Redlands Remembered: Stories from the Jewel of the Inland Empire

Part I

Before Redlands Blossomed

If those with an interest to develop the as-yet-untouched areas of the San Bernardino Valley think that things are difficult these days, they should have been here in the early to mid-1800s. The Franciscan padres from San Gabriel Mission were the first nonnatives to recognize the potential of the Redlands area. A priest recorded: In the year 1819, at the request of the unchristianized Indians of the place they call Guachama [Place of Plenty to Eat]…we began the introduction of cattle raising and farming…The place has an abundance of water…There is enough for irrigation.

Enough for irrigation. Those were the magic words that would eventually turn the dry chaparral into a fertile garden, but it wasn’t going to be easy.

It is not clear that the unchristianized Indians of the place they call Guachama actually made a request for the European settlers to invade the valley. The San Bernardino Valley is the place where the traditional cultural territories of the Serranos (fanning northwest through the mountains and over the Cajon Pass on to the high desert) and Cahuillas (spreading southwest through the mountains and over the San Gorgonio pass to the low desert) came together. For centuries, the tribes of these two cultural groups lived in permanent villages scattered throughout the area. These two groups of people lived off the land; their staples included the piñon nuts from the pine trees and a dish made from the acorns of the oak trees. Like other native people, the local tribes were forced onto reservations in the late 1800s and suffered greatly as the trickle of outsiders turned into a flood that claimed their historical lands and pushed them out of their homes.

Priests from the San Gabriel Mission sought to bring water from Mill Creek to a naturally fertile area at the mouth of San Timoteo Canyon. Local natives dug the Mill Creek Zanja by hand in 1812. It starts at the eastern end of Mentone, meanders through Redlands and was designed to serve an estancia, or outpost to support cattle grazing. The buildings on Barton Road, today known as the Asistencia, are actually reproductions built in the 1930s. The original estancia was located about one mile to the east.

By 1820, the padres had enlisted the local natives and finished the first irrigation project in the valley. The ten-mile-long Mill Creek Zanja, or Sankey, was dug by hand using shovels fashioned from available implements such as rocks and the shoulder blades of oxen. Understandably, many of the local tribes were not particularly happy with the European interlopers, and the remote location was difficult for the padres to defend. By 1834, the San Gabriel priests had given up.

Between the 1830s and 1880s, large landowners of Spanish and Mexican descent, called Californios, built ranches up and down California. Over this period, California was claimed by Spain, then Mexico and, finally, the United States. California became a state in 1850.

In 1839, Don Antonio Maria Lugo, a prominent Californio from Los Angeles, received permission to establish a ranch and colony in the San Bernardino Valley. The Lugos’ growing numbers of cattle and horses needed expanded grazing lands, and the fertile plains at the mouth of the Santa Ana River seemed perfect. While we honor the Lugos with the name Lugonia, they didn’t stay.

Plentiful water and easy transportation were two keys to the development of much of Southern California. Few recall that the San Bernardino Valley owes some of both to one of the Lugo colonists, a woman by the name of Maria Armenta Bermudez. Maria Armenta married Jose Bermudez in 1823. Jose was thirty years older than Maria, and they both probably worked for the Lugo family. Jose first built a house in the area where the San Bernardino Courthouse now stands. One of the Lugo sons moved into that house, and the Bermudez family settled across the valley in what is now Redlands.

Maria wanted to grow grapes, but the closest water supply was the Zanja, about two miles away. Maria arranged for a ditch to be dug from the Zanja to her property near what is now Ford Park. She laid out the channel, beginning near the current site of Crafton Elementary School, following along the base of the hills. Known as the Maria Armenta Ditch (the only zanja to be named after a woman), the route was so well designed that, years later, the Bear Valley Water District followed it when it built its canal to the original Ford Park reservoir. The remains of Maria’s vineyards were visible testimony to the future prospects of the area when Americans Edward Judson and Frank Brown bought Redlands property more than thirty years later.

The Bermudez family moved on and settled in San Timoteo Canyon, first near the mouth of Live Oak Canyon and finally down on the south side of what is now Barton Road, near the area called Guachama. Here, Maria planted large fields of grain and corn and carried her produce to market in Los Angeles in two-wheeled carretas drawn by oxen. The remote San Bernardino area was connected to Los Angeles by a mere footpath until Maria enlarged it into a full-sized road for her ox carts. The sixty-mile trip must have taken three to four days each way.

In 1847, government records show that Maria applied for a parcel of land on the other side of the Los Angeles River. Maria’s stated reason for the application was her need to earn a livelihood for her family. After such a long journey, her oxen needed a rest stop in Los Angeles. Her petition was granted. Jose was by now seventy-nine years old and unfit for strenuous labor. Although he had fathered their nine children along the way, Maria was definitely the one responsible for her family.

Maria Armenta Bermudez was a true pioneer. It is hard to believe that anyone could survive the birth of nine children in a time of frequent Indian and outlaw attacks, all the while running a thriving truck farm. She stayed in the valley long after others came and gave up. It is sad to note that she died of tetanus said to have been contracted by stepping on a sharp stick as she jumped a ditch on her farm. This was clearly a woman of vision and fortitude.

The next time you are tempted to complain about the traffic jam at Kellogg Hill on the commute between Redlands and Los Angeles, remember Maria Bermudez and her ox carts.

HANNAH SMITH EMBERS, A LOCAL PIONEER

Martha Embers Beal, wife of pioneer Redlander Israel Beal, carried a remarkable legacy. In 1856, when Martha was two years old, her mother, Hannah Smith Embers, along with fellow slave Biddy Smith Mason, sued their master for their freedom. The story of their bravery has been told by several historians, including Clyde A. Milner II writing in The Oxford History of the American West. This is their story.

Much of the history of the West is a story of journeys. Hannah and Biddy, two African American women, followed an ox cart all the way to the San Bernardino Valley from Georgia. In the beginning, they had no choice in the matter. They were slaves of Robert Smith, a Mormon convert. Fortitude, fortune and the help of a friend gained them their freedom.

In 1844, Smith and his family joined a group known as the Mississippi Company as it traveled west to join other Mormons, heading eventually for Utah. While the Mormon Church did not sanction slavery, some members of the party kept their slaves anyway.

Another family in the Mississippi Company was that of Bishop William Crosby and his slaves, two of whom were brothers, Grief and Toby Embers. Toby would become Hannah’s husband. Also in the group was the Flake family, including their slave, Elizabeth, known as Lizzie. Lizzie married Charles Rowan in San Bernardino, and they became quite prosperous in later years.

The Smith, Crosby and Flake families became part of the Amasa M. Lyman and Charles C. Rich party of about five hundred people, including twenty-six African Americans, who moved on west in 1851 to settle the San Bernardino Valley. The trek from Salt Lake was arduous. Fear of attack by hostile Indians and outlaws competed with the monotony of the trail. The trip took three months.

It is hard to imagine the conditions of this westward migration. Each family loaded one wagon with their belongings. Room to ride in the wagon would have been limited, so most made the trip on foot. The few accounts from descendants of the slaves tell us that these women walked, driving the livestock while taking care of the master’s children as well as their own.

Lyman and Rich negotiated the purchase of the Lugo Rancho from the Lugo family, who were giving up because of the dangers associated with its remote location.

It was the summer of 1851, and the only man-made landmarks in the valley were the Mill Creek Zanja, dug by local Indians for the Spanish padres thirty years earlier, a few dwellings and barns constructed by the Lugos, and some Serrano and Cajuilla villages. The new settlers were very well organized. Their first task was the construction of a stockade. Each family was responsible for a certain length of the wall, and once complete, they built small homes for themselves inside the fort. Wheat fields were planted, and roads were developed into the mountains to retrieve the lumber.

Grief Embers achieved a place in the history books because he had a six-foot horn, which he used to call the settlers to work in the fields and to alert them to danger.

As the fear of marauders lessened, the streets of San Bernardino were laid out, and homes were built outside the fort. In September 1852, the colony held a Harvest Feast. The Los Angeles Star reported, In this miniature World’s Fair, several hundred people of both sexes assembled at 10 A.M. in their best dress, forming a beautiful representation of an American assembly of every age and condition; and this bright picture shaded in the background with a few specimens of representatives of the Spanish, Indian, and African races.

This model of Fort San Bernardino shows how the homes were put together to form a combined stockade and village.

California had joined the Union as a free state in 1850. Rumors may have reached the slaves in San Bernardino concerning their new legal status, but white owners suppressed the information that they were automatically free once they crossed the state line. Martha Beal said in later years that her people had originally been afraid to live without the protection of their owners but easily made the adjustment.

By 1855, the settlement of San Bernardino had turned into a full-fledged town. The county of San Bernardino had been formed (it included what we now know as the county of Riverside), and the area was under the legal jurisdiction of a circuit judge by the name of Benjamin Hayes.

Hayes’s diaries show that he was well known throughout his district and that he had an interest in the downtrodden. There were so few African Americans living in San Bernardino that it is possible he met Hannah and Biddy soon after their arrival.

In 1856, Robert Smith decided to take his family (and his slaves) to Texas, which was still a slave state. There are no diaries or oral legends to tell us Hannah and Biddy’s reactions when they heard