-58, but by 1859
Witherby definitely had nailed down the post and held it until 1867.18
As Public Administrator, during practically all the years
that he was at Rancho Rincón del Diablo, he worked through the probate court in
San Diego administering the estates of persons who had died without known heirs.
There were many such cases in a country of pioneers who were thousands of miles
from home. The fees available from this job were often lucrative. The work was
easy and so sporadic as to cause little problem to a holder of the position who
lived thirty miles from the courthouse. His legal practice also continued, as
his services were sought from time to time in important cases of wealthy litigants.
In 1857, the year Witherby moved north to his Rancho, he was
appointed another kind of judge—a judge of the plains. The county
supervisors, as authorized by state law, annually selected
some fifteen to twenty men to hold the important position for a year.19
Appointees didn't receive much pay, but they had ego-satisfying authority in
connection with law enforcement. Most of them engaged in a pattern of
round-robin socializing in connection with their duties, to the extent that
their virtue (or lack of it) was sufficiently its own reward.
Judges of the plains (jueces del campo) functioned under a
California statute of 1851 as the principal law enforcement officers of the vast
livestock industry in each county. Such officials were a holdover from the
Mexican regime, which in turn had borrowed the system from sheep raisers of Spain.
Herds of cattle and sheep, sometimes by the thousands, were
regularly traversing unfenced southern California as local ranchers, as well as
drovers from northern Mexico, herded their animals toward markets in the booming
central areas of the State. Judges of the plains on horseback were expected to
protect locally-owned stock and also cultivated fields, orchards and gardens,
from thefts, trespasses and other depredations frequently associated with
migrant mass drives of animals that were often under careless or unscrupulous
management. In such connections the officials had powers of a sheriff.
Judges of the plains also had duties of supervising the
butchering of stock, and of registering brands on all hides, of which there were
many thousands per year. This was done to prevent poaching.
As a judge of the plains for several years Witherby
undoubtedly was engaged in the activities just mentioned. But, it was in
connection with rodeos, where such judges played an important role as mediators
when needed, that his social life can be both inferred and presumed—clear proof
being unavailable.
San Diego was without a newspaper during most of the years
that Witherby was domiciled at his Rancho, and evidence about rodeos during that
period has come from other sources. The statute demanded that such round-ups had
to be held between fixed annual dates by every ranch owner who possessed as much
range stock as Witherby is known to have owned.20
The diary of Dr. George McKinstry for October 9,1861 says
that he was at Rancho Rincón del Diablo on that day, and notes: "All hands out
at rodeo." On the l0th he wrote that all hands were at the rodeo at neighboring
San Pasqual. On the 11th he commented that Witherby and others had moved over to Couts' rodeo.
From an unidentified early newspaper this comment has been
found: "The annual roundup of the Escondido ranch became a feature of back
country life." It also is known from newspaper reports both before and after the
non-journalistic period of 1860-1870 that business and pleasure were lavishly
joined at rodeo time at Guajome, Hedionda, Santa Margarita, and other rodeos.21
What went on at these repetitive social extravaganzas? Most
of the wealthy white Americans were unmarried. There were a few
eligible daughters of the former Californios, but considering normal interests
of Spanish-Mexican blades there simply were not enough women to go around. Yet,
almost unanimously, the reports of rodeo parties have depicted a rollicking
musical, bacchanalian "high old time".
A closer, more intimate, investigation must be attempted in
order to discover some of the meagerly reported goings on in The Devil's Corner.
Guys And Gals
The master of Rancho Rincón del Diablo did not operate a
common inn—only an uncommon one.
The principal narrator of happenings at Witherby's place
during the years 1859-1861 was Dr. George McKinstry who practiced his profession
from his own ranch at Santa Ysabel (sometimes he called it Mesa Grande).22 The
main road from San Diego via Escondido to Fort Yuma ran through or by his place.
Dr. McKinstry was a relative of Elisha W. McKinstry of
California's Supreme Court and once had been a sheriff in northern California.
He had served with Witherby on San Diego County's Board of Supervisors in 1855.
He traveled about the county on a white mule, aided the afflicted, and kept a
brief daily record of his goings and comings. Three years of his diary are in
the San Diego Historical Society Library.
McKinstry regularly noted inconsequential aspects of the
weather and occasionally commented on more important occurrences such as
earthquakes and floods. The most striking items of his record, however, are so
naive in their inferential disclosures that he certainly would have written
differently if his medical training had followed, instead of preceded, Freud.
His writings, interspersed with items of utter trivia for
some days, are over-all shocking in their recitals of repetitive gatherings of
goodly numbers of men. These persons were more or less prominent in the early
history of San Diego County and were mostly bachelors. The wives of the minority
probably didn't know that their spouses regularly congregated at The Devil's
Corner, and often for days at a time.
In the first ten months of the diaries, for instance, Dr.
McKinstry stopped at the Witherby Rancho an even twenty times, and often from
two to five days at a visit. These were not professional calls and usually there
were at least a half dozen other men between thirty and forty-five years of age
who were present during part or all of his visits. Actually there were more of
these sessions than McKinstry remembered to jot down. One other unmarried
gentleman has left a record of his having been at Witherby's place during the
same ten-month period and on a date not mentioned by the Doctor's diary. He
states that Dr. McKinstry was on hand along with the customary group of other gentlemen.23
At other times during this same period of ten months some of
the same men collected at McKinstry's own place. Again, they were noted as
having spent several days together at Agua Caliente hot springs, and at San
Pasqual. Twenty-five men are named as having been present at these gatherings at
different times, and a half dozen of them were "regulars"—present for at least a
dozen of the multi-day meetings.
With inconsequential exceptions nothing is mentioned in
McKinstry's diaries concerning what these seemingly boon companions did to
occupy their time. No meals are described, no card games, drinking bouts,
conversations or entertainment. Nothing is mentioned about servants or sleeping
accommodations. One exception to the latter item is that the Doctor relates that
on one evening Witherby "finished the bottle" and, very much intoxicated, spent
the night on a mat in front of the fireplace.
It is a strange, shadowy picture, but the Doctor's meager
information is positively voluminous compared with anything handed down by
Witherby himself. After a search over several years there has not been found a
single letter or report by the Judge. He left a few business memoranda that
explain nothing about the real nature of the man.
Before jumping to a conclusion that the Witherby "gang" may
have been a bit gay, a careful consideration should be given to the women who
undoubtedly abounded in the ranch home at The Devil's Corner. Unmentioned by Dr.
McKinstry, they may well have been considered by him as unmentionables. These
were Indian women, and the story of their genre in western America must be
mentioned in order to understand the social milieu at Rancho Rincón del Diablo
in the mid-nineteenth century. It should be remembered that there were less than
a dozen white women in San Diego as late as 1866.24
In America's past the "Indian Love Call" has sounded far
beyond the audible performances of an operetta. Both real and fictional Indian
women have stirred the imaginations and the hearts of countless white men.
Pocahontas and Sacajawea (who guided Lewis and Clark) were of the first type,
while Hiawatha's Laughing Water, and Alessandro's Ramona were brain children of
almost equal fame. America's much-traveled military men and government engineers
of the nineteenth century have left radiant writings about the loveliness of
younger Indian women, including numerous encomiums about the beauty of the girls
of several tribes in San Diego and Los Angeles counties.25
These native women were regularly reported as not only being
physically shapely and attractive, but also as sensually minded, and wholly
uninhibited sexually. Their desirability certainly was not diminished by their
uniformly overt willingness to cooperate with the romantic desires of white men
whom they half idolized as virtual gods. It has been written by students of this
period that the pinnacle of ambition of most Indian girls was to be taken over
by a white man.26
The standard of cleanliness among these women was very high,
considering living conditions at the time. It is said of the Cahuilla Indians of
southern California, for example, that among the females personal hygiene and
bodily cleanliness were emphasized with a mystical and almost religious
fervor.27 Native women also were clever in the use of scents and other small
allurements.28
Another trait appreciated by many of the rough and hardened
trail-men was the relish of Indian women in doing almost anything sexually that
only prostitutes would consent to do back in the settlements—things that still
are forbidden by law in many states.
The great difference in the Indian girls, however, was a
complete absence of prurience. Sex was practically a worship service at the
shrine of procreation. Bodies were left undraped because they were more
beautiful that way. The Indian maidens lived as nature's unspoiled children,
just as the pre-missionary Polynesians had lived, and as non-prudish but
virtuous peoples had lived since Eden. Some four thousand years ago, for
instance, in the highly cultured paradise of Minoan Crete, as their vases and
reliefs still show, the women were mostly undraped, unashamed, and far from
unassuming of life's sensual pleasures.29
White men who had been brought up in prudish Victorian
society where females covered their ankles and were taught to be ashamed of sex,
found a field day of enjoyment among women who were glad not only to accept, but
to make, overtures for intimacy. Many of the western-type men actually preferred
the companionship of an Indian girl to that of a white woman.30
It didn't take long for the hundreds of Indian tribes between
the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean to discover this hankering of white men
for their females, and to take advantage of it in a big way. The slave trade in
Indian women and children began.31
To satisfy the whites' cravings for what to them had all the
lure of forbidden fruit, tribesmen traded away their younger women for horses,
guns, liquor or what-nots. They also raided enemy tribes to acquire young
females to dispose of to traders, trappers and argonauts. The trade value of a
satisfactory girl was about $400. Even Sacajawea, before joining the Lewis and
Clark expedition, had been kidnapped from her Shoshoni people in Idaho, carried
hundreds of miles eastward, and eventually either sold, or paid over for a
gambling debt, to a French trader.32
Congressional and territorial legislative bodies in the
mid-nineteenth century investigated and condemned these practices, if for no
other reason than because many tribes were destroying themselves for lack of
sufficient females to perpetuate the group.33
In San Diego county the problem was exactly the same. At San
Pasqual, for instance, even as late as 1871 the special Indian Agent who visited
and inspected the rancheria right next door to The Devil's Corner,
wrote that "the practice of selling young girls to white men prevailed
to an alarming extent at the rancheria."34
Researchers report that in the 1860s in and about the San
Pasqual area there were "white men with Indian housekeepers." It was a common
practice. Joseph Smith, who had been a respected overseer of the Butterfield
Stage enterprise through San Diego county in 1858-59, was murdered in 1868 by
the foreman of his Palomar ranch—"legend says because of his infatuation with
Smith's Indian housekeeper."35
Judge Witherby, Smith's almost neighbor, and friend, had charge of the sale
of the latter's property at the ranch. The buyer, "George Dyche, a Virginian of
good family", moved in and lived with an Indian girl.36
Similar illustrations could be multiplied.
There was another, sometimes correlative, method for
procuring Indian girls (also boys, if desired) with more of an atmosphere of
legality. The "legislature of a thousand drinks" (Witherby present) enacted an
innocuous appearing statute in 1850 for "Protection of Indians", but which
actually provided for domestic peonage and forced labor under judicial decree.37
The system was a direct descendant of the encomienda regime started in
the West Indies shortly after 1500.38 It involved the idea of a "protector" for
young natives, whereby they could be brought under personal auspices of the
landowning conquerors in order to learn civilized and Christian ways of
living.39
The early docket books of San Diego courts show examples of
this beneficent system in operation. In one typical case a sixteen year old girl
was delivered by judicial decree to a man for the purpose of being trained in
the ways of American culture. She probably liked it, and so did he. Whatever was
paid to parents or the tribe in these instances (if anything) is not a part of
the public records.
There were about one hundred Indian rancherias in San Diego
county in mid-nineteenth century plus some thirty ranchos, in addition to some
large farms and a few small villages. No owner of a rancho, whether he was a
Californio or an Anglo-Saxon, ever conceived of the idea of any manual labor
being performed by him or by any member of his family. The great pool of practically
unpaid help came from Indian rancherias.
The crux of these matters, as far as Witherby's Rancho Rincón
del Diablo is concerned, is that he required at least a hundred, if not double
that number, of Indians and half-breeds to keep his place in operation. The
rancho entities of that period were like self-sufficient manors or towns of the
feudal age.
No record has been found of the exact size of the work-force
on Witherby's ranch. But, ample evidence exists about the amount and kinds of
labor on ranchos of similar or lesser size in the same general area. These
ranchos, incidentally, have left no record of such heavy traffic in tourists,
guests, hangers-on (and perhaps accomplices) that kept The Devil's Corner
as busy as a bank's revolving door immediately prior to its
pre-holiday closing.
One similar rancho had twenty rooms to house "four
woolcombers, two tanners, carpenters, shoemakers, harness makers, gardeners,
milk and cheese men, dressmakers, sewing women, washer women, cooks." The list
goes on and on, and finally says that a hundred lesser kinds of Indian help
came in each day the Indian village.40
The duties were endless: curing olives, making raisins from
grapes, drying peaches, apples and other fruit for after-season use. There was
growing and storing of potatoes, turnips, onions, peppers, and other vegetables
that were not too perishable. Butchering duties were an almost daily task in the
days of no refrigeration.
Reports from another similar rancho said of the Indian women,
"four or five are occupied by grinding corn; six or seven serve in the kitchen,
and nearly a dozen are employed at sewing and spinning."41 It then is added that
there are several girls who serve the personal needs of the master.
Anyone who thinks that Witherby's Rancho Rincón del Diablo
was a sleepy little homestead doesn't know what it means to operate over fifteen
thousand acres with garden lands and orchards, from one to two thousand head of
stock, and with all the retinue of dependent help.
Anyone who thinks of The Devil's Corner as a sweet and
heavenly demesne of a virtuous Victorian country squire will find it difficult
indeed to understand Herbert Tingsten's statement in his recent book Victoria
and The Victorians:42 "At country house parties the host was often hard put
to it to know how to allot the bedrooms so that the guests who were not married
to each other could keep their nightly assignations discreetly."
All That Glitters. . .
In card games there is always the lurking possibility that
one holding a royal flush can be flushed, and that a grand slam hand can let its
bidder down.
Judge Witherby knew, and rightly, that he held a powerful
hand, but the breaks were against him. It was a grand slam all right, and he was the recipient.
In the first place, the prospects of making a fortune from
stockraising began to dry up, along with the sun-scorched once-grassy hillsides,
when a three-year drought commenced in 1855. Before ranch owners could recover
from the starvation losses of thousands of head of stock the Civil War put a
quietus on practically the whole economy of southern California.
To terrestrial travail was added terror. In 1862 a killing
epidemic of smallpox decimated work-forces as the unvaccinated Indians either
died or refused to venture beyond their own doorways. Doctors from San Diego
vaccinated hundreds of Indians in the county,43 but fear was universal. W. B.
Couts shot and killed a man for attempting to bury a person, dead
from smallpox, in the cemetery at San Luis Rey.44
Indeed, speaking of cemeteries, in the words of a Los Angeles
county journalist, the whole San Diego area was as "quiet as a village
graveyard."45 Without any attempt to make a sales profit, those who had to feed
themselves and their workers were further broken in spirit and substance by
another killing drought in 1863-65. Truly, the Day of Judgment was succeeding
Armageddon. Almost no one had money; many lost their land and all assets. In
1862 even Witherby, once well-to-do, had to borrow $1000 at interest of 1.5% per
month to see him through. From every ranchero's standpoint it could be said that
the stock market was less than bearish. It was threadbare.
The railroad rah-rahs also ended up not worth a toot. The
only rails that ever were laid during half a century between San Diego and Fort
Yuma were a few fence rails. There were steamed up puffing promoters, but no
puffing steam motors in the county's backcountry during Witherby's lifetime.
Local pro-Southerners, under the influence of national leaders like Jefferson
Davis, had wanted the transcontinental railroad along the 32nd parallel for
political reasons. San Diego's copperhead leader, and later Confederate General,
Lt. Col. John Bankhead Magruder, had been the first president of the first
railroad corporation in San Diego, and Witherby its vice president. When Civil
War threatened, Magruder and many Southern sympathizers left for the South. The
boosters who remained were left with the only steaming behemoths between the
coast and the Colorado River-over-weight Cupeños and Cahuillas in their temescal
steam baths at Warner's, Vallecitos, and other hot springs.
The envisioned improved wagon road from San Diego to San
Bernardino never got off the ground, or (more important) on it. The Mormons
discovered quickly that the distance to Los Angeles was much shorter than to San
Diego and the intervening terrain less mountainous. However, a Federal contract
for a stage line from San Diego to El Paso and San Antonio was let by the
Postmaster General in 1857. (At The Devil's Corner the proprietor's pulse must
have pitapatted). The operation started immediately, but almost as immediately
was cancelled by order of President Buchanan who had the contract switched to
his friend, Butterfield, with provision that the route by-pass San Diego on its
way to Los Angeles and San Francisco. (The pulse probably sputtered and
puttered). The original operators tried to continue for a brief period but soon
changed their main route to a road that was far south of Witherby's place; from
this they had most of their passengers ride over Cuyamaca Mountain on mule back,
thus earning for their line the term "Jackass Mail". For the man at The Devil's
Corner the whole result was as incredible as a jackass female.
Whatever happened to the Territory of Colorado, and to the
people who promoted it? They were out-dueled! Or so it seems.
At the identical time that the southern Californians were having labor
pains in the delivery of their new entity to the Fathers in
Washington, there was another area, on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains,
whose inhabitants were busily organizing a proposed new "State of Jefferson"
(1858). Like their counterparts in southern California they were making
overtures to have it enter the Union. The "Jefferson", however, was opposed as
sounding too pro-Southern by prominent Northerners, including James W. Denver, a
past Governor of the area, and thereafter a Union General.
It so happened that this same Denver had been a state senator
in California in 1852 where he killed one Edward Gilbert, the state's first
congressman, in a duel. The winner of that affair became in rapid succession
California's Secretary of State 1853-55, and his victim Gilbert's successor in
Congress, 1855-57. After that he became Governor of Kansas Territory which at
that time included practically all of the present state of Colorado. His
political influence was sufficient to enable him twice to be a candidate for President.
Denver had known at first hand all about the copperhead
activities in southern California relative to the establishment there of the
"Territory of Colorado". Politically he disliked the promoters, and didn't want
them to get their new pro-Southern state into the Union. He also had been
strongly opposed to having slavery in Kansas.
Using knowledge he had gained from extensive political
activity in California, he not only helped to block the southern Californians'
proposal, but reached for his killer weapon: Let those knocking on the doors of
Congress for a state to be called "Jefferson", he demanded, change that
unsatisfactory name to "Colorado"-and be welcomed! And as he recommended, so it
was done.46
Now there never could be a Colorado in southern California.
The whole lollypop fell off the stick, and to intensify the coup de grace,
the name of one of the leading little towns of the eastern Rockies, St.
Charles, was changed to Denver and became the state's capital.
Alas, the capital of Colorado (albeit, a different one) was
supposed to be Escondido!
The things that had glittered for Witherby turned out to be
less than gold. But, since Escondido could be neither a railroad division town,
nor a state capital, the Judge decided to create a gold mining boom town. There
had been some half successful prospecting on the rancho about 1850, and quartz
veins were known to exist. (There was a later flurry in 1894).
Miners who worked on a percentage basis were brought in and
established a typical western-type camp. In late 1859 their shaft was forty feet
into the hill. A steam engine for crushing ore was put in place. Other things
associated with miners also arrived. In 1860 Dr. McKinstry's diary noted that
three "French women" from the east got off the stage. Probably they were not the first.
Although only small amounts of gold ever received notice in
public records, some letter writers of San Diego mentioned the operation
favorably47and many golden words were poured into the ears of visitors at the
ranch. Things were so good, Witherby told his visiting judicial successor, Hon.
Benjamin I. Hayes, that he was willing to sell out at a bargain price of $30,000
so he could assuage his homesickness and return to Ohio.48
The truth is that at that identical time he made a sworn
statement to the county assessor that the total 15,500 acres with all buildings,
improvements and mining equipment, plus over a thousand head of livestock, had a
fair market value of somewhat less than $10,000.
By November, 1861 Dr. McKinstry thought so little of the
Witherby mining venture that he never mentioned it again. The Judge, himself,
pondering the matter, decided to get dead drunk.
He did.49
NOTES
1. San Diego Herald, August 20,1953, 2:1.
2. Quoted in Richard Pourade, The Silver Dons (San
Diego: Union Tribune Publishing Company, 1963).
3. Witherby File, San Diego Historical Society Library and
Manuscripts Collection (Hereinafter cited as SDHS Library).
4. U.S. Stats. at Large, March 3,1853, p. 219.
5.San Diego Herald, May 21, 1953, 2:1.
6. Ibid., April 1, 1954, 2:1; April 22, 1954, 2:2.
7. See Leland Stanford, San Diego's L.L.B., A History of Law and Justice
in San Diego County (San Diego: San Diego County Bar Association, 1968), p. 51.
8. Ibid.
9. Pourade, The Silver Dons, p. 191.
10. Minutes, San Diego County Board of Supervisors, April 7,1857.
11.Rockwell D. Hunt, "History of the California State
Division Controversy," The Annual Publications of the Historical Society
of Southern California XIII (1927), p. 41 writes: "During the first decade of
statehood the question of division came up in some form in nearly every
session of the legislature." Public assemblies were held in the three southern
counties in 1851, and the legislative sequence began in 1852.
12. Journal of the Assembly, California, 1859, pp. 564-565.
Statutes of California, Tenth session, pp. 310-311.
13.Mary Rockwood Peet, San Pasqual: A Crack in the Hills (Ramona: Ballena Press, 1973).
14. Stanford, San Diego's L.L.B., pp. 57-64.
15. Mrs. Frances Ryan, author of several treatises about
Escondido, spent many days in the office of the San Diego County Recorder
collecting photo copies of the instruments by which Witherby secured title
from the Alvarado heirs. These copies are available in the Escondido Public Library.
16. Frances Ryan, Early Days in Escondido (Escondido: Privately Printed, 1970), p. 22.
17. San Diego Herald, May 16, 1957, 2:1.
18. Ibid., September 10,1959, 2:2.
19. Leland Stanford, "San Diego's Judges of the Plains,"
The Journal of San Diego History, XV (Fall, 1969), pp. 27-32.
20.1bid.
21. San Diego Public Library, Newspaper Index, Rodeos.
22. McKinstry File, SDHS Library.
23. Judge Benjamin Hayes, Pioneer Notes From the Diaries
of Judge Benjamin Hayes, 1849-1875, ed. by Marjorie Tisdale Wolcott (Los
Angeles: Privately Printed, 1929), p. 206.
24. Elizabeth MacPhail, ed., "Early Days in San Diego: The
Memoirs of Augusta Barrett Sherman," The Journal of San Diego History,
XVIII (Fall, 1972), p. 29.
25. Harold Howard, Sacajawea (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1971). See also Stanford, San Diego's L.L.B., pp. 57, 61.
26. Winifred Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks
(Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1973).
27. Lowell John Bean, Mukat's People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
28. Howard, Sacajawea, pp. 57, 61 and Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks.
29. Ronald Willetts, Everyday Life in Ancient Crete (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1968).
30. Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks.
31. Le Roy Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, The Old Spanish Trail
(Glendale: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1954).
32. See Note 25.
33. Hafen, Old Spanish Trail, pp. 277, 280.
34. Peet, San Pascual, p. 61.
35. Catherine M. Wood, Palomar: From Tepee to Telescope (Privately Printed, 1937), p. 50.
36. Ibid.,55 and ff.
37. California Stats., 1850, pp. 408-410.
38. Hafen, Old Spanish Trail, p. 259.
39. Ibid.
40. Saddleback Ancestors, Rancho Families of Orange County, California
(Orange County, California, Genealogical Society), p. 76.
4l. Ibid.,p.90.
42. Herbert Tingsten, Victoria and the Victorians (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972).
43. Leland Stanford, "San Diego's Medico-Legal History,
1850-1900," The Journal of San Diego History, XVI (Spring 1970), p. 20.
44. Ibid. People v. Couts (Blount) File in the Office of the San Diego County Clerk.
45. Pourade, The Silver Dons, p. 264.
46. J. C. Smiley, History of Denver (1903), p. 216;
O. T. Shuck, History of the Bench and Bar of California (1901), p. 227;
and Dictionary of American Biography (1930), pp. 242-243.
47. Witherby File, SDHS Library.
48. Hayes, Pioneer Notes, p. 204.
49. McKinstry Diary, November 23,1861, SDHS Library.
