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

The homesteaders who made the original complaint at the Los Angeles office of the Federal Land Commission included the owners of the Decker Ranch and other settlers in the “canons back of the Malibu Ranch…” the L.A. Times reported. “Frank C. Prescott, Jr., son of Gen. Prescott, is one of the men who has filed on public lands in one of the Santa Monica range canons. Other well-known Los Angeles men who have recently taken claims in the Sosto Canon are Ernest Worden, Charles Stansbury and Ed Newell.”
Some of these names like Newell and Decker still resonate now; others are lost in time. And some, like Sosto Cañon, have been shaped by time into new names: Solstice Canyon.
The conflict wasn’t just over gates at the beach road along the coast, but also to the many roads leading up into the canyons and over the hills. Homesteaders and settlers used these roads to access federal lands, but they were no longer available. In 1913, Judge Robert Bean ruled on the case for the District Court of the Southern District of California, and he detailed the roads from east to west:
“All the roads across the ranch were built and maintained by the settlers, either with the express or implied consent of the landowner, and were nothing more than mere private ways. There are 12 such roads, known in the record as the Las Flores Canyon Road, the Bieule Road, the Carbon Canyon Road, the Malibu Canyon Road, the Puerco Canyon Road, the Corral Canyon Road, the Sosto Canyon Road, the Latigo or Escandido Canyon Road, the Suma Canyon Road, the Trancas Canyon Road, the Encinal Canyon or Decker Road, and the Nicholas Canyon Road.”
On Dec. 4, 1907, the L.A. Times ran an article under the headline Uncle Sam Aroused: To Force Her Gates Open. Mrs. Rindge still carried the inherited good will of her philanthropist husband, so much of the heat for the friction at the gates of the Malibu Ranch was pointed at one N.D. Darlington:
“The bill is brought in the name of Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte on behalf of the United States of America. The acts complained of have occurred since the death of Rindge, and N. D. Darlington, superintendent of the Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit, is blamed for much of the trouble. … It is claimed that Superintendent Darlington has pastured herds of stock on the government land adjoining the Malibu Ranch without asking permission from any authorized government official.”

Who was N.D. Darlington? From his actions on the ranch — running cattle illegally on federal lands and ordering gate guards to pull guns on federal agents — it is easy to picture Darlington as the Robert Duvall character: a grizzled Civil War veteran swept across the plains toward the West on the crest of manifest destiny, ending up in California, and then the Malibu, in a refuge of the Old West, between the mountains and the sea.
Not exactly, according to Adamson House docent and Malibu historian Glen Howell:
“Frederick Rindge hired civil engineer Newell Dyke Darlington to survey the right-of-way for the Hueneme Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railroad. N.D. Darlington had become a well-respected surveyor in Los Angeles County. He was born Jan. 4, 1874, studied civil engineering at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn., and moved to Los Angeles in 1894. A street is named for him in West Los Angeles.
“After Frederick Rindge’s death in 1905, Darlington became general manager of the Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railroad, and manager of the Rindge Ranch under May Rindge.” 
Darlington was a young gun, barely in his 30s when he was working for the Rindges. Replacing the image of the grizzled cowboy is the image of a young romantic who came west from Pennsylvania thinking the Wild West party was over, but found it still raging within the Rindge domain.
Born in 1874 — the year Joseph Glidden received a patent for barbed wire — Darlington was just a 1-year-old when Wyatt Earp began his career as a law officer in Wichita, Kan. He was 2 years old when Wild Bill Hickok was murdered playing poker in Deadwood, S.D.  Darlington probably read about the shootout at the O.K. Corral when he was 7 years old. And he might have read about Judge Roy Bean, who was appointed Justice of the Peace for Pecos County in 1882. The law west of the Pecos charged $10 for divorces and $5 for weddings. Judge Bean always ended his wedding services with “May God have mercy on your souls,” which was traditionally said at the end of death sentences. Darlington was 15 in 1889, the year of the Oklahoma Land Rush and the year Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank. In 1890, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared the western frontier officially closed. Darlington finally made it to California four years later, at the age of 20.
But Darlington got lucky. Hired as an engineer by Frederick Rindge, he ended up on a little paradise of 20 square miles — in the middle of a railroad battle and a range war, dealing with cattle rustlers and letting a few of the Rindge stock slip out onto federal lands, as well as being named in many of the court cases, which were eventually ruled on by a Judge Bean — all of this well paid, with an ocean view, between the mountains and the deep blue sea, and a short ride to the modern world.
Heaven.

The legal troubles for the Rindges and the Malibu Ranch were redoubled in the middle of December, when Los Angeles County followed the U.S. District Court suit with a suit of their own. On Dec. 16, 1907, Chief Deputy District Attorney Hartley Shaw filed in the Superior Court a suit against Mrs. Rindge, Darlington, “and a number of ‘John Does,’ representing the deputy constables,” asserting that for 30 years there had been “a certain public road” that began in Santa Monica and ran through the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, and thence on through the Rancho Topango (that’s how they spelled it then) Malibu Sequit all the way to the Ventura County line. The suit provided a detailed description of that public road across private property and argued that it had been used “continuously and uniformly” as a public highway, and the defendants had no right to install gates or block entrance.
In 1907, U.S. District Attorney Lawler filed his bill in equity to bring the matter to a “speedy determination.” But he was dreaming. The federal case and the county suit were just the start of an incredibly long drama of writs, injunctions, suits, appeals, counter suits, petitions and habeas corpus ad subjiciendum that lasted until 1923, when the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark eminent-domain decision in Rindge Co, v. L.A. County that allowed Los Angeles and then the State of California to roll 21 miles of highway across the Malibu Ranch.
“For these reasons we conclude that these highways will, as found by the trial judge, afford accommodation to the traveling public, and that the taking of land for them is a taking for a public use authorized by the laws of California.
We therefore conclude that the property of the ranch owners has been taken for highways constituting a public use authorized by law, and upon a public necessity for the taking duly established, and that they have not been deprived of their property in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgments of the District Court of Appeal are accordingly AFFIRMED.”
At some point in all the tens of thousands of pages of court proceedings and millions of words, Mrs. Rindge was asked why she originally put the gates up after free passage had been allowed all those years. Her answer was simple and understandable: “Brushfires.” Even now, Malibu residents live in fear of brushfires, which refuse to die even when confronted by hundreds of engines, thousands of firefighters and squadrons of water-dropping airplanes and helicopters.
Imagine how those fires would have raged out of control 100 years ago when men in wagons on dirt roads tried to halt their progress with buckets of water. Mrs. Rindge was afraid of trespassers on her land starting brushfires, like the firestorm in 1903 that burned the Rindge home to the ground. Brushfires were one of the reasons she closed the gates, but that action sparked all those lawsuits, behaving much like brushfires she tried to prevent. The Rindge attorneys fought small battles and big ones, but every time they would win a court case, another would spring up a few months later.
In the end, the lawsuits did what the brushfires couldn’t, and they consumed the Malibu Ranch and drove the family off. For 20 years and then some, the Rindges refused to back down. These days, Malibu citizens fight long battles over their 1- or 2- or 10-acre patches of Malibu heaven. One hundred years ago, the Rindges owned it all — from Duke’s to Neptune’s Net and everything in between — and you can’t blame them for fighting for it to the bitter end.

EPILOGUE:
Ironically, after battling the intrusion of public roads for the Rindges for many years, Darlington became a pioneer of roads and highways throughout California, according to Glen Howell.
  “In 1911, Mayor George Alexander appointed Darlington as a member of the Los Angeles Board of Public Utilities. Then on Aug. 2, 1911, the California governor appointed Darlington to the three-member State Highway Commission. Darlington became its chairman. This would be the beginning of the organization that became Caltrans, which has control over all state road and highway activities.
“Darlington is given the chief credit for the selection and construction of the Ridge Route, which opened in 1915, and was paved in 1919. The completion of this state highway connecting Los Angeles and Bakersfield was instrumental in defeating a political movement to divide California into two states.”
What that means is that at some point, N.D. Darlington found himself on the other side of the fence from his former employer — putting a highway through the ranch that he had once defended with guns. The changed relationship between Darlington and Mrs. Rindge is one of many facets of this story that should one day be told.

This article was spawned while doing research for a book about the Malibu Pier that I am currently writing with Jefferson “Zuma Jay” Wagner. While researching Chapter Two, I tapped into the Los Angeles Times archive, and hit the jackpot. For the first 20 years of the 20th century, the Rindges were one of the most prominent and mysterious families in Los Angeles County. The Malibu Ranch was as closed off as Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and while Mr. Rindge was an outgoing and friendly man about town, after his death Mrs. Rindge was aloof, reclusive and in many ways the Southern California cousin to Madame Winchester. The Malibu Ranch and the battles around it were one of the biggest sensations of that time. The Los Angeles Times reportage was detailed but often speculative – sometimes sympathetic to Mrs. Rindge, sometimes reflecting the public outrage over this woman who had so much, and was so determined to maintain her privacy. I downloaded dozens of articles from the newspaper’s archives covering a span of time from 1881 to the 1940s, and those stories provide a solid keel for all that happened on the Malibu Ranch — from 33-inch steelhead in Malibu Creek to U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The L.A. Times was not always 100 percent accurate — it got some names and dates wrong, as it sometimes does now — but its reporting more than 100 years ago reads like the truth. It might be risky to rely on one newspaper, but if there is another source as detailed as the L.A. Times, I didn’t come across it.

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