The Gates of Paradise

By: Ben Marcus | Special thanks to Jefferson "Zuma Jay" Wagner, Glen Howell, Ernest Marquez and the Seaver Center. | January 30, 2009 | In Print Non Fiction Profile

In August of 1905, Frederick Rindge died unexpectedly after falling into a diabetic coma while inspecting a potential mining investment in Yreka. He was 48 years old and left behind his wife, three children and an estate worth $22 million — or the modern equivalent of nearly half a billion dollars.

May Knight Rindge was 40 years old when her husband died. She was in Northern California at the time her husband fell ill, and went to his side for the last few hours. Frederick Rindge might have regained consciousness long enough to say goodbye to his wife, maybe not. But Mrs. Rindge knew what her husband’s wishes were.

Frederick Rindge left behind a “back-up” will that left nothing to the Methodist Church or the YMCA or any of the institutions he had sponsored over the years. Frederick Rindge left it all to his wife and three children, and May Rindge became the widowed executrix of an estate that owned land from Malibu to Massachusetts, mining claims in Northern California, logging operations in northern Mexico, and stocks and bonds in Union Oil, Edison Electric Company and a wide variety of other interests.

The Rindge estate was vast and multiplying as rapidly as the West, but the centerpiece and pride of it all was the Malibu Ranch, formerly the Rancho Malibu, formerly the Rancho Topanga Malibu y Sequit, formerly Humaliwo, the southern limit of Chumash territory.
The Malibu Ranch was also known as “the Malibu,” and it was referred to as a “principality” in the hundreds of newspaper articles about the property published by the Los Angeles Times. Twenty times larger than Monaco, but a third the size of Liechtenstein — and almost exactly the same length as the Gaza Strip — the 13,315 acres of Malibu was bounded on the south by 21 miles of pristine coastline from Las Flores Canyon to the Ventura County line. Carbon Beach, Malibu Creek and lagoon, Corral Beach, Point Dume, Zuma Beach, Sequit Point: The Rindges owned it all, locks, livestock and lobsters.
The innermost limits of the Malibu were a mile to 2.5 miles inland — whatever was useful or scenic or productive. At the time Mr. Rindge passed on, the Malibu Ranch had sheep, cattle, goats and hogs, and produced alfalfa, barley, grains and hay, and thousands of dollars in lemons. In March of 1905, a few months before his death, Mr. Rindge planted 1,500 acres of lima beans near Zuma Beach “within sound of the mournful wail of the Point Dume whistling buoy,” the L.A. Times reported.

THE COWBOY
Who’d be a banker
When he could be
Riding a bronco
Over the sea?

Glad vaquero
Glad he was born
Ever on duty
Up with the morn
Riding the range
King of the hills
Poppies salute him
Birds sing their trills

— A Frederick Rindge poem,
L.A. Times, March 31, 1905

May Rindge outlived her husband by 36 years and dedicated herself to seeing through her husband’s vision of the Malibu as an American Riviera. According to this plan, the public would be allowed to enter the Rindge principality, but by invitation, and slowly. The public had other ideas, however, and assaulted the Malibu Ranch from all sides, by land and sea, on horseback and in automobiles, with revolvers, axes and lawsuits.
From 1907 to 1923 Mrs. Rindge and her tireless attorneys fought an endless string of court cases against the Federal Land Office, Ventura County and Los Angeles County, then the State of California Highway Commission and finally, the U.S. Supreme Court. Manifest destiny had consumed the entire continent from Plymouth Rock to the Pacific, and Mrs. Rindge had about as much chance of surviving as the American Indians or the Hawaiians or any other group or individual who owned something Uncle Sam wanted.
But the Malibu was worth fighting for, and Mrs. Rindge fought bravely and endlessly, but she wasn’t going to win. After the Supreme Court gave the thumbs down to the Rindges in 1923 and allowed the county road and the state highway to go through, Mrs. Rindge eventually accepted that unfair fate, and while the ’20s were still roaring, she hired Mark Daniels — the man who landscaped Yosemite — to develop a master plan for the Malibu.
All that Mrs. Rindge had endured from 1907 to 1923 was a cakewalk compared to the economic Depression of the 1930s, when all of Mrs. Rindge’s best-laid development plans were burned or buried or scattered to the wind. By 1926 the Rindges had built a 100-foot dam as part of “a water conservation system to create lakes and reservoirs…” according to the L.A. Times. “This conservation has been applied not only to water but to all of the natural resources of the rancho.”

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