Doña Rosa’s personal household staff numbered fifty, and this of course did not include the vaqueros who did the range work—the rounding-up of cattle for branding or butchering, the breaking of horses, and the like—or the gardening staff. Her head cook was a California Indian named Jacobo, who was assisted by his half-breed wife Refugia and a crew of Chinese and Filipino kitchen assistants, all under the supervision of a Portuguese majordomo. Jacobo was locally famous for his culinary innovations. He invented potato chips long before George Crum of Saratoga Springs and was able to transform these paper-thin wafers of crisply fried potatoes into all manner of fanciful shapes—shamrocks, stars, crescents, rabbits, hearts—to amuse the children. He had a particularly magical way with roast fowl. A turkey, for example, might arrive at the table looking like a traditional Thanksgiving bird, plump and browned and basted. But when the carver cut into it, he would encounter not a single bone.
The cocina, or cookhouse, was in a separate building, to keep kitchen odors out of the main house, and so was the laundry, which, considering the size of the household at Dos Pueblos, was one of the busiest places on the ranch. This was run by Simosa, an ample Mexican woman, and a crew of local Indian helpers. Pure white Castile soap was manufactured on the premises out of tallow, rendered with wood-ash lye in a hundred-gallon iron kettle that had been salvaged from the wreck of a whaling ship.
This is not to say that imported goods were in short supply. Jacobo’s larder was supplied with curls of candied Chinese ginger, brought on ships from Cathay. Curry and chutneys came from India, and English traders brought rum-flavored coffees and Dutch bonbons filled with exotic liqueurs. There were pâtés de foie gras from France, smoked salmon from Sweden, kippered cod from Norway, peat-smoked O’Mara hams from Ireland, cashews from Brazil, pears in crème de menthe and peaches in brandy from England, and bars of maple sugar from Vermont. In the west wall of a canyon near the cookhouse, Don Nicolàs had ordered a deep cellar dug. Twice a year, freighters dropped anchor off Rancho Los Dos Pueblos to deliver huge cakes of ice that had been carved off living glaciers along the Alaskan coast. These were stored in the ice cellar, covered with sawdust and salt, and lasted even through the hottest summer months. Thus were Dos Pueblos and other ranchos like it provided with the ultimate luxury in Southern California at the time, refrigeration, as well as plenty of ice for mixed drinks. One of the lessons Doña Rosa taught her daughters was the technique by which a lady can avoid perspiring in hot weather: Hold an iced drink against the inner wrist and let the cooler blood circulate throughout the body.
The main house, or casa grande, at Dos Pueblos, was a long, rambling, one-story affair of white stucco with red-tiled roofs, surrounded by wide verandas. The principal rooms were large and high-ceilinged to accommodate the massive pieces of Spanish furniture—the long sofas, the tall mahogany chests and armoires that were favored by the rancheros and their wives. The larger pieces had been shipped from Spain around the Horn, and the smaller pieces had made their way across the Isthmus by mule train. The floors of the hacienda were of tightly packed earth, but they were covered with thick rugs from Persia. In the main dining room, fifty people could be seated in richly upholstered high-backed chairs to admire Doña Rosa’s table settings. Her silverware—the pistol-handled knives, the three-pronged forks—was of the heaviest available, and she was particularly proud of an Irish Georgian silver tea service, a family heirloom of her husband’s that was polished daily by the bare, damp palms of her Indian servants. Doña Rosa’s dinners were memorable for one special touch: Her china always matched the course being served. That is, if the course was pheasant, the dinner plates had a pheasant design; peaches would be served in bowls decorated with peaches, and so on. This seemingly endless collection of bone china had been custom-made for her in English kilns.
The hacienda at Dos Pueblos even had air-conditioning of sorts. To begin with, the adobe walls were more than two feet thick, and the terra-cotta roof tiles were designed to reflect, rather than absorb, the sun’s heat. The encircling verandas of the house shaded the windows, and all around the house, tall stands of cypress, palms, and olive trees provided further shade. Finally, every room in the house contained an earthenware olla, or water jar, sitting on a japanned tray in one of the deeply recessed windows. These jars were filled every day with cold well water by the servants, and evaporation through the porous clay helped to cool the rooms.
One wing of the house was set aside for the Den children, and this was the domain of Nicholosa, the head of the nursery, and her retinue of Indian baby-sitters. Nicholosa, in turn, was under the supervision of Doña Rosa’s personal maid, Maria de los Angeles.
Every Sunday morning, without fail, the entire family trooped off to mass, which was said either in the mission at Santa Barbara or in the family’s private chapel at the ranch. Priests frequently visited Dos Pueblos, and even occasionally—a great honor—the obispo himself, Father Alemany, journeyed south to Dos Pueblos from faraway Monterey. Sunday afternoons were invariably given over to informal family fiestas, where a freshly killed bullock would be barbecued over a hardwood coal fire, the servants turning and basting the carcass on the huge spit as it roasted. And there would be games: horse races on the beach, roping calves against a time limit, bulldogging steers, and jousting with padded sticks. The cruel sports, such as bullfights and bear fights and cockfights, which the Anglos enjoyed, were never permitted.
Music was an important part of every Spanish don’s family life, and after dinner Doña Rosa’s family gathered around her concert grand piano while she played and sang. The rancho also employed its own musicians—guitarists, cellists, mandolinists—who played during all family meals, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, seven days a week. Besides music, Doña Rosa’s other great passion was her garden. Her favorite flower was the rose of Castile, after which she had been named, and these were planted in profusion outside the hacienda, along with hollyhocks, Matilija poppies, anise, and potted Italian cypresses. Her great-granddaughter, Katherine Den Cheney Hammond of Montecito, would recall Rosa as an old lady, moving slowly through her flower beds with Pedro, her Indian head gardener, in tow, pointing to a shrub that needed trimming here, a bud that should be nipped there, and to blossoms that should be picked for the flower arrangements in the house, which she mentally arranged as she moved along to be able to tell her maids precisely what she wanted done.
Dos Pueblos also contained a twelve-acre fruit orchard. The citrus fruits—limes, oranges, lemons, and grapefruit—were used primarily in the house for decoration. Only the peaches, apricots, pomegranates, pears, olives, figs, and apples made their way to the table.
If this style of life seems remote and dreamlike, even insular, it was really not. For one thing, it was more or less duplicated at every California rancho between Monterey and San Diego. For another, despite the seeming isolation of the ranchos, perched on the edge of the continent, before telephones, railroads, and even paved roads between the East Coast and the West, the rancheros were sophisticated people for their time. By 1860, the Dens’ oldest son, Manuel, was at school in England, and in 1861 the Dens had just returned from a fourteen-month tour of Europe—and were planning a round-the-world tour—when the first cannon were fired over Fort Sumter, causing them to postpone any further travel.
Finally, the seemingly endless stream of visitors to ranchos like Dos Pueblos kept the rancheros from becoming out of touch. Because friends and relatives had to travel long distances on horseback to visit, when they came they stayed for weeks, even months. It was customary, furthermore, for a visitor—whose own horse was bound to be tired from the journey—to be presented with a new horse, as a gift, from the don. To give away a new Thoroughbred to a visitor was regarded as no more than a simple, welcoming expression of hospitality, a gesture no more important than a kiss or a handshake. The Spanish dons were notoriously indifferent to the value of money, as, indeed, they could afford to be. But the Spaniards literally treated money as though it were
a plaything. Another commonplace at ranchos such as Dos Pueblos was for a visiting guest, after being shown to his apartment, to find on his dressing table a large box filled with gold and silver coins. The guest was expected to help himself to this money, to take as much or as little as he might need during his stay for expenses. It was a custom that one might wish were still practiced in hosts’ homes today, but to a nineteenth-century Spanish doña, seeing that her guests’ quarters were supplied with boxes of money was as routine as a modern hostess seeing to it that her guest bathroom contains fresh soap and clean guest towels. This largesse was available to commercial guests as well: the dressmakers who periodically came to the rancho from Paris to measure the ladies of the house for their gowns, or the tailors and bootmakers who traveled halfway around the world from Bond Street to fit Don Nicolàs for his bespoke suits, tweeds, riding breeches, and boots.
In 1850, when California joined the Union, the dollar became the unit of currency, and paper its principal medium. The dons, whose traditional faith had been in gold and silver, found it difficult to take the new paper currency seriously at all. Outsiders were sometimes shocked to see Spanish dons light their imported Cuban cigars with ten-and twenty-dollar bills, as Don Nicolàs occasionally did. It was assumed that this was their way of flaunting their great wealth. More accurately, it was their way of showing their disdain for the new paper stuff, which they regarded as worthless anyway.
The only time that money was taken even halfway seriously was when it came to gambling. The Spanish dons, almost without exception, were great gamblers. Gambling was in their blood; it was a sport. They would bet on anything. At their great ferias, rodeos, and horse races, huge sums of money changed hands between dons—won and lost with equal cheerfulness.
Though Don Nicolàs had married a major heiress, he was by no means an idler. He was a dedicated rancher, and since their marriage in 1836, he had increased the value of Rancho Los Dos Pueblos enormously, adding to its herds of cattle, improving the quality of its beef and the price it could command at the marketplace, and adding to its stable of Thoroughbreds until they numbered more than 200, while his cattle were virtually uncountable at more than 25,000 head. By the 1860s, he had acquired the 8,875-acre Canada del Corral Rancho from an improvident Ortega cousin of his wife’s, as well as part of the 8,919-acre Tequepis grant, and was leasing 35,499 acres of the College Ranch from the Catholic Church. All told, Don Nicolàs controlled 114,000 acres of the finest ranch land in California. He had also been active in a civic sense—campaigning for better roads in California, underwriting a project to build a graded road from San Buenaventura to San Luis Obispo across the Gaviota Pass, and laying the groundwork for the famous Concord stagecoach, which would carry mail between Santa Barbara and Lompoc and other northern towns.
It was a strange and ironic twist of history, then, that the years of the Civil War, which would spell an end to the glorious age of plantations and gracious living in the South and would leave the Old South a civilization gone with the wind, should also have marked the end of the era of the rancheros in the California Southwest. But in the case of California, the villain was not a tragic war between the states. Instead, it was the farmer’s greatest and most inscrutable adversary, the weather. If it had not been for a meteorological fluke, California today might be owned entirely by perhaps thirty Spanish-American families.
Water had never created much of a problem for the rancheros. In fact, at times, there had been almost too much of it. In the winter of 1861–1862, there had been what historians still refer to as the deluge—five straight weeks of pouring rain that came flooding down through the canyons to the sea. The normally sleepy Dos Pueblos Creek became a raging avalanche of churning white water, carrying with it huge boulders and the trunks of uprooted trees; here and there a miner’s cabin, lifted from its foundation in the hills, bobbed crazily along the surface. Landslides and mudslides cascaded through the canyons and into the sea, and the sea turned brown for miles offshore. In the downpour, a number of adobe houses simply melted away, but the buildings of Rancho Los Dos Pueblos were made of sterner stuff and, fortunately, had been built on high ground. When the great rain ended, the damage to the ranch was minor. About two hundred head of cattle had been drowned, but this was a small loss to a rancher who had more cattle than he could count. The surrounding landscape, meanwhile, had gained a whole new shape. Landslides had created new canyons, ravines, and gullies, and the great Goleta Estuary, and an island within it, had become so silted in that it was now nothing but a shallow swamp.
During the spring and summer of 1862, the hills around Dos Pueblos had never been greener. The rains had brought a new layer of rich and loamy topsoil into the valleys, and it was decided that the great deluge had been a blessing to the farmers.
But by January of 1863, the normal winter rains had not come, and the hills were brown again. As the month progressed, the many little streams that fed Dos Pueblos Creek began drying up, one by one, and waterfalls that had cascaded down the canyon walls disappeared. Soon Dos Pueblos Creek itself was nothing but a series of puddles, green with algae, and the estuary that had become a swamp was now a flatland of sun-baked mud strewn with the corpses of fish and waterfowl.
By May, there had still been no rain, and a kind of awesome hush began to settle over Southern California. The heat was merciless, and the hot, debilitating winds that Californians call the Santa Anas blew in from the Mojave Desert. There were dust storms now, whirling down from the parched hills, and a temperature inversion—of the same sort that causes Southern California’s smog today—made the dust hang in the air for days, turning the sky yellow and the sun into an alien, dull-copper disk. The sunsets transformed the skies into strange, sickly colors of green and purple. The cattle moaned for food and water, and desperate ranchers went into the foothills to cut down oak trees to provide food for their starving animals. All through the summer no rains came.
Throughout Southern California, ranchers watched with dismay as one after another of their great beasts tottered forward, sank to its knees, then fell on its side and died. In the sun, their skins became dried husks of cowhide, stretched across the frameworks of their skeletons, and the dreadful stench of rotting flesh blew through the canyons on the dusty winds. Down from the mountains came the scavengers, the coyotes and the cougars and the grizzlies, and buzzards, which had never been sighted so close to the sea before. Soon the skeletons were picked clean, and the birds, too sated with carrion to fly, sat about their trophies like grim guardians of death. Next, late that summer, came an invasion of chapules, or grasshoppers, millions upon millions of insects eager to devour whatever traces of greenery were left. And the chapules were quickly followed by an epidemic of smallpox that surged through the entire state and particularly ravaged the Indian population. In Santa Barbara alone, the Indian population was reduced from twelve thousand to a mere forty. There were no more string quartets playing at mealtimes at Rancho Los Dos Pueblos now. Beyond the hacienda, Doña Rosa’s flower gardens were reduced to rows of chewed and withered stalks. The fruit and olive trees died, and even the desert-hardy palms turned brown, uprooted themselves in the dusty soil, and toppled. And what was happening at Dos Pueblos was not an isolated disaster. It was happening to every ranchero in the state. As one ranchero, Pedro Carrillo, wrote to a friend in Los Angeles about conditions in Santa Barbara County:
Everybody is broke, not a dollar to be seen, and God bless everyone if things do not change. Cattle can be bought at any price, Real Estate is not worth anything.
The chapules have taken possession of Santa Barbara, they have eat all the Barley wheat, &c., there is not a thing left by them, they cleaned me entirely out of everything and I expect if I do not move out of this Town soon, they will eat me also. Dam the Chapules.…
In a panic to sell what remained of their cattle, ranchers dropped their price to as low as $12 a head. Then it was $8 a head. Then it was $3 a head, and then it was zero. No one wanted the sick and
half-starved animals. And meanwhile, in faraway Washington, the country was too busy fighting a Civil War to pay much attention to the plight of supposedly wealthy Spanish-American ranchers in Southern California.
If the year 1863 was disastrous, 1864 was even worse. Again, no rains fell that winter, and the heat during the summer was even more severe than it had been the year before. At Dos Pueblos, the herd that had numbered as high as twenty-five thousand head in 1862 had been reduced to just forty animals by mid-1864, and it was decided at Dos Pueblos and the other big ranches that there was only one practical—and humane—recourse: wholesale slaughter of the remaining animals. Their hides could be tanned and sold. Their bones could be boiled, and the tallow extracted could be sold for glue. What remained of their flesh could be pressed into cakes called cracklings and sold for hog feed at a penny a pound. And so, with heavy hearts, this was what the ranchers set about doing, and what animals were left of their once mighty herds were systematically destroyed.
Some rains came in 1865, but it was far too late. The cattle business was dead, and never again would cattle form California’s economic base. Without their cattle, of course, the rancheros had no livelihood and no source of income. With their aristocratic nonchalance about financial matters, few of them had any savings to speak of. All they had left was their land, but what was there to do with it? The experience of the Great Drought had left most Californians leery about any sort of agricultural endeavor in the southern part of the state. Even the land seemed worthless.
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