by Albert Simonson

Highways 76 and 79 up to the Warner Springs airstrip embrace San José Valley, named already in 1795 by Padre Mariner, a hard-riding priest. He had in mind the biblical Joseph, a practical man like himself, and he spelled it Joseph. His penmanship looks like he wrote his report on horseback.

The commanding officer of his military escort was Don Pablo Grijalva, a man as important as Mariner on this exploratory reconnaissance.

Don Pablo’s ancestral name was given by loyal and grateful troops to the Grijalva river which runs deep through Mexico’s towering Sumidero Canyon under mist and high cascades and sweeps grandly north through emerald jungles of Olmec/Mayan Tabasco.

Don Pablo replaced deceased and venerable Cuyamaca explorer José Velásquez in 1785 and he served at the San Diego Presidio for years. Within weeks of his visit here, 35 miles south of today’s border, at La Mision, his horse was shot out from under him while he transported three murder suspects. It’s a peaceful little place now where I bicycle without a care along its river below mission walls.

He retired soon after to his Rancho (Santiago de) Santa Ana, marking the beginning of Orange County development with a simple adobe.

His exploration report of our local Valle de San José has been lost, but a summary exists in the Bancroft Library, naming many Indian rancherias in our back country, which still need to be identified through archaeology. It corroborates and amplifies Mariner’s account in Santa Barbara mission archives.

It seems, though, that the most significant leatherjacket soldier in that exploration party or anywhere in California was Corporal José Vicente Féliz. He had already founded Los Angeles, fourteen years earlier. Imagine that on a corporal’s resumé!

Féliz came from Real de los Alamos in Sonora, having signed up for duty with de Anza’s colonization of California.

Desperately poor families of mixed races were seeking a better life in a new land, and Spain needed frontier settlers to secure its province from Russians and a surge of illegal aliens from British America.

Along the trail, Vicente’s wife died in childbirth. He buried her at Mision San Xavier del Bac and brought his newborn son along to California with their other children and all the pioneers. This was in 1775.

Six years later, Corporal Féliz, three soldiers and a priest settled eleven founding families of Los Angeles into their destiny. After mass, Féliz instructed each family on where they could plant and build on a well-chosen fertile spot uphill from the present Union Station, near Olvera Street. Supplies were distributed. An irrigation ditch from the Rio Porciuncula was staked out.

The new pueblo took on the name given to the river on the 8/1/1769 jubilee of “our lady the queen of the angels of Porciuncula” [ a land parcel in Assisi].

An existing native village nestled in grapes and roses downhill was Yangna [Commercial & Alameda].

Féliz was appointed Comisionado at the new pueblo Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles by the Spanish governor. This made him the highest pueblo official, mayor, judge, and Indian agent rolled into one. He was the only person in the pueblo who was literate.

He held this office both before and after the 1795 exploration of Valle de San José. There he was outranked by Alférez [Ensign] Grijalva.

In 1802, Féliz was granted 6677 acres just north of the pueblo he had established. This was for extraordinary service to the crown rendered over 27 years. The rancho was called Nuestra Señora del Refugio de Los Féliz. In deference to native communal land rights, very few grants were issued by the Spanish colonial government, and only in exceptional situations.

Part of the rancho is now the upscale community of Los Féliz. Another part became Griffith Park, a huge, verdant park in the asphaltic sprawl of Los Angeles.

Our explorer leatherjacket was held in the highest esteem at the time.

An eventual Welsh successor to Féliz lands, “Colonel” Griffith Griffith, was held in less esteem, although he was a public benefactor. The “colonel” thing was pure invention, and he was famous for pomposity, boring speeches, grand gestures, “a strut like a turkey gobbler”, and conspicuous wealth derived from insider trading of mining stocks.

Maybe giving a kid a dumb name like that provides motivation.

His wealth increased when he married rich, young, beautiful Tina Mesmer, heiress of the neighboring San Rafael Verdugo rancho family. She was Catholic, and one day, in the presidential suite of seaside Arcadia Hotel in 1903, she knelt in prayer. The “colonel” was moved by his Protestant faith and surreptitious saloon visit to loom over her with a prayer book in one hand and a gun in the other, demanding to know if she was in league with the pope to poison him and steal his money for their church. She pleaded to be spared for the sake of their young son, who needed his mother.

Shot in her lovely face, she managed to leap in terror out the window, falling 14 feet to a porch roof, breaking a shoulder and becoming still more famous as “the society wife who would not die.” She found an open window and refuge with other guests. Even LA was stunned by the horror of it all and would not forget such a crime that cried to the heavens.

Griffith Griffith’s trial was sensational with celebrity lawyers and headlines and specious defenses. The colonel got a reduced sentence at San Quentin for “temporary insanity induced by alcohol.” He got off easy. Tina, severely injured, got a divorce in a complex ruling that set a speed record of less than 5 minutes. You can read all about it in the ’04 newspapers. Domestic violence is nothing new. Nor are sleazy courtroom tactics.

You can see an imposing statue of the colonel at Griffith Park on Los Féliz Boulevard, but I would rather gaze on Tina’s photograph. Still, if you check him out further, you will find that San Quentin made Griffith, in the fullness of time, into a model prisoner, a crusader for prison reform, and a generous civic benefactor. Nevertheless, he was shunned, and the city delayed acceptance of his gifts until his death.

In our crystalline kaleidoscope of history, Tina remains for us ever the freshly radiant daughter of a founding ranchero family, in retrospect an emblem of that gentle, generous, gallant era. She continued to live with her son and wounded memories in the 17-room mansion. It still stands.

It’s a tragic story, yes, but it could be your inspiration for today. Tina later said she had found forgiveness in her heart. We hope it was so.

Griffith Park is there for everyone with its famous Hollywood sign, observatory, golf, Greek temple and panoramic views over a broad urban plain where a humble corporal once allotted land and guidance to poor but hopeful pioneers of New Spain. They could hardly have foreseen the urban vista that would later unroll across that plain.
The colonel and the corporal each left a legacy, each good, each in his own way.