by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This evening I had the privilege of presenting reflections on some of the history of Rancho La Puente from 1776 to 1876 to the Rancho La Puente Parlor of the Native Daughters of the Golden West, an organization that installed a plaque nearly four decades ago at the Homestead commemorating the historic nature of the Workman House and La Casa Nueva and which was celebrating its 50th anniversary tonight.
The talk was organized with the America250 commemoration in mind and the thought that the first century after America’s Declaration of Independence had plenty of food for thought (an apt metaphor since the meeting was at Marie Callender’s restaurant in the City of Industry) was behind the approach.
The best-known and most essential phrase in the Declaration—”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—is also core to how we think about the impacts of this foundational document and its enormous impact, not just in our nation, but worldwide, as well as how we have measured up to or fallen short with its words.
The first seventy years of the period involved Alta California being part of a Spanish colony and then a Mexican department, followed by three decades of the early American era, so there is much to consider with respect to how that piquant phrase can be viewed during that century. Whether we look at the incursion of the Spanish in the 1760s and afterward and the effects on the indigenous people, including through the Mission system; the secularization, or closure, of the Mission; the consequences of the Mexican-American War and the Gold Rush; and more, the history of Rancho La Puente from 1776-1876, hopefully, is one that offers some notable perspectives for the period.
For most people, the year 1776 in our country really means what transpired on the other coast, with the issuing of the Declaration amid the Revolutionary War and all that it meant for American and world history. For much of that year, conditions were very challenging for the rebels and it was not at all clear that the revolt would succeed.
On this remote west coast of the continent, the Spanish colonial endeavor was just seven years in the making, beginning with the establishment of the first mission at San Diego in 1769 as well as the Portolá Expedition that made its way along the seaboard that year and the next. Part of that trip involved the crossing of the Puente Hills and the building of a bridge over San José Creek, denoted by the Reverend Juan Crespí as La Puente del Arroyo del Valle de San Miguel. And, yes, the valley was originally San Miguel!
Watching, perhaps with a mixture of apprehension and amusement, were the indigenous people of this region, whose village of Awiinga has been reported to be near El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead Museum and near the city park and high school in La Puente—the location likely depending on when the creek rose.
Crespí, tasked with identifying mission sites, chose one just to the west where the San Gabriel River cut a gap between the Puente and Montebello hills, now called the Whittier Narrows. At the west bank of the San Gabriel River, today’s Río Hondo, the missionaries Pedro Cambón and Angel Somera, founded the 4th of the 21 in the chain of missions from San Diego to Sonoma. The mission was built of tule and other relatively soft material, but flooding from the river forced a move to a higher, dryer spot within about 4 years.
Mission San Gabriel claimed all the land east to about San Bernardino, in which there were several ranchos used by the Mission fathers for grazing and farming with the indigenous people as laborers—some suggest this was a form of slavery. One of these, La Puente, appears in records in the early 1790s.
Records of La Puente under the Mission are sparse, but one item of note was a granary, a storeroom for grain, which stood on the north side of Valley Boulevard, the ruins of which could still be visited in the 1870s. Early American-period maps showed this as “Mision Cranoras” or Mision Graneros.
Why this matter is that, under a decade after secularization, or the closing of the missions, the Rowland and Workman families, recently arrived from New Mexico, settled on La Puente after John Rowland received, in March 1842, a land grant, over the vehement opposition of the padres at San Gabriel, to La Puente, totaling not quite 18,000 acres. Why Workman was not listed as an owner has always been a question, maybe connected with rumors that he was involved in a plot to assassinate New Mexico’s governor, Manuel Armijo, who sent a secret letter to California authorities warning of Rowland and Workman coming “to seduce and confuse” locals.
Three years later, however, a regrant added Workman as an official owner, with Rowland offering a rather strange excuse that he was inadvertently omitted from the original grant, and expanded the ranch to the maximum allowable under Mexican land law, nearly 49,000 acres. The massive property, the largest allowable under Mexican land law, stretched from the San Gabriel River on the west to Cal Poly Pomona at the east and from north of Interstate 10 southward to the upper reaches of the Puente Hills. The rancho was filled with thousands of cattle and horses, with Rowland and Workman conducting some small-scale farming.
At this point, it is good to stop and observe that the Rowland and Workman families were multi-ethnic. The men were American and British, the women, being from New Mexico, were almost certainly Spanish and indigenous. An interesting recent scientific article states that up to 90% of all Mexicans have some indigenous ancestry. With people of color at La Puente, information is usually very limited, but we should strive to keep searching and to continue remembering everyone who lived and worked on the rancho.
We know that Nicolasa Urioste (that is a Basque name) de Workman baptized her children, Margarita and José in the Taos Pueblo church, not the “European” church, San Francisco, in which husband William was baptized. This is very telling—especially because a granddaughter, Josephine Workman, became a major early film star under the name Princess Mona Darkfeather.
We should also remember that, through María Encarnación Martinez de Rowland, a New Mexican settlement was established on the east end of the rancho in what is now Walnut. In addition, there were untold numbers of Latino laborers working on farming, household work and ranching. Their stories have been all but forgotten, as they are so sparsely documented.
This is also true of the many indigenous people who were employed as workers by the Rowland and Workman family and who, especially, were listed in significant numbers on censuses in the Rowland household. Among the little we know about the natives includes a remark that they were said to be the reason the Workmans built, in the 1850s and 1860s, St. Nicholas’ Chapel within El Campo Santo, with the added information that Indians employed by the family earned 50 cents per day and resided in “shantees” near the Chapel and Workman House.
We should also remember the Chinese cook enumerated in the Workman household in the 1860 census. Listed only as “John Chinaman,” the 30-year old is otherwise invisible and was among only a handful of Chinese residents of the rural areas of Los Angeles County. We hold out hope that there may be some other reference to him with respect to his labor.
Then, there is the man only denoted as “Workman’s John,” who appeared three years later in tax assessment listings. To the best of our knowledge, this was John Ballard, who came to Los Angeles with his family in the late 1850s and was later a homesteader in the Santa Monica Mountains, where a mountain name was recently changed from N*!@#rhead to Ballard to affirm his humanity and that of his family, of which there are descendants in this region today.
Moreover, there were the several Black persons in the Rowland household of whom John and his second wife, Charlotte, were legal guardians. These included women and children, but the nature of “guardian” is one that has to be weighed with the fact that Charlotte Rowland was from the South and that, while slavery was illegal under the 1849 California Constitution, it is a fair question to ask what the status of these people was when they lived on the rancho.
Mexican Alta California experienced frequent internal political dissension and one of the several examples of this came in 1845 when Workman, as captain, and Rowland, as lieutenant, led an Anglo contingent of a force to help Don Pío Pico confront Governor Manuel Micheltorena at Cahuenga Pass, where Universal Studios is today. The fighting was brief and Anglos on both sides who knew each other apparently worked out a settlement so that Micheltorena, an appointee of the central government and very unpopular in California, agreed to return to México Pico became governor, not knowing he’d be the last of the Mexican period.
With Pico’s ascension and given Workman’s leadership role in the revolt, is it a surprise that the La Puente grant was amended and extended? Or that Workman and the governor’s brother, Andrés, were granted San Clemente Island and another called Bird or Alcatraces, now apparently being reconsidered as a federal prison? Or that Workman and Scotland native Hugo Reid of the Rancho Santa Anita (and married to a notable indigenous woman, Bartolomea, also known as Victoria) were granted the lands surrounded the Mission San Gabriel? One might call these “spoils of war.”
The following year, in the nation’s first imperial war, the United States invaded Mexican California and quickly seized Los Angeles, which was then retaken by the Californios amid curfews, martial law and other indignities. Rowland was captured with other Americans and Europeans at the Chino ranch (where the Boys Republic institution is today in Chino Hills) by Californios. The prisoners, eventually taken to what was eventually the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, were later freed by Workman and neighboring ranchero Ygnacio Palomares of what is now Pomona.
Workman then was something of a negotiator between the Americans and Californios in the waning days of the war, including delivering to Mission San Juan Capistrano a message from General José María Flores to Commodore Robert F. Stockton offering peace in return for a general amnesty as the Americans marched from San Diego to recapture Los Angeles. He then helped bring out the white flag of truce when Los Angeles was surrendered for the second time on 10 January 1847.
When Pico, who fled to México during the American invasion, returned the next year, he stayed with the Workmans. Rowland’s son-in-law, John Reed, who enlisted with the American Army during the late war, informed his superiors in Los Angeles. Angered by this, the garrison commander, Jonathan R. Stevenson called Workman “ever hostile to the American cause” for this.
Almost immediately following the war came the Gold Rush and, with other ranchers, Rowland and Workman cashed in due to the high demand for fresh beef. Cattle drives yielded many thousands of dollars in profit and generated wealth for the two families while the Gold Rush lasted, which was about six years or so. With their financial positions greatly enhanced, Rowland and Charlotte built a new house, the oldest standing brick building in the region, and Workman remodeled and expanded his residence and added El Campo Santo and the aforementioned chapel.
The end of the Gold Rush, the importing of better breeds of cattle from places like Texas, a national depression in 1857 and floods and drought (get ready for the super El Niño, everybody) were among the major economic concerns that took place in the decade from 1855 to 1865. It appears, however, that Rowland and Workman weathered these storms reasonably well and were probably aided by diversifying their use of La Puente with agriculture, along with keeping adequate reserves of cash to sustain them in lean economic years.
Another major issue was that the La Puente owners contended with 15 years of a claim for the ranch with the federal government, spanning from 1852 to 1867. There were substantial costs with lawyers, surveys and so on, but they were able to persevere and, because of Rowland’s persistence in hiring a Washington, D.C. attorney to pursue the claim, receive their patent from Washington, while many other ranchers, especially Spanish-speaking Californios, lost their properties during these often dark times.
This includes the period of the Civil War, the biggest test of American unity and democracy and during which, Rowland and Workman were Democrats, though whether they were in favor of the Union is unknown. We do know that the two were vice-presidents for a mass public meeting for the Democrats in Los Angeles for the 1864 presidential election. Notably, Workman’s son-in-law, a native of Massachusetts, was a Union supporter and Republican, which placed him among a decided minority in the region.
In 1867 and during their twilight years, Rowland and Workman divided La Puente, taking exact amounts of hill and valley lands. By this time, financial conditions were substantially better and Rowland and Workman increasingly shifted their use of the ranch to farming, including grains and grapes. Rowland, who was a miller in New Mexico, built the first mill in Los Angeles County in 1847 (millstones from this were later unearthed, sold to Workman’s grandson and Homestead owner Walter P. Temple and he placed them in the fountain of his La Casa Nueva residence, where they remain today) and Workman added one about two decades later. Both men had large vineyards and Workman established a winery about the time the ranch was partitioned.
Greater Los Angeles underwent its first period of substantial growth from the late 1860s through the mid 1870s and the Rowland and Workman families were experiencing significant financial success during this time. Rowland, however, stayed largely on the ranch, though he long had a vineyard in Los Angeles. In October 1873, at age 82, he died and left his large estate to his family, who gradually sold off most of their half of La Puente, although there is still a small piece on the former rancho that comprises commercial property in the City of Industry.
Workman, a partner with son-in-law Temple in business in Los Angeles and an investor in many projects as well as co-owner of the Temple and Workman bank, was blindsided when an economic panic took place in summer 1875 that exposed deep management flaws with the bank, which soon failed. Devastated and distraught, the 76-year old, fearing the erasure of 35 years of work at La Puente, took his life in May 1876, several weeks before the American centennial celebrations were held.
Hopefully, this brief review provides a decent overview of some of the history of Rancho La Puente over a century and, as we commemorate America250, perhaps its story reflects some of the themes that are part of how we mark the anniversary of American independence. For more relating to the marking of the 250th year of our nation’s founding, join us at the Homestead on Sunday, 12 July at 2 p.m. for a presentation relating to how the centennial was celebrated in 1876 and the sesquicentennial (150th) commemorated in 1926.