We shall find that the God of Israel is among us when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies,when He shall make us a praise and glory.... For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God. . . we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.

John Winthrop, 1630, to the Puritans departing from old Plymouth, England, enunciating the sacred promise of reward and the divine penalty for failure to live up to that promise of the "New World."

I

Apparently, a characteristic of the self-consciousness required in becoming an organized people is the proposal of a special destiny for themselves in regard to the rest of humankind. Practically all people, as they separate themselves from the whole and form a distinct culture and nation, believe that they are special in some way or another. Often they believe that they are a particularly chosen people of their god, or of some only god.

Ancient Rome was the "Eternal City." Constantinople believed itself to be the sole possessor of the only orthodox religion. Fifteenth Century Moscow called itself "the Third Rome," the third and final destination of the one true universal faith. The Mongols under Ghengis Khan proclaimed a specialized world mission. And even the barbaric Vikings believed that at Ragnarok

their gods alone would wage war for the eventual and final triumph of good over evil.

Long years before Woodrow Wilson’s promise of a New Freedom, a later Roosevelt’s New Deal, followed by slogans and promises of a Fair Deal, a New Frontier, a Great Society, and apparently even a Great Crusade – all of which implied or promised increasing material rewards for the deserving American faithful, the idea of America, the promise of a "New World" meant something considerably different. Once upon a time a long, long time ago, the "New World" meant an opportunity to apply certain holy and sacred lessons that had been learned from a decadent secular and profane "old world."

Secular then meant the attention to the material present, the avoidance of any spiritual or historical responsibility. It meant, as a Nick Romano once expressed it, "Live fast, die young, and have good-looking corpse."

But that was not the philosophy expressed by John Winthrop, the Puritan leader. Winthrop and many of those original Puritan emigrants to America believed that a special opportunity had been presented to a newly "chosen people," perhaps for the last time in history. Thus, if we started "as a city upon a hill," with "the eyes of all people upon us," have we dealt falsely with our god? Shall we "be made a story and a byword through the world?"

All sorts of people have come to America, to what has become the United States. They have come for reasons as varied as their origins; yet, they came and they continue to come. Understandably, from the point of view of the American Indian, they no doubt all looked alike, interlopers, colonizers, conquerors . . . enemies all. Equally understandable is the belief, only occasionally expressed publicly by the historian of the countries of these peoples’ origins, that the immigrants comprise the various elements in the original society or nation that might be called the "losers." Even the black Americans, after all, descend from those Africans who, for whatever reason, got caught and sold into slavery, by other Africans, by Europeans and by Muslims.

"We always meant to thank you for that," I was told by a Swedish historian after I had asked him to explain the apparent difference between the Scandinavian-Americans’ social and political value system with that of the obvious majority of the Scandinavian peoples themselves. Some answer, "We always meant to thank you for that," the that being our willingness to absorb their malcontents, those who could not make it at home and, for whatever reason or reasons, chose to seek "freedom" in the land of the American Dream.

The United States, with its lure of this thing called the "American Dream," the real or imagined opportunity to begin again, to start over, to succeed, continues to exist. The closing decades of the 20th Century may cast certain doubts over the continued prosperity of the United States and over the rest of the so-called "developed nations. " Yet, it is to the United States that "they," the tired and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, continue to flee.

The United States itself, the major focus of the so-called "New World," was peopled by some 45 million who fled that "Old World." Thus, that so many chose to risk the thousands of miles of open sea or the hundreds of miles of parched prairie to reach California ought not to surprise us. Americans, those who began it and those who came later to people and build it, excel at fleeing "old worlds." Consider, for a moment, what the subsequent history of that "old world" might have been had they all stayed . . . stayed and fought . . . fought, not fled to an "America," to the West, to a dream of something better.

California became, then, an apogee of the "American Way"; and southern California, certainly the San Fernando Valley, for 100 years typified the American dream of escape from struggle. And even now, as the children of those children of still other children of small and private dreams start the slow, inexorable exodus out of this Valley, others to whom it still appears warm, lush and green, suburban, rural even, continue to move in. To them, it is still America.

Sometime in the mid 1970's a New Yorker Magazine cartoon depicted the Mayflower in 1620, as it approached the Plymouth Rock of the promised land. Standing in the bow of the ship, two Pilgrim fathers discussed the future, with one saying to the other, "While my primary motive for coming here is religious freedom, I later hope to get into real estate. "

A cynic might insist that real estate speculation is what the United States has always been about. Certainly, real estate speculation, the activities of the boomers and the boosters, has remained central to southern California ever since that day the lands under the control of the Church passed into hands less pious.

From 1769 to 1822, the religious and secular arms of the Spanish Empire reached into California and established 21 Missions, four presidios, or military garrisons, and three pueblos, civilian towns. Los Angeles, El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles, was established in 1781 as one of those three original pueblos. The presidios of San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco and Santa Barbara eventually developed into pueblos, joining Los Angeles, San Jose and Branciforte, across the river from the Mission at Santa Cruz. But that the "Town of the Queen of the Angels" originated as a pueblo under Spanish law that the United States later recognized as controlling in regard to water ownership created a legal, tangled and confused tale back to which we shall have several occasions to refer. But that, later.

In the San Fernando Valley, the rule of the padres lasted until 1834. In that year, with California then part of the independent Republic of Mexico, control of the Valley lands passed out of the hands of the Church. For the following 35 years of foreign invasion, war, California independence, annexation to the United States, statehood and the American Civil War, the Valley remained in the hands of the Pico and de Celis families. It is those years that are often called "the era of the old Dons."

The secularization of the California Mission lands began in 1834, and was completed two years later. The pressure toward the dispossession of the Church, or Indian, lands had been mounting even before Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1822. With that independence, the Church lost whatever support it had once had from the Spanish Crown.

The increasing population moving into California from Mexico, hungry for land, coveted the best lands, which mostly meant the Mission, or Indian lands. The demands from that population produced sufficient pressure upon a not too unwilling governor, Jose Figueroa, to issue the secularization and dispossession decree in August, 1833.

The Mission Indians were, of course, not prepared to be expelled from the Mission environment, to be unceremoniously thrown off their traditional lands. Yet they had not fared too well under the tutelage of the Franciscans in any case. Deaths at the Missions, particularly at the San Fernando Mission, regularly outnumbered births. The Mission roll records a steady and tragic decline in population.

The Mission Indians, as later writers who no longer remembered, or who never knew their original names, called them, were as certainly exterminated as any people in history have been . . . as too many have been. That the motivation behind their destruction differed from that of the Turks against the Armenians, the Anglo-Americans against the Indians of the eastern United States, the Nazis against the Gypsies and Jews, all matters little to those being destroyed. California Indians survived in direct proportion to their distance and freedom from the Missions and the Spanish civilizers. And those who survived the Spanish and Mexican periods bore the brunt of the later Anglo-American invasion of the gold fields in the 1850's. For under the Anglo-American, the California Indian fared no better.

With secularization and their dispossession, the missionized Indians mostly wandered off to one of the nearby towns, to the City of the Angels, for example, where they lived where they could, worked when they were able and, generally, simply disappeared. A few sought refuge among relatives and friends, continuing to live free among the hills and the valleys farther inland.

The San Fernando Mission never actually owned the San Fernando Valley. The function of the Missions, under Spanish colonization policy, was to hold the land while utilizing it to civilize and Christianize the Indians. Once this was accomplished, the land was to revert to regular secular control and administration and come under the usual Spanish laws and practices in regard to pueblos. In the eyes of the Spanish and later Mexican governments, the Church operated the land as trustees, through the Missions, for the benefit of the Indians.

But "for the benefit of the Indians" did not mean that the Indian owned the land either. First, the Indian had no rights whatsoever in land, or in much else, for that matter, until they became subjects of the Spanish crown. Then, as Christians and Spanish subjects, they came under the same laws, rules, regulations and customs as all others who worked for and served their Spanish masters.

The "Era of the Dons" originated with the secularization of the vast Mission lands which were carved up to become the great ranchos of California legend. Among others throughout the state, the Pico brothers enter the historic record as men of immense and lavish hospitality, operating from their baronial estates, and, as in the case of Andres, with his home in the San Fernando Valley, a landed domain that would have rivaled many an "old world" fiefdom.

That these "Dons" later lost out to the even more experienced and aggressive Anglo-American, after the conquest of the northern Mexico lands by the United States, should surprise only the more naive. The Anglo-Americans, with the support and backing of their government and its law of title, their culture, their practices of taxes, loans and mortgage payments, slowly and steadily became the new masters of the land.

To later and more dispassionate observers, the change in power from the "Dons" to that of the Anglo-American contains a bit of what poets in simpler times called " justice." When the old mobs in Chicago fought over neighborhoods, when a Clark Street garage became memorialized by a St. Valentine's Day massacre, who among the working people cared? How little the Indians benefited by the alterations in political and power arrangements about which they knew nothing, and were only going to be the losers, in any case, is clear.

The California Indian population in 1900 had declined to about 15,000. When what is often called civilization first thrust itself upon this near ecotone island, some 300,000 people lived here. Thus, from about 1769 to 1900, a mere 131 years, a 95% reduction in the native population occurred. By many modern standards, that length of time for the effected result might indicate a lack of proper incentive or productivity, but, all things and the times considered, it was not a bad job.

During one of the many struggles between the Mexicans in the north of California and those in the south for the control of the province, the little known Battle of Cahuenga took place. In February, 1845, two small armies of about 400 each met at the southern edge of the Valley near Cahuenga Pass. One side had three small cannons; the other side, two. After a half day's shooting at each other, the casualties amounted to two horses killed on one side and a mule wounded on the other.

Apparently that was enough. The northern forces led by Governor Micheltorena capitulated. As a result of his victory in the "Bloodless Battle of Cahuenga," Pio Pico became the new governor of California, with Los Angeles as the new capital. Aside from the already traditional rivalry between the northern and southern portions of California, this particular revolt, led by the Pico brothers, had real estate as a motive.

Shortly after assuming his position as governor, Pico set into motion the final leasing and sale of the Missions. The San Fernando Mission was leased for a period of nine years at a rate of $1,120 per year to Pico's brother, Andres, and Juan Manso.

Micheltorena had attempted to restore the Mission Lands to the care and control of the Padres and their Indian charges. It may have been a well-intentioned plan, but its time had passed. Not only were there only eight Padres left in California, but many of the Indians had either been forced off the land by those leasing the Missions, or they had simply left. It was also too late to stop the hunger for those vast lands and those great herds of cattle.

With the cattle industry of Spanish and Mexican California as the primary source of wealth and income, the southern portion of the territory, including the San Fernando Valley, soon became known as the "cow counties."

The market and cash value of the great cattle herds came primarily from the sale of hides and tallow to the enterprising English and New England traders who braved the long voyage around South America to the coast and harbors of California. While the meat could be used locally, particularly among the soldiers and their families that garrisoned the presidios, the hides and tallow brought cash into a money-starved economy. And money purchased the imports, the amenities, from Spain and Mexico.

The meat of the cattle was cut into strips, dried and stored for later use. The fat was cooked down into a semi-liquid gelatinous mass called tallow and stored in bota bags for later use in cooking and flavoring of various dishes. The stripping of this cattle fat, its cooking and storing were among the least desirable jobs on the Missions and ranchos. It was a greasy job and, of course, the Indians did these tasks. Apparently the later derogatory term of "greaser" originated this way. Then, as the poorer of the Mexican immigrants to California slowly displaced the vanishing Indian, the term was simply applied to them.

The American Indian, of course, did not possess the horse until the coming of the Spanish. And originally, the Spanish attempted to prevent the Indians from acquiring them. It was an impossible task. Horses escaped ran wild and multiplied. Many of these, and others purchased, traded for, or stolen from the Spanish found their way into many Indian cultures.

Actually, the Spanish had no choice, particularly north of Mexico, and most particularly in an area such as California. There never were enough non-Indians in California to work the cattle and sheep herds of the Missions, the presidios, and the private ranchos. So the Indians were taught to ride, and many of them became extremely skilled at the trade of the vaquero, the cowboy of Spanish America. Remember, the Indian vaquero did most of the work, at least until there were too few of them left, and increasing numbers of immigrants from Mexico took over their occupations.

A highly skilled vaquero could ride quickly past a steer and skillfully cut a nerve in the nape of its neck. Death was practically instantaneous. The hides were then stripped, cleaned, dried and packed into bundles for later shipment by wagon over the Santa Monica Mountains and down to the coast. Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast described the arduous and often dangerous task of getting these bales of hides down from the cliffs, or off of the beaches, onto small boats to be taken out to the New England trader's sailing ship.

On June 17, 1846, the San Fernando lands were sold for $14,000 to Don Eulogio de Celis, a Spaniard living in Los Angeles. The sale to de Celis was subject to the previous lease held by Andres Pico and Juan Manso, though it is not clear what private arrangement the three then had. Lease or not, the title to the San Fernando Valley, less the Encino and a few other ranchos,

some 121,319 acres was, for the first time, officially owned by a private individual. In 1854, at the expiration of the nine-year lease, Andres Pico purchased a one-half interest in the former Mission land, the Ex-Mission de San Fernando, from de Cells. Eight years later, Andres sold his undivided half interest to his brother Pio Pico, the ex-governor of California.

That 1846 purchase agreement by which de Celis became the owner of record of the San Fernando Mission lands specifically stated that, "The purchaser is bound to maintain the old Indians actually living on it, and to sustain them for the remainder of their days.... " But then that does sound painfully similar to other promises, other agreements, made to and about Indians intended to be observed only in the breach.

The 35 years that followed secularization, 1834 to 1869, saw change thrust itself upon these "cow counties" at a rate eclipsing all previous change, and with a force that threw from power most of those who had benefited from the secularization of the Mission lands.

Northern and southern Californians struggled for control of the Mexican province right up to the Mexican-American War, when California, as part of the almost 40% of Mexico liberated from the Mexicans in that war, passed under United States control. About the same time as the 1848 Treaty between Mexico and the United States ratified that transfer of territory, James W. Marshall discovered the famed yellow flecks on the land of his employer, the Swiss immigrant Johann A. Sutter. The discovery could not be kept secret, and the first wave of gold-seekers brought 50,000 Americans into California by the spring of 1849.

As the news of the discoveries spread, people came from all over the world; from China, from Australia, from Chile, from Mexico, as well as from the United States. In 1850, the population of California had surpassed 100,000, enough people to qualify California for statehood.

Six years prior, in 1842, the first historically authentic discovery of gold in California took place just outside of the San Fernando Valley in two canyons, Placerita and San Feliciana, a few miles to the northwest of the present town of Newhall.

With that gold then assayed at nearly $20 an ounce, the two canyons attracted scores of people from all over the southland. Some got an ounce a day for several days; others worked gangs of Indians and got more. Within two years of the discovery, an estimated $80,000 to $100,000 in gold was taken from these diggings. As late as 1855, some $65,000 was taken out. Indeed, many believed that the Mission Fathers had been secretly mining the gold for many years prior to 1842 and hiding it in the Mission compound.

Over the years, many holes have been dug on the Mission lands, into the walls of the old buildings, and even one in the floor of the Church in front of the altar, by fortune hunters looking for some long forgotten secret priestly cache.

As the dollar value of that metal "for which every virtue is sold and almost every vice," as Ben Johnson once correctly observed, rapidly rose during the 1970's, interest in local prospecting was renewed. But "the pickings" by the weekend prospectors have remained small and uninspiring.

The gold era of the 1850's will stand out forever as a strangely exciting decade. With the full mad rush for the gold fields underway by countless ships sailing around the tip of South America, thousands more strung out across the great plains in their ill-equipped and often poorly-led wagon trains, the rush for the gold fields hit its peak.

Some people would toil the day long, standing waist deep in the cold stream, panning for that elusive metal. Others would dig hour after hour into the mountainside, looking for something they called the "mother lode," the source of the nuggets and flecks that tumbled down the rivers and streams. Something of a mystery about these people will always remain. For most, it was enough that they made it to the pickings, to the fields. That they might "strike it rich" almost seemed incidental.

Of course, most never struck it rich. The real money, then as now, was made in providing for those working the sluice boxes, the placers, the creek beds. Middlemen bought as cheaply as possible and sold to the desperate for as dearly as possible. Some things never change. And upon certain secular values, one can always count. Apparently.

The 1850's brought the first of the boom times to the southern California "cow counties." The influx of gold seekers into California stimulated markets for commodities and turned shrewd petty merchants into empire and railroad builders within a decade. In the Valley, cattle could be bought for $15 a head, to be resold in the markets of San Francisco and Sacramento for as high as $48.

In addition to beef, commodities of all sorts, from shovels and picks, to canvas, lead, nails, beans and potatoes, brought high prices from those pursuing that eternal "New World" fantasy of becoming so rich that no work will ever be required again.

The boom years of the 1850's were going to last forever, or so they thought, for that is the nature of the boomer mentality. The cattle were there, free, feeding off of even freer land. The price was better than right. The "Dons" could well afford to entertain in a manner to which they believed they were entitled. So, when necessary, they borrowed from the newcomers, the people with cash, with conditions and contracts they did not wish to understand. If one believes correctly, then tomorrow all will be exactly the way one wants it to be. Is it not all in the mind?

The 1850's, with all of the prosperity for some, were violent years. As Lynlar says, "For some to get ahead, others must fall behind; in order for some to get more than they need, others must get less than they need."

While years of relative prosperity for the rancho owners, the great influx of new people during the 1850's, and their increasing use of the highways north to the gold fields, brought an end to the traditional hospitality of the rancho owners. In the Valley at Encino, two roads diverged. On the main highway from Los Angeles, one road split off north across the Valley, past the Mission, and up through the mountains to Ft. Tejon, into the San Joaquin Valley, and then north to Sacramento and the gold fields. A second continued west past Calabasas along the coast, and on to Ventura, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco.

Vicenta de la Osa, owner of the 4,400-acre Encino Rancho, notified the public that while they were still welcome to stop and refresh themselves, travelers would be expected to "pay as one goes. "

The el camino real, the old state highway or what for a time was known as Ventura Boulevard and now the Ventura Freeway or Highway 101 became a major artery of commerce and travel north from Los Angeles over Cahuenga Pass, through the beautiful San Fernando Valley. A journey of three and a half days and nights took travelers to San Francisco via the coast route that ran through Santa Barbara.

Just south of Santa Barbara, the road often disappeared under the ocean waters of high tide. But water and the almost impossible climbs over the mountains worried travelers less than the road agents, the bandits and highwaymen who roamed the state and regularly held up the stages. In the midst of the incredible prosperity for many in southern California, certainly for the Picos in the San Fernando Valley, the 1850's was an era of highway crime that finally required the establishment of special California Ranger divisions, the first state police.

Prior to the United States' conquest of California and the immediately following influx of thousands of gold-seekers, violence was practically unknown, except against Indians, of course. In the early 1840's, a South American visitor reported that during the period from 1840 to 1843, "We had heard of but one murder and one robbery." Ten years later, "California had more murders than the rest of the United States, and Los Angeles had more than the rest of California. " The cure for the violence of San Francisco was sought in the formation of an armed gang of private citizens, the Vigilantes, a cure that was often worse than the disease.

Among the many causes of the violence of the 1850's, a real or imagined sense of outrage and desire for revenge existed among many of the poorer Mexicans in California. At the news of the gold discoveries, thousands of Mexicans joined the rush to the "golden state." Coming from Mexico so soon after the American war, the humiliating defeat inflicted upon their country, and the consequent wresting of California and the Southwest from their Republic, from those who still considered it all theirs, it was most unlikely that they would mix easily with the "gringo." It was equally unlikely that the recently victorious Anglo-Americans would relish sharing the gold fields with the "greasers."

And added to the newcomers from Mexico, the poorer native Californian Mexicans viewed the massive inpouring of the English-speaking gold seekers, apparently neither a most gentle nor most genteel representative sampling of what the United States had to offer, as simply the last in a long list of final outrages. It is always difficult to accept displacement from one's home at the hands of strangers, particularly when that displacement was usually accomplished through strange legal chicaneries or through outright force.

In addition to being forced out of the gold fields by the Anglo-Americans, in addition to having their land, their social and political position forced down to the level of the Indian, whom they had themselves displaced in California, too many incidents of violence, of rape, of murder occurred to include here.

A few sentences from Carey McWilliams' Southern California: An Island on the Land ought to suffice to indicate the casualness of violence that created and has sustained in the minds and legends of many the justification of the Mexican avenger, the vengador, who struggled valiantly against those who perpetrated the many crimes done to his people.

On July 5, 1851, a mob of miners in Downieville lynched a Mexican woman who was three months pregnant . . . Juries would convict greasers on very moderate evidence indeed, and the number of lynchings has never been computed . . . The practice of lynching Mexicans (by the late 1850's) soon became an outdoor sport in Southern Califomia.

The 1850's saw several individuals and several gangs of Mexicans resort to banditry, looting and murder. Juan Flores was a mere 22 years old in 1856, when he gathered around him a band of 50 and swore to take California back from "the gringo bastards. " Flores had just escaped from the new prison at San Quentin where he had been serving a sentence for cattle rustling in southern California.

For nearly a year, Flores and his men marauded the Los Angeles area, even attacking the German settlement at Anaheim, even ambushing and killing the pursuing Los Angeles sheriff. Captured in early 1857, Flores was taken out of the Los Angeles jail by local Vigilantes and lynched on February 14. Of course, that was before that day had been proclaimed Valentine's Day.

We are too far removed from the time and circumstances to actually know or feel what they knew and felt. United States history has the Molly Maguires, the James Brothers, the Daltons, "Pretty Boy" Floyd, John Dillinger. The old English tradition manufactured the original Robin Hood, and no doubt all groups being conquered, subjugated and exploited possess and support the memory of a Paladine, the French version of the romantic and self-sacrificing defender of his people. Pride, as in the case of hope, springs eternal from the human breast.

While nearly everything else about him may be disputable, Tiburcio Vasquez was a real enough person. There is even a state park named after him, Vasquez Rocks, in the hills just to the north of the Valley, purportedly a favorite hideout of his. And the stories of his exploits, comings and goings in and through the Valley are as numerous as the written and oral traditions. Though not finally captured and hanged until the 1870's, Vasquez, in 1852, had proclaimed, "A spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had numerous fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen."

In the San Fernando Valley, in the 1980's, some people continue to speculate and search for the hidden treasures of Tiburcio Vasquez. Some have told this writer of the occasional and perhaps mystical ray of light that now and then shines down upon a particular spot in the Valley, in an area called Sylmar. The light allegedly points to a hidden treasure cache of Vasquez. Unfortunately, the light disappears before any are able to get to that exact spot. Life is often like that, full of large and small disappointments. Yet their quest continues.

Beginning on Christmas Eve, 1861, one of those periodic wet cycles struck the Los Angeles area. With but two short interruptions, it rained for 30 days and 30 nights. In the town of Los Angeles, adobe structures melted away under the torrent. Orchards and vineyards collapsed as the ground supporting them eroded and moved on. Along the main business street, shopkeepers stood waist high in the flooding waters, struggling to move their merchandise to higher levels. February and March brought more rains, more destruction.

Particularly hard hit was the small town's drinking water and refuse systems. In late 1862, typhus and smallpox began to stalk the town, spreading outward to neighboring settlements. The smallpox decimated the remaining Indian population, particularly those living in the towns.

The pox continued to kill, weaken and disfigure until 1864, when an 18-month-long drought began. Dry, of course, is the norm in semi-arid and arid regions. And those who have learned to live with their physical environment, those who do not extend their consumption needs above the long range capability of the resource base, accommodate themselves quite simply.

But, by the 1860's, after the flourishing and booming 1850's, few remembered. The rains of the early 1860's caused the Valleys to bloom with feed for the ever-expanding cattle herds of the "Dons." The herds expanded to the level of consumable feed, encouraged by the high prices being paid for beef and the ever-increasing material standard of living of the "Dons." That standard of living, then as now, apparently, rooted itself in what seemed to them easy credit.

Overstocking and overgrazing of the range lands brought the predictable result once the inevitable dry cycle returned. The floor of the Valley turned from green to brown, and then to dust. The foothills followed. Cattle are not sheep, and the steers could not be moved up into the higher reaches of the mountains where streams and small rivers continued to flow. The area received but four inches of rain in two years. The stories of cattle drives seeking water which instead resulted in disaster are as numerous as are all stories of downturns in the economic cycle. The county of Santa Barbara, for example, had about 300,000 head of cattle on the assessor's books in 1863. Within two years, 295,000 had perished.

By the spring of 1864, the Los Angeles SemiWeekly News reported, "Nothing can save what cattle remain on the desert California ranches." In that year, not one penny of taxes was collected by Los Angeles County. Businessmen, merchants and bankers stopped the extension of credit.

As the cattle perished, the "Dons" sold at whatever price they could get. The sudden rush of beef onto the market drove the price down and down. Soon, the Valley floor was littered with the carcasses of dead steers. With no market for the meat, the cattle's only remaining value lay in their hides. Of course, prices for leather declined also.

For all of the violence and influx of strangers, the 1850's had been boom years for the owners of the great ranchos, the "Dons" of that most romanticized decade of southern California history. And while it may be no surprise to political economists and historians that busts inevitably follow booms, that what goes up, soon comes down, that an economic cycle is always just that, a cycle, the naive secularizers apparently believed that everything would continue as they wished, that they were in charge of the world, weather and disease included.

The high living of the 1850's based itself upon credit, upon the mortgaging of the future at usurious interest rates and conditions about which the "Dons" had little understanding. The 1860's brought flood, disease, drought, withered grasslands, dead cattle, delinquent taxes, and foreclosures for unpaid mortgages. They brought the end of an especially short era, the pastoral stage of the "Age of the Old Dons."

One of the first important "Yankees" or Anglos (as it became fashionable to call the non-Mexican) to take advantage of the distress of the quickly fading "Dons," was Isaac Lankershim. Isaac hardly fits the stereotype of the shrewd Yankee. He was no Stanford, Hopkins, Huntington or Crocker. Born in 1834, raised a Jew in Loebau, West Prussia, he emigrated to America and first visited California in 1854. Liking it, he went into business, mostly farming, in the San Francisco and Sacramento region. In northern California, he came into contact and association with many struggling German Jews, including Levi Strauss, among others.

In the 1860's, Los Angeles already had a sizeable German Jewish community. One of the more remarkable members of that community, Harris Newmark, later wrote a very comprehensive and personal expression of his Sixty Years in Southern California: 1853-1913. Aside from being an invaluable account of an important local business person's perspective of the development of the San Fernando Valley, Newmark knew Lankershim rather well.

Isaac had earlier converted to Baptist Protestantism, no doubt in keeping with the obvious social as well as ideological advantages of adopting the spirit of his new land. Yet, according to "an apocryphal story," Lankershim, when dying in 1916, called his friend Harris Newmark and requested him "to recite the shma, saying, 'Der shma is doch schein. " ' Perhaps it is true. Equally perhaps, it is not.

In any case, the Valley was beautiful, and the price was right. In association with several northern California business people, Lankershim came into the Valley in 1869 and purchased the entire southern half from Pico, though the final north-south division did not take place until two years later.

The Lankershim group, originally called the San Fernando Homestead Association, included Levi Strauss, the Scholle brothers and the Sachs, all of northern California, and Lankershim's son-in-law, Isaac Newton Van Nuys. With what is now Roscoe Boulevard as the dividing line separating their portion from the northern half, they paid $115,000 for about 60,000 acres.

Of the entire group which put up the capital, only Lankershim and Van Nuys actually came into the Valley. Originally they stocked their land with some 40,000 sheep. Profitable for a few years, the essential fragility of the land reappeared with the return of a dry period in 1875.

Soon the available feed was dried and used up. In the Valley, and elsewhere in southern California, the large landowners replaced their sheep flocks with dry wheat and barley farming. Van Nuys had already experimented with the dry farming techniques being practiced on the western plains, and soon the entire southern half of the Valley was a vast grain field.

In the northern part of the Valley, the Porters, about whom more later, also put much of their land into grain. For 20 years or more, the Valley appeared to many as one giant sea of wheat. The completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad out to the townsite of San Fernando in 1874 facilitated the shipment of the grain into the mills in Los Angeles, or even all of the way to the grain ships at the small harbor of Wilmington. Still, large wagons continued to be used to haul grain over an improved Cahuenga Pass from the fields too far from the railroad at San Fernando.

In 1880, the San Fernando Homestead Association changed its name to the Los Angeles Farm and Milling Company, reflecting its altered operation. Lankershim stayed in Los Angeles and managed the company's grain mill; Van Nuys stayed in charge of their Valley farms. Until the Lankershim and Van Nuys families sold their Valley lands, millions of bushels of wheat, milled in their own downtown Los Angeles mill, were shipped out of the Wilmington harbor to serve a world market which remained strong during the 1870's and even the early 1880's.

But beginning in the late 1880's, and for most of the 1890's, world wheat supply exceeded demand. The price per bushel steadily declined. And by 1892, the American wheat farmers, as well as other western farmers, managed to devise a theory of their increasing distress. As one of the sayings of the time went, "The cow is fattened on the farm, but it is milked on Wall Street." As world prices fell and foreclosures increased, so did the militancy of the small western farmer, finally propelling them into political action.

One result was the formation, on the Fourth of July, 1892, in Omaha, Nebraska, of the world's first official Peoples' Party . . . the Populist Party, American History books call it. But Lankershim and Van Nuys were not populists. These were not the small family farmers that a Tom Jefferson once dreamed of as a future for America.

An exception to the wheat fields was the small farming community of Lankershim, then still called Toluca. Small farms with their orchards of pears, peaches and other fruits, irrigated by water diverted from the washes and from wells, bordered the road that ran from Cahuenga Pass on out toward the town of San Fernando.

As early as 1888, Isaac's son, J. B. Lankershim, established the townsite of Toluca, at the eastern edge of their vast holdings. He also later contrived the changing of the name of the early Valley subdivision from Toluca to the town and post office of Lankershim, California. Years later, the national aura of Hollywood caused the local merchants to successfully change the post office name of the community to North Hollywood.

In the 1970's, a movement to change the name of the main street through the area from Lankershim Boulevard to Universal Boulevard, in the vain attempt to associate the declining economic status of the community with the nationally known and tourist-visited Universal Studios and Universal City, just to the southeast, was successfully defeated by a group of historically minded and community-proud citizens. By the 1980's, there was even talk of renaming the severely depressed and ever increasing Asian- and Mexican-American community back to Lankershim.

"The worst railroads on the Pacific Coast are those operated by the Southern Pacific Company. The worst railroad operated by the Southern Pacific Company is the Central Pacific. It owes the government more millions of dollars than Leland Stanford has vanities; it will pay fewer cents than Collis P. Huntington has virtues. It has always been managed by rapacity tempered by incompetence." — Ambrose Bierce. San Francisco Examiner, July 22, 1888.

The San Fernando Valley continued a slowly inevitable process of change until it became linked by steel with the demographic and economic dynamism that was the American Continental Empire. In a short 35 years, a loosely held Mexican province with a Mexican population of about 5,000, California became politically, socially, economically and literally welded to the United States. The driving of the golden spike on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, connected the westward bound Union Pacific Railroad and the eastward bound Central Pacific and opened California to an even greater rush of people.

The name of the Central Pacific Railroad, together with the names of "The Big Four," Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker and their descendants, protrude through and litter the landscape of California with over 100 years of political, financial, cultural and social domination. In the Valley, the name of Hopkins is strange, but Crocker Bank, Stanford University, and the Huntington Museum are known.

Though owners of essential, familiar and holy places of various forms of economic and social adulation, the Gianninis of the Bank of America, the Otises and the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror empire, the well-oiled Dohenys, the Ahmansons and the countless others who have struck it rich in finance, real estate and other forms of chicanery all came later. As high as they have climbed, not one of them has managed to attain or buy themselves into those reaches wherein the deities of legendary success and status still live among their worshippers.

The domination of California by the "Big Four," Stanford, Crocker, Huntington and Hopkins through the Central Pacific Railroad and the later Southern Pacific, an offspring that came to dominate the parent, has been aptly chronicled by numerous writers. Frank Norris, one of the writers who detailed the political and economic machinations of these particular "Robber Barons," called the Southern Pacific The Octopus in his novel of those Gilded Times.

Originally, the Southern Pacific Railroad's authorization to build southward included the plan to construct a line from San Francisco south along the coast to connect the population centers. However, the promise of federal land grants to finance the construction, the method most railroads of that period filched from the public purse the means to construct their respective empires, could not apply along an ocean route. Most of the coastal lands were already under title to various individuals, and neither the federal nor the state government possessed the right to give them away to the railroad.

The Southern Pacific thus altered its route to go through the great Central Valley where uninhabited land and the opportunities for government handouts abounded. In the Central Valley, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of acres of free land, the railroad purchased thousands more in advance of its announced routing plans. Local governments were pressured to grant rights-of-way and depot sites, as well as give small outright cash subsidies. The Southern Pacific then encouraged farmers to move into the area along the line, to irrigate and plant, promising them title to the land they had thus improved. Later, after the improvements, the railroad drove off many of these trusting American folk, consolidating an agricultural and real estate empire that would have amazed many a medieval European baron.

Down the Central Valley, the Southern Pacific crawled. Demanding subsidies from already existing towns, or bypassing them if they refused to pay, the railroad created several towns where none had previously existed: Modesto, Merced, Fresno. But even in the 19th Century, the Southern Pacific was primarily in the real estate business. In addition to the towns created wherever its lines crept, the railroad promoted tourism and tourist centers, the Del Monte Hotel, Shasta Springs, the Del Coronado in San Diego; and to promote the values and virtues of California it started Sunset Magazine in 1898.

In the early 1870's, the Southern Pacific had reached Bakersfield in the southern San Joaquin Valley, where it stopped to await the decision either to cut through the mountains to Los Angeles, or continue south to San Bernardino or San Diego where it would then connect with another link across the southern part of the United States. When the Southern Pacific publicly threatened to bypass Los Angeles and to continue south, the city responded with land, money and the donation of an already built small railroad that ran from the city down to the harbor at Wilmington.

Eulogio de Celis had died in Spain in 1869, and his interests in the Valley had been taken over by his son, Eulogio F. de Celis. In 1854, de Celis and Andres Pico had become joint owners of the Mission de San Fernando, and eight years later, Andres had sold his interest to his brother Pro Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. The heavy toll of the Valley's cattle taken by the drought years of the 1860's forced Pico to mortgage his interest to a New York money lending house, exempting some 2,000 acres, buildings, orchards, and vineyards known as the Pico reserve. Eventually Pico sold out his overdue mortgaged share to the Lankershim and Van Nuys group.

As early as 1872, de Celis had granted to the Southern Pacific a strip of land 100 feet wide through the Valley. Also, a 30-acre parcel was set aside for a depot at the north end of the Valley. Apparently the Southern Pacific planned to enter Los Angeles through the San Fernando Valley as early as 1872, or, at the very least, was establishing options ahead of final decisions.

The northern half of the Valley also eventually fell under the threat of foreclosure. By 1873, de Celis was behind in taxes, overdue notes and attorney fees. At this distance from the time and the facts, it is not possible to reconstruct the actual events. However, the Southern Pacific had already indicated a desire to enter the San Fernando Valley, as evidenced by the arrangement made with de Celis. And perhaps most indicative of all is the fact that Leland Stanford, one of the "Big Four" of the Central and Southern Pacific, somehow or the other had heard of the pending foreclosure and informed his friend Charles Maclay where to go in southern California to purchase land. No doubt he also informed his friend and long-time political supporter of the Southern Pacific's plans to cut through that particular piece of real estate in order to reach Los Angeles. Why not?

Contrary to much folk wisdom, government subsidies to American industry in general and to certain enterprises in particular, did not originate in the Nixon or Carter years of the 20th Century. Taxpayer assistance in the form of low cost loans, loan guarantees, direct cash handouts, special tax exemptions and land grants are all as old as the Republic. Government aid and support of American economic development originated with George Washington's first administration, under the planning and direction of Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury.

By 1860, over 4 million acres of public land had been given to various canal companies by the national government. Also, many states issued special bonds, guaranteed loans, granted state lands, levied special taxes—all for the benefit of the canal companies. In the year 1850, millions of acres of public land were granted to over 40 private railroad companies, with the Illinois Central Railroad receiving 2.5 million acres of federal land alone.

Consequently, when the post-Civil War era of railroad building began with congressional authorization to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific to construct the nation's first transcontinental railroad, the tradition of government handouts of the public domain and of the taxpayers' money was one of long standing.

Granted that most of the 40 million acres being given away to the two railroad corporations "was only Indian land . . . and that Indians don't count," but the $65,000,000 in cash loans which were never repaid came out of the people's pocket. Subsequent charges and proof of corruption in high places brought neither the money back nor any of the individuals to justice. Of course.

Still, the generosity did seem a bit excessive. Aside from the California state lands given away to the railroads, federal land grants within the state of California to the Central and Southern Pacific totaled some 11.6 million acres. That 11.6 million acres of public land, about 4.5 million to the Central Pacific and about 7 million to the Southern Pacific, two names for the same operation, represented about 11.5% of the total area of the state of California. Not bad. But remember, Leland Stanford was both a United States senator and a governor of California.

The tall, curly-haired Pennsylvanian, Charles Maclay, and his wife took ship from the East Coast, struggled across the Isthmus of Panama and arrived in San Francisco in 1851. Maclay came to California as a Methodist missionary, and for a short time he had some success as a messenger of the word.

As a preacher in old San Francisco, Maclay was not merely a mumbler of phrases. A registered member of the Vigilantes, number 1161, he always carried a side arm. According to his granddaughter, one Sunday as he was giving a sermon, someone started to heckle, "And all he says is, 'There was a shot; the man was carried out, and I went on with my sermon.' Whether he made the shot or somebody else did, nobody will ever know, but he always carried a gun, that was for sure."

Maclay first saw the Valley in March of 1874. He came by ship from San Francisco to San Pedro, or Wilmington Harbor as it was known at that time. He then hired a team of horses, passed through Los Angeles and headed toward the Valley. Topping the Cahuenga Pass, which, "was straight up in the air," he saw a sight that apparently inspired the remaining Christian missionary part of him. He could see only one tree in the floor of the Valley; the only buildings that he could see in front of him were the Mission buildings . . . Off to the left he could see some smoke and he knew there were some houses there. That is what is now Encino. He pronounced the Valley beneath him "a Garden of Eden."

While a member of the California Assembly and later the California Senate, Maclay was always associated with the interests of the "Big Four. " Again, according to his granddaughter, Charles Maclay personally arranged the Central Pacific's right of way through the Mormon controlled territory of Utah. He had traveled out and talked to Brigham Young and negotiated the legal agreements, a service for which he reportedly received no pay or commission. However, his 1874 purchase of the northern half of the Valley was made possible by a personal and unsecured loan from his good friend Leland Stanford.

Pio Pico reserved about 2,000 acres around the old Mission for himself and his brother, but the remaining 56,000 acres passed into Yankee hands for $117,500, about $2 an acre. Still, the cash loan from Stanford had to be repaid, and Maclay needed partners in his Valley venture. This is how the two Porters became involved.

George K. Porter had been a colleague of Maclay's in the State Senate, and was also considered to be a friend of the Central Pacific. He and his cousin, Benjamin F. Porter, a San Francisco area real estate investor, worked out the necessary financial and title arrangements with Maclay, who managed to acquire about one-fourth of the area; the two Porters, three fourths. Two dollars an acre was hardly a "bad price" particularly when the Southern Pacific was soon to announce its route through that Valley into Los Angeles.

As each of the three partners had their own plans, a three-way division of the northern half of the Valley was effected. Maclay formed the Maclay Rancho Water Company to develop his land, mostly from the east of the proposed Southern Pacific tracks to the mountains, south to the Roscoe division line and north through his half of the San Fernando townsite. Maclay apparently intended to supply water to his land from the Pacoima Creek, utilizing a small, submerged dam up in Pacoima Canyon to store and slow the spring flood waters.

Benjamin Porter received the western almost one-third, about 20,000 acres, from the old Mission west to the Santa Susana Mountains. George got a larger and irregular portion, wedged in between the other two sections, including half of the townsite of San Fernando to the west of the future S.P. tracks, and other lands reaching around to the north and northeast of that townsite.

Early in 1874, after the necessary financial subsidies were forthcoming from the city taxpayers' guarantee of the indebtedness of the future, a usual enough American practice, the Southern Pacific laid its track out from Los Angeles across the eastern edge of the Valley, northerly through the lands of the old Verdugo and Providencia ranchos, to the newly platted town of San Fernando. For a couple of years, the town of San Fernando was the northern terminal of the Southern Pacific line from Los Angeles, and passengers bound for parts farther north had to transfer to wagons and coaches for the exciting and often hazardous climb through and over the mountains to Lang's Station near Newhall, the southern terminal of the S.P.'s line from the north.

History moves quickly when those with the motive and power decide it. For the San Fernando Valley to become part of the Southern Pacific's through route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and from San Francisco to the population and market centers of the eastern United States, required only a tunnel through those mountains, once all of the necessary subsidies and pay-offs had been made.

Several thousand semi-indentured Chinese workers labored nearly two years at a cost of some $2,500,000, plus hundreds dead in the numerous cave-ins and landslides, to construct the 6,940-foot San Fernando tunnel, the world's longest at that time. Into the late 1970's, occasional hill and mud slides in the vicinity continued to uncover the remains of many of the Chinese who were buried nearby.

Ah, but that September 5, 1876, day when old Charles Crocker drove the golden spike at Lang's Station, the spike that finally directly linked the future fortunes of the Valley and of Los Angeles with those of San Francisco and the eastern states, must have been a historic and impressive one. Fifteen hundred Chinese laborers, employees of the Crocker Contract and Finance Company, stood along the tracks like soldiers at attention, their picks and shovels upon their shoulders. Even Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington were in attendance.

Many of these Chinese laborers had also worked to clear the area that became the townsite of San Fernando. Maclay later used them to clear an adjoining townsite called Pacoima. And George Porter used more to clear what was for a time known as the "world's largest olive ranch," Sylmar, later more famous as the epicenter of the 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake.

By 1887, both the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads had completed direct lines from the East into Los Angeles. Fares were continually lowered between Kansas City and Los Angeles. From an original $125, they dropped steadily to $25, then to $15. And for a very brief time, the Southern Pacific lowered its fare to $1. The 1880's rush of people to southern California, now spurred on by the incredibly inexpensive fares, became a flood.

The great land boom of the 1880's sprang from several sources, but primary among them was the promotion of southern California by the Southern Pacific. The railroad hired and subsidized numerous writers and periodicals to encourage easterners and Midwesterners to move out West.

Probably the most persuasive and long-lasting argument was contained in Charles Nordoff's California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence, "The cost of living is today less in California by a third than in any eastern state." For nearly 100 years, southern California and the San Fernando Valley could make that claim. By the early 1980's, times had changed, and the opposite was becoming increasingly and economically painfully apparent to all.

But the 1880's were not the 1980's. Easterners were told of "wheat growing luxuriantly almost to the seashore . . . from rich soil watered out of artesian wells," or pumped easily by windmills. Never mind that the semi-arid and arid nature of the region meant that little rain and surface water necessitated the use of ground water. And never mind the elementary fact that if the water is removed from the ground at a rate faster than water is entering the ground, first the pressure, and then the level, must drop. Eventually larger and larger pumps must be used to lift the dropping water table up to the ground, and all too soon, windmills will not be powerful enough to turn the ever-larger pumps. Lastly, and most important of all, never mind that the ground water in the San Fernando Valley belonged to the city of Los Angeles, under the original Spanish grant, not to the prospective Valley farmer.

Hot air cools as it rises. What goes up must eventually come down. Speculative booms always bust. And by the end of the 1880's, real estate, real estate salesmen, the schemes of developers, the dreams of something for nothing were over once again, leaving new or enhanced fortunes for the shrewd or lucky few and disappointment or ruin for the many.

While the decade of the 1880's ended with a bust, and the consequent loss of life savings for many recent arrivals to the land of their rainbow's end, only a couple of Valley towns managed to survive. At the southeastern corner of the Valley, practically guarding The Narrows, the exit of the Los Angeles River from the Valley, stands the still independent City of Burbank. The home to numerous major media and aerospace firms, as well as the Burbank Airport, Burbank's history represents one of the few success stories of that fabled boom of the 1880's.

Though geographically a part of the San Fernando Valley, the City of Burbank originated from the combining of two old and relatively small Spanish and Mexican land grants, the San Rafael and the El Providencia ranchos. Sometime before 1800, Jose Maria Verdugo, a corporal from the original San Diego military company, received one of the earliest California Spanish grants, the nearly 4,600 acre San Rafael rancho. Originally stretching from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Verdugo Hills to the west, this rancho was immediately adjacent to and north of the El Providencia.

During the Mexican period, and prior to de Cells' purchase of the San Fernando Mission lands, Vicente de la Osa acquired the 4,200 acre grant called E1 Providencia. In 1851, de la Osa sold the El Providencia to the first two Americans to receive title to land in the Valley: Alexander Bell and David Alexander. At about the same time he sold that parcel, de la Osa acquired the Encino rancho from the three Indians to whom the nearly 4,500 acres had originally been given.

In 1857, Jonathan Scott, who had by then secured title to land (called the La Canada rancho) just north of the San Rafael rancho, exchanged those acres with the surviving Verdugos. Scott, an attorney and justice of the peace in Los Angeles, planted vineyards, raised grapes and, though the record does not indicate, hopefully stomped a few. In the early 1870's, he sold out to David Burbank, a dentist recently from New Hampshire.

By 1867, Burbank had already purchased the El Providenica rancho from Bell and Alexander, on which he built a house and engaged in sheep raising. He then combined his two ranchos, the San Rafael and the El Providencia, a total of nearly 9,000 acres, and, during the booming 1880's, established the Providencia Land, Water and Development Company. At that point, with the subdivision of the area into small parcels, the townsite still named for him came into existence.

During the first few decades of the 20th Century, most of the San Fernando Valley was annexed to the city of Los Angeles. But along with Maclay's City of San Fernando, Burbank staved off, and continues to stave off, the encroachments of the megalopolis. If for no other reason, and there may well be few others to those who do not live there, it deserves the appellation of "beautiful," although by the 1980's a majority of the Valley's inhabitants had come to scorn that city. "Beautiful downtown Burbank" was not originally coined, nor is it meant, as a compliment.

Even as they drive to the Burbank Airport for their flights to San Francisco, San Diego or Las Vegas; even as they consume hours of television emanating from various Burbank studios; even as they drive to and from work at Lockheed, or at one of that company's many local subcontractors; and even as their sophistication requires them to make innumerable jokes about the late-middle-aged, middle-American residential and residual Burbank population, perhaps a small and latent jealousy exists of that Valley town's ability to remain outside of the city's control, independent of "downtown."

Understandably, the fact that Burbank is the home to major American economic interests—the Lockheed Corporation, for example — no doubt has much to do with the small community's ability to survive independently of the city that nearly surrounds it. If only the smog were not so bad, it might be a nice place to raise children. "So it . . ." So it went.

In addition to the railroads which had vast tracts of land to sell, "the professional boomers," as one writer has described them, "moved in to show the crowds how hot air could be changed into money." Others called the speculators and developers of those 1880's "Escrow Indians," because of their skill at scalping the unsuspecting easterner and midwesterner. Many of these professional promoters were themselves from east of the Rockies, but southern California had by then become a "new frontier," where they descended upon the gullible and the naive "like flies upon a bowl of sugar."

During those boom years of the 1880's, hundreds of towns were platted, named and laid out in Los Angeles County. Most never survived into the 1890's. In fact, most never existed except in the fast talk of the salesmen and the dreams of those seeking a small farm or a home in the land of eternal youth and sun. Some promoters went so far as to hang oranges on desert Joshua trees and call them native California oranges. For a time everyone, it seemed, sold real estate, bought real estate, talked and thought real estate. Again, some things never change . . . again, apparently.

The town of Pacoima, one of Maclay's 1880's subdivisions, remained for a time a favorite Valley retreat of the city's wealthy. In fact, for many years, the only sidewalks available for roller skating were in Pacoima. Located just to the east of the town of San Fernando, and now a part of the city of Los Angeles, the area became the Valley's black ghetto well within less than 100 years of its founding. In that respect, Pacoima, a survivor of the 1880's, exemplifies one of the continuing characteristics of the Valley's fluid surface fashions: what is today "the place" to live soon becomes a place to avoid, and certainly not a place to call home. Yet, for many black people, Pacoima remains a marked material improvement over much of the south side of Los Angeles, certainly over much of the south side of Chicago, the South Bronx and other such horrors in the United States.

By 1901, the Southern Pacific had built another line through the Valley. Branching off the main line at Burbank, it cut west through the middle of the Valley, tunneled through the Santa Susana Mountains into the Simi Valley and became the coast route north to Ventura, Santa Barbara and eventually to San Francisco. Depots and stations in the Valley at Lankershim, Chatsworth, Zelzah (now Northridge), as well as other places, made the shipment of grain easier and finally ended the era of horse-drawn wagons slowly hauling over the Cahuenga Pass.

The coming of the railroads and the resulting boom of the 1880's caused a political restructuring of Los Angeles County. The San Fernando Valley until 1887 had been part of the township of Los Angeles. In that year, the county was divided into 13 different townships, and a separate one, called San Fernando Township, was established for most of the former ex-Mission de San Fernando. Chatsworth Park Township officially came into existence in 1902; and Lankershim in 1905.

At the census of 1910, and just prior to the even greater population and townsite surge made possible by the completion of the Owens Valley Aqueduct, the population of the Valley totaled about 3,300. The township of San Fernando accounted for 2,134 of that whole. Lankershim had about 850; Chatsworth Park Township, 299. By way of comparison, Los Angeles County showed 504,131 in 1910. Thus, the San Fernando Valley, prior to the coming of the water and the unfolding of the plans by those responsible for that water, gave little indication that within seventy years it would be home to over 1,250,000 people.

Within that same period, by the 1980's, the Southern Pacific had become a widely diversified holding company, still directly owning 2% of the total land area of the state of California, more land than the state itself owned. In addition, hundreds of thousands of acres were controlled through numerous subsidiaries such as the Southern Pacific Land Company, Pacific Metzler and Pacific Fruit.

In terms of political and economic power, the "Octopus" has shared boards of director members with Pacific Gas and Electric, Safeway Stores, Bechtel and other corporate giants. Much of that corporation's Central Valley farmlands continue to be watered by federally built and subsidized irrigation projects in direct violation of the 1902 Newlands Act's prohibition against receiving taxpayer-funded irrigation water for individual farms larger that 160 acres.

So the "Octopus" is still alive and well in California. Writing in 1979, Bruce MacGregor, commenting upon the 3.8 million acres still directly owned in three of the western states, reported gross revenues in 1978 in excess of 2 billion dollars, and assets of over 4 billion, concluded that "When Southern Pacific walks through the valley of the shadows, it fears no evil. For it is the biggest thing in the Valley."

Yet the land remains the same land. The possessors of that land may change as each new group militarily, politically or economically overwhelms and displaces the old . . . and in turn is itself overwhelmed and displaced. The holy places of the Tongva and the Chumash were seized by the pious Franciscans as agents of Spanish Imperialism. They, in turn, lost to the acquisitive and considerably less pious Mexican "Dons." Mexico lost to the United States; those "Dons," to Yankees, particularly the railroad barons. The 1870's and the 1880's began the invasion of the small time developer, the little hustler, small and little, relative to the Southern Pacific Railroad.

The Twentieth Century would see a veritable flood of schemes and schemers, subdividers and subdivisions, prophets of progress and plenty for all, though most particularly for themselves.