by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Two prior posts here have focused on the compadre relationships between the Workman and Temple family and Don Pío Pico and the Davis family, this latter including the half-American, half-Latino Joseph Davis and his wife, the indigenous woman, Venancia Peña. The compadre could literally be a godparent, which was certainly true in some of these connections, but it also involved a friendship that entailed a high level of trust and responsibility between persons.
For Pico, this was embodied in William Workman’s serving as the captain of the extranjero (American and European) contingent of the force that, in February 1845, helped Don Pío unseat Governor Manuel Micheltorena and become chief executive of the Mexican department of Alta Calfornia, as well as the close business ties the men maintained, while also living as neighboring rancheros.
With the Davis family, the ties included Joe Davis’ role as a trusted employee of F.P.F. Temple, Venancia’s friendship with Nicolasa Workman, and their daughter’s status as something of a member of the Temple family as she resided with them and helped raise their children. Notably, Davis’ mother was the elder sister of another compadre of the Workmans and Temples, Juan Matias Sánchez.
As noted here in a previous post, Sánchez was born in New Mexico, specifically Taos, where Workman resided for more than fifteen years and then migrated with his family to this area several years after the Workmans came—biographical sketches of two of Sánchez’ sons state that the year was 1848 when they arrived. When the 1850 federal census was taken, though on 12 February 1851 at Rancho La Puente because of California’s admission to the Union the previous September, Sánchez was listed in the Workman household as the “overseer” of the family’s half of La Puente.
It was just a few months later that Workman, having foreclosed in December 1850 on a $2,500 loan made to Casilda Soto de Lobo took possession of the rancho she put up as collateral, the 2,363-acre La Merced. The tract, which had a distinctive pointed western end, encompassed the Montebello Hills and the bottomlands along the Río Hondo, the original course of the San Gabriel River and bounded La Puente on the west.
Workman soon transferred La Merced to his daughter, Margarita, and her husband, F.P.F. Temple, and to Sánchez. While the Temples chose to build an adobe house several hundred yards east of the river and their third son, William, was born on the ranch at the end of May 1851, Sánchez occupied Lobo’s adobe residence, built on a bluff to the west of the Río Hondo, a short distance to the southeast—later, he added a wing which created a L-shaped structure, a shape that the Temples also utilized.
Yet, on 26 September 1850, seventeen days after statehood and just a few months before the Lobo foreclosure, Workman executed his own loan agreement with Sánchez and the original document is the featured object from the Museum’s collection for this post. Why this was done is not stipulated, but this is what was agreed to by the compadres, with F.P.F. Temple as witness:
It is hereby stated that Julian Workman is indebted to Don Juan Matias Sanchez for the amount of two hundred eleven and a half ounces of placer gold in Troy weight, which amount I promise and obligate myself to deliver to said Sanchez on his order at any time he requests and to be recorded at all times, signing this as my obligation at La Puente on the twenty-sixth day of the month of September of the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty.
One online source suggests that the price per ounce of gold was $20.67 and, should this be accurate, the loan was for nearly $4,400, not an insubstantial amount of money. One possibility for Workman’s borrowing from Sánchez is that he was about the embark, in late winter 1851, for his only return visit home to England, where he spent a good deal of time with a sister and brother and visited the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, not returning until late summer 1852.
Whatever the reason, the loan was paid back, as recorded on the document in four installments, though not on a schedule. On 7 February 1852, while Workman was still in England, it was recorded at La Puente under Sánchez’ signature, that he received 1,500 pesos in silver, presumably from Temple.
In March 1853, again at La Puente, Sánchez acknowledged that, “on account of this obligation, in addition to the thousand and five hundred pesos above, five hundred pesos are expressly received, being for the entire sum of two thousand pesos that I have received.” On another unspecified date that month, the lender subscribed that,
[A] sum [was] delivered by Don Julian Workman to Doña Casilda Soto to my account and I am satisfied, the amount being 825 pesos.
This, of course, is interesting in that is ties the former owner of La Merced to one of its current proprietors. Lastly, on 25 January 1854 at Misión Vieja (Old Mission), the name of the community in which La Merced was situated and referencing the fact that the Mission San Gabriel was originally located, though just for a few years in the 1770s, Sánchez attested that he “receives from Don Francisco P.F. Temple the amount of Five Hundred and Fifty-Nine Pesos in current currency, as stated in the aforementioned document.”
Below this was the calculation of those four payments as 3,384 pesos and inscribed on a folded panel is “Julian workman’s obligation in favor of Juan M. Sanchez, Sept. 26th 1850” as well as the word “Cancelado” or “Canceled” to denote that the loan was, after about three years and three months, paid off in full.
The document is a testament to that compadre relationship, with close friends willing to lend money when needed, but the transaction was still subject to a documented and formalized accounting of repayment. A quarter century later, under far different circumstances, another manifestation of the connection between Sánchez, Workman and Temple involved a financial transaction of enormous consequence and ramification.
Before concluding with that, though, let’s share some more of the history of Sánchez, whose fortunes were very much tied to his compadres, but who, undoubtedly, possessed a high degree of acumen as a rancher and farmer. We can discern this through the 1860 census, which not only listed him and his family at their residence and included his self-declared wealth of $16,000, equally divided among real estate and personal property, but through the agricultural census that showed what he was raising on his half of La Merced.
The fact, too, that there were nineteen persons in the Sánchez household was notable, a reflection of both his status as a well-to-do ranchero and his family ties. Juan Matias was listed with his wife, Luisa Archuleta (theirs was a common-law marriage with a formal ceremony conducted in 1872) and their three sons and a daughter, aged two to eight years.
Listed next was “Venancia,” as a 25-year old Indian servant, this being the aforementioned Venancia Peña (though Joseph Davis was evidently away), and her four children, two sons and two daughters also denoted as indigenous and aged two to eight years. Then there was another native servant, 30-year old Cesaria, and day laborer Juan A. “Orethus,” possibly “Olivas” and two children.
Finally, there were four male laborers, including 20-year-old “Sunard Ortesa,” the last name likely “Ortega”, Juan Parra, also age 20, and 50-year old Rafael Francis, whose surname probably was Francisco (you’re likely getting the idea how badly census taker James McManus mangled Spanish-language names throughout his work!).
The last of the quartet was Rafael “Vasa,” or Basye, whose mother was Sánchez’ siser and whose father, as was the case with many Anglos who settled in New Mexico, like Workman, was previously in Missouri. In 1869, Basye built an adobe house on La Merced, roughly between his uncle and the Temples and which has been featured here in a prior post with notable ties to the Temple family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, his daughter Rafaela was briefly married to Charles, the son of Margarita Workman and F.P.F. Temple, resulting in a tragic death and feud, also chronicled here.
With regard to the agricultural census, it shows that Sánchez had 500 improved and 2,000 unimproved acres, this larger total than at La Merced being because he’d expanded his holdings to include the Rancho Potrero Grande, situated to the north, and which was one of the earliest confirmed land grants under the federal claims act passed in 1851. The patent for Potrero Grande was issued in 1859, whereas the average time for adjudicating claims was seventeen years.
The declared cash value for this 2,500 acres was $8,000, while $800 was determined to be the worth of farming machinery and implements. Don Juan Matias’ livestock was valued at $3,000 and included 150 horses, 40 milk cows, eight oxen, and 600 sheep—notably there were no cattle listed—and 700 pounds of wool were on hand.
As for farming, there were 500 bushels of wheat and of corn, along with 100 of barley. Lastly, the value of slaughtered animals was deemed to be $800. For those listed in the El Monte Township, Sánchez was about on par with his fellow La Merced owner Temple, though the latter did not report any agricultural produce while having more valuable land. Workman and his La Puente co-owner, with their massive landholdings, were at levels of wealth far beyond others in the township.
By 1870, when greater Los Angeles was in the early stages of its first boom and land values were climbing, Sánchez declared a real estate value of $30,000 and that of personal property at $15,000, a substantial estate by any standard. His skills as a rancher and farmer continued in evidence, but, unlike his compadres, Workman and Temple, he stayed tied to the land while they ventured into the risky world of speculative business, including banking.
Consequently, he was very rarely mentioned in the Los Angeles press, aside from being called to a Grand Jury pool in 1855 and references to his Potrero Grande claim and confirmation. While his friends rose to be the two wealthiest individuals in the county by the mid-1870s, Sánchez was almost certainly shaken by the death of his wife, Luisa, in April 1875.
Perhaps this weighed heavily in his mind, along with the sudden downturn in the economy four months later, as a silver mine stock bubble crashed in San Francisco and the panic followed telegraph wires to Los Angeles. The bank owned by his compadres sought to stave off a potentially fatal run by depositors by closing for thirty days while F.P.F. Temple spent a good deal of time in San Francisco seeking a loan to keep the bank from failing.
There was only one capitalist willing to loan to the stricken institution and, as the prior post linked to above, noted, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who’d acquired the Rancho Santa Anita in the spring and then prevailed on Temple, Workman and Lewis Wolfskill to sell the western two-thirds of the adjacent Rancho San Francisquito in October, agreed to provide funds to the Temple and Workman bank—but with a enormously consequential condition in that Sánchez had to pledge his half of La Merced as collateral for the loan.
That 1851 deed from Workman to Temple and Sánchez, it turned out, was not recorded until Baldwin insisted on Sánchez including his half of La Merced as security for the loan. Angel City merchant Harris Newmark remembered in his 1916 memoir how Sánchez came to him agonizing about what to do with the Baldwin ultimatum. While Newmark counseled him to refuse, Sánchez ultimately did what a compadre would be expected to do for his friends, so he agreed.
The bank reopened in early December, but depositor confidence was beyond salvaging and the borrowed funds were withdrawn at a brisk pace. Despite more money forwarded by Baldwin, nothing could prevent the inevitable and Temple and Workman closed on 13 January 1876. Desperate to do whatever he could to avoid what he was convinced would be the entire loss of his once-substantial landholdings at La Merced and Potrero Grande, Sánchez turned to litigation, filing suits against Temple and Baldwin, probably to claim that his inclusion in the loan was somehow legally flawed and faulty.
Foreclosure was forestalled for three years as Baldwin allowed interest to rise so that the loan could not be repaid, but, when he did file to take possession of tens of thousands of acres, he made a deal, as with the Temples, by which Sánchez could keep his home and 200 acres, though only until his death.
That was under a decade later, as Sánchez died on 11 November 1885 at age 77. He’d married, several years before, 23-year old Matilda Bojorquez and had three more children by her and appears to have kept vigorous and active until near the end of his life. After her death at a young age in the early 1890s, the house went through a series of other owners, including real estate figure Edwin G. Hart and oil producer William B. Scott, whose children donated the Soto-Sánchez Adobe to the City of Montebello, which continues to own the landmark and preserve the history of its owners, including Sánchez.
This loan document is a very interesting one as an example of how the compadres Workman and Sánchez transacted personal business, but its foreshadowing of events twenty-five years later is also striking.
As noted in the post, the deed transfer of William Workman’s Rancho La Merced to Juan Matias Sanchez and F.P.F. Temple was never officially recorded, and this transfer was forced by Baldwin as part of the loan agreement. What I don’t understand is, if the transfer was unrecorded and the rancho would have still remained under Workman’s name, why did Baldwin need to insist on recording it as being transferred, complicating the legal process unnecessarily?
Hi Larry, great question; it can be assumed that he was seeking a clean legal status for La Merced as he no doubt saw his loan as a far less expensive way to acquire tens of thousands of acres than a usual purchase. The land claim for La Merced was under the names of Sánchez and Temple and they paid property taxes on it all those years, as well, so his demand was likely to make his acquisition easier when it came time to foreclose. Does this make sense?
Thank you, Paul. Yes, it certainly makes more sense if the land claim for Rancho La Merced with the federal government had been submitted by Temple and Sanchez, and land titles were so granted. This, however, reveals another possible flaw in the government’s handling of the matter – failing to properly review the qualifications of the rancho’s ownership. Instead, they proceeded the whole thing based solely on two “unrecorded” trust deeds, which outlined the transactions between the lenders, Temple and Sanchez, and the debtor, William Workman – documents that were supposed to be “invalid”.
Hi Larry, Right—it seems like the focus of the land claims process was on the legitimacy of the original grant documentation, because there were many cases in which patents were issued to the grantees, not to the current owners, if the claim was initiated by the former. The fact that Sánchez and Temple occupied La Merced, paid taxes on it and so on apparently was enough for the commission, federal district court and General Land Office in Washington, D.C. That the deed to them from Workman was not recorded until three years after the patent was drawn up apparently was never brought up. We have copies of the land claim documents, however, and could look at them (though the quality of the copies are not great) and see if there was any reference to the deed.
Thanks, Paul, for the explanation. Given that tax payments and continuous residence could easily trigger Squatter’s Rights and the Homestead Act, it’s no surprise the federal commission felt justified in granting the land claim to Temple and Sanchez.