Tag Archives: Mexican longhorns

The Wearing of the Green

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I couldn’t let this March go by without documenting the almost unprecedented growth of foxtails, bromes, cheatgrass, Spanish wild rye, Spanish wild oats, Sahara mustard, etc. This is the California grass Jo-Jo left his home in Tucson, AZ, for (albeit, another Mexican cultivar.)

Click on the link to see California’s tragically beautiful historic rangeland, almost accidentally preserved in Lopez Canyon, once the heartland of Mission San Fernando and Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando.

Behold the Spanish Pasture Mix of grasses that the Franciscans, and the rancheros, and their herds, developed for California. Great herds of millions of Longhorns, or stampedes of mestegnos, mustangs, or flocks of thousands of sheep worked by hundreds of men on horses, no longer tear into this grass. There’s nothing for it to do but grow to soil-straining superabundance, then burn catastrophically.

Coastal Sage Scrub just does not behave this way, thank you very much. Sure, it burns, sure! Of course. It’s adapted to it. Just…not…like…this.

Still this sacred forage — sacrificed, as it were, to San Fernando Rey — is beautiful. I’d be a hard man indeed not to share the gorgeous grass we Californians are taking for granted this spring.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

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Winter rains bring out the Spanish in California. If a growth of grass like this year’s had come in the ranching period, the herds of Mexican longhorns would have increased past counting. The profits from the tallow-and-hide trade with the Yankees at San Pedro would have been a cause for setting off fireworks. Ramona’s Allesandro would have grown so drowsy counting the sheep in his flock, he might have lain down in the hills for a ten year snooze, like Rip Van Winkle. Andres Pico never saw it looking so lush and fat. But this is the Spanish winter green that he, and the Franciscans, labored to create.

A landscape that was re-grassed for, and by, European stock animals.

How did it happen so quickly? You can’t make bricks without straw. It explains why the Missions took so long (the 1790s, really) to get up their great adobe buildings.

  “ And Pharaoh saith, Go ye, get you straw where ye can find it: yet not ought of your work shall be diminished. So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw…

And the taskmasters hasted them, saying, Fulfil your works, your daily tasks, as when there was straw.
And the…children of Israel…were beaten, and…cried unto Pharaoh, saying, Wherefore dealest thou thus with thy servants?…There is no straw given unto thy servants, and they say to us, Make brick: and, behold, thy servants are beaten; but the fault is in thine own people.”

Exodus 5

Mission San Fernando was the largest adobe complex ever built in California. Adobe bricks themselves cure in the sun; but if they are not covered with a tile roof and slathered with gleaming whitewash, they slump into mud with the first rain, just like the hills. Now, terra-cotta tile, and quicklime for whitewash, had to be fired in kilns, and kilns had to be fueled with oak. (Don’t blame the padres entirely: most of the Mission quicklime was sold to the pobladores of Los Angeles, to whitewash their adobe casitas downtown.)

“Gen. Andres Pico and Two Old Indians at San Fernando Mission” (1865). Left to right in background: glimpses of Limekiln, Lopez, and Kagel Canyons.
I’m pretty sure these are the Pacoima Hills at sunrise. That’s Tujunga Wash; the Verdugos; and, in a haze of purple mountain majesty, the distant San Gabriels fading away. 1883.
Spanish grass pasture has taken over the thin, recent layer of fertile soil that masks the fact
that these hills are essentially uplifted dunes of beach sand.

“The conversion of California’s grasslands to non-native grasslands began with European contact. European visitors and colonists introduced plants both intentionally and accidentally.  Adobe bricks from the oldest portions of California’s missions (1791-1800s) contained remains of common barley (Hordeum vulgare), Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum), redstem filaree (Erodium cicutarium), wild oat (Avena fatua), spiny sowthistle (Sonchus asper), curly dock (Rumex crispus), wild lettuce (Lactuca sp., wild mustard (Brassica sp.) and others (Hendry 1931).

Most of the nonnative and invasive plants in California originated from the Mediterranean region of Eurasia and North Africa. Exotic Mediterranean annual plants altered California’s native grasslands to such an extent that it has been called “the most spectacular biological invasion worldwide” (Kotanen 2004).”

from the website California’s Coastal Prairies

http://web.sonoma.edu/cei/prairie/index.shtml

Land that is disturbed for any reason (fire, flood, landslide, man or beast traffic) gets immediately be re-colonized by the invasive grasses. Mudslides, in particular, displace native plants.

Three different green California hillsides.

The peculiar geology around Hansen Dam allows a View of three green communities, on three ridges. The middle ridge is a forgotten corner of the golf course. Somehow this olive-green hued knoll either retained, or re-grew after the Army Corps left, a native foothill chaparral flora: mature laurel sumac trees, shoulder-high sagebrush, buckwheat, cholla cactus, native sunflowers and bunch grasses. Above it, carpeting Top Hill., is the deep green of the naturalized Spanish/Mexican pasture grass mix, Old World foxtails and wild oats and rye and brome.

The bottom, bright green and yellow ridge is a small alluvial dump that just a week ago washed down from a new bridle path ramp. The disturbed soil immediately sprouted mustard shoots and turf weeds. The native plants nearby are putting out root; they won’t get a chance for a foothold until they set seed in the fall. If a hot summer burns off the “weeds”, the California natives might get a chance.

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.