and mountains from Salt Lake City, and purchasing a portion of the San Bernardino Ranch from the Lugos, rapidly put a large acreage under cultivation.
This ranch was owned by three young Lugos and their cousin, Diego Sepulveda, whose grand-daughter, Mrs. Florence Schoneman, tells me that they were delighted to sell and get a chance to move nearer the center of life at Los Angeles and consequently made the easiest terms with the colonists—something like $500 down and the balance to be paid after crops began to bring in returns.
Before long these thrifty settlers were shipping vegetables, flour and dairy products into Arizona and to Los Angeles, a three-day haul away. Their flour was ground in the mill built by Louis Rubidoux, who had purchased a portion of the neighboring Jurupa grant from Don Juan Bandidi, to whom the grant had been made a year or two after the time he was traveling down the coast aboard the sail ship whereon Richard H. Dana was spending his two years before the mast. Louis Rubidoux, whose name is kept in mind by the mountain that guards the entrance to the modern Riverside, was a Frenchman, a native of St. Louis, who had come into California in 1840 by way of New Mexico. He was a cultivated man and a successful rancher who later became interested in cutting up his land into smaller holdings and has the name of being the first “sub-divider” of Southern California, the one who set the fashion that has of late grown to such appalling proportions.
The beginnings of Riverside were made in 1870
