Domingo Amestoy, 30,000 Sheep, and the Skyscraper

Born in St. Pierre d'Irube, France, in 1822, Dominique Amestoy left home for Argentina at age fourteen. Many French Basques went to Argentina to raise sheep (or in some cases cattle), but young Dominique was going to learn shoemaking.

In 1851, Dominique decided to try his luck in California's gold fields. He didn't strike it rich (very few miners did), but he was lucky enough to find work on a cattle ranch. After earning enough money to buy his own herd of cattle, Dominique drove them to Santa Barbara for several weeks of grazing, then drove them to market in San Francisco. He saved the profits, departed for Los Angeles, and worked on a sheep ranch, saving his earnings until he was able to buy his own flock of sheep.

Dominique returned to France in 1862, married 19-year-old Marie Elizabeth Higuerre, and brought his new bride to Los Angeles. In order to keep growing Dominique's sheep business and keep their large family fed (they had thirteen children), the couple needed a second income stream. They started a laundry business, with Marie doing the actual washing (in an open tub with no running water) and Dominique handling pickup and delivery in a horse-drawn cart.

Finally, in 1875, Dominique - "Don Domingo" to Los Angeles' Spanish-speaking majority - had earned enough money to buy 800 acres of land in what is now Gardena. The Amestoy Ranch - bordered by Rosecrans Avenue, Prairie Avenue, Marine Avenue (originally Amestoy Avenue), and Vermont Avenue - was born.

Don Domingo took it a step further, importing Merino sheep and Rambouillet rams. By 1880, he owned an estimated 30,000 head of sheep.

In 1871, Don Domingo co-founded the Farmers and Merchants Bank with Joseph Mascarel, Charles Ducommun, and a M. Lecouvrer. The original Farmers and Merchants Bank building is still standing at 401 S. Main Street and is Historic-Cultural Monument #271. (The Farmers and Merchants Bank that is in business today is not the same institution. The original F&M folded into Security First, Security Pacific, and eventually Bank of America.) He was also one of the first members of the Chamber of Commerce.

Don Domingo didn't just own ranch land, he owned an entire block downtown. In fact, he owned the entire block where City Hall now stands. And he built the Amestoy Building on one of the lots in 1888.

 The building stood three stories high (plus a cupola) and had one of the first elevators in the city. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner dubbed it LA's "first skyscraper" (even though the Nadeau Hotel, built in 1871, was four stories tall and had the city's first-ever elevator).

In 1889, Don Domingo bought Rancho Los Encinos from son-in-law Simon Gless. He wouldn't own it himself for very long; he passed away on January 11, 1892. He was one of the richest men in Southern California at the time, and had been the county's largest taxpayer.

The surviving Amestoys sold the Gardena ranch in 1901. There is still an Amestoy Elementary School serving the area.

Members of the Amestoy family began to sell off portions of Rancho Los Encinos in 1916. They lived on the property and held onto the last 100 acres (including the surviving ranch buildings and pond) until 1945. The adobe was repurposed as a sales office for the suburban tract homes surrounding the property, and plans were made to tear it down after the houses sold. Thankfully, concerned neighbors fought hard to save the last piece of the rancho, and it has been a state historic park since 1949. There is still an Amestoy Avenue running north-south through the Valley, dead-ending at Ventura Boulevard not far from Los Encinos State Historic Park.

As for the Amestoy Building, it quietly stood in City Hall's shadow until 1958. When it was condemned, the Los Angeles Times published an obituary of sorts for the aging red-brick building, long since dwarfed by the gleaming white skyscrapers surrounding it.

In typical fashion for Los Angeles, the Amestoy Building was replaced with a parking lot.

The Trials of Simon Gless

Simon Gless was living on Alameda Street and working as a bartender when his well-to-do uncle, Gaston Oxarat, passed away in 1886.

Quiet, unassuming, twenty-four-year-old Gless - his uncle's favorite nephew - inherited Rancho Los Encinos, fifty acres in Boyle Heights, the Postoffice Block and Odd Fellows Block (home of the City of Paris department store at the time) downtown, properties in San Francisco and in France, and about $29,000 in cash (about $800,000 today). It would be impossible to put a price tag on the Oxarat-Gless real estate holdings today, but to give my dear readers a rough idea, Rancho Los Encinos was subdivided into Encino and Sherman Oaks after World War II. The downtown properties were, at the time, some of the most valuable in Los Angeles.

Oxarat's body was barely cold before the mess hit the fan.

Simon was sued, separately, by his uncle's son, by a woman claiming to have married Gaston in 1874, and by a woman who claimed to be Gaston's illegitimate daughter. All of them wanted a chunk of Gaston's valuable estate.

Simon agreed to pay a French Basque attorney, M.V. Biscailuz, either $45,000 or $60,000 (sources disagree) to handle his uncle's estate. This ultimately did not go well, and eventually led to Simon suing Biscailuz years later. Judge Van Dyke sided with Biscailuz but reduced his fee to $14,000. 

Benita Murillo, filing a lawsuit under the name "Benita Oxarat", claimed that she was Gaston's wife and that Gaston was the father of her son Francisco. The case went to probate court. When Benita took the stand, her story crumbled. She admitted that she was not Gaston's wife and that Gaston was not Francisco's father. In fact, she stated that Edward Amar (another prominent French Basque who developed much of old San Pedro) had persuaded her to contest the will and claim to be Oxarat's widow.  

The other cases weren't so simple.

Within a few weeks of Benita's confession, Simon was back in court with his own lawsuit - against the rancho's prior owner, Eugene Garnier, and Garnier's business partner F.A. Gibson. Garnier and Gibson claimed to own a partial interest in the rancho, but Gless believed the document was a forgery.

I'll let the Los Angeles Herald (February 23, 1887) elaborate:

Plaintiff alleges that the agreement was forged by Garnier and that the claim is false. He avers that Garnier removed a certificate of acknowledgement made December 1, 1877, before Charles E. Beane, Notary Public, from another document and altering the certificate so as to make it appear to be a certificate of the acknowledgement of Oxarat and himself to the agreement, pasted it on the forged paper and filed it recently with Recorder Gibson. The document is now in the Recorder's office, and as it is material for plaintiff's case that it should not be destroyed, he asks that an injunction be issued to the Recorder preventing him from delivering it to defendant. Gless alleges that it is evident that the names were not written so long ago as 1877 nor further back than a year since, a different kind of ink was used and the writing is much fresher.

(As a Notary Public for the State of California, I was trained to spot this type of fraud. This is why certificates of acknowledgement HAVE TO be attached - no matter how much a signer whines about it - and why notaries have to make a separate journal entry for each notarized signature. If this case happened today, the alleged forgery would probably go to the crime lab and Beane's journal would probably be subpoenaed as evidence.)

Simon won that case, but Eugene Garnier filed an appeal and requested that the judgment be vacated. Garnier added that the judge in the case had a financial interest in the Gless estate and that he and his attorney were not permitted to view the relevant documents before their court date.

Adela Freeman, who claimed her birth name was Adela Oxarat, kept coming after Gless for part of the Oxarat estate, and managed to keep her claim limping along for a good six years. She was so persistent that one newspaper reporting on the case incorrectly stated Simon Gless was no relation to Gaston Oxarat.

Basque genealogy site Bridge2Pyrenees lists over a dozen court cases involving Gless. Yet another French Basque, J.B. Leonis, retained Gless as a Basque translator for his own court cases.

With all of his appearances in court as plaintiff, defendant, or translator, Gless may very well have spent more time in a courtroom than he did on the rancho.

Life wasn't all bad - Gless married Juanita Amestoy, daughter of rancher Dominique "Don Domingo" Amestoy in San Francisco in 1886, a few months after inheriting Gaston's estate.

Juanita Amestoy's wedding dress

Simon and Juanita had three children - Constant Simon (1890), Domingo Amestoy (1892), and Noeline Elizabeth (1897). 

After fighting so hard to keep Rancho Los Encinos, Simon sold it to his father-in-law. Valley lore has it that he sold the rancho for $5 after buying a block of ice downtown and finding it had already melted away upon arriving home (I'm from Sherman Oaks...this story may or may not be true, but the southern Valley is hot enough that it's definitely plausible). Another source says Amestoy paid $125,000 and wanted to subdivide the land for farming. In either case, the Gless family moved to 131 Boyle Avenue in Boyle Heights.

Gless farmhouse in Boyle Heights

Long after his mother's admission of fraud on the stand, Francisco Morillo came after Gless himself, still claiming to be Gaston's son. The matter had already been settled financially, but Morillo wouldn't drop it.

In April 1891, M.V. Biscailuz accused Simon of assault. Simon was arrested and the matter went to court, along with that long-brewing lawsuit against Biscailuz. The case dragged on for some time, but Biscailuz eventually dropped the charges against Simon. 

Two months later, Simon checked into Santa Ana's Brunswick Hotel, where he suffered a mental breakdown. Simon claimed he had been attacked by two Mexicans, but wasn't able to recall the details of the alleged incident. He was monitored overnight, took the train home to Los Angeles in the morning, and fired a revolver in his bedroom five times that evening.

After five years of lawsuits and harassment, Simon was so fearful and paranoid that he nearly attacked a visiting friend with a music box (Juanita intervened). 

Simon was taken to the Amestoy ranch (near modern-day Gardena) to recuperate; however, his attending physicians weren't optimistic about his odds of recovery. 

Mental illness of any kind was highly taboo in the Victorian era, and apart from one news article, little seems to be known about Simon's condition. 

Simon contracted chronic intestinal nephritis ("Bright's disease") at age 41 in 1903 and passed away after a few months. He died at home, with Juanita and the children at his side. 

Although Simon was mercilessly hounded by dishonest people, he was loved and missed by family and friends - so much so that the funeral procession was over half a mile long. Interestingly, given all the time he spent in courtrooms, two of the pallbearers were judges. 

Simon is unique among French Angelenos in that TWO former residences remain standing today - and Gless Street in Boyle Heights is named for him. 

The Gless farmhouse was landmarked in 2010, with the support of Gless family descendants - including Simon's great-granddaughter, Sharon Gless. 131 Boyle Avenue served as the Hebrew Shelter Home and Asylum for many years and has since been divided into apartments. Most of the tenants are mariachi musicians - fitting for a house located so close to Mariachi Plaza.

The Messy Legacy of Gaston Oxarat

You know things didn't go so well for Rancho Los Encinos' first French owners, the Garniers. The wool market collapsed, and it was all downhill from there.

The rancho went to auction in 1878. Gaston Oxarat, a French Basque, placed the winning bid. Oxarat had wanted a chance to buy the rancho for some time; he'd previously obtained a lien on the property as collateral when he loaned money to the Garniers.

Gaston Oxarat's saddle, on display at Rancho Los Encinos

Oxarat had arrived in Los Angeles in 1851, and was mentor and friend to Domingo Bastanchury, another French Basque who, at one time, owned more head of sheep than anyone else in Los Angeles County. Bastanchury's orange grove - the largest in the world - made up much of modern-day Fullerton (which I will get into at a later date). As it happens, he was married to Oxarat's niece, Maria.

In spite of the fact that wool no longer fetched good prices, Oxarat used the rancho to raise sheep. It wasn't his sole source of income; he also had orchards.

Sources disagree over whether Oxarat lived on the rancho, with the Ballade family as a boarder, or at 43 or 47 Boyle Avenue in Boyle Heights. The 1880 census record citing the Ballade residence could be a coincidence, since the boarder's age is given as 60 (Oxarat would have been 55 that year) and there were numerous French Basques living in Los Angeles by that point.

In any case, Oxarat (who was not in the best of health when he bought Rancho Los Encinos) passed away in 1886.

Things got messy after that.

Ten days after Gaston's death, the Morning Press stated that there were allegations of his death being due to poisoning. However, since there was no evidence, the authorities could take no action.

Oxarat left Rancho Los Encinos to his favorite nephew, Simon Gless. Less than a year later, Gless filed a lawsuit against Eugene Garnier and F.A. Gibson to clear the rancho's title. Eugene Garnier claimed that he and Gibson owned a partial interest in the rancho under an agreement made with Oxarat while he was still alive. Gless claimed the document was forged.

Francisco Oxarat, Gaston's son, was none too happy about Rancho Los Encinos being left to his cousin, and he took Simon Gless to court.

Benita Murillo, who claimed to have married Gaston in 1874, sued Simon Gless separately, seeking the widow's share of Rancho Los Encinos.

Adela Freeman, who claimed her maiden name was Oxarat, also sued Simon Gless, claiming to be Gaston's "sole surviving child" (which must have been quite a shock to Gaston's actual sole surviving child, Francisco).

In the end, Simon Gless kept Rancho Los Encinos...only to sell it later. But I'll get into that next time.

Eugene Garnier Just Couldn't Take It Anymore

It's high time I introduced my readers to the four French families who owned Rancho Los Encinos - one of my favorite places in Los Angeles - one after the other, for close to a century.

Quick overview for context:

Rancho Los Encinos (sometimes called Rancho El Encino, now Los Encinos State Historic Park) was a Spanish land grant given to LA's first mayor, Francisco Reyes. When the authorities discovered Reyes had been mistreating his Native American hired hands, they revoked the grant and Governor Pio Pico reassigned it to three of the very same workers Reyes had been exploiting.

Don Vicente de la Osa bought the rancho from the Tongva ranchers, raised cattle, built the adobe house that still stands on what's left of the property (it's the second oldest structure in the Valley), turned the house into a stagecoach stop and roadhouse when the cattle market collapsed, and eventually sold the rancho to a Yankee named Jim Thompson.

Jim Thompson sold Rancho Los Encinos in 1869. The buyers, Eugene and Philippe Garnier, were immigrants from France. (There were other Garnier brothers - Abel, Camille, and Léon, but little is known about them except that Camille and Léon were two of the city's biggest spenders and could often be seen dining at one of Victor Dol's restaurants.)

Philippe merits his own entry, and you'll understand why when you read it. Anyway...

Faux marbre dining salon at Rancho Los Encinos

Like so many other French immigrants who settled in Southern California in the 19th century, the Garniers were in the sheep business, and had a reputation for producing high-quality wool.

The rancho was still on the stagecoach route (today it's Ventura Boulevard). And, being from France, the Garniers knew how to top even Don Vicente's fine hospitality.

The brothers had the adobe's dining room painted with stunning faux marbre panels. Despite being almost 20 miles from what was then the heart of the city (long before the 101 existed...or, for that matter, the car), the Garniers served such good food that Andrés Pico - brother of Pio Pico - made a point of bringing VIP guests to the rancho for breakfast. In those days, it was a tiring, 15-mile horseback trip on a dirt road from Pico's house. I can't even imagine getting up before dawn and spending a couple of hours on a rough, sweaty horseback ride just to eat breakfast in Encino*, but apparently it was worth the trip for Pico and his guests.

Eugene built a two-story limestone house - a copy of the family home in France - opposite the adobe. The Garniers lived in the adobe; the limestone house was a bunkhouse for the ranch hands and for tired travelers. Today, the house is Rancho Los Encinos' visitor center.

Eugene Garnier's French farmhouse at Rancho Los Encinos

Rancho Los Encinos had its own freshwater spring - a VERY desirable feature anywhere in Los Angeles County, and especially in the hot, dry San Fernando Valley. Eugene built a brick-lined pond to collect the spring water - and he took care to shape it like a Spanish guitar. Novelty shaped swimming pools - i.e. Jayne Mansfield's heart-shaped pool - may well owe a debt to Eugene Garnier's guitar-shaped pond.

Eugene put a great deal of work into making Rancho Los Encinos what it was at its peak - and what it still is today.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't last.

In the late 1870s, the wool market collapsed. And it couldn't have collapsed at a worse time for the Garniers, who had overextended themselves financially during a brutal drought that dried up their grazing fields. And to make matters worse, the roadhouse business had waned due to fear of stagecoach robbers...followed by stagecoach service ending when the railroad came to Los Angeles in 1876.

The Garniers continued to run a tavern on the premises, but like so many other French immigrants in the sheep trade, they had to find a new primary source of income.

Isaac Newton Van Nuys, who owned most of the southern Valley, had introduced dryland grain farming a few years previously. It was a no-brainer for the Garniers to turn their grazing land into wheat fields.

Unfortunately, there was the matter of their other neighbor, Don Miguel Leonis.

Leonis, possibly the most ambitious transplant in the history of Greater Los Angeles (and THAT is saying something), snapped up land whenever he could, and controlled most of the western Valley. Rancho Los Encinos, right next to Leonis' Rancho El Escorpion, was a very desirable property - especially because it had its own supply of fresh water.

You know where this is going, right?

In 1878, Eugene Garnier stated, under oath in a Los Angeles courtroom, that Leonis and his hired thugs had beaten the Garniers' hired hands and burned the rancho's wheat fields.

When asked if Leonis was his enemy, Eugene confirmed this, adding that he was forced to testify and that he would not be in the same courtroom with Leonis if he'd had a choice.

Having lost their wheat crop, the Garniers couldn't pay the bills anymore, and the rancho was bought at auction by Gaston Oxarat (who had previously obtained a lien on the rancho when he loaned money to the brothers).

Eugene Garnier went back to France soon after that day in court, never to permanently return to Los Angeles.

But can you blame the guy? He just couldn't take it anymore.

*This is not a snobby Westsider jab at Encino. I'm from Sherman Oaks.

We're Still Here, Part 3B: Rancho Los Encinos

Moving on to the next historic location in the Valley, we find a very special property that many Angelenos don't even know exists. 

Los Encinos State Historic Park is all that remains of Rancho Los Encinos (sometimes called Rancho El Encino). The original rancho was established by Francisco Reyes (first alcalde, or mayor, of Los Angeles), re-granted to three Tongva ranchers by Pio Pico (Reyes allegedly mistreated his Native American ranch hands), sold to the de la Osa family, and sold to a Yankee named Thompson...who sold it to Philippe and Eugene Garnier in 1869.

The Garnier brothers were the first of four French families to own the property. 

Philippe Garnier, Gaston Oxarat, Simon Gless, and Domingo Amestoy.

Former residents. Note the prevalence of Basque surnames.

The original de la Osa adobe house. This is the second oldest structure in the Valley - and the only one that is pretty much unaltered.

Philippe Garnier's shaving stand.

Gaston Oxarat's saddle. This finely tooled piece was originally covered with tiny silver conchas (shells).

Juanita Amestoy wore this beautiful gown when she married Simon Gless.

Don Vicente de la Osa had previously turned the adobe into a stagecoach stop and roadside inn. The Garnier brothers, being from France, kicked the hospitality up a notch.

The Garniers had one of the adobe's rooms painted with beautifully detailed faux marbre panels.

Can you believe some idiot PLASTERED OVER these stunning walls? For over a century, no one knew this fine paint job was even there.

Try, if you can, to let your imagination fill in the blanks. It's a beautiful room now - it must have looked even better then.

I do hope someone else takes the time to notice that the plastic food on the table is French in theme. (Why is there a red candle? Did red paraffin even exist in the 1870s?)

The Northridge earthquake of 1994 severely damaged the adobe (one outer wall caved in, requiring extensive repairs). However, there was one silver lining: the earthquake may have damaged the house, but it shook much of the offending plaster right off the salon's walls. As you can see, some of the faux marbre is still covered by plaster. There is a good reason for this: the adobe is very old and very delicate. Some things are best left alone, even if they're not perfect.

What's that next to the adobe?

It's a French farmhouse!

No joke: the Garnier brothers built this two-story limestone house, said to be a copy of the family home in France, to house their employees. They also built a brick-lined pond shaped like a Spanish guitar to collect water from the natural spring on the property.

The Garniers hit tough times: they overextended themselves financially, the wool market collapsed, and Miguel Leonis tried to intimidate the brothers out of their home by burning their wheat fields and beating up their ranch hands. (Fight me on the subject of Leonis if you want, but Eugene Garnier's court testimony backs this up.) They lost the rancho to foreclosure in 1878, and it passed to Gaston Oxarat.

Gaston Oxarat, in turn, left the rancho to his nephew, Simon Gless. Legend has it that one day, Gless bought a large block of ice downtown and, upon returning to the rancho, found that it had already melted away. This was too much for Gless (I can't blame him one bit, since I know how hot it gets in the Valley - and this was long before air conditioning or swimming pools). He decided to sell the property and move to Boyle Heights (the Gless farmhouse in Boyle Heights is, incredibly, also still standing).

Simon Gless was married to Juanita Amestoy, and her father Dominique already had significant land holdings elsewhere in Los Angeles County. Dominique, commonly called "Don Domingo", smartly snapped up Rancho Los Encinos. Other members of the Amestoy family lived on the property until 1945. 

The Amestoys began to sell off bits of the rancho in the early 20th century, but it wasn't until after World War II that the bulk of it was subdivided into modern-day Encino and Sherman Oaks (my neighborhood).

Supposedly, the adobe was used as a sales office for the new housing tracts and (what else...) subsequently slated for demolition. Concerned neighbors fought hard to have the buildings preserved (thank God).

The last remaining scrap of Rancho Los Encinos has been a California state historic park since 1949 and can be visited Wednesday through Sunday, 10am to 5pm (excluding holidays). There is a pedestrian entrance on Ventura Boulevard, but virtually no one seems to notice it is even there.