CALIFORNIA'S RANCHO ERA
The living was easy for many of California's European settlers from the early 1800s to the 1840s. Spain's desire to colonize California -- and keep it out of the hands of Russian colonists and enterprising French and American trappers -- led the King to grant enormous plots of land.
These sprawling ranchos were used for running longhorn cattle, farming, and harvesting timber. Every big land grant ranch had its Indian vaqueros, the true forerunners of modern cowboys. These people did all the work for next to nothing, and rancheros who needed more of them could always ride out to an Indian village and round up another dozen.
Elk were so plentiful you could simply lasso them with your rawhide riata and hang on tight until they strangled. Free-ranging longhorn cattle grew fat on native grasses, and the vineyards produced ambrosial wines and brandies. Spirited partying and games of horsemanship were interrupted now and then for a feast of spit-roasted game, served with hot tortillas and beans.
California was still very much up for grabs in these times, and the grabbing usually involved grants of up to 50,000 acres. A handful of opportunistic Yankees and Englishmen got theirs by becoming Mexican citizens and buddying up to key people in power.
Other settlers simply built their rough abodes wherever they felt like it, leaving any hassles over deeds and boundaries for later years. Some big landowners looked upon these squatters with benevolence, and many early California property owners got theirs through this informal means of homesteading.
When they weren't sitting around in their rawhide chairs drinking brandy and singing songs, the rancheros were on horseback hunting deer, elk, and bear; or holding Spanish horsemanship contests that eventually evolved into what we now know as the American rodeo. Indians usually took care of such unpleasantries as rounding up strays and branding cattle. There weren't any fences to mend because there weren't any fences.
For entertainment, Rancheros liked to have their vaqueros hitch up a captured grizzly bear to the biggest, meanest longhorn bull they could find--at which point everybody would sit around hooting, hollering, and cheering like crazy until the animals had torn each other to pieces. The bear typically survived, but the bull was often turned into hamberguesa.
If spectator sports weren't your cup of tea you could always partake in a jolly little game of skill called carrero de gallo, which involved burying a rooster up to its neck in the dirt so horsemen could take turns bending down at full gallop and attempting to rip its head off. Nothing like the spectacle of a headless, blood-spurting chicken to make the crowd roar its approval!
By the turn of the century, all the grizzlies had been hunted to extinction and the civilizing effect of California's blossoming towns and villages had put an end to the carrero de gallo.
