Tag Archives: Leonis Adobe

The Valley’s Wild West

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😈 Hallowe’en 2021 Creepy Neighborhood Award: the Weird, Wicked West Valley

This year the Palsied Hand for creepiest, most terrifying 😱 LA Neighborhood goes to [eunuch strikes gong] 🤔🤭😏🙄🤞🏼🙋‍♀️🤷🏽‍♂️🙈

The old Rancho Las Virgenes, once owned by Miguel Leonis, see below. This trailhead, north of the Kobe site at the end of Las Virgenes Road, is a perfection of West Valley despair. Gorgeous but dangerously sick, protected but a firetrap. This is the core habitat of the rare Engelmann Oaks, which you see, are as exquisite dead as alive. I quickly recognized the mineralization patterns roasting the hills. (Drought schmout, it just rained.) But I only got two hundred yards down the trail when I was overwhelmed with putrid, pungent fumes of natural gas from the blowholes along the trail;— the unmistakable odor of driving up the Turnpike past Elizabeth, NJ. I took to my heels. More on poison gas later….😈

West San Fernando Valley! Go anywhere west of Van Nuys and you’ll find yourself in LA’s Transylvania. The mountains are creepy, the hills are gray like ghosts, the boulders make obscene mocking faces at you, there are gas fumes in the canyons, and the treacherous slopes hide a thousand Ways to Hell. Its bowls and washes cradle weird gated suburbs where ageless rich people seem to go in (Tesla, Tesla, Mercedes, Audi, Tesla…) but never come out. There are stoplights that are red in all directions and never change. Take this virtual tour of the SFV’s strangely sterile, outlandishly pricey, desperately macabre badlands…Timid Reader, you’ll cringe, gasp and retch at these scary, spookly stories! 😈 HA ha ha ha ha….

‘They Like Me! They REALLY like me!’ — The West Valley

LEONIS ADOBE: The snake-like road at the bottom of the map is the Ventura Freeway, aka “the 101,” which follows the route of El Camino Real, which is Ventura Blvd, upon which the Leonis Adobe fronts, and has done since 1844. The town of Calabasas was built around the ranch — location location location. It served in good times as a coaching rest stop. But sometime in the mid-1870s, a brutish Basque bully of a sheepherder named Miguel Leonis got control of Rancho El Escorpion by marrying Espiritu, the legitimate Chumash heiress. Leonis turned her ranch house on the Camino into a center of terror and intimidation for the whole West Valley. If arguments and fistfights and lawsuits didn’t settle it Don Miguel’s way, a gang of hitmen at midnight would. Murders and beatings just happened to people who crossed him. He stole, swindled, and connived; he drove off Yankee squatters with blazing shotguns. He acquired land and wealth and water rights simply, it seems, in order to dispossess other people. When he died, he dispossesed Espiritu; she had to wage a court battle for 20 years against the estate; they finally ruled it did belong to Mrs. Leonis, the by-then octagenarian Indian princess. She lived in her adobe home until she died in 1906, still looking great by the way.

Miguel Leonis, the Devil of Calabasas, died in September 1889, while driving a wagon home from a victorious session in court at downtown LA, and a celebratory booze-up afterwards. As his horse plodded across the silent, moonlit Cahuenga Pass (recently bought by the brand-new village of Hollywood), somehow the drunken miser fell from his buckboard and tumbled under the wheels, which left rut-marks across his face and chest. If such a thing could be an accident, it was natural justice, fittingly ‘Hollywood’ in tone and atmosphere. BUT, the ghosts are all in the West Valley. The adobe is famous as one of the most haunted places in LA. The house is a museum, where people come to see ’em — as they did this afternoon with kiddies in costume, etc.

Bonus creep: John Carradine was the last private resident of the adobe, sometime before 1962. His son Keith recalled him as an abusive alcoholic, and his mother as a dangerous schizophrenic; there were beatings, bars on windows, etc. The boys’ childhood must have been pretty harrowing.

👹 KOBE’S DOOM — January 26, 2020, was a foggy, overcast day in the West Valley, not cheery and picturesque like the photo above. It seems the helicopter pilot became disoriented flying over the hills, tricked by the flat gloomy light. The accident shocked the world and sent basketball fans into mourning. The tragedy was compounded by an ugly legacy of accusations and lawsuits that have yet to run their course. This grim LA story just won’t go to its rest, trailing fetid fetters of money, fame, envy, and that most horrifying of all our dooms, human error. It may haunt us for a long time to come. RIP.

FOUNTAIN OF THE WORLD CULT BOMBING SITE

😈 Box Canyon Road is the road the heroine shouldn’t turn onto, in a Shirley Jackson novel. Meandering, narrow, hard to turn around on once inside, it is cut off from the rest of the Valley. This is one of those places that refugees from the new Atomic reality retreated to after the War… land so remote, so uncivilized, so sore to the eye, that nobody else had ever wanted to touch it before. Like many such marginal places in LA, it attracted its own cult; which, like many such cults, attracted its own disgruntled suicide bombers armed with twenty sticks of dynamite.💥 🔥

🛎🛎🛎👺 BONUS POINTS for the Standard Air disaster of 1949, noted in the red box above. The Fountain of Life folks helped rescue the survivors, God bless them all. This ghastly accident followed an eerily similar chain of events to Kobe’s demise; a pilot distracted by passengers, but not badly, flying in morning fog not too bad, descending through a familiar flight path too quickly, but not all that fast… The accident report is fascinating and depressing. It happened right at the Devil’s Slide, by Chatsworth Reservoir. For a chilling View of how the Valley fog can distort our hills for pilots, let lovely 🌋Lopez Canyon be our spokesmodel.👺 Land of Contrasts, indeed!

Top row, see the low hills in fog. Bottom, see the high hills hidden behind the low!

ROCKETDYNE SANTA SUSANA FIELD LABORATORY NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN SITE / WOOLSEY FIRE RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT 😈 Suck it up, SFV, the wages of sin is dust! 😮‍💨 Lucky that Valley Village is a few blocks out of range of the worst zone. The View has already uncovered the Cold War hubris involved in Rocketdyne’s 1952 sodium-nuclear reactor meltdown and cover-up. Now that we definitively know it’s as bad as we all thought it was, let’s cover it up again.🙈 🕵🏼‍♂️ What about the possibility that the Woolsey Fire was started in the first place by methane or other hydrothermal venting? 🙉

THE DEVIL’S SLIDE, PIONEER CEMETERY, CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH, VITRIOL FALLS

🤡 Check back issues of the View for the infamous Devil’s Slide. The stagecoach road leads straight down to Oakwood/Pioneer Cemetery, then veers sharply around it at the bottom.

The humid green lawns seem especially eerie in these Latter Days of drought and sprawl. The 20th century fixation on turning the West Valley into the West Country of England, or Westchester West, with green lawn estates and clapboard churches, seems…a bit like folly, eh? 🤡 The tombstones here are great, creative, not somber. Angelenos, RIP.

😈 The gaping mouths of Vitriol Falls must be fresh in your mind from the recent post:

CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH https://ssmpa.com/chatsworth-park-south-old.php This was the old RR Ranch, home to Roy, and Dale, and Trigger, pictured below. 😈 Part of it was developed as a skeet-shooting range in the 50s; afterwards the City figured to save it for a park, happily (for wildlife) contiguous to other West Valley parks. But in 2008 they found spent shell casings and lead contamination everywhere. They closed the park for YEARS; in 2013, the City renovation plan emerged, which was to tear out all the nature and turn the site into a giant parking lot for…itself. Finally they came up with something green, but without any imagination or uniqueness or sense of site ecology — just swing-sets and brown lawns and picnic tables — but anyway a few years ago it was re-opened. It was a terrible disgrace for the City of LA to take so long. It took dogged community activism to get that park back; the link above is to the website archive of the Santa Susana Mountains Association. It’s worth a Hallowe’en skim to remind yourself how much citizen work it takes to get the right thing done.

JUAN FLORES CAPTURED “Head ’em off at the Pass!” The Santa Susana Pass, fka Simi Pass, and the San Fernando Pass, and the Newhall Pass, fka Fremont Pass, were collectively “the Pass” — and they were all used by bandits and desperadoes as hideouts and get-aways back in the days when the SFV was the Wild West. One of the dreamiest most charismatic worst was revolutionary hero California rights activist murderer and robber Juan Flores. After he shot the sheriff, but did not shoot the deputy, a massive manhunt was coordinated by Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando owner, U.S. Senator, and former Captain General of the California Lancers, Don Andres Pico. Flores was finally forced to surrender in the Pass. His hanging at Fort Hill, as reported by the Star, was so botched and gruesome it invites Hallowe’en perusal:

SPAHN MOVIE RANCH AND THE MANSON FAMILY CAVE

Roy Rogers wasn’t the only one whose Western-themed ranch hit hard times in the 60s. After the Hollywood studio heyday waned, Ed Spahn kept a movie location ranch going on some camera-ready acres in the Santa Susana Pass by booking it for TV Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. By the late 60s, even this second-wind was fading, and the ranch lacked business. So when Spahn met a nice fellow called Charles Manson who had been beating around the chaparral after leaving the Fountain of Life, Spahn hired him; and he let the youth’s groovy friends move in to do chores on the place, sleeping rough and running around barefoot and letting the sunshine in. 😈 Helter Skelter! On the new freeways, chic Laurel Canyon was just a few minutes away.

Natural gas — methane — can be smelled all over the West Valley but especially in Porter Ranch. (Natural gas is odorless; if you can detect it, it’s man-made. They put the sulfurous odors in so that it can be detected.) I’ve been driven off trails in Las Virgenes and elsewhere in the Wild West by the stench. It’s awful that the State has recently re-committed to pumping tons of methane into the West Valley storage grounds even after the scandalous Aliso Canyon leaks.

https://projects.laist.com/2019/after-aliso/ LAist.com has put together a good discussion of the problem. 😈 Because educated public discussion is always great at solving society’s problems! HA ha ha ha ha ha……

HAPPY HALLOWE’EN FROM THE VIEW!!😈💥🌋🔥👻🎃🧛🙈🙉🙊⚡️⚰️🦦

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The Leonis Adobe, in what is today the heart of Calabasas. 

Miguel Leonis was a Basque immigrant, a land-grabber extraordinario,  legendary for his cruelty and bad temper. He was greedy, litigious, abusive, conniving. He ruthlessly drove off squatters, intimidated neighbors into abandonment, cheated his foremen, and bullied passing travelers on the El Camino Real. “Git off’n my land”, with a pair of crossed shotguns, might have been the shingle over Leonis’s puerto.

After years of amassing a fortune in ranch lands, and building this lovely (and thoroughly haunted) adobe, and plaguing the entire Valley, he died mysteriously in the Cahuenga Pass, run over one night by his own wagon, while returning home from a court session in Los Angeles. Had he gotten out to pee? Gotten drunk and fallen asleep at the reins? Or had Leonis been met in a Cahuenga ambush and thrown under his cartwheels, by, well, just about anybody in LA? And most important: is this the fatal wagon??

The story of how Leonis’s long-suffering common-law Indian wife Espiritu Chujila, daughter of the Chumash chief of the western Valley, held onto her land after her husband-tyrant’s demise, reads like a Greek myth.

Hollywood actor John Carradine (THE GRAPES OF WRATH) was the last private tenant of the adobe. He raised three of his four talented and tall, rangy, good-lookin’ sons on this ranch.

WHERE’S THE BEEF?

These lucky beeves are a pair of Texas Longhorns, who live at the Leonis Adobe in Calabasas. They are modern cousins of the old stock California Longhorns breed that once ranged the San Fernando Valley.

San Fernando Mission, Rancho los Encinos, Rancho el Escorpion, Rancho Providencia, Rancho San Rafael, Rancho Los Feliz, Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando, and the other Valley brands ran tens of thousands of cattle at a time. Many owners became extremely rich. But most were eventually forced out, due to secularization, legal chicanery, drought or usury – only one of which, n.b., is a natural economic cause.

During the Spanish and Mexican periods, Mission Indian labor was used to round up, brand, ride herd, butcher, skin and tan the hides, and try out the tallow in huge smoky, greasy vats. The game for the Missions and the side-lining soldiers was to elude the Monterey customs agent, and the profit was in selling thousands of hides and tons of tallow to the traders from “the Boston Nation” who hovered in their clipper ships at San Pedro, and flew back to Catalina like seagulls in case the odd Spanish ship came up from San Diego. 

Some Bostonians, like Richard Henry Dana, even came ashore. There he marveled at, and spluttered in disgust over, the wasteful, luxurious, wine-and-song sodden, improvident, lazy, fence-less, money-less, bank-less, slave-based society of the horseback Californios. Dana noticed that thousands of pounds of beef were left to rot, since the skins and fat were the commodity. This in a country where the Mission Indians he saw seemed to be starving. With all their hides, which they folded and stacked on a burro’s back a dozen high to haul them onto the ships, still no Californio would deign to work as a shoemaker, whatever his profits; they’d rather ride like hidalgos, and buy the hard Boston shoes at the ruinously high luxury premium.

In 1847 the Capitulation was signed on the porch of Casa de Cahuenga, a Valley ranch-house. The Yankees got California, but the Californios kept their land grants. Then the Gold Rush hit Southern California as a Food Rush – for up in the hills, the miners valued as good-as-gold, the lean California beef. 

The Rancho era reached its zenith in the 1850′s. Cosmopolitan and rich, Los Angeles celebrated with fireworks, fandangoes, and Plaza bullfights; but the Pueblo was also one of the most lawless and bloody places in the country. Many of the old families, like the Avilas and the Coronels, shook the dust of downtown off their boots to live permanently on their country Ranchos. “Los Diablos” simmered with enough Mexican resistance, Tong wars, cattle rustling vendettas, ethnic inequality, and social crisis caused by fortunes won and lost on drunken high-stakes horse races, to plot a thousand Westerns.

In the1860s drought hit hard. There had been droughts before; herds wiped out, hardship all around. There was the time the Los Angeles River completely changed its course, and the fortunes of landowners drained away with it. But in those droughts the Californios had no Boston or Philadelphia or San Francisco branch banks, no mortgages, no gas lamps and pianos and carpets brought on Yankee credit around the Horn from New Orleans or Paris. When the proud old families went to poor-mouth their new bankers in downtown Los Angeles, they got very short terms indeed. In sudden debt, most lost out to short sales, forced sheriff sales or were dogged in the courthouse by people named Glassell, Leonis, Banning, Maclay, Van Nuys, Burbank, etc. etc. 

The cattle themselves, the sturdy Longhorns that created so many fortunes on the good grass of the Valley, which walked up from Baja in 1769 to San Diego, and from there reproduced hill by hill, Mission by Mission, Valley by Valley in their un-fenced millions; and which were praised by Fremont’s soldiers as the most delicious beef in the world, are not the beef cattle raised in California today. We can’t really know how the legendarily flavorful and nutritious Californio beef tasted, because the breed was displaced.

With the herds decimated by the droughts, cattle baron Henry Miller, a German immigrant butcher in San Francisco, swooped in and re-populated vast San Joaquin lands with American breeds. He believed the ancient Mexican stock-lines were inferior to the Northern European breeds whose Manifest Destiny it was to o’erspread the continent. Or something.

The Californio longhorn does survive as a breed, and has spread around the Pacific Rim. Coastlines seem to unite trading cultures, rather than divide them; thus we find Californio cattle given as a gift by Sir George Vancouver to King Kamehameha of Hawaii. Pairs from what soon became the dangerously over-populated Royal Herd were sold off to a ship bound for the Spanish Phllippines. The Manila trade was controlled then by the savviest traders on the Pacific, the Chinese, who took the Hawaiian stock and naturalized it all over the islands. Thus California’s homegrown stock Mexican longhorn, via the bloodline of the Royal Herd of Hawaii, reportedly flourishes all over the Far East.