The first white man to set eyes on the area probably did so from the crow’s nest of Juan Cabrillo’s flagship in 1542. But it wasn’t until 1769 that an expedition of Spanish explorers, traveling overland to find a route to Monterey Bay, discovered the rich beauty of the Gaviota Coast.
These members of Gaspar de Portola’s expedition were led by trailblazer Jose Francisco de Ortega, a rotund, enthusiastic Mexican career soldier from Guanajuato, who later built the presidio at Santa Barbara and served as its first comandante.
Ortega fell in love with the country of live oak groves, rolling rangeland, and tangled thickets of willow, alders, and sycamores. Another member of the expedition, Franciscan Priest Juan Crespi, described the area as, “… extremely delightful … giving signs of its being very fertile land, capable of producing whatever one might wish to plant.” Fr. Crespi would have been amazed has he known the topsoil was 300 feet deep in some areas. It was called Gaviota because a sea gull (gaviota) was shot by one of the members of the party.
Each time they camped, super-hospitable Indians used their arrival as an excuse for all-night entertaining, bringing gifts, and dancing. Perhaps it was for this reason the bleary-eyed men missed their Monterey destination and wound up at San Francisco Bay. But whatever the reason, the weary Spaniards turned back towards their camp in San Diego. Ortega, however, did not forget the Gaviota Coast.
Ortega was a better trailblazer than a bookkeeper. When he retired from the Spanish army in 1791, he left his accounts in such disorder that he owed a sizeable sum to the government.
Wanting to set the account straight, Captain Ortega petitioned the viceroy to grant him grazing rights to some land near his favorite spot on the Gaviota Coast where he could raise sheep and cattle and eventually pay off his debt.
Over the objections of mission fathers who protested the precedent, the King of Spain gave Ortega a 26,529-acre grant, the only one of its kind in Santa Barbara County. A devout man, Ortega named the golden coastal strip Nuestra Senora del Refugio, Our Lady of Refuge.
Ortega lived to enjoy his paradise only a short while, for on February 3, 1798, as he was riding through Refugio Canyon on his way to visit a son in Santa Barbara, he suffered a heart attack and slumped lifeless from his saddle. He was buried with high honors at Mission Santa Barbara. His son, Jose Maria, took over operation of the Refugio Rancho.
Jose Ortega’s diversified business activities soon brought a great deal of activity and excitement to the ranch. He ignored the fact that the King of Spain considered the Pacific Ocean his private lake, and encouraged foreign smuggling vessels, including those ships bearing the American Stars and Stripes, to take refuge at his sheltered cove. He swapped otter skins for dry goods, tools, medicines, and other scarce commodities.
Smuggling activities at Refugio ended abruptly in 1818 with the arrival of a French mercenary, Hyppolite de Bouchard, who, in the service of newly independent Argentina, was sent to harass Spanish shipping and ports. The Ortega family was lucky to escape alive, fleeing over Refugio Pass to the safety of Mission Santa Inez.
The following years were the heyday of the Ortegas and other California rancheros as hide and tallow replaced otter and seal skin in a frontier land where coins and currency were virtually unknown. Thousands of cattle were slaughtered during annual roundups. Ranchers used only the hide and tallow, leaving the carcasses in the sun to rot, providing feasts for buzzards and the great California condors.
Cowhides were scraped, sun-dried, then folded hairy side in for storage and later shipment to Boston factories. Tanning was rare. The going price for a cowhide was from one to two dollars, and they became known as “California banknotes.”
Then came the Mexican-American War, forerunner of the American annexation of California in 1846 and the gold rush of 1848-49. The gold rush radically changed the cattle industry from $2 hides to $50 a head for tough beefsteak to feed the hungry miners flooding into California. Fortunes were made by driving cattle from southern to northern California.
In 1854, a travel-weary sheepherder and his flock of sore-footed Merino sheep entered the valley all but unnoticed. The sheepherder was Colonel William Welles Hollister of Hanover, Ohio. He had driven his flock 2,500 miles over desert and mountain, one of the most remarkable feats of the time. Of the 6,000 sheep he had started with, only 1,000 survived the rugged crossing. Brackish water holes, prairie fires, miles of waterless desert, and attacks by Indians all took their toll. But in the lush, green valley dotted with oak groves, natural springs, and numerous creeks, the herd soon doubled in size. Before pushing on to Monterey, Hollister vowed he would someday return to the Gaviota Coast.
The decade of the 1850’s was marked by a statewide collapse of law and order, and Santa Barbara seemed to receive more than its share of outlaws, including Joaquin Murrietta (probably blamed for the deeds of several bandidos named Joaquin), Solomon Pico (immortalized in fiction under the name of Zorro), and the worst of all, Irishman Jack Powers (the ringleader behind a wave of murders and robberies). These bandits waylaid miners and cattlemen alike, making trading risky and traveling alone impossible.
In the winter of 1861, California was deluged by a freak month-long rainstorm. Many historic adobe houses literally dissolved. Along the golden coast the rain was followed by a two-year drought which was followed in 1864 with a swarm of voracious grasshoppers that destroyed every remaining blade of grass and green leaf. Out of an estimated 250,000 cattle in the valley, only 5,000 remained.
Meanwhile, Hollister had become a wealthy man in the San Benito Valley and he sold his sheep ranch for nearly half a million dollars. Taking two brothers, Albert and Thomas Dibblee, as partners, Hollister bought vast acreages in western Santa Barbara County, including El Rancho Nuestra Senora del Refugio from the now impoverished Ortega heirs. Colonel Hollister later became sole owner of the property now known as the Hollister Ranch.
Hollister was one of California’s outstanding citizens and did a great deal to develop and enrich his state. Besides reviving the cattle ranch, Hollister was a horticulturist by avocation and imported great numbers of exotic plants and trees. His sons learned to ride, rope, and shoot on the Gaviota range. His youngest son, Stanley, became such an expert he was invited to join Colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s elite Rough Riders cavalry company in Cuba.
After Hollister’s death in 1886, his son, Senator John James Hollister, supervised the large-scale cattle operations on the ranch. He and his family lived in a redwood mansion he built, complete with the first swimming pool in the county.
Today the Hollister Ranch is one of the most pleasant areas on the west coast. It is protected by the Santa Ynez Mountains on the north and cooled by the Pacific Ocean on the south, a unique geographical arrangement. Present owners will keep it as it has always been, a cattle ranch overlooking the Pacific.
This article was originally published in the February 1972 issue of Western Horseman.
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