Old Days Dim With Vaquero’s Passing

For most of his 97 years, Reyes Serrano rode wild horses, rounded up cattle, hunted bobcats, chewed tobacco, smoked cigars and supposedly downed a shot of whiskey with breakfast every morning.

Until he moved into a nursing home two months ago, he spurned Orange County’s “city life,” living in Trabuco Canyon out of view of the houses and strip malls that encroached upon the open hills where he once worked.

This morning, the cowboy revered by local historians as California’s oldest vaquero, whose great-grandfather received the original Mexican land grant of 10,000 acres that would later be called El Toro, will be returned to his ancestral land, to be buried beneath a towering oak tree.

Serrano, born on a Juaneno Indian reservation in San Juan Capistrano on Jan. 6, 1901, died Tuesday of pneumonia and cardiac arrest. His burial, at 10 a.m. at El Toro Memorial Park, will be a simple prayer service, punctuated by the singing of an Indian song.

“We’ve lost another of the dwindling remnants and memories of the area’s past,” said Joe Osterman, a local historian who grew up with Serrano’s two daughters. “The links with what used to be El Toro are gradually disappearing.”

Eddie Grijalva, who also grew up in the area, said Serrano was “a real cowboy, a man’s man, a real rugged old guy. He was a different breed that’s now gone. We don’t have that kind of people anymore. It’s sad.”

Serrano’s great-great-grandfather was Don Francisco Serrano, who served as chief executive officer of the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1799. Don Francisco’s son, Don Jose Serrano, received the El Toro land in 1846 as part of a sweeping series of land grants in Orange County.

After a drought in 1863-64, however, the property was taken by bankers. But rather than leave the area, the Serranos stayed to work the land. Reyes Serrano worked mostly as a cowboy, sometimes as a farmer, on the Irvine, Mission Viejo and Moulton ranches. Cattle grazed where subdivisions now rest.

He and his wife, Dora, lived for many years in Laguna Canyon, then moved to the El Toro area. Their last home was a trailer in Trabuco Canyon.

In a 1993 interview with The Times, Serrano recalled that during his childhood, his family lived in El Toro “with nothing but . . . Indians and rocks.”

Serrano roped his first horse when he was 3 and only occasionally attended school. He loved hunting and found an abundance of deer, bobcats, mountain lions, rabbits and quail.

Historian Jim Sleeper recalled one particular visit to Serrano’s home.

“I remember him sitting out in the front yard waiting for a bobcat to come by so he could knock one off with his .36. . . . He was a good shot.”

Serrano relished his days astride his horse, Lady, who died in 1993, and even at age 92 he kept pestering Dora to get him another one.

“Hot damn, I took some rough rides,” Serrano recalled about his horse-breaking years. “Sometimes the horse would wheel around, and I’d be going that way and the horse would be going this way.”

Serrano had to give up raising cattle about 10 years ago when he broke his leg. A cow having a difficult birth had rolled over and knocked him into a ditch.

Irene Hastings, a distant cousin of Serrano’s, recalled her visits to the Serrano home as a child.

“It was all open country, and I remember when we went to see him back in the canyon we’d go over oak trees and hills. Once we got there, they always had horses,” she said.

“My folks used to love to dance, and we’d go down to the El Toro clubhouse and he was always the first one there. He was a cowboy, but he loved his dancing music. He was always the life of the party. He was little, but a big man. He was always in his cowboy boots.”

Also characteristic was Serrano’s rough language, friends and family said.

The expletives frequently flew whenever he commented on the changes that city folk brought to the area--and particularly when local residents voted to change the historic name of El Toro to the more upscale Lake Forest in 1991. He also put up a fight whenever his daughters tried to take him into town.

“He was an old mountain goat,” Joan Camarillo of Grand Ronde, Ore., one of his two daughters, said.

He considered modern conveniences so unnecessary, his family and friends said, that until last year, he did not have a telephone.

Together, Dora and Reyes Serrano were a feisty couple, each always interrupting the other during the telling of stories, friends and family recalled.

“His comment to Dora was always, ‘What the hell do you know about it? You were born in El Modena [a rural area near Orange].’ Like El Modena was the podunkiest town in Orange County. But El Toro wasn’t any bigger,” Sleeper said. “They would scrap and snort and fight, but they were definitely an item.”

Dora died three years ago after a stroke.

Reyes continued to live in the trailer, cared for by his granddaughter, amid dogs, peacocks and other animals.

In May, he moved into the nursing home, reluctantly giving up his tobacco and whiskey and just staying in bed, his daughters said.

Sleeper said it was fitting that Serrano’s drink of choice was Early Times.

“That was appropriate because those were the only times he ever lived in,” he said.

Serrano relished his habits as long as he could, family friend Grijalva recalled.

“When I last visited him, there he was sitting underneath his old pepper tree,” Grijalva said. “He went in and came out with a half gallon of strong whiskey and said, ‘Come on, Grijalva, let’s have a drink.’ And, my God, I could barely swallow the stuff. But he gulped it down and said, ‘Ahh, Eddie, this is good. . . . “

In addition to his daughters, Serrano is survived by seven grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren.

His final resting place was supposed to have been next to his wife’s, the daughters said. In 1963, Dora and Reyes selected the plots because they were beside what was then “a twig of a tree,” said daughter Agnes Urmson of Costa Mesa.

That twig now is so large that cemetery workers would have had to destroy the tree to place Reyes’ coffin beside Dora’s. Instead, his coffin will be placed over hers.

“She’s gonna raise hell,” Urmson said, chuckling.

Times staff writer Valerie Burgher contributed to this report.