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"Ruins of Warner's House" and the Butterfield Stage Route

Finely executed manuscript map of the Rancho Valle de San Jose, dated January 10, 1880, in conjunction with the final confirmation and patenting of the Rancho to Silvestre de la Portilla in 1880.

While covering a now relatively unassuming portion of San Diego County, Rancho Valle de San Jose is in many respects an important early crossroads.  The Rancho's main hydrographic feature, Buena Vista Creek, was recorded as a campsite by the Spanish Portolà expedition of 1769, where the Portola party encountered native villagers while camped on Buena Vista Creek. 

However, perhaps the most interesting information on the map concerns the location the "Ruins of Warner's House" and the "Old Adobe House" shown at the intersection of several roads on Buena Vista Creek (one of which is the "Road to Fort Yuma).  As noted in the Warner Ranch House section below, this map and the field notes of Deputy Surveyor William P. Reynolds are apparently the sole surviving evidence which definitively identifies the location of the original Warner Ranch House on the Butterfield Stage Route and clarifies that the neighboring "Old Adobe House," which historians have long identified as the Warner House, was actually built and occupied in 1857 by Doña Vicenta Sepúlveda, who had acquired the Rancho from Silvestre de la Portilla and was, at the time of the map's creation, living in the house and pursuing her claim to ownership of the Rancho through the court system.

At the east end of the map, several other interesting place names appear, including:

• Road to Smith's Mts [?]
• Old Indian Rancheria
• Old House
• Indian Reservoir (the future location of the Lake Henshaw dam)

The map also includes faint township and range survey markings, as well as faint markings in an early hand showing subdivision of the Rancho and specifically a note identifying "Lot No. 40" (?) below Buena Vista Creek.

Rancho Valle de San Jose (Portilla) and The Mystery of the Location of the Warner Ranch House 

While Warner's Ranch on the road to California is one of the iconic locations of early California history, the exact location of Warner's Ranch House has been a subject of historical; debate.  

The present map was generated as part of the final adjudication of California Private Land Claim-Docket 531, In the matter of Silvestre de la Portilla and the Valle de San José, commenced in 1870 and completed in 1880. This land claim is actually a compendium of documents resulting from an adjudicated conclusion of a long legal battle between the successor claimants of the Portilla grant of 1836 and the Juan José Warner grant of 1844.

Rancho Valle de San Jose was a 17,634-acre Mexican land grant in modern San Diego County, California given in 1836 by Governor Nicolás Gutiérrez to Silvestre de la Portilla.  Bounded on the north by Buena Vista Creek and Rancho San Jose del Valle the western part of the grant is currently part of Lake Henshaw formed in 1922 by a dam on the San Luis Rey River.

During the process of secularizing the Mission San Luis Rey in 1834, Captain Pablo de la Portillà was appointed administrator. In 1836, his brother, Silvestre de la Portillo was granted the Rancho, consisting of a portion of the valley formerly occupied by the Mission San Luis Rey, by Governor ad interim, Nicolás Gutiérrez. Silvestre de la Portillo left the rancho in charge of his brother, Pablo, and returned to his native Sonora and did not come back until the 1850s. 

With the cession of California to the United States following the Mexican–American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided that the land grants would be honored. As required by the Land Act of 1851, a claim for Rancho Valle de San Jose was filed with the Public Land Commission in 1852.  In 1858, Silvestre de la Portilla sold Rancho Valle de San Jose to Doña Vicenta Sepulveda. In 1869, John G. Downey entered the picture, as he began acquiring land in the Valle de San José during the pendency of the claim process.

The Portilla land claim was resolved following the conclusion of a long legal battle between the successor claimants of the Portilla grant of 1836 and the Juan José Warner grant of 1844.  The Warner claim had been the subject of a separate legal proceeding, which had been resolved in 1856.  A portion of the land confirmed to Warner by the District Court in 1856, was land claimed by Doña Vicenta Sepúlveda de Carrillo, the grantee of the Portilla property. She had not contested the Warner ownership because her claim to the property had entered the courts prior to confirmation of the Warner claim and judgment had not yet been rendered. Portilla’s 1836 grant to four square leagues in the valley preceded Warner’s ownership of six square leagues by eight years. Each time a judgment was rendered for Warner, an appeal was filed. By the time ex-Governor John G. Downey began his acquisition of the Valle de San José in 1869, the title dispute was before the courts.

The grant was ultimately patented to Doña Vicenta Sepúlveda, the successor to Silvestre de la Portilla, in 1880. 

The present map was generated as part of the final adjudication of California Private Land Claim-Docket 531, In the matter of Silvestre de la Portilla and the Valle de San José, commenced in 1870 and completed in 1880.

The Present Map and the Reynolds Field Notes Locate Warner's Ranch House.

As part of the dispute, Deputy Surveyor William P. Reynolds set out in May 1870 to conduct a survey of the Valle de San José based on the information contained in the Portilla and Warner land grants. His resultant Field Notes and detailed survey, accompanied by a Plat (this map), provide the best surviving picture of the valley.   Most interestingly, Reynolds’ report (and this map) located and described in detail the Ranch House, demonstrating that Warner’s adobe that so many had written about in contemporary journals and diaries from the 1840s and 1850s, and which historians had reviewed in regard to the Butterfield Stage Route, was not what was in the location shown on the present map as the "Old Adobe House."  Warner’s house, built by him after his land grant in 1844, had been destroyed by Indians in the Garra Uprising of 1851, and had not been re-roofed and repaired as historians had previously theorized.  Reynolds specifically noted that:

“The ruins of the house occupied by J. J. Warner and which was burnt by the Indians during an uprising by them in 1851 bears N 401/2 degrees W. The ruins of the Blacksmith Shop about 150 links west of the ruins of Warner’s House bears N 42 1/2 degrees W

The Old Adobe House located on the map and identified in Reynolds field notes, which historians had previously though was the Warner Ranch House was, based upon Reynolds field notes:

 . . .  built by Doña Vicenta Sepúlveda (the Grantee of Don Silvestre de la Portilla of the Rancho Valle de San José) in the year 1857 and is now occupied by some of the present owners as the Ranch House.

William Minto

William Minto (1837-1919) was born in Annan, Scotland.

Beginning 1871, Minto did survey work for the General Land Office, in the State of California for 39 years. His first survey contract was issued on August 9, 1871, and his last recorded survey with the General Land Office is dated July 12, 1910.

The surveys executed by William Minto span the entire length of California and are located on or near the following places: Van Nuys, Beverly Hills, Whittier, Alhambra, Santa Margarita, Berkley, Santa Ana, El Cajon, Costa Mesa, Cedarville, Fort Bidwell, Likely, Madeline, Davis Creek, Paradise, Butte City, Glenn, Durham, Parkfield, Priest Valley, Hopland, Cloverdale, Laguna Beach, Porterville, Viola, Healdsburg, Mount Whitney, San Juan Capistrano, Yorba Linda, Susanville, Observation Peak, Red Bluff, McCloud, Mount Shasta, King City, San Bernardino, Fontana, Riverside, Mammoth Lakes, Palo Alto, Palomar Mountain, Trona, Hemet, Quincy, Santa Monica, Beaumont, San Jacinto, Pomona, Portola, Oakland, San Pablo, San Leandro, Point Sal, Palm Springs, Banning, and Clearlake.

Minto was also indicted as a member of the infamous Benson Syndicate that performed fraudulent surveys through the West. According to the Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office for the year 1887, Minto was paid over $60,000 dollars for work performed for the syndicate.

Rarity

The map is seemingly a unique survival, although it must be assumed that an example exists in US General Land Office. 

OCLC locates a photocopy at the Bancroft Library, described as a  "negative photocopy of ms. map in U.S. General Land Office, Washington, D.C."

Provenance:  Acquired in 2021 from the heirs of an employee of a San Diego County title company, who reportedly acquired the map during a deaccession of company maps in the early 1970s.