CAMPO CAHUENGA : WHERE CALIFORNIA FIRST BECAME A STATE

This Campo Cahuenga history site is so interesting and well done. It has accurate historical information along with pictures that focus on the various periods from the Tongva Indians of the area to the women like Dona Bernarda Ruiz who may have brought the men to the peace table.


I'm posting it not only because it's interesting American history, but because on Sunday it will be the 165th anniversary of the Signing of the treaty between the Californios and Mexico and there's going to be a celebration at the Campo, which happens to be right across the street from the big Universal Studios Tourist Trap. Sadly, though thousands visit the Tourist Trap and spend lots of money there, few look across the street to a place that is open to the public once a week for free and the site of transformative history.

Being so close to the Universal Studios Tourist Trap also means that you can get there by public transportation very easily, forget the gas prices and the parking fees, including simply getting off the subway station at Universal and taking the elevator up to street level. That subway itself is one of the most beautiful artistic subway stations in Los Angeles featuring local history in pillars of handmade glazed tiles (a wonderful photo-op).

Despite what certain history revisionists may want us to believe (that this territory still belongs to Mexico) the treaty was signed fair and square back when the people who lived in California did not identify themselves as Mexicans but as Californios. Many Spanish land grant recipients had huge (Malibu for instance) ranchos here. Today as you ride down Lankershim Boulevard, you may not realize that stage coaches once came down this way.

See you there?

AMERICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE HAS SOME ARTICLES THAT ARE WEB EXCLUSIVES

Just reading AMERICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE, Winter 2011 issue which has an article called "Fremont Steals California" by Sally Denton, which I found very interesting indeed!

The physical site where the Treaty of Cahuenga was signed (which made California the United States) is very close to the entrance of the Universal Studios in Studio City - North Hollywood, California. I've been meaning to go there during one of their open houses, but it's not open often. Apparently this historical site is one that is not very popular, perhaps because there are so very many Mexican - Americans in Southern California, legal and illegal aliens, who feel that this state still belongs to Mexico and they seem to lack volunteers, even though the Universal Studio tourists are so very close to a major point of American history.

The Treaty was signed January 13, 1847. And since then this has legally been the United States of America.

The title of Ms. Denton's article is in reference to the fact that Fremont was a junior Army officer who was acting on secret orders of the President of the United States to bluff that his forces were far stronger than they were. As a result Fremont waged an almost bloodless coup for the Monterrey area of California. And so it went.

Linking to the magazine's web site above: Maybe you'd love a subscription for Christmas? The magazine is excellent for Civil War buffs.

DANCING at CIRO's by SHEILA WELLER : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW (LOS ANGELES IN THE 1940'S)

DANCING at CIRO'S by SHEILA WELLER

I love to read around the people I'm researching, who become characters in the great play of life. Sometimes you read a book and it brings a place and time alive again too. This is a wonderful excerpt from a wonderful writer, Sheila Weller. Her mother's brother owned the famous Ciro's restaurant which was something of a home to the Rat Pack when they weren't in Vegas... Christine

Page 84 and 85

"There was still an unfinished quality to the place. The whole Los Angles basin, from San Bernadino to Santa Monica, had, two centuries earlier, been a swamp-pocked plain where antelope and wild cattle grazed on patchy grass amid alder, willow, and sycamore; where cacti, manzanita, and buckthorn spouted, giving the ground a scrubby aspect. Into this abyss, several leather-jacketed Spaniards - members of a company led by Captain Don Caspar de Portola (the Spanish Governor of the Californias) and a gray - robed Franciscan friar named Juan Crespi had stumbled in August 1769. They encountered stocky aboriginals who "began to howl like wolves as they drew near to us," their diary reads, but they eventually agreed to barter. They explored and christened their new friends the Gabrieleno Indians.

"Priests, soldiers, and colonists made their way up from Mexico over the next fifty years. The city passed from Spanish to Mexican rule in 1822, and the 1841 Pre-emption Act allowed settlers to homestead for $1.25 an acre. After a trio of events - the Gold Rush of 1848, the cession of California to the United States that same year, and statehood in 1850, Hollywood and West Los Angeles attracted migrants who, over the next thirty years, built citrus orchards on acreage that would later become Melrose, Fairfax, and Fountain Avenues and miles of Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Sunset Boulevards.

"Danish sailor Christian Duen homesteaded 160 acres that squared Santa Monica, Normandie, Melrose, and Western. Kentucky miner John Bower worked a plot between Franklin and Sunset. A 1870's roster of Hollywood fruit farmers includes "a German cripple, a French sailor, a Basque sheep raiser, a Mexican war veteran, a Prussian Calvary officer." Eventually this ragtag lot would disappear, to be replaced by a civic culture so bland, it would lead H.L. Mencken to dismiss L.A. as "Double Dubuque." Yet something of this haphazard diversity lingered, making for a class system that upturned eastern caste rules. The Irish, scorned in Boston, became L.A.'s elite; the Mulhollands and the Dohenys were the young city's Astors and Rockefellers. In Los Angeles, Jews didn't try to "pass." People WANTED to be Jews; many who weren't born Jews later converted.'"

C 2003 Sheila Weller St Martins Press

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