when a colony of people from various places in the East bought some of this bench land above the Santa Ana River. Although the first plan was to go into the cultivation of the silk-worm for which there was a great enthusiasm for a year or two even to the extent of general bounties offered by the State legislature, it was not long before the town was in its characteristic groove; by the time we had moved to Los Angeles the first naval orange had fruited and the first Glenwood Inn offered a setting for hospitality,—Riverside, oranges, tourists! But I knew nothing about it. Why should I? It was far away and very small, so far in fact that its inhabitants, according to a local history, allowed a week for a trip to Los Angeles and return. At first they had to drive all the way but after a few years there was a railroad extending toward them as far as Uncle Billy Rubottom’s. And who now knows where that was? It wasn’t Pomona, which then was barely in embryo, being represented by the few settlers under the San Jose Hills on the properties belonging to the Palomares and the Vejars, and later to the Phillips. “Uncle Billy” came from Spadra Bluffs in Arkansas, and maintained a very popular way station for the Butterfield stages to which ultimately he gave the old home name, Spadra. Going on toward the city one crossed the Puente Ranch and came to El Monte, which doesn’t mean anything about mountains, but refers to the thickets of willow that even today are characteristic of the place. “The Monte” it used to be called when first it was founded, a little later than San Bernardino, by people who came in from Texas.
