Adobe Days/Chapter 7
Chapter VII
Los Alamitos and Los Cerritos
For many reasons our choice of Los Angeles as a residence was a very happy one. In the first place it gave my father an opportunity to keep in touch with his business interests in the southern part of the state, and in the second it fulfilled two dear wishes of my mother.
It had been her desire, for years, to get away from the large ranch house at San Justo, with its crowds of people, and into a small home of her own where she could surround her children with influences and conditions that accorded with her ideals.
Again, it was joy to her to be near her two sisters, who lived on the neighboring ranches, Los Cerritos and Los Alamitos, and to her father who had recently come to Southern California.
The three families were doubly related,—Hathaway mothers and Bixby fathers, Mary and Llewellyn, Margaret and Jotham, Susan and John. I have told of my father’s marriage to Sarah Hathaway. She was always a delicate girl and lived only six years after she came west as a bride. There were no children, much to the disappointment of them both. After an interval of six years father returned to Maine and married my mother, Mary, the little sister of his 
Rancho Las Alamitos
Before this time Jotham Bixby and his family had moved from San Juan to the Cerritos ranch, bringing with them for company at the isolated home, his wife’s sister, Susan, who, in the course of time married the young cousin, John W. Bixby, newly come from Maine. They fell in love and became engaged and kept their secret right under the noses of interested friends and relatives who were planning all sorts of matrimonial alliances except the one that was planning itself—one destined to exceptional happiness.
When they married they left the Cerritos and lived in Wilmington, where they remained for several years. They moved their home to the Alamitos about the time that we came south to settle in Los Angeles.
The intimate connection of double blood-kinship and of business association made the three families seem like one and us children like brothers and sisters.
Our home in Los Angeles became the headquarters for the out-of-town relatives, and several times a week we had some of them for luncheon guests. On the other hand we of the town grasped every chance to spend a day, a week, or the long summer vacation at one of the adobes. All the festival days were shared. Cerritos claimed the Fourth of July most often, for its bare court yard offered a spot free from fire hazard. What a satisfying supply of fire-works our combined resources offered! There were torpedoes, safe for babies, fire-crackers of all sizes, double-headed Dutch men, Chinese bombs,—to make the day glorious,—and, for the exciting evening (one of the two yearly occasions when I was permitted to stay up beyond bed-time) there were pinwheels that flung out beauty from the top of the hitching post, there were dozens of roman candles with their streams of enveloping fire, and luscious shooting stars, and sky-rockets that rose majestically with a disdainful shriek as they spurned the earth and took a golden road to the sky.
Inter-family feasting at the three homes in turn marked Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day. It was the laden tree on Christmas Eve that offered the second annual escape from early bed-time rules, in itself enough to key one up to ecstacy, without the added intense joy of mysterious expectation and satisfied possession of the largesse of Santa Claus. A Christmas celebration at Cerritos when I was four stands out distinctly in my memory,—a tall, tall tree, as much as twenty feet high, judged by present standards, stood in the upper chamber whose ceiling, unlifted by an excited imagination, is about eight feet. From that tree came Isabel, my most beloved doll, a small bottle of Hoyt’s German Cologne,—how I delighted in perfume,—a small iron stove. The latter was put to a use not contemplated by the patron saint, for I am sure he did not want me to spend the whole of the following morning in duress vile in my bed, because of that stove. This is what happened. After breakfast my almost-twin cousin Harry and I, while our mothers chatted at table, re-visited the scene of the past evening’s festivities and wished to bring back some of the joy of it. Drawn curtains gave semi-darkness, candles stolen from the closet under the stairs and placed lighted in the wide window-sills gave a subdued light, and many little stubs of the gay Christmas tapers from the tree made a wonderful illumination under the bed and in the tent made by the turned-back bed clothes.
But it was the escaping fire from the paper-stuffed toy stove which stood on the sheet about the foot of the tree that made us decide to hear the clamoring for admittance of the suspicious mothers,—we had sense enough to summon help when conditions arose with which we were unable to cope. But Harry was cannier than I, for he sent me to open the door where the worried women stood, while he escaped from the far end, going down a ladder from the flat roof of the wing to the tall weeds beyond the huge wood-pile. I was apprehended and punished. He wasn’t, not being subject to the same administration of discipline as was I. Then it was that I learned that justice does not always prevail in this world.
This Christmas visit affords my earliest memories of Cerritos, although I know I had been there several times before. It was the long blissful summer when I was seven that packed my mind with vivid pictures and remembrance of joyful activity. Is not seven a peak in childhood,—old enough for self direction, young enough for thrills?
After this visit was over and we departed for nearby Los Angeles to make ourselves a new home my life went on in parallel lines, school days in town, vacation days at the ranches. I should tell of them both at the same time to be truly realistic, but the exigencies of narration make it seem better to write of the two experiences as if they were separate. So first, the ranches.
I have told at length of my birthplace, the San Justo. Although it, as well as the southern ranches, was devoted to sheep raising, there were many differences between them. The houses and gardens at San Justo were of New England type, built and developed according to the early associations of the young men. At the other ranches the homes were of adobe, old ones, handed down from an earlier period.
The locations and surrounding country also differed greatly. In the north the house stood in a valley between wooded hills, with no wide outlook. The southern houses were each placed on the brow of a mesa, with a view across a characteristic California river which might be a dangerous torrent or a strip of dry sand, according to the season of the year. The eyes could follow across flat lands, treeless, except for a few low-growing willows, to far, blue, mysterious mountains. It was a very empty land, empty of people and towns, of trees and cultivated lands.
The people on the northern ranch were but two miles from a village, with friends, a post office and a church, and San Francisco, a real city, not far away nor hard to reach. When Aunt Margaret came to Los Cerritos there was not a railroad nor a street car within five hundred miles, and Los Angeles, the small village, was sixteen miles away—by horse power, not gasoline or electricity.
However, distance did not prevent the making of good friends, and the isolation of the frontier life was broken by an occasional visit to San Francisco, one or two trips to distant Maine (Aunt Margaret traveled East on the first through sleeper to go over the new railroad), and by the coming of visitors from neighboring ranches or from away.
On one occasion the ranch welcomed for a week the officers of the flag-ship, Pensacola, anchored at San Pedro, including Admiral Thatcher, an old friend of the family, who was in command of the Pacific squadron.
Often there was unexpected company in this land of great distances and few inns. Even after my day wayfarers used occasionally to drop in, so that it was necessary to be prepared to double a meal on short notice. Liebig’s Extract of Beef many a time counteracted in soup the weakening effect of quantity-extending water. Locked up in a large tin box a ripening fruit cake awaited an emergency call for dessert, and there was always an unlimited supply of mutton and chickens.
The young people did not have time to be lonely. Uncle Jotham was engaged in building up a large sheep business and Aunt Margaret had her sister for company; she had her children and sufficient help so that she did not suffer any of the hardships that are usually associated with pioneer life. I have observed that if a woman is occupied with a young family, and of a reasonably contented disposition it makes no great difference whether the people outside her home are near or far, few or many;—there are books for spare minutes.
It may be of interest to some to know how we happened to come into Southern California, and something of the history of the ranches, Los Cerritos, “The Little Hills,” and Los Alamitos, “The Little Cottonwoods”—beautiful, lilting Spanish names, either one of which would have been preferable to the name chosen by those who bought of the ranch lands and promoted the seaside town of Long Beach. I am glad that we are free of responsibility for the choice of that prosaic name, or for the dubbing of Cerritos Hill, Signal, because of the presence on its top of a tripod used as a marker by surveyors.
When my father sailed up the western coast on the Fourth of July, 1851, the old S. S. Northerner, unseaworthy, hugged the coast, nearly wrecking herself by the way, on the rocks at Point Firmin; he, from his place on the deck looked across the mesa to Cerritos Hill, and watched the vaqueros at work with cattle, and like many a later comer, was captivated by the country and determined, if possible, sometime to possess a portion of that land. The time came in 1866, when Flint, Bixby & Co. bought from Don Juan Temple the Rancho Los Cerritos, paying him for it in San Francisco twenty thousand dollars in gold, or about seventy-five cents an acre for the twenty-seven thousand acres, without allowing anything for the fine adobe hacienda with its Italian garden. The reason that this was possible was that the owner was growing old and anxious to settle his affairs so that he might go with his family to spend the remainder of his life in Paris. Moreover, business conditions in Southern California were bad at the time, owing not only to the war depression of the country in general, but also to the disastrous drouth during the years ’62-’63 and ’63-’64, during which practically no rain fell. The raising of cattle had been up to this time the chief industry, but with the failure of vegetation thousands of them starved to death. It is told that it became necessary for the citizens of Anaheim, where their fine irrigation system kept their colony green, to use their surrounding willow hedge as a defense and post men to fight off the inrush of the famished cattle. It was the wiping out of this industry that brought about the sale of many of the large holdings of land in Southern California and was the beginning of the development of varied industries and the opening of the land for settlement.
The lands which came into the possession of our family about this time were those of Don Abel Stearns and Don Juan Temple, who were both heavy losers as the result of the drouth.
Both these men came to Los Angeles from Boston before 1830 and were among the first Americans to settle in the pueblo. They married native Californians and adapted themselves to the life of the com munity they had chosen for their home, and their names occur frequently in all accounts of early Los Angeles affairs.
They both owned city property. Stearns’s home, El Palacio, was on the site of the Baker Block, near the plaza. In 1859 he built at the rear, facing Los Angeles Street and looking down Aliso the Arcadia Block, named for his wife Arcadia de Bandini. For this building he used bricks from the first local kiln. In order to complete it he borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Michael Reese on a mortgage on the Rancho Los Alamitos, and because of his great losses of cattle during the great drouth of the sixties he was unable to repay the loan and so lost the ranch.
John Temple’s general merchandise store stood where the post office does today. In 1859, the same year that marked the building of the Arcadia Block, he built at a cost of forty thousand dollars and delivered to the city a market house surmounted by a town clock with a bell “fine toned and sonorous.” This was the court house of my childhood and its clock ordered our days. It stood where the new Los Angeles City Hall is now rising. He, with his brother, F. P. A. Temple built the fine block that marked the northern junction of Spring and Main Streets and has stood until this day of rerouting of Spring Street. By the way, the cutting out of the diagonal part of this street marks the final disappearance of the last bit of the oldest road in town, that which followed the base of the hills out to the brea pits which were the source of their roofing material. Temple Street was originally a gift of John Temple to the city, and the suggestion that its name be changed to Beverly Boulevard does not meet with the approval of those who know what this man meant to the young city. He was one of ten Americans who came to Los Angeles before 1830 and might well become the patron saint of those later men out of the east who come to develop us; for it is due to his public spirit they must trace all the land titles of the city. When after we had come under the rule of the United States it seemed advisable to survey Los Angeles the impecunious city council had no money so Temple provided the necessary three thousand to pay for the Ord Survey upon which all titles are based.
At one time he extended his operations into Mexico where he acquired lands and wealth, part of the latter due to an arrangement with the Mexican government whereby he and his son-in-law performed the functions of a mint, making the money for the government on a commission basis.
Those who are interested in seeing pictures of the don and his lady, who dreamed and built the Cerritos House and garden may find old portraits in the museum at Exposition Park.
As for the ranches, Cerritos and Alamitos, they were both part of the great grant of land made to Don Manual Nieto in 1784 by Governor Don Pedro Fages, representing the King of Spain. This grant amounted to about two hundred thousand acres which extended between the San Gabriel and Santa Ana rivers and from the sea back to the first foothills. It was the first of four grants made to retired soldiers before 1800. The second was the San Pedro to Juan Jose Dominguez and the third was the San Rafael to Jose Maria Verdugo. The fourth was beyond the Santa Ana river, the Santiago, granted to N. Grijalva and which early in the nineteenth century was divided between his two daughters, one the wife of Jose Antonio Yorba, the other of Juan Pablo Peralta. Don Antonio Maria Lugo who remembered back to 1790 is authority for this order of grants.
At the death of Don Manuel Nieto his lands were divided into four parcels for his heirs. The Rancho Santa Gertrudis, upon which Downey and Rivera now stand, went to Doña Josefa Cota de Nieto, the widow of a son; Los Alamitos, Los Coyotes and Palo Alto were the portion of Don Juan Jose Nieto, the new head of the family; Los Bolsas was the portion of Doña Catarina Ruiz, and Los Cerritos that of Doña Manuela Nieto de Cota, whose title to it was confirmed in 1834 by Governor Jose Figueroa on behalf of the Mexican government. In December, 1843, judicial possession was given John Temple, he having paid each of the twelve children of Doña Manuela the sum of two hundred and seventy-five dollars and seventy-five cents. He also paid someone twenty-five dollars for the ranch branding iron and the right to use it. I presume that this went with the ranch and was the familiar triangle with a curly tail that I knew in my childhood. Temple at once proceeded to build his house and lay out his Italian garden.
It was in 1866 when Flint, Bixby & Co. bought the Cerritos. At the time of the purchase my father’s younger brother, Jotham Bixby was made manager, and was given the privilege of buying in at any time. In 1869 a half interest was deeded him, and the ranch carried on by him and the older firm under the name of J. Bixby & Co.
When California came under United States rule there ensued much confusion as to land titles and all must be reviewed and passed upon by a specified commission. I have seen a formidable looking transcript of these proceedings in regard to Los Cerritos, copied out in long hand with many a Spencerian flourish, rolled in a red morocco leather cover and tied with blue tape, all of which went to confirm the title of the land to Don Temple.
The deed from J. Temple to Flint, Bixby & Co. and the later one of one-half interest from that firm to Jotham Bixby are in the vaults of the Bixby offices in Long Beach.
Because of the possible interest of the many thousand land holders now in Long Beach and Signal Hill I recapitulate the list of early owners of the land. The first of record is Don Manual Nieto, 1784; from him it went to his daughter Manuela de Cota and later to her twelve heirs; Don Juan Temple bought it in 1843, and Flint, Bixby & Co. in 1866, selling a half interest to Jotham Bixby in 1869. In 1880 four thousand acres of this were sold to the American Colony under the leadership of W. E. Willmore and from this beginning has gone into the ownership of an untold number. The name at first was Willmore City but was changed to Long Beach about four years later when it was bought by a group of men interested in developing it as a Chautauqua town.
The ranch was held intact for some time after its purchase by my people and used at first almost exclusively for the grazing of sheep, at one time there being as many as thirty thousand upon it. Later cattle were added, but not allowed to range at will as in the Mexican days, but confined in large fenced fields or potreros.
Just how or when Abel Stearns came into possession of the adjoining Alamitos I do not know; from time to time he bought this and adjacent land until he owned 200,000 acres lying between the San Gabriel and Santa Ana rivers and for a number of years he maintained large flocks and herds there. He built the present ranch house and used it for his country residence.
There were very neighborly relations between him and the Temples over on the adjoining ranch,—seven miles between houses meant little in those days. A friendly rivalry existed between them as to the relative speed of their horses and a race was an annual affair, the course being from Cerritos Hill to and around a post on the bluff where Alamitos Ave. in Long Beach now reaches the sea, four miles in all. Horse racing was a favorite sport of the time and many stories have come down to us, among them one of these Temple-Stearns affairs. The stake was a thousand head of cattle and was won by Beserero, Temple’s rather ungainly horse. On this occasion there was great rejoicing at Cerritos, celebrations and feasting that lasted all night.
But the great drouth of ’62-’64 ended these halcyon days. Temple sold the Cerritos, dying almost immediately afterward. Stearns lost the Alamitos to Michael Reese, the money lender of San Francisco. My uncle Jotham used to say that this Mr. Reese was famous for his excessive thrift and that he came to his end thereby. It seems that he wished to visit a certain cemetery that charged a five cents admission fee, and that he, in order to save his money, attempted to climb over the wall, but slipped and fell, breaking his neck.
Soon after the drouth the whole twenty-nine thousand acres of the Alamitos had been advertised for sale for $153, delinquent taxes, but no buyer appeared.
In the seventies it came on the market at a tempting price and young John Bixby, who was working for his cousin Jotham as ranch carpenter, and his wife Susan Hathaway coveted it. The wife had been in California for a number of years and had seen the process by which Jotham with help had been able to change from a small rancher to the prosperous manager and half owner of the Cerritos and urged her husband to make the attempt to do likewise. First he was to see the big Los Angeles banker, I. W. Hellman. He said he would go into this purchase if Jotham Bixby would; the latter said he would if Flint, Bixby would. They all would and so it came about the Alamitos was secured, Mr. Hellman owning onethird, J. Bixby & Co., another third and young John Bixby in as manager with the chance to earn his third.
This ranch, like the Cerritos, had been cattle range before it became sheep range; unlike the former it has continued to this day as a stock ranch, and although it is many years since there have been sheep it is well known for its cattle, horses, and mules. All the eastern portion of Long Beach, including Bixby Park, that famous center of annual state picnics, came from the Alamitos, and it was John Bixby himself who bought and planted the trees that now shelter the multitudes and afford foci for the gathering of the wandering inhabitants from each and every Iowa county. (There were sixty thousand of them at the last picnic, I have been told.)
Many people now familiar with Southern California have seen the old house surrounded by trees that is on the brow of a hill out on Anaheim Road beyond the Long Beach Municipal Golf Links. That is the old Alamitos Ranch house. When my uncle and aunt first went there to live it was almost a ruin, having fallen during the Reese period from the high estate it had known when it was the summer home of the lovely Arcadia de Bandini de Stearns. The only growing things about it were one small eucalyptus tree and one fair sized pepper tree.
The front room had been used as a calf-pen and the whole house was infested with rats. Uncle John told me that the first night they slept there the baby demanded a drink, and in his passage to the kitchen to secure one he counted sixteen of the rodents. The first improvement they made was to cover all the holes in baseboards and walls with portions of kerosene cans.
It was what grandfather called a “notable housewife” that undertook the rehabilitation of that wreck of a house. Gradually as the young couple got ahead improvements were made, each one to be rejoiced in and enthused about by the interested visiting relatives. I remember when certain doors were cut, when the windows were enlarged, when the first lawn went in, when two fuchsia bushes were brought from Los Angeles, (one of them is still in its place, bravely blossoming), and a rare yellow calla. Aunt Susan took care of the chickens, with the privilege of spending all her returns for books; great was the occasion when a big stuffed armed chair could be purchased for the young head of the family.
Little by little changes were made in the building itself, that added to both its comfort and its charm. One of the first was the building of a high tank with its cool house underneath which has served more than forty years for the storing of food; only recently a self-icing refrigerator has come to its aid. To supply this tank with water a busy ram down by the spring, over-hung with willows and decked with water hyacinths, steadily chug-chugged its days and nights away.
A bath room shortly followed, its installation holding the excited imagination of the children; a little later the house sprouted a wing, containing two bed ooms, “No. 1” and “No. 2,” and the moving of dining room and kitchen three times marked the expansion of the home.
The growing habits of the place persist; it is alive. Each time I go back I find some new thing, now a garden, now a modern heating plant skillfully contrived to circumvent the cellarless condition and massive walls, last of all a cactus garden boasting some imported sand to simulate a desert, but crying out for rocks and stones, which are not to be found in adobe soil.
The vision and industry of one little woman made from the dilapidated pile of mud bricks one of California’s most charming homes, whose generous hospitality, continued by her son and his wife, have made the old place widely known. It is a rare thing in this new country to find a house that has been occupied continuously by one family for almost fifty years.
In contrast to this ranch house the one at Cerritos has fallen from its high estate and is now but a shell of its old self. It has long been deserted and has been kept in repair only sufficient to prevent its meeting the fate of neglected adobes, that of melting away under the winter rains.
Little do the many people who daily pass it on their way to Long Beach dream of its former beauty, its gay and busy life.
Don Juan Temple planned and built it about 1844. For it he imported bricks from the East, shipping them around the Horn. They were used in the foundation of the house, for paving two long verandas, for marking off the garden beds, and for lining a sixty-foot well and building a large cistern.
From the northern forests of the state he obtained handhewn redwood which he used for the beams, floors and other interior woodwork, and for the twelve-foot fence about the large garden.
The walls of the house were made from the usual large slabs of sun-dried adobe, made on the spot. They were moulded in frames constructed for making nine or twelve at a time; this frame was laid on a level bit of ground and packed with clay-like mud, into which straw had been tramped by the bare feet of the Indians; when exposure to the sun had caused the shrinking away of the bricks from the wood, the frame was lifted and the slabs left for further drying out.
When I was a child there was a pit below the house, near the river where water could be obtained easily, in which I have watched the mixing of the adobe; I saw the bricks made in small quantities for purposes of repair or the building of a new wall.
The house was built with a two-storied central portion a hundred feet long, with two one-storied wings about one hundred and sixty feet in length, extending toward the river. The ends of these were joined by a high adobe wall in which there was a single gate, its heavy wooden doors being closed at night during its earlier history, but seldom during the later period.
Originally the roofs were flat and roofed in the usual Southern California fashion, first a layer of redwood planks, then a covering of sand or gravel over which was poured hot brea (asphaltum) from the open beds beyond Los Angeles. These were the same brea pits in which in recent years the remarkable discoveries of pre-historic animal bones have been made. In the days when my father and uncles first came to California there were many dangerous wild animals still at large, but fortunately the mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers, hyenas and milder camels were all safely put away in brea storage.
When the summer sun was hot on the roofs the asphalt grew so soft that we could dig it out with sticks and shape it with our fingers. Such depredations undoubtedly contributed to the unsatisfactoriness of the overhead shelter, but even without our intervention the alternate shrinking and expansion of the substance made the roof more or less like a sieve in winter. Uncle Jotham soon tired of rain inside the house in winter, no matter how much he prayed for it outside, so that very soon after he moved into the adobe he added a good old-fashioned Yankee roof to the main portion of the house. The roofs on the wings did not come until after I had learned the joy of the flat ones. Here we used to go at sunset to wait for the homecoming of the fathers, for whose returning buggies we could watch from this vantage ground. We also could see the whole sunset sky, and the lovely pink lights on far, faint Baldy.
The outside of the house, as was the custom with adobes, was kept trim with frequent coats of whitewash; the doors, window frames and slender balusters of the upper veranda railing were a soft green, like the tones on old copper. In the lower story the win dows were iron-barred, and in the outer walls of the wing, high up, were funnel-shaped holes through which guns might be shot if any necessity for defense arose.
It may be because of these features that some people have called this an old fort, but it never was one in any other sense than that a man’s house is his castle. However the use of guns was more or less free in those old frontier days and an occasion might arise when the man inside might be very glad of a chance to defend himself such as those loop holes afforded.
It was on this ranch that one of the battles at the time of the American occupation occurred. It is recorded that the Californians under Carillo here met, one night, Col. Stockton’s forces which had landed at San Pedro; the Californians, by driving back and forth in the darkness a large herd of horses, succeeded in giving the impression of a much larger force than they really had. Perhaps they were horses belonging to Don Temple and Don Stearns and to the neighboring Dominguez ranch.
The approach to the house was through the large gate in the wall that closed the patio. I think the court never was planted to any extent, the garden being on the farther side of the house. It afforded only a few locust trees, one large pink oleander and several hitching posts. There was always much going and coming here, for the ranch business involved the use of saddle horses and carriages. The animals were kept in the barns beyond, but were brought here for all family saddles or carriages. It was a sunny, friendly, busy place, much loved and frequented by the many cats and dogs. I remember also a coon that lived in a far corner for a time and some little coyotes that had been brought in from the range.
In the right wing, next the foreman’s room, was the store room, possibly more interesting because it was kept locked and only occasionally did we get access to the dried apples, the chocolate, the brown sugar and the fragrant lead foil that came in the gay boxes of Chinese tea. Many a wise mother-cat entered the fastness through the long window closed only by the iron bars where we could admire but not handle her babies.
One day I discovered a very beautiful heavy white smoke pouring out this window and hurried to find help. Father and the men who came had great difficulty in putting out the fire that had been caused by the drying-out and self-ignition of some stick phosphorous, kept for the preparation of poisoned wheat for use in the war with the squirrels who would have liked to eat up all the wheat we had raised.
Next to the store-room was a double-sized room, the usual one being square, the size of the width of the building. Here was a great chimney with a bellows and forge, and on the other side a long bench well-supplied with carpenter’s tools. One of our favorite occupations was to hunt up odd pieces of lead pipe, cut them into bits, beat them flat on the anvil and fold over into book-like shapes which we decorated with nail-prick design. I think it speaks something for the tastes of our elders that it was books we made.
Patio—Rancho Los Cerritos—1872
When Aunt Margaret had first come to the ranch to live there was no stove in the kitchen, and the first morning she went down she found her Indian boy kindling a fire by the friction of a couple of pieces of wood. The baking was done, even after the installation of a range, in a large brick oven out in the rear court, and Saturday afternoon witnessed the perfection of pies, bread, cake. Once I remember feasting on a sand-hill crane, that, too big for the kitchen stove, had been baked in this out-door oven.
I have been asked about the character of the meals and the sources of food supply at the ranches. As was customary at the time there was more served than is usual at present. At breakfast there was always eggs, or meat,—steaks, chops, sausage—potatoes, hot bread, stewed fruit, doughnuts and cheese, and coffee for some of the grown folks. Dinner came at noon and frequently began with soup, followed by a roast, potatoes, two other fresh vegetables, with pickles, olives and preserves. Salads were unknown, but we sometimes had lettuce leaves, dressed with vinegar and sugar. For dessert there were puddings or pies or cake and canned fruit, and cheese. It will surprise some of the younger folk to know that mush—either cracked wheat or oatmeal or cornmeal was a supper dish. Sometimes the main article was creamed toast, and there might be hot biscuit, with jelly or honey or jam, and perhaps cold meat, and always again doughnuts and the constant cheese—very new for some tastes and very old for others.
As for the supplies—the meat all came from the ranch. Every day a sheep was killed—occasionally a beef. Uncle John at the Alamitos built a smoke house and cured hams. There were chickens and ducks, tame and in season wild.
The staple groceries came from Los Angeles in wholesale quantities—sugar and flour in barrels, navy beans and frijoles and green coffee in sacks, the latter frequently the source of delicious odors from the kitchen oven while roasting; it was daily ground for the breakfast drink, and the sound of the little mill was almost the first indication of stirring life.
At San Justo the vegetables grew in the garden but at the southern ranches they were bought once a week from the loaded express wagon of a Chinese peddler, whose second function was to bring news and company to the faithful ranch cook and his helper. There was always a plentiful supply of vegetables and the quality was of the best. I remember hearing Aunt Susan tell that her man had brought strawberries to the door every week in the year and she had purchased them except on two January occasions when the berries were not quite ripe.
The chief beverage was water, there was some tea and coffee, never wine or other liquor, except the delicious product of the fall cider mill. Whiskey stood on the medicine shelf and I suppose sometimes afforded relief to masculine colds, or insured against possible snake bite—which never occurred.
Oranges, lemons, figs, and grapes grew in the Cerritos garden, and apples and pears in the orchards, peaches, plums, and apricots were bought from peddlers. Much fruit was canned and fresh apple sauce was constant.
The two Chinamen prepared and served three meals a day to the family, three to the regular men, put up noon lunches for those working away from the house, and at the Alamitos three more meals to the nine or ten milkers who could not eat at the same time as the other men. After this digression I return to the listing of the Cerritos rooms.
Next the kitchen came the men’s dining room, which contained a long table, covered with oil-cloth and flanked by wooden benches; the constant fragrance of mutton-stew and onions, of frijoles and strong coffee was more attractive to a hungry nose than the odors chastened for the family meals. Harry frequently ate with the men but I couldn’t. There are certain disadvantages in being a carefully brought up girl.
Following down the line of rooms in the left wing one came next upon a wood-room which was given over to many tiers of willow wood, a very necessary adjunct to a kitchen when cooking for as many as thirty people must be done with that light wood for fuel.
In the adjoining laundry, lighted only by two doors in the thick walls we could weekly watch, admire, and try to imitate the skillful sprinkling of the clothes in the approved Chinese manner,—a fine spray blown from the mouth. In those days there were no germs!
The last of the series, opening into the court-yard, was the milk room where the rows of shining pans afforded us unstinted supplies of cream both for the interesting barrel-churns and for the table,—clotted cream thick enough to spread with a knife upon hot baking powder biscuits, or a steaming baked potato. I am glad I can remember it, for there is no evidence now-a-days that such cream ever was.
A second court off to one side was formed by the row of barns, sheds, the granary, the hen houses, each offering a different chance to play. On one occasion when we had climbed the outside ladder to the high door in the granary, when it was full of wheat, we tried the difficult feat of chasing mice across the top of the huge, soft mass of grain. One small boy who was fast enough to catch a mouse by the tail had the unpleasant experience of having it turn and bury its little teeth in the back of his hand.
There was a corn crib nearer the barn and I think I must have filled my mouth at some time full of the hard yellow kernels, for otherwise how would I have acquired knowledge of certain sensations to enable me to dream from time to time that my teeth have suddenly all fallen loose into my mouth, very much over-crowding it?
Once across this court I saw a rebellious young colt who objected to being “broken,” walk magnificently on his hind legs, and it was here that Silverheel, the father of all the colts, and otherwise honored as a trotter who had won races, showed his superior intelligence, when loosed in the barn which was on fire, by dashing out, rolling in the dirt and extinguishing the blaze in his mane. It made so great an impression upon my little cousin Fanny that some time later when her apron caught at a bonfire she promptly followed his example and undoubtedly saved her life by her prompt action.
To enter the house from the court, we stepped up to the brick terrace and through a wide, low door into a short hall that opened directly opposite into the garden. In this hall was a narrow, steep stairway, under which was a fascinating closet where choice bridles and old coats and boots were kept; where there were boxes of mixed nails and bolts and screws and tacks; on the shelf forward could be found some plug tobacco, some small square bunches of California matches, some candles, and a pile of pink bar soap for use at the veranda washstand. I know yet the smell of that closet.
On the right was a door into the parlor, so low that tall Uncle John had to stoop to enter; across the hall was the spare room. All other rooms opened directly on the long outdoor corridor.
The rooms were dimly lighted because the windows were high, rather small, and, on account of the thickness of the adobe wall, deep-set; upstairs there was more light as those walls were but two-feet thick, the lower ones being about three. At the Alamitos one of the first things Aunt Susan did was to cut the windows to the floor. This was never done at Cerritos.
The parlor was a small square room with one window to the court and one to the front veranda. The walls were covered with a light flowered paper, and on them hung four steel engravings of the “Voyage of Life,” and the familiar picture of Lincoln and his son Tad. A large walnut book-case occupied one side of the room. Its drawers at the base were filled with blocks and toys for the downstairs delectation of the succession of babies in the home. A Franklin stove in one corner kept us snug and warm when the ocean chill crept inland. The furniture was covered with a maroon leather, a set exactly like the one in the office at San Justo. I associate the reading of many books with one of those comfortable, stuffed chairs, among them Two Years Before the Mast, and Oliver Twist.
At the table in the center of the room father and Uncle Jotham spent many a long evening over interminable series of cribbage, and my books are punctuated by “fifteen two, fifteen four and a run is eight.” Uncle Jotham’s convulsive shakings made his amusement visible rather than audible.
One night Nan was desperately ill with the croup and was wrapped up before the fire in this room while one of the older cousins rode in haste to Compton for the doctor. When he returned he tied his horse hurriedly in the stall in the barn, leaving too long a rope, with the result that somehow, during the night, the poor horse became entangled and was strangled to death, a hard reward to him for his successful effort to save the life of a little girl.
Another memory of this room—of a Sunday afternoon. We had all been over to camp-meeting at Gospel Swamp, not that we were much addicted to camp-meeting, but it was the only available service within reach, and of course we had to go to church on Sunday. We sat on wooden benches in the dust under the willows, not an altogether unpleasant change from the usual pew, at least for the children, and Aunt Adelaide, who was camping there for the week, took us to her tent afterward and gave us some watermelon before we drove the few miles back to the ranch. But Uncle Jotham had a more exciting aftermath. He and papa and I were reading in the parlor after dinner when suddenly he gave a tremendous jump and ran upstairs three steps at a time, where we soon heard a great noise of tramping. In a minute or two he came down with a dead lizard almost a foot long spread on his New York Tri-weekly Tribune. Evidently it had mounted his bootleg over at camp-meeting and lain dormant for a couple of hours before attempting further explorations. The first jump came when the little feet struck my uncle’s knees—harmless, but uncanny.
The usual gathering place for the family was the wide porch where the sun upon the rose vines flecked the floor with shadows. The bricks that paved this open corridor were laid in an herring-bone pattern and we often practised walking with our feet set squarely on them in order to counteract any tendency we might have to pigeon-toedness.
Beside the central door was a space in the wall held sacred and never touched at regular white-washing time. Here was kept a record of the varying heights of the family from year to year so that we could keep track of our growing prowess. Uncle John, at six feet, topped the list for his generation, but was ultimately passed by his son and two nephews.
A Mexican olla, embedded in sand in a high box, and a long handled tin dipper provided convenient drinking facilities, and a tin wash bowl, nearby, just outside the dining room door, was a peremptory invitation to clean hands for dinner.
At the other end of the porch, near grandfather’s room, was a very long, knotted, twine hammock, in which we rolled ourselves and held tight for a high swing. I had first known this hammock among the trees in the yard at Skowhegan, but it had come to California with grandfather and Aunt Martha. It had belonged to Uncle Philo Hathaway, who, in order to earn money to complete his college course at Amherst, had been cruising a year with Admiral Thatcher as his private secretary. He evidently contracted Panama fever while in Caribbean waters, for on his way home he died, and was buried at sea. The loss of this promising young man was a great grief to all who knew him but to his nephews and nieces who had come into this world after he left it, he was a very shadowy figure.
The already long veranda was extended at each end by an arbor, hung with bunches of the small mission grapes, which Harry and I were wont to squeeze in our grimy handkerchiefs over a tin cup for the purpose of making wine.
The garden spread before the porch, at least two acres, shut in from intruders and sheltered from the ocean winds by the high fence. It was laid out in three tiers of four beds, each about fifty feet square, with a wide border about the whole. They were separated by walks, edged with more of the imported brick. Near the house were flowers and shrubs, but further away grapes were planted, and oranges, pomegranates, and figs.
At the end of the rose-shaded path leading from the front door stood a summer house, bowered in the white-blossomed Madeira vine and set in a thick bed of blue-flowered periwinkle, which I never quite dared to invade, lest it harbor a snake. California children were taught never to step where they could not see. Under the seat in this little shelter were kept the mallets and balls for the croquet set. I wonder if others found the mallets attractive crutches, I believe it was as much fun playing lame as it was playing legitimate croquet.
Beyond the summer house was the large brick cistern and the old well. When Mr. Temple first made a garden he provided the necessary water by using a ram in the river below the hill. In those days there was much water below the hill for the Los Angeles and San Gabriel united their waters and poured them into the lowland from which there was no good opening into the sea. As a result the bottom lands were wooded and swampy. Then about 1860 floods came that washed open a channel into the ocean, and another great storm caused the river to divide, sending most of its water through what is now known as New River which crosses the Alamitos further east and reaches the sea some ten miles from the old mouth. These changes, together with the increased use of water for vineyards and orchards in Los Angeles, lowered the river level so Don Temple dug a well, circular, six feet in diameter, and sixty feet deep. His Indians drew the water by means of a long well-sweep. Little folk were duly impressed with the danger of the old well, but there wasn’t enough fear to prevent an occasional peering into its black depths, and the dropping of a stone that took so long to reach the water below. The empty cistern could be entered by ladders without and within and afforded a diversion from time to time.
When the Americans came the breezes of the sky were summoned to pump the water from a new well outside the fence, and prosaic pipes carried it from the tank under the windmill to all parts of the garden.
All along the fence grew locust trees, whose blossoms are like white wisteria, and at their feet bloomed the pink Castilian roses brought to California by the Spanish padres. Over beyond the croquet ground there was much anise among those roses—anise, the greenest, most feathery growing thing, and withal affording sweet seeds.
In the center of the far side, shading the small gate that led to the wool barn was a very large pepper tree into whose branches we could climb, and near it grew many lilacs. Two of the walks held little bricked islands in which towered old Italian cypresses, whose smooth, small cones my cousin George assured the younger children were bat eggs. That seemed reasonable—there must be some source for the many bats that swooped about at night.
On a certain south-east corner grew the Sweetwater grape, the first to ripen, and directly across the path from it was a curious green rose, one of the rare plants of the place. The blossoms were of the same quality as the leaves, though shaped like petals. They were not pretty, just odd. The pink roses nearby were lovely, and so were the prickly yellow Scotch roses. We loved the rich red of the Gloire de Rosamonde,—isn’t that a more attractive name than Ragged Robin, or is it after all too imposing for the friendly, familiar rose? The best one of all was the Chromatella whose great yellow buds hung over the pale green balustrade of the upper balcony, like the Marecial Niel, but larger and more perfect.
In spring, spreading beds of iris were purple with a hundred blossoms and the white ornithogalums, with their little black shoe-buttons delighted us, while, later in the year, there were masses of blue agapanthus and pink amaryllis and scarlet spikes of red-hot-poker. There were no single specimens of flowers, but always enough for us to pick without censure.
The garden did not contain even one palm tree, or a bit of cactus, nor do I remember a eucalyptus tree, a variety belonging to a later importation. There were two large bunches of pampas grass and two old century plants, which we desecrated in the usual child fashion by scratching names and pictures on the gray surface. There were no annuals.
Orange blossoms, honey-suckle, lilac, and lemon verbena, roses, oleander and heliotrope made a heaven of fragrance. For years the bees had stored their treasure in the wall of grandfather’s room, which, being a wooden addition to the house, offered a hollow space; the odor of the honey mingled with that of the old leather bindings of his books in the room, and with the flowers outside. The linnets, friendly, and twittering, built about the porch, and the swallows nested under the eaves; the ruby-throated and iridescent humming birds darted from flower to flower and built their felt-like nests in the trees, and great lazy, yellow and black butterflies floated by.
And children wandered here and played, or climbed the spreading tree for the heavy figs bursting with their garnered sweetness, or picked crimson kernels from the leathery pomegranates, or lying under the green roof of the low-spread grape vines, told fairy stories while feasting. There seemed no limit to our capacity for eating fruit, and I never knew any one to suffer. One morning at an eating race I won with thirty-two peaches, not large ones, fortunately.
Over by the wind-mill was a boggy bed of mint, and many a brew of afternoon tea it afforded us,—mint tea in the summer house, with Ying’s scalloped cookies, sparkling with sugar crystals, and our mothers for guests.
Garden Side Rancho Los Cerritos