Page 6 - outland_oldshoebox

It was Y gnacio del Valle who enlarged a primitive adobe into
the now famous ranch house and lived the good pastoral life
through his declining years, pressing the oil from the olive and
wine from the grape.
Helen Hunt Jackson, while dreaming her typically maudlin
nineteenth-century classic, Ramona, had stopped here for a few
hours to taste the flavor of the California rancho period, an era
that was lingering on its deathbed long before Y gnacio had com-
pleted the ranch house. Yet it was she more than anyone who
would forever put the stamp of fame upon the place the Indians
had called Camulos.
Now a new day was dawning. No longer would the descend-
ants of Antonio del Valle dispense the legendary hospitality of
the Californians. As a means of saying goodbye, the del Valle fam-
ily would hold one last grand and glorious "bull's head barbecue"
for which the old rancho had long been famous. Then the Camulos
would be turned over to August and Mary Rubel, who had pur-
chased this remaining acreage of the once vast San Francisco Grant
of eleven square leagues. They were tenants who had promised to
cherish and guard the land and its heritage with all the fervor of
Y gnacio himself.
But there was work to be done. Dozens of historic documents
and artifacts abandoned by the del Valle family were interlarded
with worthless trivia in the attic of the adobe and the loft of the
winery. (One might suspect that to a del Valle a bull's head
barbecue, vintage Camulos brandy, and a fandango rated higher
priorities than an 1 8 5 2 legislative document printed in Spanish or
an ancient pistol plowed to the surface in the orange orchards of
the Camulos. And who is to say that he may not have been right?)
Even that old shoe box was abandoned, although there must have
been some reason for its preservation. In an attic jammed with the

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