The Irvine Ranch
by Robert Glass Cleland
The Huntington Library
Chapter 1
NATIVE AND SPANIARD
The Spaniards began the colonization of California with the establishment of a royal presidio at San Diego in July
1769. On the 14th of that month, "the day of the seraphic doctor San Buenaventura," Don Gaspar de Portolá, com-
mander in chief of the expedition, and a company of trail-hardened friars, leather-jacket soldiers, muleteers, servants,
and Indian neophytes left the infant settlement for the far-off, half-mythical port of Monterey .
Two weeks later, while encamped on the banks of a tree-lined stream, the company experienced four such "horrify-
ing" earthquakes in a single day that it seemed appropriate to Father Juan Crespi, one of the friars of the expedition, to
call the shallow watercourse the River of the Sweet Name of Jesus of the Earthquakes. Out of respect for St. Anne,
the Mother of the Virgin, however, the hard-bitten soldiers, Crespi's companions, named the stream El Rio de Santa
Ana, and by that name the river is still known.
Rising in the high sierra above San Bernardino , the Santa Ana flows southward across the San Bernardino plain, fol-
lows the winding Santa Ana Cañon through the rough, chaparral-covered Santa Ana Mountains , enters the lower
Santa Ana Valley at the small settlement of Olive, and finally reaches the sea slightly west of the city of Newport
During its hundred-mile-long course, Father Crespi's River of the Sweet Name of Jesus of the Earthquakes thus traverses
parts of three southern California counties-San Bernardino, Riverside , and Orange .
The valley of the Santa Ana , between the Santa Ana Mountains and the sea, is one of the richest agriculture
regions in California and the site of numerous prosperous towns and cities, including Anaheim , Santa Ana , Fullerton
and Orange. It is also the seat of the great landed estate known now for some ninety years as the Irvine Ranch.
Roughly oblong in shape (except f or a large, curving segment along its northeastern border), the ranch is approximately
twenty-two miles long by nine miles wide, once included well over a hundred thousand acres, and still covers over
eighty-eight thousand. Its main axis runs northeast by southwest; its environs are remarkable for their striking contrasts.
On the northeast, for many miles, the ranch shares a common boundary line with the Cleveland National Forest ,
a region of lofty peaks and rough, brush-covered ranges. Its long northwestern boundary runs in part through moun-
tainous, uncultivated land and in part through rich, highly productive plains. In the extreme southeast, the ranch is
bordered by orchards, fields, and extensive grazing lands. From Newport to Laguna its southwestern boundary em-
braces crowded harbor, winding estuary, and bold, high cliffs that front upon the sea.
At the time of the Spanish occupation of California , there were approximately 250,000 Indians living in the province,
a figure that represented about a fourth of the entire native population of what is now continental United States when
Columbus discovered the New World . The southern California coastal plain, including present-day Orange County ,
was one of the major centers of Indian population.
The natives of the region now included in the Irvine Ranch were Gabrielinos-that is, Indians of Shoshonean
stock who occupied a large part of the Los Angeles plain and the San Gabriel and Santa Ana valleys. Traces of the
Gabrielino culture have also been found on the channel islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente .
In addition to many smaller settlements, the Gabrielinos had at least three major centers of population on or near the
present Irvine Ranch. One, called Pahav, was located about fifteen miles southeast of Corona , just north of the Santa
Ana Mountains and the ranch boundary. A second, Moyo, was situated north of the Newport Bay estuary; and a third,
Lukup, occupied a site near the ocean, west of the mouth of the Santa Ana River .
According to Alfred L. Kroeber, a distinguished authority on the Indians of California, because the Gabrielinos
held "the great bulk of the most fertile lowland portion of Southern California " and thus enjoyed a more abundant
food supply and easier living conditions than their neighbors, they attained a higher cultural level than any other
Indian group south of the Tehachapi and communicated elements of that culture to other villages.
The life that went on along the banks of Rio Santa Ana before the Spaniards came was infinitely far removed from
that which our own day is witness to. But the small, crude rancherias of the Gabrielinos, the myths, ceremonies and
shadowy gods of a childlike race, the silence and solitude of an age-old wilderness are still part of the heritage of the
Irvine Ranch.
The Spanish occupation of California , like that of all similar provinces of the Kingdom of New Spain , was carried
out by means of three institutions designed especially for the settlement of the frontier, namely the presidio, the
pueblo, and the mission. Though radically different both in character and purpose, these institutions had at least two
things in common-all three were established to aid in the subjugation, control, and civilization of the frontier, and
all three depended upon land grants from the crown for their existence.
Such royal grants were based upon an ancient principle of Spanish law that recognized the king as owner in fee sim-
ple of all the colonial possessions in the New World and vested in him private title to the fabulous resources of a
continent. “We give, grant, and assign forever to you and to your heirs and successors, Kings of Castile and León,” ran
the famous bull of Alexander VI in 1493, "all and singular the aforesaid countries and islands thus unknown and hith-
erto discovered by your envoys and to be discovered hereafter, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places,
and towns as well as all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances of the same whereon they may be found"
It should be noted, however, that the royal grants to presidios and pueblos differed from the mission grants in two
particulars: grants to presidios and pueblos were made in fee simple and included a fixed area of four square leagues,
or about seventeen thousand acres; grants to the missions, on the contrary, though, of enormous extent, were of a tem-
porary nature and involved no transfer of title from the king.
So long as California was under Spanish rule, and indeed for a decade longer, the missions remained undisturbed in
the use of their almost limitless landholdings. As the years went by, the ranges were covered with great herds of cattle,
sheep, and horses, and thousands of Indian neophytes were brought under the teachings, discipline, and training of
the friars. Meanwhile, however, a few royal grants, called ranchos, were bestowed on private individuals. The first of
these were made in 1784 by Governor Pedro Fages to José María Verdugo, Juan José Domínguez, and Manuel Nieto,
all of whom were members of the companv of soldados de cuero, or "leather-jacket troops;' that Fages had led to Cali-
fornia in 1769.
The grant to José María Verdugo was named the Rancho San Rafael and included over thirty-six thousand acres be-
tween the Arroyo Seco, the Los Angeles River , and the La Cañada hills. Juan José Domínguez received sixteen square
leagues, or approximately seventy-two thousand acres, running westward from the San Gabriel River to Redondo
Bay and embracing all the territory now included in Palos Verdes, San Pedro, and Wilmington .
Manuel Nieto, to whom Governor Fages showed unusual generosity, was awarded a principality of nearly three
hundred thousand acres. The San Gabriel River , which then emptied into the ocean near the present entrance to
Long Beach harbor, formed the grant's western boundary; twenty-five miles down the coast the Santa Ana River
marked its limits on the east; and from the lonely shore line of the Pacific his unfenced leagues of grazing, lands
spread away to the north to meet "the main road leading from San Diego along the hills to San Gabriel ."
During the remainder of the Spanish regime and for the first ten or twelve years of Mexican rule, about thirty pri-
vate rancho grants were made in all California ; but in 1833 the Mexican government "secularized" the California mis-
sions, took over almost all of their immense landholdings and distributed many millions of acres to Mexican citizens
who applied for grants of government lands.
At the time of the American conquest of California in 1846, these large grants or ranchos were the dominant fea-
ture of the province's economic and social life. They remained the controlling factor in much of the state's settle-
ment and agricultural development for many years, and their gradual conversion into cities, towns, and
communities in large measure brought into being the southern California we know today. The ranchos thus constituted
one of the few enduring legacies that California inherited from Mexico and Spain . Two such grants and part of a third
went into the making of the Irvine Ranch.
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