Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Free Soil, Unfree Labor [Cave Johnson Couts] Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 20 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 22:09:00 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:17:31 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:17:31

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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364 Pacific Historical Review Figure 2. The courtyard at Rancho Guajome, 1905. Photograph #1078, courtesy of the San Diego Historical Society, San Diego, California. increased his herd from 126 to 2,000 head. During the same period, the number of horses on the ranch rose from 62 to 271, while Guajome’s flock of sheep swelled from just 10 to 1,100 (see Table 1). To accommodate these growing numbers, Couts expanded his pastures by acquiring the nearby Buena Vista rancho in 1854, thereby doubling his holdings. Later, in the early 1860s, he purchased ranchos San Marcos and La Jolla. Altogether, Couts’s four non-contiguous estates contained around 23,000 acres that he was able to control as a single unit so long as squatters did not settle on the intervening public lands. Fortunately for Couts, squatting did not become a significant problem until around 1870.27 27. San Diego Herald, July 30, 1853; CT 2543-6; San Diego District Court, People v. Couts, Feb. 23, 1863, San Diego Historical Society Research Archives, San Diego; Annable, “The Life and Times of Cave Johnson Couts,” 114-128; Wilson, et al., History of San Bernardino and San Diego Counties, 149-151; Smythe, History of San Diego, 112-113; Richard Pourade, The History of San Diego County: The Silver Dons (San Diego, 1963), 72; Cecil Moyer, Historic Ranchos of San Diego (San Diego, 1969), 22-77. Cave Couts and Indian Labor Table 1: Rancho Guajome Livestock Livestock 1854 1860 1862 1870 Horses 62 250 271 250 Cattle 126 1,700 2,000 1,500 Sheep 10 700 1,100 600 In the meantime, the northwestern quarter of San Diego County remained a sparsely settled region. As late as 1860 only nine Anglos resided in all of San Luis Rey township. These included Cave Couts, his younger brother Willie “Blunt” Couts, and their friend and fellow stock raiser George Tebbetts.”® The rest of the township’s tiny population of 318 was made up of 137 Hispanics and 172 Luiseno Indians residing at the mission village.*° In this isolated frontier setting, it fell to the Luiseno to provide Cave Couts with the bulk of the human labor he needed to build and maintain his pastoral empire. One of the so-called “Mission Indian” tribes of Southern California, the Luiseno claimed a small ancestral homeland of about 1,500 square miles that included the Santa Margarita and San Luis Rey river basins. Flowing in southwesterly courses off the northern and southern slopes of Palomar Mountain in California’s Coast Range, these two roughly parallel streams run some forty miles to the Pacific Ocean. Clustered along 28. Nine years younger than Cave, William Blount Johnson Couts was born in Tennessee on July 18, 1830. After following his older brother to San Diego, “Blunt” became Cave’s close associate in local business and politics. Like Cave, Blunt entered the ranchero elite by marriage; he wed Santiago Argiiello’s daughter Refugia in April 1863. See Couts family Bible, San Diego Historical Society; Couts Family Web Page, http://www.coutsfamily.com; Smythe, History of San Diego, 269; and Engstrand and Ward, “Rancho Guajome,” 263. 29. Although it still included all of modern-day Imperial County and most of Riverside, San Bernardino, and Inyo counties as well, San Diego County contained only 798 people in 1850, exclusive of “uncivilized” Indians. Despite significant growth, the county’s census totals remained small for the next two decades, reaching only 4,324 in 1860 and 4,951 by 1870. See Smythe, History of San Diego, 254-255, and Robert Melbourne, “San Luis Rey in the Nineteenth Century: Its People, Institutions, and Events” (M.A. thesis, University of San Diego, 1990), 82-104. For lack ofa more clear and specific alternative, the term “Hispanic” is used in this essay as an inclusive label for the Spanishspeaking Californios, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans of San Diego County. Similarly, the term “Anglo” is used to denote all European Americans and non-Spanish-speaking European immigrants.