My first ancestor in California that I know of was William Wolfskill who came to Los Angeles in 1831 (yes, it existed then) and tried hunting fur seals, but the Russians, who were all over the California coast with their Aleut sidekicks, had pretty much cleaned them out (as well as killed off the Channel Island Indians). He married a Spanish señorita and settled down to develop vineyards and citrus orchards, then got into cattle ranching, doing quite well in all his endeavors. One of his descendants helped finance the Chaffey brothers in establishing Etiwanda and had extensive citrus groves in that area.
Years later, another one of my ancestors, part Northern Cheyenne (I've written about how this came to be a couple of times), scouting for the Bartleson emigrant wagon train, made it to California in 1841. Years later, one of his sons participated in the second Pitt River expedition of 1857 against the hostiles under Gen. George Crook. When the Civil War broke out, he tried to go east to join Crook's boys in the Army of West Virginia but ended up joining a cavalry unit in Nebraska that didn't serve with Crook but fought the Cheyenne and Sioux in the war that erupted after the Chivington Massacre. So he was probably fighting some of his own distant relatives, a kind of civil war of its own, if you will.
Another of my ancestors, who made his fortune in ranching and mining in Montana, came to southern California around the turn of the 20th century and invested in real estate, oil, the early movie industry and the rising aviation industry. He hired the architect Horatio Cogswell to design houses on his real estate projects. Cogswell created the quintessentially classic Los Angeles bungalow as well as such houses as Pickfair for Mary Pickford, who was a good friend of my great-grandmother. I have seen a photo of her (my great-grandmother) with Pickford and Anne Morrow before she became Mrs. Lindbergh at some social function at Pickfair.
He invested in the Keystone Film Co. of Mack Sennett and sprung for $100,000 in 1915 to build Mabel Normand a studio at Fountain and Brae. He was driven out of the movie industry by the arrival of gangsters from back east, specifically the goons of Murder, Inc., the Bugsy Siegel mob.
My great-grandfather became friends with Donald Hall when he worked at Douglas in Santa Monica before he moved to Ryan in San Diego and designed The Spirit of St. Louis. While he was serving in the Navy as an aviator, he (my great-grandfather) met and became friends with Charles Lindbergh at Panama in 1929 when he (Lindbergh) visited the USS Saratoga after the completion of Fleet Problem IX, probably in part because great-grandpa knew Hall, so they had a mutual acquaintance to spark the friendship.
