California’s Last Vaquero

G E R A L D H A S L A M Sonoma State University California’s Last \foquero He is eighty-nine years old now, spry but eighty-nine nonetheless, and he is composing his eighth book, writing as always of places and people few others know, the great ranches of California and their vaqueros. Arnold R. “Chief” Rojas, who rode for J. J. Lopez on Rancho Tejon, who rounded up cattle from the vast holdings of Miller and Lux, who doctored horses on the ranges of the Kern County Land Company, has lived to see one of America’s great ranching areas, the San Joaquin Valley, become an agri­ cultural larder, then increasingly urban. “Except for the lupins and poppies, which covered the valley in the spring, the country was semi-desert,” he recalls. “No one ever thought it would one day be covered with orchards and vineyards. But,” he adds, “today there are too many people. Some day we will have to plow up the malls and plant something to eat.” If ever a waddy saw the elephant, it was Chief Rojas, and his books provide a living link with history that is vital, yet remote to most. Cali­ fornia’svaqueros rode ranches seldom mentioned in popular western novels, and few motion pictures featured them, so the general public even today knows little of their lives and accomplishments. The irony is that at the very time when Hollywood was beginning to produce western movies, vaqueros still rode—albeit in diminishing numbers—the mountains and great valley not far north of the studios. Given the power of Southern California’s media image, it is not sur­ prising so few people realize that in the last century it could fairly be considered the wild West: Los Angeles in the 1850s was, according to Lawrence Clark Powell, “the toughest town in the West, a cesspool of frontier scum.” Horace Bell, in Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881), docu­ ments that period when the future megalopolis was still very much a Mexi­ can pueblo. Americans adjusted to the region, not vice-versa. Bell, referred to by a contemporary as a “blackmailer, murderer, thief, house-bumer, snake-hunter, and defamer of the dead,” offers a sense of that society when he defines gringo: 124 Western American Literature Gringo, in its literal signification, means ignoramus. For in­ stance : an American who has not yet learned to eat chili peppers stewed in grease, throw the lasso, contemplate the beauties of nature from the sunny side of an adobe wall, make a first-class cigar out of corn husk, wear open-legged pantaloons, with bell bottoms, dance on one leg, and live on one meal a week. Southern California would be known until the 1880s as “the cow counties.” In the 1860s, however, a terrible drouth devastated the area’s beef industry; Robert Glass Cleland describes its effects this way: The thousands of head of “black cattle and beasts of burden,” which once carried the familiar brands of the proudest of California families, disappeared forever from the plains and valleys and rolling hills. Reduced to the unromantic realism of assessment lists and tax returns, the story of the passing of the old rancheros is written in the long-forgotten, dust-covered records of every Southern Cali­ fornia county. It marked the end of the region’s primacy in ranching. Just north of Los Angeles, though, in the Tehachapi Mountains, cattle and sheep roamed the canyons and meadows of Edward Fitzgerald Beale’s vast Rancho Tejon and, a few miles farther north, lay the San Joaquin Valley, where the ranches of Miller and Lux (encompassing over 1,000,000 acres) and the Kern County Land Company (totaling 1,369,576 acres) developed later in the century. Because of such massive holdings, the San Joaquin’s southernmost town, Bakersfield, “early became the ‘feeder cattle’ capital for the livestock producers of the Southwest and remained so for many years,” explains historian W. H. Hutchinson. Beale’s Rancho Tejon was in many ways prototypical of the state’s cattle and sheep industry; it also mirrored the developing state’s culture with what Kevin Starr refers to as “its assertive amalgamation...