USA > California > Riverside County > History of Riverside County, California > Part 3
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As in the case of the Bandini family, noted above, most of the Spanish residents of Riverside county were friendly to the Amer- icans, as were some of Anglo-Saxon ancestry who had married into
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Spanish families. After Fremont and Stockton had taken posses- sion of Los Angeles they left that city with a garrison of only fifty men in charge of Captain Gillespie. His tactless and overbearing methods aroused anew the animosity of the native Californians, who revolted and compelled him to retire with his little force to the American man-of-war at San Pedro. When the attack was made the commander sent a message to Benito D. Wilson, who was at Jurupa-now West Riverside-ordering him to join the little squad of soldiers at a military station at Chino and come to the assistance of the Americans at Los Angeles. But the Mexicans met him in force at Chino, and after a sharp skirmish took the entire party prisoners and imprisoned them for a long time at Los Angeles, where they would all have been hanged but for the energetic efforts of humane leaders among the Mexicans. They remained in prison until the Americans again captured the city.
) Louis Rubidoux, whose name is so familiarly associated with the territory upon which, a quarter of a century later, the city of Riverside was located, and for whom Mt. Rubidoux and city streets and buildings are very appropriately named, bore quite a conspicuous part in the war. When Captain Gillespie was driven out of Los Angeles he took his company to San Diego by water to reinforce the garrison there, and when General Kearney, with a battalion of American troops, was coming across New Mexico to assist in the conquest of California, he was ordered to take his company, and joining Kearney, guide the party to San Diego. Mr. Rubidoux was a member of Gillespie's company, and because of his knowledge of the country was selected to act as guide. Kearney was met near Warner's ranch, and the united forces, numbering about one hun- dred and sixty men, most of them poorly mounted and greatly worn by their long journey across the deserts of Arizona and California, were proceeding on their way in a rather straggling fashion, when, at San Pasqual, in San Diego county, they were met by a force of Mexicans under Andreas Pico. The latter were not superior in number, and were very deficient in firearms, but they were splen- did horsemen and expert with their lances, and they charged the Americans with such impetuous courage that Kearney's little force suffered severely, losing eighteen men killed, all but one of whom died of lance wounds, and as many more seriously wounded, among
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LOUIS RUBIDOUX
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the latter being Mr. Rubidoux. This action was probably the blood- iest that California saw during the war. In spite of this success the Californians subsequently retired, and Kearney's little army was allowed to reach San Diego without further molestation. This action has a local interest because of the prominent part taken in it by one so long and intimately associated with the early history of this sec- tion-who was the owner of the tract upon which the business sec- tion of Riverside is located. Mr. Rubidoux was a native of France, and, evidently something more than the rough and courageous fron- tiersman he was admitted to have been, for he was able to converse in four languages and brought with him a good library in which he took much pride, and his Spanish wife was a member of one of the oldest and wealthiest of the Santa Fe families. His brother is said to have been the founder of the city of St. Joseph, Mo., and is said to have brought to this coast some $30,000 in gold, besides horses and cattle, with which to stock his ranch. Not many years ago there remained ruins of an old adobe structure on the edge of the High- grove mesa, overlooking the river bottom, which is said to have been constructed by him as a fort for defense against the Indians. As an evidence of his standing among his contemporaries it should be men- tioned that when Los Angeles was organized as a county in 1850, Louis Rubidoux of Jurupa was elected one of the three associate justices, whose duty it was, as a "Court of Sessions," to set in operation the machinery of the new county government .; He built himself a home on what has been known in later years as the Daley ranch, and the conspicuous group of adobe ruins on the north side of the county road, a short distance west of the bridge, is all that remains of it. This neighborhood, known as Jurupa, was for many years the center of the military and social activities of a large ter- ritory. On the south side of the road, where Mr. Ables' seedling orange grove now stands, the government built a fort, covering two or three acres of ground. Within this enclosure adobe buildings were constructed and used for barracks by the force of some two hundred United States soldiers, quartered here for several years, to guard the settlers against the Indians who, at times, were very troublesome. Both the walls of the enclosure and the barracks were made of large adobe bricks, capable of withstanding bullets, and when torn down, twenty years later, to make way for orchard plant-
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ing, it was with difficulty that they could be broken and leveled. Some of these were used in constructing the farm buildings erected on the premises. In preparing the tract for farm use the plows brought up evidence that here had existed the first mill for the grind- ing of grain in the interior of Southern California. A strongly- built cement ditch had brought water for power and irrigation, and one of the two mill-stones unearthed is now used as a corner founda- tion for one of Mr. Ables' ranch buildings. Mr. Rubidoux met with an accident which made him an invalid in the last decade of his life, and because of this he was unable to prevent the waste of the wealth he had acquired, and little remains in the possession of his descen- dants, many of whom still reside in the county. He died in 1869. His widow, still kindly remembered by a few of the older citizens, remained with one of her daughters in the old home for a while, but spent the last years of her life with a married daughter at San Jacinto.
Near the river, some dozen miles or more below Riverside, there stood at one time the old ranch house of Don Juan Bandini, that worthy old Spaniard of San Diego, to whom Governor Alvarado gave, in 1840, the eleven leagues of land since known as the Jurupa rancho. This name, given the rancho and military station, was an Indian word, and is said to have been the first spoken by an old Indian chief, who greeted with it the Catholic priest who first vis- ited the spot-Jurupa meaning, so it is said, "peace and friendship," It is interesting, as illustrating the conditions existing in those early days, to quote a reference to Bandini found in Dana's work, "Two Years Before the Mast." There was a wedding in a prominent Spanish-American family at Santa Barbara, while the author was there, and he mentions the presence of Bandini as a guest, and the fact that he rode horseback from his home on the Santa Ana river to Santa Barbara to attend the festivities. The distance traveled over mountain and plain, to attend this important social function, must have been considerably more than a hundred and fifty miles.
In those days there was quite a settlement of Spanish people at Agua Mansa, in the river bottom above Jurupa. But the great flood of 1862 nearly destroyed it, as it did many other places in Southern California. It was this long-continued storm which sent a flood of water four feet deep through the town of Anaheim, in Orange county,
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although that settlement was several miles from the river channel. The rain commenced falling on the 24th of December, and for thirty days the sun showed itself but twice, and then very briefly. The resulting floods, sweeping down from the encircling mountains, drove the people of Agua Mansa from their homes, swept away many of the dwellings, destroyed the timber, and left the river bottom the wide and sandy waste it is today. For half a century at least the river channel had been narrow and straight, held in place largely by the heavy growth of cottonwood and willows, but with the destruc- tion of this protective growth the channels have since changed with nearly every severe winter storm.
James H. Roe, writing concerning the appearance of things along the river, when he came into the country in 1873, says : "Among the old buildings, until recently standing on the west side of the river, near Agua Mansa (gentle water), was the Mexican Roman Catholic church-an adobe building-in front of which, on a rude tower, was one of the old bells, made in Spain, so romantically asso- ciated with the old California missions. The Latin inscription on this bell was too much defaced to be deciphered in Riverside's time. In later years the bell had fallen from the tower, and was hung from the branch of a cottonwood tree close by. But, except in the river, which was often a roaring torrent in winter and absolutely dry in summer, the land all about was so destitute of water that it was a current joke in those days that the coyotes and jackrabbits had to carry canteens when they crossed the plains."
Aside from the Spanish grantees and their families, whose large possessions have been described, there were very few white people in the county previous to 1870, the year in which was made the first serious attempt at colonization by Americans. Benjamin Ables, who located at first at San Jacinto (in which section at that time there were hardly a half dozen American families) and who finally purchased and built upon the site of the old fort at Jurupa, says that at the time of his coming to the latter place, there were only the families of the Widow Rubidoux, Cornelius Jensen, Judge Arthur Parks, and possibly one or two others. Mr. Jensen was evidently a man of good standing, for he represented his section as supervisor of the county for many terms, and is remembered as a man of good business ability. 2
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Few citizens realize that Riverside came near being as famous in silk culture as it has finally become as the most successful and famous among the orange and lemon-growing sections of the world. Following the flood year of 1862 came the terrible drouth of '63 and '64, which practically destroyed the cattle industry of Southern Cali- fornia, and forced the great ranch owners to seek some other use for their land. Experiments were made in many directions, to find crops that it would pay to grow and therefore give value to the otherwise worthless property. Most of these resulted in failure, but one which seemed to have better chance of success than many (because the cli- matic and soil conditions were unquestionably favorable, and there was a force of Indian women who might furnish the cheap labor required) had a disastrous sequel on account of the death of the one man qualified to successfully inaugurate the business. It is because Riverside owes her location to the silk-culture craze that the story of California's experience in sericulture deserves space in this history, To encourage the silk industry the legislature in 1866 passed an act authorizing the payment of a bounty of $250 for every plantation of 5,000 mulberry trees two years old, and one of $300 for every 100,000 merchantable cocoons produced. As a result it is said that three years later there were ten million mulberry trees in the state in vari- ous stages of growth. Demands for the bounty poured in upon the commissioners in such volume that the state treasury was threat- ened with bankruptcy. At the head of the industry in the state was Louis Prevost, an educated French gentleman, who was thoroughly conversant with the business in all its details. He believed that Cali- fornia would surpass his native country in the production of silk. He established at Los Angeles an extensive nursery of mulberry trees and a cocoonery for the rearing of silk worms, and an associa- tion of leading citizens was organized for the establishment of a colony of silk weavers. Mr. Prevost and Thomas A. Garey (the latter gentleman well known afterward to Riverside orange growers as the nurseryman who introduced the Mediterranean Sweet variety of orange, and whose nursery furnished many of the trees planted here in the early years of the colony), were a committee to select a location for the proposed silk-growing colony, which was to consist of a hundred families, sixty of whom were ready to settle as soon as the location was decided upon. They decided that the soil and cli-
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mate here were far better adapted to the culture of the mulberry than any other of the southern counties. They therefore purchased 4,000 acres of the Rubidoux rancho and 1,460 acres of government land adjoining it to the eastward, and also arranged to purchase 3,169 acres of the Jurupa rancho on the east side of the river. But before all the deals were perfected Mr. Prevost died, August 16, 1869, and as his death deprived the Association of its mainspring all work stopped. The silk culture craze began to decline. The immense profits of ten or twelve hundred dollars an acre that had been made in the beginning by selling silk-worm eggs to those who had been seized by the craze had fallen off from over-production; and a fin- ishing blow was given the business when the state repealed the law granting the bounty. . Without an experienced head to manage their business the Silk Center Association decided to give up its project and offer its lands for sale on most advantageous terms; and, through the efforts of one of its members, Thomas W. Cover, who subse- quently located on government land at the junction of what is now Brockton and Jurupa avenues, and became a prominent Riverside orange grower, they soon found a buyer.
And this brings us to the era when new men came with full appreciation of the county's possibilities, and the energy and taste to evolve here an ideal civilization.
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CHAPTER II. THE COLONY DAYS By E. W. Holmes
There are few among the thousands now resident in Riverside who can fully realize the marvelous change which forty years have wrought. The treeless plain, with its frame of encircling hills, rocky and barren, and only briefly beautiful when the rains and sunshine of early springtime had awakened to life the dormant native flowers and grasses, is now perennially beautiful with its wealth of orchard and vineyard and clover fields, amid which hundreds of miles of fine shaded avenues, dustless and smooth, converge upon a business center, where tasteful public and private buildings serve all the needs of modern urban life and furnish in an exceptional degree the most desirable features of both town and country life.
When the little party of pioneers came to this coast in 1870, for the purpose of selecting a site upon which to locate a colony, only a single railway line had been built across the continent, with its ter- minus at San Francisco. From that point the only easy means of reaching the southern part of the state was by the little coast steam- ers, and even these could not enter the shallow harbor at Wilmington, and passengers and freight were taken ashore in lighters. Los An- geles at that time was a half-Mexican pueblo of a few thousand in- habitants, and Santa Barbara and San Diego the only other towns worthy of notice. San Bernardino, originally settled by the Mor- mons, was an insignificant village, and the Germans had but just started a little vine-growing colony at Anaheim.
The credit of organizing the idea, out of which grew the colony and city of Riverside, belongs to Hon. J. W. North. He was a man of restless energy and fine ability, who had previously founded the city of Northfield, Minn. During the Civil war he served as associate justice of the territory of Nevada. The document appointing him to this position is signed "A. Lincoln," in the great president's well- known handwriting, and this long adorned the walls of the law office of his son, the late John G. North, and is highly prized by the sur- viving grandchildren.
. While living in Knoxville, Tenn., Judge North conceived the
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idea of getting up a colony of people of means and intelligence to engage in semi-tropical fruit growing in Southern California. On the 17th day of March, 1870, he issued his first prospectus calling attention to his project. In this circular he stated that in connection with personal friends he was engaged in organizing a colony for settlement in Southern California, on or near the line of the pro- jected Southern Pacific railroad. The following extracts will indi- cate the character of the original plan: "Appreciating," it says, "the advantages of associated settlement, we aim to secure at least one hundred good families, who can invest $1,000 each in the pur- chase of land; while at the same time we earnestly invite all good, industrious people to join us, who can, by investing a smaller amount, contribute in any degree to the general prosperity. We do not expect to buy as much land for the same money in Southern Cali- fornia as we could obtain in the remote parts of Colorado or Wyo- ming; but we expect it will be worth more in proportion to cost, than any other land we could purchase within the United States. It will cost something more to get to California than it would to reach the states this side of the mountains; but we are very confident that the superior advantages of soil and climate will compensate us many times over for this increased expense. Experience has demonstrated that $100 invested in a colony is worth $1,000 invested in an iso- lated locality.
"We wish to form a colony of intelligent, industrious and en- terprising people, so that each one's industry will help to promote his neighbor's interests as well as his own. It is desirable, if pos- sible, that every one shall be consulted in regard to location and pur- chase; but since those who will compose the colony are now scattered from Maine to Texas, and from Georgia to Minnesota and Nevada, this seems next to impossible. For this reason it is proposed that some men of large means, who are interested in the enterprise, shall, in connection with as many as can conveniently act with them, select and purchase land sufficient for a colony of 10,000 persons. Let this be subdivided and sold to the subscribers at the lowest figure prac- ticable, after paying the expenses of purchase and subdivision. We hope in this way to arrange it so that each individual shall receive his title when he pays his money and commences in good faith to improve his property. It is also proposed to lay out a town in a convenient locality, so that as many of the subscribers as possible
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can reside in the town and enjoy all the advantages which a first- class town affords. We expect to have schools, churches, lyceum, public library, reading-room, etc., at a very early day, and we invite such people to join our colony as will esteem it a privilege to build them.
"Many who wish to join the colony have not the money in hand to defray traveling expenses and pay the full price of the land at once. We hope to make arrangements for the accommoda- tion of all such, so that they can pay part down, and balance in yearly installments with interest. Each subscriber will be allowed to pur- chase 160 acres of farming land and two town lots-or a less amount if desired. It is expected that every subscriber will reside upon and improve his property within one year of the time of subscribing, otherwise he will lose his rights as a member of the colony. We hope to make up a party of subscribers to visit California in May next and determine on a location, and it is desirable that subscribers should be well represented in that party." -
Dr. James P. Greves, one of the most prominent among the pioneer colonists, and for many years the popular postmaster of the town he had done so much towards creating, published in 1883 the following story of the search for a location: "In April, 1870, J. W. North, E. G. Brown, A. J. Twogood, the late Dr. Eastman and my- self came from the east to Los Angeles for the purpose of securing a tract of land where a colony of eastern friends might find a home, -first, as a healthful resort, and second, for the raising of semi-trop- ical fruits. Some four months were expended in endeavoring to secure a suitable tract in Los Angeles county, but without success- mainly for the reason that an abundant supply of water could not be insured. Finally, Judge North was inclined to purchase the tract known as the San Pasqual ranch (now Pasadena), containing some 1,700 acres. With this object in view, the Judge went to San Fran- cisco to make arrangements for the purchase of that tract. Soon after Thomas W. Cover called on Mr. Brown and myself and ex- pressed a wish that we would examine a tract of land in San Ber- nardino county, owned by himself and others, which had been pur- chased in 1869 for the purpose of establishing a silk culture colony. The death of the man selected as manager had compelled them to give up the project, and now they were desirous of selling the prop- erty. Mr. Cover urged us to examine the tract before we made a
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final purchase. To us, at that time, it seemed located too far inland for our use, and we declined. Mr. Cover then offered to take us to the tract free of expense. As we were temporarily at leisure, and wished to see more of Southern California, we accepted his offer. As soon as we visited this spot we were convinced as to its great value for the purpose we had in view, and immediately addressed a note to Judge North at San Francisco requesting him to make no purchase until he could personally inspect this tract. He followed our request by viewing the property, and negotiations commenced for the purchase of the same, which was completed September 14, 1870. A. J. Twogood and Dr. Eastman had in the meantime returned to their eastern homes, leaving only Judge North, Mr. Brown and myself. Dr. K. D. Shugart did not arrive until August, I think. Mr. Brown and myself visited the spot on the 24th of June, 1870. Judge North and myself first originated the idea of a colony in Knox- ville, Tenn., and the Judge issued a circular inviting others to join in the enterprise."
The land selected consisted of 8,735 acres, being the Rubidoux rancho, and the eastern end of the great Jurupa, or Stearns' rancho. The purchase price was about $3 per acre. The broad plains thus purchased for the use of the "Southern California Colony Associa- tion," as the company was named, was entirely destitute of trees, houses or improvements of any kind, except on the bottom lands of the Santa Ana river, which ran through the Rubidoux rancho, and which was covered with willows, tules and occasional clumps of cot- tonwood trees. But this bare plain was not a desert, as it has been so often called. The soil was rich and produced luxurious grasses whenever there was rainfall enough to bring them up. All the soil needed was water, and this it was now to have.
Among those who came to Riverside as settlers in its colony days-between 1870 and 1875-was James H. Roe, the full details of whose life will be found in the biographical department of this volume. He was a gentleman of versatile tastes, with a gift for lit- erary work which led him to start the first successful newspaper in the settlement. Being familiar with the men and the work of those early days, and feeling the importance of having a record kept of those times, he gathered considerable data with the intention of writing a history of Riverside. Ill health and finally death pre- vented the carrying out of his plans, but the writer has been allowed
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the use of his record in preparing this chapter regarding the colony days.
Mr. Roe says that almost immediately after Judge North com- pleted the purchase of the first 6,000 acres he moved upon the ground, accompanied or shortly followed by E. G. Brown, Dr. Greves, Dr. Eastman, Thomas W. Cover, D. C. and A. J. Twogood, L. C. Waite, T. J. Wood, J. W. Linville, David Meacham, S. O. Lovell and "Dick" Reeves. Many of these were accompanied by their families.
The man who furnished the principal part of the money needed for the purchase of the colony lands and the construction of the first irrigating canal was Hon. C. N. Felton, a wealthy California gentle- man. The company was organized in 1870, and its stockholders were: J. W. North, C. N. Felton, James P. Greves, Sanford Eastman, John C. Brodhurst, G. J. Clark, T. W. Cover, H. Hamilton, M. W. (or Bar- bara) Childs, J. H. Stewart, Dudley Pine, W. J. Linville and K. D. Shugart. The officers were: President, J. W. North; secretary, J. P. Greves; treasurer, K. D. Shugart; superintendent of canals, T. W. Cover.
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