Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/185

 The American Occupations of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores

By Jeanne Skinner Van Nostrand

WHEN on August 3, 1942, United States Marines took over the his- toric Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, in San Diego County, for a training center, it was the second time this old Mexican land grant had been occupied by American forces.

The first occupation of the ranch by an armed American force took place during the War with Mexico. In January 1847, General Stephen Watts Kearny and his men, nearly a month after the bloody battle of San Pascual, while on their way north, pitched camp on the ranch.^ General Kearny met with no resistance. The owners of the property Andres and Pio Pico, had prudently "vamoosed" ahead of the approaching Americans. General Kear- ny's camp site was a tract of land that had originally been known as the Rancho San Onofre y Santa Margarita. A grant of 89,742 acres of the tract was made in 1 841 by Governor Juan B. Alvarado to Andres and Pio Pico. In 1844 the Pico brothers acquired the adjoining Las Flores property from the Indians, and their combined holdings were known as the Rancho Santa Mar- garita y Las Flores. Later, part of the ex-mission lands of San Juan Capistrano were added by a subsequent owner, making a total of some 133,440 acres^ which extended along the coast from the present site of Oceanside to San Clemente and inland along the course of the Santa Margarita River for a dis- tance of fifteen miles. The valley was first named "Santa Margarita" by the Portola expedition in July 1769.^

Linked with the history of the Santa Margarita district is the career of an Englishman, John Forster, better known as Don Juan Forster, who married Ysidora Pico, sister of Andres and Pio, in 1837. In 1844 he acquired the lands formerly belonging to the Mission San Juan Capistrano on which he ran his ever-increasing herds of cattle. As the years passed, Forster's cattle fattened and the Forsters prospered, while the Picos on the neighboring Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores fared less and less well. In 1862 Pio Pico bought his brother Andres' half interest in the rancho, but bv 1 864 the impecunious Pio had scattered promissory notes with a lavish hand over California as far north as the offices of Pioche and Bayerque, San Francisco money lenders.* Forster, who had helped his brother-in-law many times before, now assumed the indebtedness and took over the ranch entirely. He moved into the adobe house and proceeded to enlarge and improve the buildings. Meanwhile, his son Marcos commenced building a substantial adobe on the Las Flores part of the ranch. The Forsters' cattle business was one of the foremost in the