GAYE LEBARON
Sonoma County was La Frontera del Norte in 1800s
Published: Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 4:42 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 5:44 a.m.
If the video is playing when you arrive at La Frontera del Norte, the Latino history exhibit currently at the Sonoma County Museum, chances are you will enter to the strains of "La Golondrina" played on an old-fashioned music box.
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JEFF KAN LEE / The Press Democrat
The wind-up, paper-cylinder "Symphonia" is among the oldest artifacts on display in this first-rate show. As the late Earl Carrillo tells you on the screen, as he cranks out the familiar tune, it belonged to his great grandmother, Dona Maria Carrillo, the first non-Indian resident of Santa Rosa.
Dona Maria's family traded for it, probably with hides and tallow, with one of the whaling ships that stopped at Tiburon. It was one of her proudest possessions.
Dona Maria died in 1849, but there are Carrillo descendants who still live in the area, some of them on the very same land grant where their ancestor made local history.
The Carrillo family's Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa was one of 24 large land grants in the valley lands of what is now Sonoma County.
These ranchos were not of the sort we read about in early California literature, peopled with dashing vaqueros with ball fringe on their sombreros playing guitars and lovely senoritas with jeweled combs in their hair, waving painted fans.
Those ranchos were long established in Southern California. These northern land owners were rugged pioneers, many of them soldiers in Gen. Mariano Vallejo's tiny garrison in the pueblo of Sonoma. Others were Vallejo's family members. Dona Maria was his mother-in-law.
THE MEXICAN WAR of 1846 ended Mexico's rule and marked the beginning of American California. Truth be told, it was, in many ways, a land grab engineered by President James K. Polk after Mexico declined to sell its northern possessions. Most of the Mexican land grant owners headed south. A very few stayed around -- perhaps to see what would happen to their heritage.
Petaluma's Tim Talamantes is descended from a determined land grant family that has hung around Sonoma County for seven generations. Along with some Vallejo and Carrillo descendants and members of the Fitch family from Rancho Sotoyome (Healdsburg), Talamantes and his family can trace their lineage to rancho days. Tim's ancestor was a soldier from Sinaloa who came north with the deAnza expedition that reached San Francisco Bay in 1776.
Tim and his family live on the Laguna de San Antonio Rancho, which was once 26,000 acres stretching into Marin County and including Chileno Valley and portions of the Two Rock area.
In a video segment at the museum exhibit, he talks about his ancestors and the land granted to them 170 years ago. As keeper of the historical flame, he can recite ancestors and court cases and land disputes through the years.
In the 1850s, Tim says, Americans "stole" the ranch from his family. "The Mexicans didn't stand a chance in the courts of California," he says.
His great-great-grandfather, Bartolo Bojorques, divided it into nine pieces for his children, who subsequently sold off eight random pieces without regard for who owned which. It was a scenario repeated throughout the state.
The disposition of rancho land in the treaty that ended the Mexican War required proof of patent through a special Lands Commission and an automatic suit in the federal courts.
The average California grant took 18 years to clear the courts. In that 18 years, gold was discovered and the largest land migration in history, to that point, headed across the prairies for California.
The new arrivals "squatted" on the land grants, and the owners were powerless to turn them away. Suits clogged the U.S. courts for several decades after statehood. Rancho Laguna de San Antonio was more than 20 years in the courts.
Tim's great-grandfather, Anastasio Talamantes, bought a portion of the ranch from Bojorques family, and subsequently married a Bojorques daughter, which is the family lineage to the 2.17 acres where Tim lives today.
His grandfather, Pat Talamantes, who was born on the ranch and lived in Chileno Valley on 10 acres, was, as is Tim, a storyteller who passed on three centuries of family lore.
He sold his 10 acres, the last family claim, in 1950. Tim's two-plus-acre "rancho" "didn't pass down," he says. "I had to buy it."
SPANISH/MEXICAN California, you see, ended here in Sonoma County. Ran smack-dab into the push (more of a gentle shove) from the north by imperial Russia and was subsequently overrun by wagonloads of American farmers heading west until they reached the Pacific Ocean.
With good reason it was known as the northern frontier, the very edge of Hispanic California. It is certainly an appropriate title for the museum exhibit, which embraces two centuries of Latino history.
The first chapter is surprisingly brief, and the impact less intense than it has been on areas to the south, including Monterey, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego, all of which were truly Spanish colonial settlements dating from the mid-18th century.
If you check a map, you will note that Santa Rosa is the last city with a Spanish name as you go north. Here we pass from just about every saint (Diego to Rafael) in the liturgy to towns named for pioneers like the Heald brothers or for the names the Indians called them, like Ukiah -- and on to Eureka and Crescent City and Portland.
EVEN SAN FRANCISCO, with its Presidio, was marginal at best in any attempt to protect lands around San Francisco Bay. Except for sporadic military expeditions into our coastal valleys, the Spanish generally ignored this frontier area. It wasn't until Mexico won its War of Independence in 1822 that attention was paid, the direct result of a 10-year Russian presence at Fort Ross and three inland farms.
With the Mexicans came a mission decade (1823-1833) in Sonoma followed by the establishment of a pueblo there and the division of most of the valley lands into the land grants dating to the late 1830s and early 1840s.
Mexican California lasted just 23 years. Tim Talamantes is justifiably proud of his link to that era, which must have had a "small-town" aspect since he claims family ties to the Carrillos, to Mark West's wife, Guadalupe Vasquez, to the Soberanes family, also of Petaluma.
Tim learned most of this from his grandfather, and he also learned not to have hard feelings about family losses.
"We might as well get along," he says, even though he admits to teasing friends when "I know they live on land that was stolen from my ancestors."
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