America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

And now, into their midst descended another breed of scavenger. Down from San Francisco, the state’s financial center, came the Anglo bankers. The Anglo bankers had a solution to the ranchers’ problems. It was something that Spanish dons had never given much thought to, and it was called a mortgage. One by one, the dons began mortgaging their lands and, one by one, unable to meet their mortgage payments, they discovered that failure to pay meant foreclosure. Foreclosure, of course, could be put off by obtaining another mortgage on another land parcel. And so the inexorable process began by which the great landholdings of the Spanish families were steadily eroded and slipped out of Spanish hands into the hands of Anglos.

  This, at least, is how the descendants of the old Spanish families prefer to explain the loss of their lands today—it was the doing of the villainous Anglo moneylenders. The early Spaniards, they point out, did not fully understand what the bankers were up to, since most of the Spaniards spoke no English. (Doña Rosa de Den, for one, had never learned English; by the time the Great Drought was over she was a widow, and, having led such a pampered life, she may not have had any comprehension of why her great fortune was suddenly disappearing.) The only flaw in this charge of victimization by Anglos is that one of the most notorious moneylending firms of the day was the Spanish company of Pioche & Bayerque, in San Francisco. Pioche & Bayerque charged an interest rate of 5 percent per month, compounded monthly, and this steep charge quickly became the going rate at all the other banks.

  At the same time, independent speculators who had made money in the gold rush heard that Southern California land was selling at dirt-cheap prices and that for loaning a rancher a few hundred dollars one could, through foreclosure, end up owning several hundred acres. Thus these men began acquiring land for speculative purposes. The land-poor Spanish families just didn’t have the wherewithal to compete in this process.

  After the Civil War, too, there arrived another group that would change the demographic profile of California. Santa Barbarans today call this the Eastern Black Sheep Era. To have produced a black sheep in one’s family isn’t of much concern today, but in the Victorian age it was a serious matter indeed. Black sheep were given a certain amount of money and told to remove themselves as far away from home as possible, which meant California. Thus it was that branches of a number of prominent eastern and middle western families were established on the West Coast during the 1870s and 1880s. These include, in Santa Barbara, the Mortons (salt), Fleischmans (yeast and distilleries), Armours (meat), Hammonds (organs), and Firestones (tires), and Forbeses of Boston. Farther north, in the Carmel Valley, can be found a descendant of New York and Newport’s colorful Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish on his Palo Corona Ranch. San Francisco’s prosperous Folger family (coffee) descends from the early Folgers of Nantucket, presumably from a black sheep.

  Meanwhile, though the Great Drought drastically undermined the fortunes of the founding Spanish families, their properties had been seriously under attack prior to 1864. When California became a state, the Spanish landholders had been assured that their rights to the lands granted by the Spanish king would be completely respected. In theory, at least, it was all very clear-cut. In fact, in the bureaucratic tangle of creating a new state, it turned out to be all very complicated. Part of the problem was that the early land grants were very loosely worded. A man’s property, for instance, might be described as extending “from the side of the mountain” to “the willow grove,” and thence to “the big oak,” and from there to “the bank of the creek.” These demarcations had been perfectly clear to the early settlers, but over the years these landmarks had altered and in many cases had disappeared. Furthermore, many of the land grants described acreages in numbers that were probably guesswork, with the notation “mas o menos” (more or less) at the end. The new American bureaucracy insisted on surveyorly precision, which was almost impossible. The early rancheros had let their cattle roam freely, unfenced, relying on their brand markings—and each other’s honor—to distinguish one man’s cattle from another’s. The new bureaucracy felt that properties should be properly separated by fences. It wasn’t enough for a rancher to say that he “knew” which tract of land belonged to him and which belonged to his neighbor. Now he had to prove it, which meant that a rancher had to take his claim to an Anglo court in order to defend it.

  This in itself was a hardship. Not only did a rancher have to employ a lawyer, he in most cases also had to hire an interpreter, since most of the land-grant owners, like Doña Rosa, spoke only Spanish. In court disputes between English and non-English-speaking claimants, the issue frequently became racial. It was a matter of “Spaniards” versus “real Americans,” “Mexicans” versus “Yankees,” olive skin versus white skin. In a judicial system dominated by Anglos, the decisions handed down often went against the “ignorant Mexican.”

  To complicate things further, in his final days as California’s last colonial governor, Pio Pico had handed out land grants indiscriminately in return for bribes, feathering his nest for retirement from public life. Some of these grants were deemed legitimate. But, at the same time, other less scrupulous types, seeing what Señor Pico was doing, did a lively business selling forged land grants over Pico’s forged signature. Some of the forgeries were obvious, but others were less so, and once again it was up to California’s courts of law to decide which were which. The courts became clogged with land-grant cases, and the cases dragged on and on. Many of them were still in court when the Great Drought came—and the great hush fell over the ranchos.

  Finally, there was the tricky matter of water and mineral rights, of which the early grants made no mention. Don Nicolàs Den suspected that there were deposits of oil beneath some of his land, and he was right.

  Considering all this, it is astonishing that any of California’s earliest Spanish aristocracy should have been able to hold on to any of their land at all, and yet, miraculously, some did—if not to all of it, at least to some of it. Bernardo Yorba is a handsome, dark-haired, olive-skinned man in his fifties who still speaks with a trace of a Spanish accent and who has made quite a lot of money in Southern California real estate. He is the great-great-grandson of Don José Antonio Yorba, who came in the original party with Gaspar de Portolá and Father Serra in 1769. His cousins are Peraltas, Carrillos, Sepulvedas, Serranos, and a great many other Yorbas, since his great-grandfather, also named Bernardo, sired twenty-three children. Fecundity being a Yorba family tradition, the present-day Bernardo Yorba is the father of ten. In addition to the family’s paternity record, Bernardo Yorba is proud of the fact that his estate in the Santa Ana Canyon, outside Anaheim, stands on part of the original land granted to his great-great-grandfather by the Spanish king. This was sixty-two thousand acres, mas o menos, which Don José Yorba christened Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana and which was large enough to permit the don to ride twenty miles in any direction and not leave his own property. Much of the Yorba land was lost after the Great Drought, scooped up by a canny Scotsman named James Irvine who was putting together his vast Irvine Ranch. But the family held on to some of it, turned from cattle raising to citrus growing, and prospered raising the crop for which Orange County is named. Bernardo Yorba still has orange trees on his property—“but only enough to squeeze into my vodka,” he says with a wink.

  Bernardo Yorba still speaks bitterly about the Anglo bankers who moved in “like buzzards on a kill,” tempted his forebears with mortgages in their time of need, and then, when they could not pay them off, ruthlessly foreclosed and evicted them. He also deplores the fact that so much of the land that once belonged to hardworking rancheros has ended up the property of the U.S. government. “The government does nothing with it, nada. That land could be made productive, but the government just lets it sit there,” he says. But he is at all times fiercely proud of his Spanish heritage. “Of course we form an aristocracy here,” he says. “Spain’s is an ancient culture and civilization—much older than the English. Dios mio, in cities like Cordoba and Granada and Seville
they had indoor plumbing and flush toilets in the fifteenth century, when Londoners were still throwing their slops into the streets!”

  Don Bernardo, as his family and friends still call him, is also proud of his Mexican ancestry. “My mother used to say, ‘We’re Spanish, not Mexican,’” he says. “It was sort of a snobby thing with her, as though being a Mexican was somehow an inferior thing to be. But we came up to California, on horseback, from Mexico. When people ask me, I say I’m a Mexican. The Mexicans are a proud, hardworking people, with a culture even older than the Spanish. Look at the color of my skin—don’t you suppose there’s the blood of some old Indio or mestizo in me from way back? Of course there is. We’re an aristocracy because we descend from a superior people. Look at the way my ancestors treated the native Indians when we first came to California—much better than the English, Scotch, and Dutch settlers did back East. We tried to convert them to Catholicism, yes. But that was an effort at assimilation, as a way to lift them up to our level of culture. We didn’t go out and massacre them, or try to turn them into slaves, or herd them onto reservations the way the Yankees did.”

  Because of his loyalty to Mexico, Bernardo Yorba is the only American member of the Congress of Charros, a patriotic-historic Mexican equestrian group that, in traditional charro garb, demonstrates precision horsemanship at such events as the Rose Bowl Parade. In addition to his various enterprises—chiefly building and developing shopping centers—he is also properly civic-minded and has headed various projects to improve Orange County schools. He is executive vice-president of the children’s hospital and is a director of the Angels Stadium Corporation. “We Yorbas are still doing our share, pulling our weight,” he says. “My wife and I want to set that kind of example for our children.”

  “We families are all mixed together,” says Conchita Sepulveda Chapman Raysbrook, whose mother, Princess Pignatelli, was for many years the popular society columnist for the Los Angeles Examiner. “The members of those few original clans all married into one another’s families, which explains why so many of us are interrelated. Our family records show that we’re related to the Avila, Serrano, de la Guerra y Noriega, Verdugo, and Dominguez families—so I guess we’re all cousins somehow.” If Mrs. Raysbrook has Serrano cousins, so does Bernardo Yorba, which would probably make him and Mrs. Raysbrook cousins, though at this point neither of them could tell you how.

  But at the mention of their Dominguez cousins, the eyes of both Mr. Yorba and Mrs. Raysbrook will light up perceptibly. The Dominguezes have the honor of being not only the very first of the Spanish families to have been given a grant by Carlos III of Spain, but also of being one of a painfully short list of families who have been able to hold on to most of it. The grantee was the pioneering Don Juan José Dominguez, and that much of his original grant is still owned by his heirs is due to the tireless efforts of his great-nephew, Manuel Dominguez, who spent most of his lifetime fighting to have his family’s claim to the land recognized by the U.S. courts. In the end, he won, and his deathbed words to his large family are said to have been “Hold on to it!”

  The only trouble was that, at the time of Don Manuel’s death, the land he had secured didn’t appear to be worth much. But his heirs followed his instructions, and today the situation is quite different. The land, most of it in the South Bay area, extends on either side of the San Diego Freeway, that booming northwest-to-southeast corridor that has become so hectic with development that it threatens, in time, to turn the cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego into one contiguous, indistinguishable megalopolis. Along much of the distance, little pumps bob cheerily up and down, looking very much like ponies on a merry-go-round, pumping oil from the ground. Yes, Don Manuel was also able to secure the mineral and water rights, and many grateful Dominguezes find lovely royalty checks in their mailboxes every month. “Thank you, Don Manuel,” whisper his heirs on their way to the bank. Today, the land around what was Rancho San Pedro is selling for as much as $100,000 an acre. It will probably go higher. “Never sell—lease,” was another of Don Manuel’s parting shots. Thank you, Don Manuel.

  Profits from the family-controlled Dominguez Water Company, which started supplying water to once arid Torrance in the 1920s—opening up that city to agriculture and development—are still flowing in to this day. As they say in California, “Civilization begins at the end of the water hole.” Other Dominguez enterprises include the Carson Estate Company, the Watson Land Company, and Dominguez Properties, Inc. Though there are many Dominguez heirs to share, in varying degrees, the income from these operations, the family collectively today is worth easily a billion dollars.

  Another Spanish family that has managed to hold on to a good deal of its land is the Camarillos. The Camarillos are not to be confused with the Carrillos. The Carrillos are a true first-cabin family. The Camarillos are not quite, having arrived in California a little later. But the Camarillos had the good sense, in the 1870s, to buy Rancho Calleguas from Don José Gabriel Ruiz, the original grantee, and to turn its acreage into citrus groves and fields of beans and strawberries, which have been flourishing very profitably ever since. One of the features of Santa Barbara’s annual August Fiesta has been the sight of members of the Camarillo family, in Spanish costume, seated in silver-studded saddles astride their pure-white Camarillo horses—a special breed developed by Don Adolfo Camarillo in the 1920s. The dowager of the family today is Doña Carmen Camarillo de Jones, Don Adolfo’s daughter, a sprightly octogenarian who rode in the Santa Barbara Fiesta for sixty-three years. Many of Doña Carmen’s children and grandchildren live in the nearby town of Camarillo that has sprung up around the ranch. Asked how many of Rancho Calleguas’s original acres the Camarillo family still controls, Doña Carmen replies with aristocratic vagueness (and Spanish indifference to such mundane matters as figures), “Oh, about a thousand.” “Actually, about five thousand,” corrects her nephew, Gerald FitzGerald, who manages the properties, “among various family members. Carmen herself has about twenty-five hundred, mostly leased.”

  The town of Camarillo, like so many others in California, is growing rapidly, with a population now nudging fifty thousand, and Doña Carmen is under constant pressure to sell her land. “The developers call me up all the time and say, ‘Don’t you want to sell, Mrs. Jones?’ And I say, ‘No, I don’t. You know perfectly well I don’t.’” And that has been that.

  It often comes as a surprise to some easterners to learn that one of the oldest hereditary societies in America—older than the Colonial Dames of America, as well as both the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution—was organized in California in 1850.* This is the Society of California Pioneers, known more informally as the Pioneers Club. To join the all-male Pioneers, a prospective member must produce a male or female antecedent who set foot on California soil prior to midnight, December 31, 1849, and be able to prove it. Since 1849 was the height of the gold rush, a number of present-day Californians manage to qualify. But some very prominent others do not. Members of San Francisco’s Crocker family have applied in vain; the first Crocker was not there in time. Similarly the De Youngs, who gave San Francisco its leading newspaper, the Chronicle, as well as its De Young Museum, have been disqualified, though one De Young grandson, Michael de Young Tobin, was able to join when he produced an ancestor on the distaff side named Oliver who just made it under the magic wire. The Floods also just managed to make it by a hair, but not the Fairs, Mackays, or O’Briens. The great California publishing families—the Hearsts, Otises, and Chandlers—cannot join. Neither can most of San Francisco’s great Jewish families—the Magnins, Haases, Koshlands, Dinkelspiels, Fleischhackers, Hellmans, and Schwabachers. The Zellerbachs, on the other hand, met the deadline.

  The membership committee of the Pioneers has always been relentlessly strict. Not long ago, one applicant produced records to show that his ancestor, headed for San Francisco by ship and due to arrive within the December 31 deadline, had been delayed by a storm that forced his s
hip to drop anchor off the Farallon Islands, outside the bay. As a result, he did not arrive until the morning of January 1, 1850. Not good enough, said the committee in its rejection of the application. Even though the Farallons are part of the state, the ancestor had not set foot on California soil until after the witching hour had passed. Dropping anchor offshore did not count. Still another would-be pioneer tried another tactic. He produced documents showing that his ancestor had left New England in October 1849 and other records showing that the same man had become gainfully employed in Sacramento by mid-January 1850. That meant, he claimed, that his ancestor had to have crossed the state line some weeks earlier, within the time requirement. This argument cut no ice with the committee. Though technically enough time had passed between the eastern departure and a California arrival two or three months later, the committee pointed out that the ancestor had made his westward trek during winter months, when snows in the high Sierra would most likely have slowed him down.

  The Society of California Pioneers is headquartered in San Francisco, where it maintains a handsome clubhouse on McAllister Street, part of which is devoted to a museumlike collection of Old California artifacts, including gold and silver household utensils from the adobe haciendas of the old Spanish dons. But the society’s 1,300-odd members are scattered all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. The Pioneers considers itself a truly international assemblage, far from parochial.

  Mr. George T. Brady, Jr., of San Francisco is a small, compactly built, handsome, and dapper man in his seventies who never steps out-of-doors without donning a spotless, gray felt homburg. He is the kind of man who, even when he is not wearing one, exudes the air of sporting a small fresh flower in his buttonhole. Yes, Mr. Brady is a dandy and would be the first to concede this fact. He is also the sort of man who, in his mature years, has never missed the gala opening night of the San Francisco Opera, the city’s premier social event. Mr. Brady was raised to the music of his mother’s singing and piano playing. For opening nights, though black tie suffices for most gentlemen these days, Mr. Brady prefers to dress in full fig, in white tie and tails and a tall silk hat and immaculate white gloves, plus a crimson sash across his chest on which to display his various medals and decorations. These include honors earned as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy in both World War II and the Korean conflict, as well as the jeweled medal he is proudest of, which shows him to be a Knight Commander of the Order of Isabella Católica, an award bestowed upon him by King Juan Carlos of Spain in return for Mr. Brady’s achievements in stimulating and maintaining interest in the Spanish exploration and colonization of California.