Imagine a ranch so large that you could walk all day, never get cell reception and have a chance to see what most people never see – a California condor taking wing on a sudden updraft.
By Sue Hancock Jones; Article from 2022 Winter edition of Ranch Record
The remarkable landscape of the Tejon Ranch reveals a dramatic tapestry of rugged mountains, steep canyons, oak-covered rolling hills and broad valleys with roaming elk, wild turkey and black bear.
The 422-square-mile ranch is the largest single expanse of private property in California, but it’s also a working ranch raising cattle and crops. In cow country talk, it’s the largest ranch in the state under one fence.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is only an hour away and could “just about fit inside the fence line of Tejon,” according to ranch publicity. Despite Bakersfield being only 30 minutes away, the 270,000-acre ranch has remained a wild place where mountain lions prey on unsuspecting fawns and California condors spiral in the sky with 10-foot wing spans.
Tejon Ranch may seem like a remote hideaway, but millions of motorists pass it every year on Interstate 5 connecting San Diego to northern Sacramento. Drivers can see the majestic scenery, but in the heart of the ranch are thousands of cattle grazing in wild country under the watch of modern-day vaqueros.
The Cross and Crescent brand dates back to 997 A.D. in Spain and is the oldest livestock brand in the United States still in use.
Centennial Livestock leases the lion’s share of Tejon Ranch’s open ranges, and each cowboy trains and cares for his own string of horses and stock dogs. They meet up before dawn at the Old Headquarters where an old barn still has signs of the Cross and Cresent brand stamped on its limestone floor and welded into its swinging gate.
Considered the old livestock brand in the country still in use, the Cross and Crescent traces back to about 997 A.D. in Spain. Conquistadors brought the brand to Mexico and then carried it to Rancho el Tejon.
Spain and Mexico Came First
The ranch got its name from Lt. Francisco Ruiz who called the region El Tejon (Spanish for “badger”) after his soldiers found a dead badger at the mouth of the canyon. Ruiz also named the canyon Canada de las Uvas (Grapevine Canyon) because of the abundant grapevines.
Tejon Ranch is one of the few locations in California that has remained as it was before the Spanish arrived. Thriving Native American villages once dotted the landscape of the present ranch when it became the northernmost area of responsibility for Mission San Fernando, part of the mission system established by Spain.
As a Spanish colony, Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and began issuing mission lands to its own people in the form of land grants. Between 1843 and 1846, the four ranchos that would eventually make up the Tejon Ranch (Rancho el Tejon, Rancho de Castac, Ranch la Liebre and Rancho los Alamos y Agua Caliente) were granted to Mexican citizens to help colonize the region and spur the economy.
War was brewing between the United States and Mexico by the mid-1800s. The Mexican-American War broke out in 1846, and Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale–the eventual owner of Tejon Ranch–arrived in California as a naval officer. He served with John C. Fremont in the Battle of San Pasqual 30 miles north of San Diego.
Gold Discovered in California
Spanish and Mexican rule ended in California with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. News of the discovery of gold was initially confined to California until Beale made the perilous journey across Mexico on horseback and eventually boarded a ship in Vera Cruz. He sailed to the southeastern part of the United States and then made his way by stagecoach to the east coast to become the first person to carry the news to Washington, D.C., of the discovery of gold in California. Though it’s been widely reported that Kit Carson was the first Californian to bring the news about the discovery of gold to the Army, Beale beat him by two months.
The news of gold eventually brought hundreds of thousands of people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. In 1850, California became one of the few American states to go directly to statehood without first being a territory. The flow of people into the new state displaced the remaining Native Americans, and three Indian reservations were established. Parts of the southern reservation were in two of the four original land grants but soon diminished in size to include only Tejon Canyon.
In 1852, Beale was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the western U.S. territories. In 1853 he began his work on the Tejjon lands and named the reservation the Sebastian Indian Reserve for Sen. Willliam K. Sebastian who had encouraged funding for Beale’s plans on the Indian Reserve.
Because the reservation was to be a military reserve, Fort Tejon was established at the top of Grapevine Canyon in 1854 to control and protect the Indians from the white man who wanted to eliminate them.
Located within the Castac Land Grant, Fort Tejon was built on the main roadway through California for the purpose of easy access but also to control the lawlessness growing throughout the state. When the military relinquished the use of the post in 1864, Tejon Ranch used the buildings in its ranching operation.
Early cowboys working on the Tejon Ranch; date unknown.
In separate purchases from 1855 to 1866, Beale bought the four land-grant ranchos that now comprise Tejon Ranch and began a new position in 1866 as Surveyor General in the West. Sheep were the first industry of the newly combined Tejon Ranch followed by decades of cattle raising, agricultural crops, oil leases and wildlife management.
Tejon Goes Public
About 10 years after the death of his father in 1893, Truxtun Beale sold Tejon Ranch to a group of property investors from Los Angeles headed by Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, and land developer Moses Sherman.
These famous families enjoyed the ranch as a private hunting preserve. In 1936, the Tejon Ranch Co. became a public company with the Chandler-Sherman group retaining a controlling interest. The Chandlers’ Times Mirror Co. sold its stake in 1997, and the ranch has been publicly listed since 1973.
Dating the 1843 land grants as the origin of the ranch, Tejon Ranch celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2018 by donating the federal deed signed by President Abraham Lincoln to the Autry Museum of the American West. This historic document made the Mexican land grants recognized as U.S. land deeds.
Because putting land first has been the Tejon Ranch approach since 1843, the Tejon Ranch Co. entered into an unprecedented agreement in 2008 with a coalition of environmental groups to protect permanently 240,000 acres of the historic ranch. It is the largest conservation and land-use pact in California history and took 20 months of off-and-on negotiations.
“We voluntarily agreed to develop only a small portion of our property, leaving hundreds of square miles of open land where trees and other vegetation store 3.3 million tons of carbon,” explained Barry Zoeller, vice president of corporate communications and investor relations. “That’s like taking 2.5 million cars off the road for a year.”
With 90 percent of its land protected forever from development, the remaining 10 percent (30,000 acres) has created one of Southern California’s longest running development battles.
Tejon Ranch Co. diversified to include the Tejon Ranch Outlets, a commercial enterprise that boasts name brands like Coach and Starbucks and factory industries like IKEA. Three planned communities are in various stages of litigation and include a combined estimated total of 65,000 homes with electric vehicle chargers at residences and commercial businesses and incentives to support the purchase of electric vehicles, school buses and trucks.
Homes and businesses in the planned communities will have solar panels, necessary bandwidth and high-speed connectivity to grow as technology grows. Water conservation and reuse plans will be priorities, and all the communities will have a full and complete internal trail system connecting them to the 240,000 acres of open space throughout the rest of Tejon Ranch.
Defenders of the project include not just the ranch company but also labor groups. They argue that development will create tens of thousands of jobs as well as housing, both of which are badly needed in California. Opponents worry about climate change and the danger of wildfires, arguing that “developments like this are literally built to burn.”
Change Over Time
Since the conquistador saw the dead badger at the mouth of the canyon, the pristine land of Tejon Ranch has changed occupants, owners and purpose. Yet most of the land remains unspoiled.
Even while mission land has become ranch land and courts have become battlefields, Tejon cattle still graze pristine pastures and cowboys still meet at the Old Headquarters. Not all change happens quickly, and condors may yet fly for decades over 240,000 protected acres.
