Violent Fact and Fiction Merge at Rancho Guajome

If ever a house was populated by fictitious characters as well as the real personalities that may have inspired them, it’s San Diego County’s Rancho Guajome.

The rancho, steeped in historic lawlessness, owes its name to the Luiseno Indian word whakavumi, meaning “the frog pond,” and much of its reputation to the ruthless soldier who built it. The rest of its reputation comes from the writer who made it famous.

Cave Johnson Couts was a pioneer who fought off cattle rustlers, squatters and all other comers with gun, guile and muscle. He also had a taste for drink that proved fatal to foes--and, eventually, himself.

Born in Tennessee and educated at West Point, he came to California as an Army lieutenant in 1848, a year before the gold strike, to help wrest the state away from Mexico.

He made a fortune feeding gold miners with his cattle. He also kept diaries that became one of the most important published historical sources of information about California during the Gold Rush. These days, the volumes are in the custody of the Huntington Library.

Three decades after Couts’ adventures made him and his home famous, Helen Hunt Jackson came calling. After a dust-up over Indian servants, Couts’ widow sent her packing. Once she’d read Jackson’s 1884 best-selling novel “Ramona”--the “Gone With the Wind” of its day--she threatened to sue.

Couts stood 6 feet 3 and weighed more than 200 pounds. He survived gunfights, Indian battles and a lackluster stint in the military before settling in Southern California.

In 1849, he was part of an escort for Army wagons from Monterrey, Mexico, to California. As the Army rode through San Diego, two daughters of prominent ranchero Juan Bandini leaned on a porch railing--as the story goes--to watch the troops. The railing gave way and the girls fell. Couts had the presence of mind to spur his horse over to one of them, Ysidora Bandini, and help her to her feet. Two years later, they were married.

Later in 1849, as California was preparing to become a state, Couts was appointed to the statehood convention. He also surveyed and mapped the town of San Diego, where he paid tribute to his future father-in-law with some place names, such as Juan Street.

In 1851, Ysidora’s sister, Arcadia Bandini Stearns, and Arcadia’s husband, prosperous rancher Abel Stearns, gave the couple the deed to the 2,219-acre Rancho Guajome as a wedding gift.

Today, its remaining 165 acres are part of Guajome Regional Park, about three miles east of Mission San Luis Rey in the wilds of Oceanside. Rangers can discuss the history of the state, the family and the rancho’s supposed links to the fictional half-Indian maiden Ramona (to which many Southern California sites lay claim).

Couts used the gift as a beginning to become a land baron. He resigned from the Army and soon acquired other San Diego properties, including the area surrounding Mission San Luis Rey (but not the mission itself) and, later, nearby Buena Vista Rancho.

But an Indian war loomed. Less than a year after his resignation, the Army recalled him and promoted him to lieutenant colonel. Leading a group of soldiers and volunteers, Couts quashed the rebellion and captured Antonio Garra, a bitter Luiseno who had sworn vengeance against all white settlers.

Couts served as prosecutor and judge at the trial of Garra, who was convicted and executed by firing squad.

Some Indians resented Couts, but more than 300 Luisenos who lived in the shadow of Mission San Luis Rey helped him build the 22-room Rancho Guajome in exchange for permission to live and hunt on his land. The rancho was almost a town; it even had its own general store and jail.

In 1853, Couts moved into Rancho Guajome with his wife and two children. (The couple eventually had 10, eight of whom survived.) He was appointed U.S. Indian sub-agent, with duties that included responsibility for the welfare of local tribes.

That’s about when his relationship with the Indians went from tentative to terrible.

Twice, a county grand jury considered charging him for beating two Indians with a strip of rawhide. One man eventually died from the beating, but no charges were filed.

By the early 1860s, floods and a long drought had led to a breakdown of the cattle industry, which almost ruined Couts.

Far grimmer and more ruthless was the smallpox epidemic of 1862-63. Couts kept tabs on it in his diary:

“Smallpox is quite prevalent--six to eight per day are being buried in S. Juan Capistrano--Indians generally.... I vaccinated the whole rancheria at San Luis some six weeks since, and hope they may escape, thus saving our community of the terrible disease.”

Fearful that the malady would spread, Couts determined to prevent burials of its victims in the mission cemetery, which he owned. His edict would lead to bloodshed.

On Jan. 13, 1863, family and friends of a well-known vaquero and cattleman, Don Ysidro Maria Alvarado, arrived at the cemetery for his burial. Couts’ younger brother, San Diego Deputy Sheriff William Blount Couts, rode up with two of his brother’s vaqueros to prevent it.

As the Alvarado family lowered the coffin into the grave, Blount Couts told them that they could not proceed.

Shooting at Burial

One member of the burial party, Leon Vasquez, was outraged. Shovel in hand, he rushed at Blount Couts, who was armed with a double-barreled shotgun. Blount Couts shot him to death.

As the unarmed burial party fled in fear, one of Couts’ vaqueros fired again, wounding two men.

“The whole affair was the act of a moment, the shots and deaths--all was muy pronto,” one of Alvarado’s sons, Tomas, later wrote.

Cave Johnson Couts felt responsible for what had happened and tried to deflect some of the blame. He wrote his brother’s defense attorney: “The fellow killed is really not worth noticing. He [Vasquez] is known as a bad character.”

Three months later, San Diego County indicted Blount Couts for murder. His attorney cited a variety of problems with the paperwork and succeeded in having the charge dropped, despite depositions from eight witnesses.

Smallpox had subsided by the spring of 1863, but Couts’ bad luck continued.

In 1865, while visiting the San Diego city plaza, he happened upon Juan Mendoza, his former ranch foreman, whom he had fired. Mendoza had threatened to kill Couts on several occasions. But when Mendoza spotted his former employer, he turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Couts showed no such compunction: He flew into a rage and shot Mendoza in the back with a double-barreled shotgun, killing him.

Los Angeles County Judge Benjamin Hayes, a friend of Couts, defended him, contending that the victim was a known robber and troublemaker and that his client had merely acted in self-defense. Couts was cleared on grounds that one of the jurors was not an American citizen.

Fatherhood wasn’t as forgiving as the law. In 1868, Couts’ 15-year-old daughter, Tonia, ran off with two of his vaqueros. He tracked down the threesome and enrolled her in an Oakland convent.

By 1870, he believed she had reformed and allowed her to return home. Couts was to be rudely disappointed.

He caught Waldemar Muller, a schoolteacher he had hired to tutor his children, climbing out of his daughter’s window in the middle of the night. Muller tried to run, but Couts, drunken and enraged, peppered him with a load of buckshot. Muller was critically wounded; Couts was arrested and severely beaten by the sheriff.

Even Couts’ attorney scolded him in a note: “I fear your excitability from drink--as a friend, let me ask you to keep sober. It is the only way to get even with the miserable judge and Irish sheriff.” The case was dismissed.

But the lawyer’s warning about alcohol was on target. Couts died four years later at age 53, his health compromised by years of heavy drinking.

Ysidora, known throughout the county for her hospitality, continued to run the rancho with the help of her eldest son, Cave Jr.

In 1882, while Helen Hunt Jackson was touring Southern California missions and Indian reservations, she visited Rancho Guajome. She returned a few months later, staying for several days and locking horns with Ysidora.

As the two women prepared to hear Mass in the chapel, Indian servants brought them chairs from the house. Jackson objected to the servants’ sitting on the floor. Ysidora worried that she would incite a riot among the servants and asked her to leave.

“Ysidora was very demanding on her servants, and the two women had unmendable differences about race and class,” says Rancho Guajome senior park ranger Jake Enriquez.

In 1884, when “Ramona” was published, Ysidora was outraged at what she perceived to be an unflattering portrayal of her and her son. She began talking to lawyers, but Jackson died before a lawsuit was filed.

Reality vs. Fiction

Ysidora does resemble the fictional Senora Moreno, Ramona’s Spanish guardian and rancho matriarch, Enriquez tells visitors, just as bits of Ramona’s home resemble Guajome. Ysidora died in 1897, leaving the rancho in the hands of Cave Jr., who continued his father’s wanton ways.

The land remained in the family for 122 years, until 1973, when San Diego County purchased it for more than $1 million. Cave Jr.’s three elderly grandchildren--whose grandmother was Cave Jr.’s servant but never his wife--got the money.