The Americans, and their European counterparts, began invading northern California in the late 1820s and early '30s. A good-sized handful had settled in the Napa and Sonoma valleys by 1840, and with the first wagon train to cross the Sierra in 1841 — and for decades thereafter — the influx quickened. A few of these played stellar roles in the history of South Lake County.
The First Owner of the Valleys of South Lake County
Jacob and Rosalia Leese
Jacob P. Leese was well-known in Alta (upper) California. A native of Ohio, like many young men of his time Leese had left home at an early age. As hunter, trapper, trader and guide on the Santa Fe Trail he had been successful enough by the age of 25 to establish a mercantile and marine supply business with a partner in Monterey.
A restless sort, he left the business two years later and continued north, arriving in Yerba Buena in 1836. “I have concluded to stop in this place for good,” Leese wrote to his business partner, “in consequence of the great prospect ahead…” Proving his business acumen better than his spelling, he continued, “I have made a contract with a couple of Men to Build a house for 4 hundred and 40 dollars paid in Goods. I think it is a good Traid.”
Leese’s new home, completed by a crew hired from ships moored in the bay, was the second residence in the nascent village – Capt. Wm. Richardson, known as the founder of San Francisco and later of Sausalito, had erected a tent to house his wife and children a year before. Leese’s home and store was the first frame structure in what would one day be billed as “everybody’s favorite city.” As soon as it was completed he, in his own words, “invited the whole countryside to a glorious Fourth of July party at which the guests ate, danced and drank for three days while both the Mexican national emblem and the Stars and Stripes floated overhead.” That occasion, in the summer of 1837, is assumed to be the first appearance of Old Glory in California.
Notable among the great prospects Leese saw was General Mariano Vallejo’s sister Rosalia, whom he courted and wed in a remarkably short time. In 1838, their daughter Rosalie was the first American child born on the San Francisco peninsula.
Leese became socially and politically active in both Yerba Buena and throughout the district of Sonoma, where in 1841 he claimed about 18,000 acres around Carneros Valley. He soon commis- sioned the construction of a grand adobe home in Sonoma across the plaza from that of General Vallejo. His fortunes multiplied, primarily through his dealings in land. He subsequently purchased or traded several other parcels of land in northern California and the Monterey area, including the lands that became Salinas, California, where he is listed among the city’s founding fathers.
The year after he set up his cattle business on the ranchos here, Leese was caught up in events directed at his well-known brothers-in-law. Most notably, Leese served as interpreter and translator during the Bear Flag Rebellion of June 14, 1846, the first overt move toward making California a part of the United States.
We’ve all heard of the rebellion, but the ease by which the rebels took over is rarely noted. There was only token resistance. Well before they arrived, General Vallejo had heard the approach of the thirty-three rowdy Americans who stormed Vallejo’s Sonoma headquarters in the wee hours of the morning June 14, 1846. He donned a full-dress uniform and greeted them at the door, invited their leaders in, and offered wine and brandy to the ragtag group of militants.
As discussions began, Vallejo suggested that Jacob Leese might be useful “to help draw up any formal papers that would require approval and signatures.” A few hours later the rebels claimed victory and raised a hastily constructed Bear Flag over the villa, declaring California a free and independent republic. General Vallejo and other officials were taken prisoner. Leese was asked to accompany them to act as interpreter, but by the time of their arrival at the fort he too had been made a prisoner.
News of the declaration of the Mexican-American War reinforced the rebels’ claims. On July 7, 1846, Commodore John Sloat planted the American flag in Monterey. Seven weeks later, on August 2, General Vallejo, ill with malaria, was released. Jacob Leese and others were held until August 8.
Leese went back to buying and trading land and in the following years became, despite his questionable spelling, adviser, accountant, business representative, and counselor to most of the old-line families as well as many recently arrived ranchers in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties.
By 1851, Leese, like Salvador Vallejo, apparently wearied of long distance ranching. He sold both of the local ranchos, and pre- sumably the cattle on them, to Capt. Archibald Alexander Ritchie for $14,000. South Lake County was still essentially owned by one man, just a different man.
Among his numerous grants, Leese held the Rancho Sausal, and participated in the founding of Salinas there. He had a fine home constructed in Massachusetts, then deconstructed and shipped around the Horn to be reconstructed on his Salinas property.
Once his wife and nine children were comfortably ensconced there, Leese took off for New York and Washington, D.C., where he spent the next fifteen years trying to convince the U. S. government it should buy Baja California.
When Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, revisited San Francisco 24 years after the book was published,
he recognized the now-aged Leese because he recalled the derring-do with which the young man had exhibited his skills as a sharpshooter and his extravagant self-confidence.
The Man Whose Death Held Up Progress
A. A. Ritchie
Archibald Alexander Ritchie and Paul S. Forbes filed a claim for both the 21,200-acre Rancho Guenoc grant and the adjoining, 8200-acre Rancho Collayomi on which Middletown is now located, in 1852, under new land title laws established with California’s statehood. They were not approved until 1863 and 1865. Ritchie sent Robert Sterling, nephew of a business partner, to manage the sprawling property. We know nothing of Forbes, but Ritchie's life in San Francisco, Benicia and Suisun drew lots of attention.
Ritchie was born in New Castle, Delaware, Jan. 28, 1806. His well-established parents expected him to join the navy when he reached maturity, but at age 13 he ran away and hopped a ship bound for China. It was “a calling”; five years later he was in command of the good ship Treaty, owned by Philadelphia’s Marine Insurance Co. In 1831, he married a Philadelphia girl, Martha Hamilton, and when their first child, Eliza, was born the following year he was bringing a shipload of tea and silk from China.
Ritchie became resident agent in Canton, China, in 1838, for Philadelphia shippers and importers Platt & Sons whose ships carried hides, tallow and otter skins from California to China and returned highly desirable goods back to the new state. His family joined him there and at least four of the Ritchies' seven children were born there. In 1847, Ritchie returned his family to Phila- delphia and found himself drawn to California by the gold rush.
We have no information about Ritchie's co-signator Paul S. Forbes. But it is provocative to know that at the time Ritchie was stationed in Canton, Paul Siemen Forbes of the affluent east coast Forbes family was American Consul there. Forbes was at the time also president of Russell & Co. Shipping, recognized by all in the shipping industry as holding "a virtual monopoly" on the rampant opium smuggling trade.
Older than most gold seekers, Ritchie quickly became active in San Francisco's commercial world, and although not himself a member was involved with the first members of the vigilantes committee in 1851, whom he described as "the richest, most influential, orderly and respectable citizens." He reversed that opinion a year or so later.
In 1850, Ritchie bought both the Collayomi and Guenoc grants from Jacob Leese for $14,000. Immediately after he also bought the massive Suisun land grant from General Vallejo for $50,000, as well as several smaller properties in Napa County. He promptly sold part of Suisun to Capt. Robert Henry Waterman, who had also long been involved in the China trade. Waterman's nephew, Robert Sterling, would be involved with Ritchie thereafter and Waterman was named executor of Ritchie's estate.
One of Ritchie's holdings claimed "all the hot springs" in the upper Napa Valley, and it is known that he sold at least one square mile of what it now Calistoga to Sam Brannan for the founding of the soon-to-be-famous resort.
Although it was stipulated that lands available for claiming had to be uninhabited, most had "squatters" who were promptly evicted. Apparently there were few problems with the Callayomi and Guenoc grants, but on the Suisun acreage even Ritchie himself noted there were “men of means, lawyers, doctors, with fine farms and families.” Nonetheless, he set about removing them.
So many lawsuits ensued, along with fist fights, gunfights, cane fights and other rowdiness, that the courts were clogged for decades.
Also in 1850, Ritchie had purchased a prime lot in Benicia and was involved in getting that burgeoning town named state capitol. He implored his wife to bring their children to live in the impressive home he'd had built there. About the time they arrived, in 1854, the home burned; it was reported to be an act of arson by infuriated "squatters" Ritchie had run off the Suisun property.
The Ritchies commissioned the finest home in San Francisco's new South Park development, which was completed shortly before Ritchie's death in 1856. Martha Ritchie lived there after her husband's death and was praised for her "elegance and refinement" in San Francisco's first social register in 1879.
On July 9, 1856, nearing Napa from Sonoma, Ritchie was thrown from his buggy and died instantly. A man who claimed to have been merely riding a couple of hundred yards behind claimed Ritchie had "simply reared up and pitched over." The cause of death was listed as apoplexy.
The San Francisco Herald, then the city's leading newspaper, noted the death of a "long prominent merchant of San Francisco and a gentleman owning large interests in several portions of the state." He was buried in Yerba Buena Cemetery, now the site of San Francisco's civic center from which all bodies were moved to Laurel Hill.
For South Lake County, Ritchie's death was bad news. His estate remained in probate for fourteen years! It is said the State of California created a new law specifically to clear the courts of the many lawsuits remaining against Ritchie.
Ritchie's family and friends were broadly included in his entre- preneurship. His brother-in-law, John M. Hamilton, in particular was active in many of his ventures and remained a resident of Middletown until his death
Drawn from A.A. Ritchie, California Pioneer, by Dr. Albert Shumate, Society of California Pioneers, 1991.
RITCHIE'S RANCH MANAGER - Robert Henry Sterling