Old Cowboy Reaches End of Trail : Resting Place Overlooks the Land He Once Rode

Philip Crosthwaite lived his life as a cowboy. On Monday, he was buried like one.

A horse-drawn wagon, followed by a riderless horse, carried his branded coffin up Santiago Canyon Road to a hillside overlooking land he had once ridden as a vaquero.

His pallbearers, at his request, wore Western garb, as did many of the 200 friends, colleagues and relatives who gathered to pay homage to one of the county’s oldest cowboys. Strains of country music filled the air before Crosthwaite’s widow was handed her husband’s riata , the rope he had used, which had been atop the casket.

“This is what he asked for,” said Leroy Homan, who works on the Irvine Ranch. “He’s always been a cowboy, all his life. And he wanted to go out like a cowboy.”

Crosthwaite, foreman of the Irvine Ranch until he retired in 1972, died of cancer Thursday at home, at the ranch’s Augustine Camp. He was 74.

He had suffered through many ailments, including cancer of the throat, which had robbed him of his voice, said his daughter, Luz Olson. He had been hospitalized in September but said he wanted to die at home. “He said a hospital is no place for a man who couldn’t talk,” his daughter said.

Two months ago, in pain, he had scribbled a long letter to his daughter, spelling out in detail how to plan his cowboy’s funeral.

Pallbearers Get ‘Good Drink’

He told her where to get the wagon. “Just get one with good brakes,” he wrote. He wanted a country-western band to sing “Red River Valley,” “Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” and “That Silver-Haired Daddy”--the last “so you and (son) Angel can feel me for the last time.” He even instructed his pallbearers each to have “a good drink” of his whiskey.

And true to his wishes, it was carried out with all its anachronistic flourishes Monday. After a Catholic funeral Mass, a hearse drove the casket to the intersection of Santiago Canyon Road and Chapman Avenue, where waited the team of horses, the wagon and a saddled but riderless horse.

The mile-long procession up to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery took the casket, covered with carnations in the shape of a horseshoe and branded with Crosthwaite’s mark (a P atop a downturned C), past an open field of mustard and a tract of new homes, while cars sped by and more slowed behind.

At the cemetery, the friends and family cried to plaintive lyrics about a cowboy going home.

“It was a traditional cowboy farewell,” said Ray Serrano, 84, who worked with Crosthwaite for 20 years at the Irvine Ranch. Now retired and living in Holy Jim Canyon, Serrano showed up at the grave site in his best Western garb, a cigar clenched between his occasional teeth.

“He was one of the last true vaqueros ,” said Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, who attended the funeral dressed in a monogrammed Western shirt, blue kerchief and black cowboy hat. Gates, who grew up in San Juan Capistrano, knew the Crosthwaites as family friends.

‘Lived Life the Right Way’

“He loved the land and life and lived it the right way,” said Gates.

Born in Baja California, Crosthwaite was a fourth-generation cowboy whose great-grandfather, another Philip Crosthwaite, came to America from Ireland in 1843. Although he originally settled in New England, the Irishman wound up on the West Coast when what was supposed to be a fishing trip landed him in San Diego.

Instead of returning to New England, Crosthwaite married into a Spanish family and, in 1861, bought Rancho San Miguel in Baja California.

Family Returns to North

The Crosthwaites came back north of the border in 1918, when the Irishman’s great-grandson, the Philip Crosthwaite buried Monday, was 8 years old. Young Crosthwaite had only a grammar-school education but learned other things--how to toss a rope, how to tend cattle, how to break horses, how to respect the land and its creatures.

Through the years, Crosthwaite worked a number of ranches, moving to the Irvine Ranch in 1954.

“He was one of the best,” Gilbert Camarillo, a cowboy who works the Tejon Ranch in San Joaquin Valley, said after the services. “To be a cowboy, it’s a good thing. Nobody’s stepping on you, nobody’s pushing you. You have a lot of good days, and you have a lot of hard days.”

At the grave site, the friends of Crosthwaite filed past his widow, offering their condolences. She received an especially teary hug from a young cowboy, Gary Arballo, whom she advised “to keep up the good work he taught you.”

Arballo, 22, dressed in jeans, a striped Western shirt and a brown silk scarf, said he traveled 850 miles from the ZX Ranch in Paisley, Ore., to attend his mentor’s funeral.

‘Taught Me the Tricks’

As a boy, he said, he practically lived at the Crosthwaites’ home, taking a bedroll with him to spend more time with the old cowboy.

“He taught me all the tricks of the trade,” Arballo said. But in addition to the technical skills, he said, he learned patience from the old man.

“You watch and listen, and you learn a heck of a lot. So I watched and listened with him . . . . He taught me a bunch.”

Father Paul Martin of Mission San Juan Capistrano, who said Mass for Crosthwaite at La Purisima Catholic Church in Orange, said that although Crosthwaite had little schooling, “he had a kind of wisdom that said, ‘All things under my care must be well.’ ”

“I see in Phil a man of simple wisdom that cannot be found in degrees and books and letters,” the priest said. “He would not put up with mediocrity.”

Crosthwaite was “a true vaquero . . . a man of his word, a man of honor.

”. . . In a day of broken commitments we need to pay tribute to that kind of man.”