The Founding of Anaheim, California 1857-1870
Graduation Date
Summer 1961
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Degree Granting Institution
Catholic University of America
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
The dream of finding some "favored land beyond the mountains and the seas; a land of equal laws and happy men" has been a recurrent theme in American history. The hope of building perfect little societies has been conceived, in their secularistic forms, in terms of Platonic republics, associated menddesirous of putting socialism into practice, and in the religious forms, while extremely diversified, all more or less theocratic and apocalytic. Anaheim, California, was formed in 1857 as such an Utopian dream. Settled by the Los Angeles Vineyard Society, the colony was born of a type of social philosophy different from either nationalism or individualims, and yet, as subsequent history shows, Anaheim developed strong communial traits of both nationalism and individualism.
Between September, 1859, and the late spring of i860, members of the society all German tradesmen and their families traveled by steamer, either the Senator or the Orizaba, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, anxious to see for the first time the land which they had purchased with their life savings. With eager anticipation they had read about the rich soil in the Hansen reports. Doubtless, they had listened with pleasure to the description of Santa Ana’s rolling plains from the first-hand accounts of Vice President Charles Kohler, and his business partner, John Frohling; probably they had visualized their own twenty-acre plot with the aid of the lithographed maps of Kuchel and Dresel. The passengers anchored off the Coast of San Pedro Harbor and awaited a smaller boat which brought them close enough to shore to transfer to a rowboat, thence to the shoulders of the Yaqui Indians, who carried them through the breakers to land.
The adventurous story of Anaheim, a frugal, hardworking, typically German Community, set in the midst of the last of the romantic Spanish ranchos, lavish still with the wealth of land, has captured the academic interest of several students of history, sociology and geography. To retell the story would be of no profit unless new facts, uncovered by fresh research, were presented in the retelling. This the author of the present thesis attempts to do.
By employing all the available documents, both in San Francisco and in Los Angeles, the writer hopes to have made some contribution to the history of Anaheim's foundation, and by the correlation of scattered documents, to have brought into focus some new insights. A further outcome of her research is the correction of some minor discrepancies which have crept into Anaheim's narrative, and which, unfortunately, have been accepted by historians and perpetuated in print through continually appearing articles on Anaheim, the Mother Colony.
One seeming omission in this thesis is the treatment of the intellectual history of Anaheim. This fascinating account unhappily falls outside the time span to which the paper is confined. The seeds of this history, however, were planted in the decade treated and first make their appearance with the coming of Major Max Strobel; like the story of this man, Anaheim's history intellectual was, and is, a history of dramatic paradoxes and labyrinthian speculation.