Madeleine Ruthven: Poet of the Mountains

More than 70 years ago, poet Madeleine Ruthven captured the spirit  of the western Santa Monica Mountains in her poetry. Thanks to conservation efforts, that landscape has remained largely unchanged and still inspires with its rugged beauty.

In 1934, Hollywood screenwriter and poet Madeleine Ruthven wrote a slender pamphlet of poems titled Sondelius Came to the Mountains. In it she captured the austerely beautiful back country of the western Santa Monica Mountains and painted a vivid portrait of some of the area’s early 20th century pioneers. Today, the book provides a tantalizing glimpse into an otherwise mostly forgotten past.

A portrait of Madeleine Ruthven by legendary photographer Edward Weston. 

I first encountered Madeleine Ruthven in author Lawrence Clark Powell’s essay on living in Malibu called Ocean in View.  Powell stated that her poems describing the beauty and wildness of the western Santa Monica Mountains were one of the inspirations that brought him to Malibu. It would be years before I tracked down her poetry.  

While I was researching a feature article on Ruthven and her poetry for Anne Soble’s Malibu Surfside News in 2010, I found that Ruthven was a pioneer woman screenwriter, a celebrated poet, a Los Angeles intellectual in the early days of Hollywood, a progressive activist, and a victim of the relentless communist witch hunt of the McCarthy era. I was fascinated and continued to hunt for details, but they were frustratingly scarce.  

A poster for the 1934 film Shock, written by Ruthven. Image: IMDB

I found that Madeleine Bunch Ruthven was born in Iowa in 1894. In 1920, the US Census lists Madeleine, 26, living in Houston, Texas with husband Sam D. Ruthven, 35, born in Louisiana, and Ormond B. Ruthven, son, aged 10. 

Sometime during the 1920s, Ruthven moved to Hollywood. She wrote title cards for silent movies, story treatments and screenplays for 16 film projects.

A studio still from the 1927 film Riders of the Dark, directed and written by W.S. Van Dyke, known as One-Take Willy. Ruthven wrote the title cards for this film. Image: IMDB

In the late ’20s, she wrote several westerns, including The Frontiersman. Unfortunately, this film like so many from the silent era, is lost. She also has  credits for writing title cards, an essential part of the silent era storytelling process.

A still of actress Claire Windsor sharing a pensive moment with her horse from the MGM film The Frontiersman. A handful of studio stills are all that is left of this 1927 silent western. Ruthven shares a story credit for this film with Ross Willis. The film was directed by the prolific Canadian-born filmmaker Reginald Barker. Image: MGM Studios

Ruthven published two collections of poetry during the 1930s. Most of the poems first appeared in Rob Wagner's Script, a weekly literary and film magazine that Ruthven contributed to regularly. However, there is little record of her as poet or film writer in the papers of the time. Just a party in 1937 honoring English poet and novelist Ralph Bates, where she rubbed shoulders with celebrated writer William Saroyan and a glowing review of her first collection of poems, Summer Denial, published in 1932, written by journalist and activist Reuben Borough, whom she would later marry. 

Summer Denial is a bleak but compelling collection of poems. There's just one note of levity, and that's a malediction entitled "To a Victorious Rival":

Daughter of a limpet,
Sister of a leech,
Triumphant as a fungus
On a blasted peach,
To you the palm of victory,
Crown of laurel, too!
(They tell me laurel's poison,
And I hope to God it's true!) 

In the 1940 US Census, Ruthven is divorced and sharing a residence  in Beverly Hills with artist and studio architectural researcher Herta Uerkvitz. Both women were blacklisted by the House Un-American activities committee in the  McCarthy era. 

Herta was an artist, poet and an architectural studio researcher. Like Madeleine, she was blacklisted. Herta appeared before the House Un-American committee on September 20, 1951. She took the 5th, rather than incriminate herself. 

According to Robert Vaughn, in his book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting, Ruthven was denounced by "Mrs Meta Reis Rosenberg, former head of the literary department of Berg-Allenberg," who "introduced into the ‘Red’ record Ruthven 'ex-writer and CP Functionary in Hollywood and its environs.'" 

By the 1930s, Ruthven had switched from writing Westerns to police dramas. This 1936 thriller was directed by Charles Barton. Image: Wikipedia

The 1936 film The Accusing Finger, a detective story about a man wrongly accused of murder, is Ruthven's last film credit. The title seems perversely appropriate in light of the ordeal the writer would face during the McCarthy Era. Image: IMDB.

Unlike many victims of the Hollywood witchhunt, Ruthven appears to really have been a member of the Communist Party. She was also a member of the Women's Shopping League, a socialist organization that promoted consumer and worker safety and opposed war profiteering. 

Ruthven may never have worked in Hollywood again as a writer, but being on the black list didn't prevent her from continuing to work as a political and social justice activist.

She married journalist and fellow progressive activist Reuben Borough in the 1950s, after the death of Borough's first wife.  Borough set several of Madeleine's poems to music, according to documents held by UCLA, but no additional collections of poetry appear to have ever been published. 

Madeleine Ruthven with Reuben Borough (left) and a mystery man during Borough's unsuccessful 1946 campaign for Congress. The couple married some years after the death of Borough's first wife. Borough died in 1970, Ruthven in 1978. Image: USC Digital Library.

There's no record that I could find of when Ruthven visited Malibu. She must have come often in the early years when the newly constructed Roosevelt Highway first opened the area to visitors and adventurers. The finding aid for the Borough's collection lists letters from her that contain pressed flowers. There may be wealth of information on the Santa Monica Mountains within those boxes. She certainly knew the area well and loved it.

A large swath of the western Santa Monica Mountains remain largely unspoiled by development thanks to decades of conservation activism. This is a spring view from the Mishe Mokwa trail that leads to Sandstone Peak, the highest point in the mountains. Photo © S. Guldimann

“Oh wild and lovely country! I am beginning to know you,” Ruthven wrote, describing the “white fire” of the yucca, the “golden tarweed, burned by the summer sun,” and canyons “veiled in a haze of mist-gray sage.”

When she first explored the mountains, they were a true wilderness, roadless and remote. Malibu and the western portion of the Santa Monica Mountains were accessible to the public for the first time only in 1929, when Roosevelt Highway—today’s Pacific Coast Highway—opened.

Massive Balance Rock, a local landmark and popular hiking destination, looks just the same today as it did in Ruthven's time.

Ruthven celebrates a landscape of unspoiled vistas, abundant wildlife, caves that still contained Chumash pictographs, springs of water that were not only safe to drink but provided the only source of water for miles, and the rugged individuals who were the first since the Chumash to make the mountains their home.

Today, the backcountry attracts crowds hikers, bikers and rock climbers, but an early riser can still find the solitude that Ruthven and the settlers she described rejoiced in.

According to Ruthven, Dagon Sondelius was one who loved solitude. He once owned the ridge—600 acres of land—and lived in a cabin made of sheet metal:

 On the crest of Boney Mountain
Where the parapet breaks
And all the world is spread like a map below.

Melted glass from a wildfire glitters on a stark outcropping of stone off Yerba Buena Road. The mountains are filled with evidence of old homesteads reclaimed by fire and repopulated by nature. 

According to Ruthven, Sondelius kept goats and made a hobby of collecting bottles. He was dead by the age of 30, but his goats lived on, veterans of a fire that reduced the cabin to ashes and melted Sondelius’s collection of glass into shapes of “strange fluidity.”

No trace remains now of cabin, but the view still spreads out at one's feet. On a clear day, one can see a panorama of mountains—the San Gabriels, the Topa Topas, and the Channel Islands—the farthest reach the Santa Monica Mountains—with the Pacific stretching away to the horizon.

I like to think this might have been where Sondelius lived. There are the remains of a cabin at this site, and just as it did then, "the world spreads out like a map below."

Other Boney Ridge characters described by Ruthven include Mary La Touche, an Irish woman who came west from Kansas with her husband to homestead in Big Sycamore Canyon, carrying all of her possessions and a month-old child over the rugged spine of the mountains during the heat of summer on pack mules and horses.

La Touche loved the backcountry and kept an inland cabin on Boney Ridge. In summer, when the springs dried up, water had to be carried in by pack mule.

A large section of the backcountry described in Ruthven's poetry has been preserved as part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, including Bony Ridge, Balance Rock and Echo Cliffs. 

When Ruthven knew her, La Touche,“weatherbeaten and rugged as the land,” still roamed the mountains on her mule, Benny, who was:

...Twenty years old, 

As spoiled as a child, 

And sleek as a cardinal's jennet...

There is scarcely a spot in these hills

Where Benny and Mary La Touche 

Have not traveled...

This is a small section of the epic expanse of shear rock shown in the panorama photo. Instead of homesteaders, shepherds and prospectors, hikers and climbers now flock to Echo Cliffs. 

One of the anecdotes presented by Ruthven is an account of La Touche, her five-year-old son Edward and fellow pioneer Walter Haines who became lost in a maze of arroyos while exploring Triunfo Canyon. They spent a cold and uncomfortable winter night on a boulder above the raging floodwaters in the creek without food or blankets. It was almost night on the following day when they finally found their way home.

Haines, a refugee from the city, lived in a tin shack in a canyon “Where trees grow, and a spring trickles,/ And a gray cat purrs in the doorway. 

In Ruthven's time, the residents of the area called the massive stone “face” above Trifuno Canyon “Walt’s Old Woman,” in honor of the canyon hermit.

Ruthven knew Edward La Touche at 15, “competent, strong, unhurried,” a “true child of the hills.” The La Touches, mother and son, arranged horses for Ruthven and guided her and other visitors through the mountains.

Luxuries like paved roads, water and electricity began to arrive in the Malibu back country in the 1930s. This last bastion of wide open spaces still appeals to individualists who enjoy solitude, dark skies and wildlife for neighbors. Self-sufficiency remains key. Emergencies like fires and rockslides are frequent and cell phone reception undependable. The roads are narrow and steep, and while mule teams have been replaced with SUVs, there are still no quick routes out of the mountains.

Ruthven’s poems appear to provide the only surviving record of the rugged mountain characters like Sondelius, the La Touches, and Walter Haines. The names may have been changed but it's clear that they were real people, members of the tough and self-sufficient homesteader community who carved out a precarious life for themselves, a sort of corner of the wild west, without roads, electricity or running water, in the early years of the 20th century.

She also provides a description of fire in the mountains, and its after effect on the environment and the people who made the area their home.

In her poem Mountain Fire, Ruthven describes a wildfire that traveled almost the same route taken by the 2013 Springs Fire. It's a pattern of destruction and regrowth that has occurred over and over. I took this photo of Boney Ridge just days after the 2013 fire. Photo © 2016 S. Guldiman

Mountain Fire

When we came to the crest of Boney Mountain

All the lower hills and the sea were hidden

Under a cloud of fog.

Mountains and valleys and plains of cloud

Glistening pearl in the moonlight.

We turned to the north and east.

Sixty miles away we saw the mountains burning

In Santa Barbara and Ojai—

White plumes of smoke billowing over the ridges,

And a black wall of smoke,

Smooth and solid as basalt,

Thrust seaward into the horizon.

They have known fire in Yerba Buena, too,

They have faced fire and survived

Stripped and scarred, but still alive,

Ready to begin anew.

Two years ago fire came here.

It licked the thick brush from the high hills,

And filled the canyon with flame.

It leaped from the great parapet of Boney Mountain

And swept the slopes below.

The hill people fled before it.

They left the roads, arched with fire,

And followed the wild things

Seeking safety in the water courses.

The fire roared after

And did not pause in its ravening

Until it came to the sea's edge.

Then the folk went back to the blackened smoking hills.

They had nothing left but their courage

And the stoic strength of the harsh land

Under their feet.

They had no assurance

Save the promise of the rain

And the surety of the seasons

To bring life back again.

They went back—

They belong to the hills.

I revisited the Springs Fire in the spring of 2014. Although it was a severe drought year with little rain, the damage from the fire was already beginning to disappear, even without "the promise of rain." Photo © 2016 S. Guldimann

The people Ruthven described are gone, but if she were alive today she would find the area around Boney Ridge that she lovingly described in verse still recognizable. Her voice remains alive in the poetry that reveals her deep love for the Santa Monica Mountains.

This was the summer when I came to know,

After long years,

My love for these brown hills,

And learned the peace

Their stony harshness brings,

And felt their beauty singing in my blood.

Now in October, warm and dusty-hazed,

I wait serenely for the winter rains

To fill the parched and stony waterways,

Knowing that Spring will follow

In a blaze—

Green fire of grass,

Blue flame of lupin bloom,

And poppies burning on the bare hillsides.

Poppies still bloom on the bare hillsides in spring. Photo © 2016 S. Guldimann

Sondelius Came to the Mountains is out of print and can be hard to find-apparently only 200 copies were printed by the Primavera Press in 1934-but the book occasionally turns up second-hand.

The mountains that inspired Ruthven’s poems are still right here in Malibu’s backyard, and continue to invite exploration and reflection.

Although development has engulfed the valley below and made inroads on the once remote wilderness, the peaks are preserved as part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, created by an act of Congress in 1978, the year Madeleine Ruthven died, and nearly 50 years after her book celebrating the mountains was published. Yerba Buena Road still invites the traveler to explore Ruthven's mountains. Photo © 2016 S. Guldimann 

Farewell to Spring

Memorial Day weekend may mark the unofficial beginning of summer, but spring isn't over yet and there are still plenty of opportunities to see wildflowers in Malibu and throughout the Santa Monica Mountains, despite the worst drought in decades. Above, a field of mustard dazzles the eye at Malibu Creek State Park. This opportunistic and adaptable invader from Europe requires very little water to thrive. All Photos © 2014 S. Guldimann

The "May gray" has arrived just in time for Memorial Day weekend. While beachgoers hoping for sun may be disappointed that the heat spell petered out before the holiday, the return of the marine layer is a blessing for native plants that have adapted to depend on the fog as a source of moisture, and any source of moisture is welcome during this prolonged drought. But despite the dry conditions there are still springs flowers blooming, you may just need to look a little harder for them.

I wrote an article on wildflowers for the April 21 issue of the Malibu Surfside News that included a short list of wildflower field guides and online ID resources. Many of the flowers in that article are still blooming. You can read more about them and other late bloomers below.

There's always something to see at the Point Dume Natural Preserve, even during the dry season. The flowers in this photo—crown daisies, wild radish and spurge—are all invasive non natives, but they're still beautiful to see. There are still plenty of native wild flowers here, too, if you know where to look. 

At the Point Dume Headlands the spectacular giant coreopsis flowers have finished blooming, but bush sunflowers, Encelia californica, still provide a golden background. The seeds, rich in protein and oil, draw a variety of birds, including this house finch, whose beak is perfectly adapted to seed cracking. Bush sunflower grows easily from seed and is a good plant for coastal gardens, although its stems break easily, giving it its other common name, brittlebush.

Beach evening primrose, Camissonia cheiranthifolia, grows in the sandy soil at Point Dume.  A formidable root system helps beach primrose survive life on the sand. This plant has begun to recolonize the sand dunes at Westward Beach. It also flourishes on the big sand dune across from Thornhill Broome State Beach. 

Purple sand verbena, Abronia umbellata, looks delicate, but its thick succulent leaves and stems are covered with tiny sticky beads that help the plant capture and store water, enabling it to live on the sand. The flowers have a sweet fragrance. The yellow and orange flowers growing nearby are deerweed, a pretty plant with the decidedly unattractive Latin name Acmispon glabera. Deerweed is a native member of the pea family. It's one of the most ubiquitous late spring-early summer flowers in the Malibu area. Butterfly weed would be a better name for this plant. They're supposedly slightly toxic and don't seem to appeal at all to deer, but they are wildly popular with butterflies and bees. 

This sunflower is smothered in wishbone bush flowers. Like the sand verbena, the wishbone bush, Mirabilis californica, has thick leaves to store water and sticky hairs that help the plant conserve moisture. It gets its name from the way the flowers stamens, arranged in pairs of two, supposedly resemble wishbones. However, these flowers aren't open enough to reveal the secret. 

At first glance, Malibu Bluffs Park may not seem like an auspicious place to hunt for wildflowers. This is what greets you when you drive into the parking lot...

...But once you find your way into Bluffs Park Open Space, there's all kinds of possibilities. It's not a big park, but it offers wildflower enthusiasts a mix of Coastal sage scrub, native grassland, laurel sumac chaparral and even some riparian habitat. It also has spectacular views of the ocean and the mountains. 

This is blue-eyed grass—it's actually a member of the iris family and not a grass at all. It's the most conspicuous Bluffs Park flower. In a wet year, there are acres of this delicate violet-colored flower. This year they are somewhat sparse but still present. They seem to like the same niche inhabited by the much rarer native needlegrasses. 

It may not look like much, but native needlegrass plants can live for more than 100 years and often have root systems that can stretch for 20 feet, enabling the plant to weather drought. This is purple needlegrass. Its seeds were reportedly an important food source for the Chumash. It's vanishingly rare to find this grass growing on a coastal bluff in this era of intensive development, and the Coastal Commission identifies native grassland as significant ESHA—environmentally sensitive habitat area. The California Natural Diversity Database lists needle grass habitat as "a community needing priority monitoring and restoration," and considers grasslands with 10 percent or more cover by purple needlegrass to be "significant." We're lucky to have this remarkable example of native grassland at Bluffs Park. Needlegrass has been planted at Malibu's Legacy Park in an effort to establish a new coastal prairie, but the plants at Bluffs continue to survive, relatively undisturbed, in their original habitat. 

This is one of the real stars of the show at Bluffs Park. This delicate member of the brodiaea family is Triteleia ixoides, also called golden brodiaea, yellow star lily, and pretty face. It's a bulb, which helps it weather drought years. Where you find Triteleia you sometimes also find a much rarer wildflower, the Catalina Mariposa.

Bluffs Park has a large population of this threatened species. An Environmental Impact Report prepared by theSanta Monica Mountains Conservancy before they traded the park to the City of Malibu for Charmlee Wilderness Park, identified more than 200 plants. I found this mariposa perched on the edge of a bluff. Unfortunately, Catalina mariposas, unaware of the difference between parkland and housing tracts, also grow on the Crummer property next door to the park, soon to be developed into McMansions. It is to be hoped that whoever does their EIR is aware of the potential treasures under foot. 

Here's a closer look at Calochortus catalinae, complete with a native pollinator. Several other species of mariposa lilies grow in the Malibu area, including a bright yellow variety, but the Catalina mariposa, with its distinctive red spots and violet-tinged white petals, is the rarest.

Bluffs Park and the Point Dume Headlands offer a new adventure every time one takes the time to walk there, but there are remarkable things all around, and wildflowers everywhere this time of year, even by the side of the road. It's worth slowing down and taking a closer look.

My mother and I stopped on our way home from Agoura Hills on Kanan Dume Road to admire this view. The small yellow flowers are goldfields, Lasthenia california. They once covered miles of the local mountains—and still do in areas like the Carizzo Plain. The blue is lupin. "We don't always realize how lucky we are to see this every time we go shopping instead of subway tunnels and city streets" she said to me.

This blue larkspur was growing along the roadside nearby.

Here's the trail leading up from Kanan to the top of Ladyface Mountain, golden with tarweed and the star-like flowers of triteleia. There wasn't time that day to for a walk. I can't help wondering what we might have missed.


The golden tarweed, burned by the summer sun,
Carpets the valley with russet.
The flowers on the hills are fewer,
But they are still bravely there—
Firecrackers and flowering pease,
And others, delicate and doubly lovely
Because the earth has grown so parched.

—Madeleine Ruthven, Yerba Buena, 1934.


Suzanne Guldimann
25 May 2014

Waiting for the Rain

Malibuites have watched storm clouds roll past all winter, bringing dramatic sunsets, but little measurable rain. This storm brought the first real rain of 2014. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

"California's very existence is premised on epic liberties taken with water..."

—Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert

It rained last week. On Point Dume, we had a third of an inch. It’s not much, but it's enough to keep at least some seeds of hope alive. Back in January, I wrote a short article for the Malibu Surfside News on local drought history. Here’s a more in-depth look at the pattern of droughts and floods that has shaped the landscape of Malibu.

Until the recent rains in Northern California, the media had a field day with dire predictions that this will be the worst drought in California history, or at least the worst since the drought of 1977 or the dry spell that lasted from 1944-51. However, the historical record shows numerous severe drought periods in the 19th century, before “official” scientific records were kept. Drought impacted Southern California in 1863, 1871, 1877, and 1897, and those drought periods arguably changed the course of history in Malibu.

Malibu Rancho ranch hands brand cattle at Zuma in 1897, the year of a major Southern California drought that affected the Malibu Rancho and much of the West.

Frederick Hastings Rindge, who bought the entire Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit from the Keller family in 1892, provides a grim description of historic drought in his book Happy Days in Southern California, published in 1898:  

 “There was a dry time in 1863, another in 1877, and in 1897 there was a great drought. In November, 1863, there was a regular downpour, and it did not rain again until November, 1864 ; and in consequence, dead cattle covered the ground from Monterey to Southern California. Abel Stearns' losses in cattle were enormous. The year 1877 was very dry. In Santa Barbara County, hay was forty dollars a ton. I have heard men say, with a sigh, ‘It was the dry year of ’77 that broke me up. My sheep all died.’ Many a man grew gray that year, as he saw his living withering away.”

Raindrops from the first real rain of the year in Malibu collect on a yucca leaf. Even California's specialized, drought-adapted native plants are suffering from the extended lack of rain this year. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

The Report of the Agricultural Commissioner for the Year 1874 gives a less poetic but equally bleak account of the earlier 1871 drought:

“During the three years from 1868 to 1871, south of Monterey neither grass nor grain grew...Hundreds of farms were abandoned, and the stock-men were compelled to drive their cattle, horses, and sheep to the gulches of the mountains, not only for food, but for water. In February, 1870, not a blade of grass was to be seen over the extensive valley of the Santa Clara; and the broad plains of Los Angeles, covering over 1,000,000 acres of arable land, were nearly desolate, even to the borders of the streams...In March, 1871, the usual season when the crops should be luxuriant, not a blade of grass was to be seen over the great plains and through the valleys, which are richly covered after favorable rains. Hundreds of thousands of sheep, horses, and cattle were lost by starvation.”

Rindge also wrote of his own experiences with drought in 1897:

“Alas! Alas! The dry year is upon us. The very air seems oppressed and oppressing. The very air seems oppressed and oppressing. It is a battle to feel cheerful when Nature is sad. One's nervous system loses its elasticity, and it is hard to do vigorous work. Indeed, this may be the effect of the mind upon the body : the mind being burdened with distress, the body responds sympathetically. The sombre fields look sad and discouraged. The wild flowers are not "in tune," but lie late, sleeping silently in the seeds ; the poppy fields are silent and sad, though next year they will awake in their glory. The cows, with mournful pity, look upon their shrunken-sided calves ; the mothers eat even the leaves, but alas ! they make but little milk. The goats drop their young before time, in the foothills, for lack of nourishment to support their growth. Dejection is on every side. Even the good spirit of the blue jay seems lacking, under the relentless skies.

In this 'day of grief and desperate sorrow,' what shall we do but trust in God ? Our cattle and horses have death before them. The little lambs lie dead about the corral and on the hills, the ewes being milkless. To pay the pasturage on alfalfa farms would cost more than the stock is worth."

Rain from the recent storm system that brought a deluge to much of Northern and Central California failed to make landfall in the south, although there was rain out to sea off the coast of Malibu. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

Rindge gives an account of horrific loss of livestock:

 “Word came from Ventura today that a man up the valley had shot all his range horses rather than see them die, for he could not sell them. Another rancher, with a flock of seven thousand sheep, has found it necessary to kill two thousand young lambs, in order to save the lives of the mother sheep. They are taking horses to the soap-works, and selling them at two dollars and a half. The hide is worth a dollar and a half, the tail fifty cents, and the balance is valuable for soap and land dressing. Some cannot pay their interest, and the mortgage is foreclosed. Others, more prudent, rejoice that they had kept to the motto their parents taught them, ‘Out of debt, out of danger.’” 

“Happy and wise is the man who has settled by a water-course, who owns a never failing spring, or whose wind-mill is above real water-bearing ground. The streams never were so low. They sink before they reach the sea…”

Vegetation burned in the 2013 Spring Fire last year hasn't received enough rain yet to begin the process of recovery and regrowth. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

“The drought of 1898 was, if possible, more devastating in its effects than previous droughts except that of 1862-1864,” states an article entitled “California’s Cattle Range Industry: Decimation of the Herds, 1870-1912, published in the Journal of San Diego History in 1965. 

“Reports of county assessors indicate a reduction in number of cattle in the entire state from 487,742 in 1898 to 463,536 the next year,” the article states. “The president of the State Board of Agriculture, however, reported that actual losses were much greater than the assessor's reports revealed. A contemporary remarked that the drought of 1898 was ‘the means of crippling the cattle business greatly in California.’"

The 1877 drought reportedly drove the previous Malibu Rancho owner, Matthew Keller, to abandon plans to plant extensive vineyards and other crops. Keller bought the ranch in 1857 and spent the next 15 years fighting a legal battle for title to the land. He received the patent in 1872,  at the end of the devastating three-year drought.

 At his extensive farm acreage in Los Angeles, Keller experimented with cotton, castor beans, and citrus, in addition to raising grapes for his successful Rising Sun and Los Angeles Vineyard, which produced wine, sherry and brandy. Keller eventually planted a vineyard at Solstice Canyon, one of the few local canyons with reliable year-round water, but large-scale plans for Malibu never materialized and he leased most of the property to neighboring cattle and sheep ranchers for grazing range. Today, all that remains in Malibu of Keller's legacy is the Rising Sun Trail in Solstice Canyon, named for his 19th century vineyard.

Much of the livestock that grazed in Malibu belonged to ranchers on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, including the areas that are now Newbury Park, Thousand Oaks and Westlake in the Conejo Valley. The 1877 drought decimated cattle and sheep population and left many ranchers bankrupt.

Egbert Starr Newbury purchased a portion of  the former Rancho El Conejo land grant in the early 1870s, but had to abandon his Newbury Park Ranch following the devastating 1877 drought. This is an archival photo of an old Newbury Park Ranch barn. While we have little information on the effect of drought on the Malibu Rancho in 1900s, accounts from Conejo Valley on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, paint a grim picture of this period in local history.

 “Up until the drought years of 1876 and 1877, the Conejo [Valley] was covered in vegetation, feeding thousands of roaming sheep and livestock,” wrote Jeffrey Wayne Maulhardt in the introduction to his book Images of America: Conejo Valley. Maulhardt puts the pre-drought count at nearly 20,000 sheep. At the end of the drought period “a few thousand emaciated sheep worth 10 cents a head remained.”

The drought cost many Conejo Valley farmers their farms. Civil War veteran Egbert Starr Newbury, who homesteaded Newbury Park and built the first post office in the Conejo Valley, lost everything in the 1877 drought. He wasn’t alone. Howard Mills, one of the first land speculators in the area,  bought 20,000 acres in 1873, including  the 6000 acres that he named  Triunfo Ranch and that is now Westlake Village. The 1877 drought drove Mills to bankruptcy.

Mathew Keller died in 1881 and his family sold the entire Malibu Rancho to Rindge, who continued to run cattle, but as a hobby, not for a living. Later ranchers, including the Kincaid family in Trancas Canyon and the Roberts Ranch in Solstice Canyon also ran cattle, but on a more modest scale. Fire followed the 1897 drought in 1903, burning much of Malibu. The 1945-51 drought was followed by a catastrophic fire in 1956 that put an end to the last remnants of the Malibu ranch tradition. 

County water arrived throughout much of Malibu following World War II, bringing more intensive development, but the cycle of drought, and the wildfires that accompany it, still impact residents directly, and water remains a critical issue in the areas of Malibu that still depend on wells. Only a small fraction of Malibu's population would able to live in Malibu if the community depended on groundwater, and the current craze for vineyards combined with the lasting drought is reportedly already impacting areas of the Santa Monica Mountains where homeowners are increasingly finding themselves competing with viticulture for well water.

An aerial view of the eastern end of the 1956 fire, dated 1956-12-27, from the Los Angeles Examiner Negatives Collection at USC. The fire followed an extended period of drought from 1944-51. The 1978 fire took the same route to the sea and also followed a period of extreme drought.

The 2007 Corral Fire, sweeping down the canyon towards the sea on the same trajectory as the 1956 fire, above, and the 1978 fire. This photo was taken from Point Dume just before dawn on the first day of the fire. The white lights are homes, The red lights are the fire engines. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

This is an archival photo from the old Malibu Surfside News of Topanga Canyon during the floods of 1979-1980. The pattern of drought, fire and flood is familiar to anyone who has lived in Malibu for any length of time.

Predictions continue to indicate extended dry weather across Southern California this winter but longtime residents still recall that the 1977 drought was followed, first by the 25,000-acre 1978 Kanan Dume Fire and then by the floods of 1979-80 that damaged more than 100 homes, transformed dry creek beds into raging rivers, and buried a section of PCH under thousands of cubic feet of mud and rock.  It's a pattern that has repeated many times. In fact, the 1863 drought was preceded by the great flood of 1862, when it reportedly rained for 45 days in a row, flooding the entire West Coast, from the Columbia River in Oregon to Northern Mexico.

There's no surviving record of how the great flood of 1862 affected Malibu, but here's a charming litho of Sacramento, transformed into "a second Venice." The flood, also known as the Noachian Deluge, was no joke, it bankrupted the state. Almost the entire Central Valley was transformed into a temporary inland sea. In Southern California, the town of Ventura had to be abandoned, residents scrambled for high ground as the river rose and kept on rising. Los Angeles was hammered with 35 inches of rain. The L.A. River, reportedly clogged with debris that included entire houses and hundreds of drowned cows and sheep, turned much of the L.A. Basin into a vast, shallow lake. 

“No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” wrote Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, a 1998 chronicle of the numerous disasters, real and fictional, afflicting the Los Angeles area. The book includes Davis' infamous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” And yet, many who live here love this place fiercely and are willing to endure all of the extremes in exchange for a chance to experience what Frederick Hastings Rindge described as “very near terrestrial paradise,” even when that paradise is tempered by the extremes of flood, fire and drought.

"Old Growth," one of a series of paintings by the author inspired by California's turbulent,  disaster-prone—and often lunatic—history. Artwork © 2014 S. Guldimann

This was the summer when I came to know,

After long years,

My love for these brown hills,

And learned the peace

Their stony harshness brings,

And felt their beauty singing in my blood.

Now in October, warm and dusty-hazed,

“I wait serenely for the winter rains

To fill the parched and stony waterways,

Knowing that Spring will follow

In a blaze—

Green fire of grass,

Blue flame of lupin bloom,

And poppies burning on the bare hillsides.

—Madeleine Ruthven, 1934