Have you ever wondered about where you came from?
Sure, most of us know who our parents are/were, as well as our grandparents, etc. We know these things because we were told the family tale by our parents and other members of the family when we were growing up. We had no reason to doubt the narrative, so we accepted it at face value.
However, sometimes the recounting is self-serving, i.e. to protect some family secret, hide some shameful episode, ignore obvious irregularities, and so forth. I’ve never understood what’s gained by covering something up, because the truth will eventually surface. And, usually, it’s better when one knows all the facts: less resentment, more understanding, and a feeling of belonging, because you’re now privy to the “secrets”.
My wife Charlie has struggled with the demon of not being privy to the real story of her birth. She grew up in a family of six children, and it was obvious to her that she (the oldest) was different in many ways from her five siblings. She knew this all of her life, but no one in the family would clue her in to the real story. Her parents and their siblings took the truth to the grave, refusing to rat out the other conspirators.
After her parents died, she and I did some research and have come up with a reasonable guess as to what happened. It appears that her mother got pregnant while unmarried, the scandal was hidden by the staunch Catholic family, an admirer stepped up to make an honest woman out of Charlie’s mom, and everyone involved (the new parents, their parents, and her Mom’s siblings) all agreed to hide the truth. This was back in the mid-1940’s: it was much different then, when pregnancy while unmarried was considered a disgrace. Nowadays, as the saying goes, “shit happens”, then you move on.
So, Charlie never met her biologic father and never learned anything about him, either. She has a variety of health issues that are probably genetic, i.e. from her father’s DNA contribution. That missing information has tormented her. And there’s the fact that several of siblings don’t seem to care that she was deprived of the truth: that’s caused a lot of resentment which she will probably take to the grave.
We’ve got a neighbor Kenny Juber who had the same empty feeling for most of his life: there was something missing in the “official” family lineage story. Anyway, he’s a single, energetic guy with time on his hands and he decided a few years ago to start an Ancestry.com investigation on his lineage. Low and behold, he found out that he had a bunch of half-brothers and half-sisters back in New York state. It turned out that his Dad wasn’t actually his biological father, and that the sperm donor was a very prolific salesman/lothario in the community, a veritable Johnny Appleseed. He’d hooked up with Kenny’s mom when Daddy was away at work.
When my friend traced back to all those half-brothers and half-sisters he found out that several of them had musical talent like he does. Kenny performs in local musical theater and is also a Karaoke legend around here. It turned out that one of his half-sisters has performed on The Grand Ol Opry! He’s now met all of his lost siblings on the other side of the continent, most of them look like him, and they’ve totally accepted him. It’s pretty cool.
Last night Charlie and I were watching “American Pickers” on TV. The junk pickers were at the ranch of some 90-year-old ex-cowboy/Hollywood stuntman who had a lot of memorabilia from his life. One such item was an elaborate tassled jacket that was given to him by an old friend/actor named Duncan Reynaldo. That rang a bell with me because, back in the 1950’s, Reynaldo had been the lead character in the beloved TV series “The Cisco Kid”.
Not only had I watched it as a child but, according to my Dad, who was a pretty straight-shooter, the co-star Leo Carrillo (who played sidekick “Pancho”) was a distant relative of mine.
That seemed hard to believe at the time because Mr. Carrillo was Hispanic, and my parents’ lineage was supposedly Scotch-Irish and English. I never met my Dad’s father (Bill) and mother (Lila) because they were run over by a train (at a railroad crossing) before I was born.
I know very little about my grandfather Bill Manning except that he was a railroad man, a neat and tidy guy, and a fairly strict father who believed in corporal punishment.
I am pretty much in the dark as far as my paternal grandmother Lila is concerned. According to my mother, she was a very loving lady whom my Mom worked with at a box factory during World War II and who introduced my Mom (Barbara) to her son Richard. My Mom adored her friend/eventual mother-in-law, whose maiden name was Lila Mae Enz.
The Enz branch of the family had a very interesting history.
The Enz’s were all railroad men going back several generations. My Dad’s uncle Les (Lila Mae’s brother) was an AT&SF railroad engineer at the time I got to know him (in the 1950’s). He was, then, the regular “driver” of the AT&SF City of Las Vegas (L.A. to Vegas) run.
Our Manning family grew up in the city of Monterey Park in Southern California which is bordered on the north by the city of Alhambra. That latter city is where my Dad grew up before WWII and where I later went to high school (Mark Keppel H.S.). The Enz’s (my grandmother’s side of the family) had homes in that area and in adjacent South San Gabriel, and my Dad spent a lot of his youth there goofing around with his uncles and cousins.
The Enz family connection with the Santa Fe Railroad came in handy during the Depression, when the Enz and Manning families always had work with the AT&SF. My father told me that he got a job as a teenager which required him to load/unload boxcars at a hot, dusty railroad hub in the desert called Las Vegas. This was back in the 1930’s: it was a hellhole, then, without casinos, showgirls, or the Mob.
My father also told me about his “interview” for the railroad job. He was taken into Santa Fe headquarters down in Los Angeles by his Dad and one of the Enz clan who hooked him up with a guy (he implied that it was another Enz) who was in charge of hiring. It was more of an introduction than a job interview, and he was given a job on the spot.
Later in life, in the early 1960’s, the Manning and Enz families had beachside vacation homes together in Mexico near Ensenada. My great Uncle Les Enz loved to fish and he taught me the basics. One of his brothers was at that time a Border Patrol officer working at Tijuana, and he would bring my brother Terry and I confiscated fireworks that we could ignite on the beach. I met another Enz brother (Irv) later in life. He was retired then and dabbling in real estate up in Anza, where he owned an old Western museum.
My Dad later explained the strong Enz connection to the Santa Fe Railroad.
It began with an Old West frontiersman named Richens Lacey Wootton. For most of his adult life he was known as “Uncle Dick”.
Wootton was a contemporary of famous guys like Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Old Bill Williams and William Bent, all of them early trappers, guides, and explorers up in the Rocky Mountains. Uncle Dick had a lot of adventures in his life like trapping, guiding, hunting buffalo, herding cattle, freighting, trading, fighting Indians, and such. He was a well-known “mountain man”of the time.
Wootton was asked by John Fremont in 1848 to lead a party of men through the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Winter. He declined, so the job went to Old Bill Williams…who died as a result of the ordeal.
Supposedly, Wootton was one of the first ranchers to experiment with breeding Buffalo and cattle (i.e “beefalo”), built the first commercial building in Denver, and later signed the incorporation papers when that town became a city.
He had a big life: you can Google him.
In his waning years Uncle Dick Wootton settled in the Raton Pass area of New Mexico where, in 1866, he built a road (on an easement that he acquired from the Maxwell Land Grant) through a rugged mountain pass with the help of a local Indian tribe. Wooton then set up a toll booth on his property where he collected fees from cowboys who were driving cattle from the south up to Denver. It was a profitable venture for him.
Eventually the Santa Fe Railroad got the idea to shorten their cattle-hauling line by about a thousand miles by building a tunnel and laying some track through the Raton Pass. In the 1870’s, they offered Wootton $50,000 ($1.2 million in today’s money) for his easement.
The aging, almost blind Uncle Dick turned down that offer, but instead countered with a sweet deal for the AT&SF: they could have the easement for free with the proviso that they would provide Mrs. Wootton (his much younger 5th wife) with groceries and a railroad pass…for the rest of her life. The AT&SF happily took the deal, and supported Mrs. Wootton for 30 years after Uncle Dick’s passing in 1893.
That project through the Raton Pass completed the AT&SF’s rail connection from Kansas City all the way to Las Vegas, Nevada.
During his life Uncle Dick Wootton sired twenty children.
Because Manning/Enz family lore is so specific about Mr. Wootton, and the Enz family ongoing connection with the Santa Fe Railroad, it is my guess that my paternal grandmother, Lila Mae Enz, was a descendent of one of Uncle Dick’s many daughters.
(That, plus the fact that my grandmother’s brother Les Enz was the spitting image of Uncle Dick Wootton, when compared to an image featured his biography, which was produced by the University of Nebraska Press.)
I was told in my younger days by my Dad that the Enz family has a Basque (Spanish) heritage.
That could be the connection with California and the early Spanish/Mexican Californios.
In the mid-1800’s, Uncle Dick Wootton led a party of men from New Mexico to the California gold fields with a huge herd of sheep to feed hungry Gold Rush miners. Wootton’s group left New Mexico with 8,000 sheep and arrived with 7,800, which is no small feat, considering that they had to cross the Rockies, the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Basques and sheep husbandry are almost synonymous. Where there are sheep, there are Basques. Thus, it is very likely that Uncle Dick Wootton, who did not raise sheep, would have guided Basque men and their herd of 8,000 sheep out to California.
I’d bet my bippy that one of those Basque men (with an Enz surname) hooked up with one of Wootton’s twenty daughters. That would explain the Wooton/Enz connection and the continuing relationship with the Santa Fe Railroad.
So, back to old Leo Carrillo. How does he fit into this mystery?
My Dad told me that when he was a young boy he was taken down to a “big Spanish-styled mansion in Los Angeles” where he was introduced to a “matriarch” of a big family that was connected somehow to his mother’s side of the family (the Enz’s).
When my Dad related this incident to me later in his life, he believed that the matriarch he met (in the 1930’s) was involved with the “Dominguez Rancho”.
But, why would this lady want to be introduced to my Dad?
Jose Dominguez was a Spanish soldier in the 1769 Gaspar de Portola expedition from San Diego all the way up to the Monterey Bay. On that expedition ordered by the Spanish crown to colonize California del Norte, Franciscan friar Junipero Serra identified sites for what eventually became the California mission system. The route that the explorers followed became the historic Camino Real and, later, Highway 101.
In recognition of his service to the Spanish crown, in 1784, King Carlos III granted about 75,000 acres to Jose Dominguez. That land grant, called Rancho San Pedro, was the very first Spanish land grant in California. The original Rancho encompassed all of what is now Los Angeles Harbor, the Signal Hill oil fields, the Cal State University at Dominguez Hills campus, Palos Verdes, Marina del Rey, and the Los Angeles International Airport.
Today, that acreage would be worth a jillion dollars .
Manuel Dominguez, the grandson of Jose Dominguez, and who once was the Alcalde (Mayor) of Los Angeles, died in 1882. He was at that time the patriarch of the Dominguez clan. Since he had no male heirs, the remaining 46,000 acres of Dominguez rancho lands were partitioned among his six daughters, of which three had children.
Given the time frame that my Dad described (i.e. having met the “matriarch” when he was a young boy), at a Spanish-styled mansion in Los Angeles (the Dominguez Rancho Adobe?), I’m guessing that the lady he met was the daughter of one of those three siblings who inherited most of what survived of the Dominguez land grant in 1882.
By the mid-1930’s, the Dominguez legacy was continued through the Carson, Del Amo, and Watson families, which were the lineages of three of the six Dominguez heirs.
I’m guessing that the Enz family was somehow connected to one of those three families by marriage. Otherwise, why would my Dad (who was 50 percent Enz) be introduced to the family matriarch?
So, where does the actor Leo Carrillo, supposedly a distant relative of mine, fit in?
I think he was related to the Dominguez clan in some lineage that included an Enz relation.
Leo Carrillo’s great-great grandfather Jose Raimundo Carrillo was a soldier in that same 1769 Gaspar de Portola expedition, along with Jose Dominguez. So, senors Carrillo and Dominguez were fraternal brothers, of a sort. In addition, they both knew Father Junipero Serra from the expedition. In fact, Father Serra performed the marriage ceremony of Don Jose Raimundo and Tomasa Ignacia Lugo in 1781. So, Father Junipero Serra was part of the fraternity, as well.
The Carrillos, the Dominguez’s, and Father Junipero Serra would all play a big part in the early history of California.
Leo Carrillo’s great grandfather was Carlos Antonio Carrillo, who was governor of Alta California (which encompassed what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona) from 1837 to 1838.
He was also, like Dominguez, a Spanish land grant recipient, once owning Santa Rosa Island in the Channel Islands (near Santa Barbara).
Carlos’ great uncle, Jose Antonio Carrillo, was a three-time mayor of Los Angeles and was twice married to different sisters of Pio Pico, who was the last Governor of Alta California in 1846.
It is highly likely that the rich and famous, old-line Dominguez and Carillo families, who were early California royalty and had by the mid-1800’s known each other for at least eighty years, were connected by marriage, which was the fashion in the Spanish culture (and in Old California).
In the middle of this golden era of Old California history, Uncle Dick Wooton and his team of Basque sheepherders brought a herd of 7,800 sheep into the Bay Area to feed hungry 49’ers.
I’m just speculating here, based upon the clues given me by my Dad, of course, but I think that one of those Basque sheepherders, who had an Enz surname (possibly the brother an Enz who had married one of Uncle Dick Wooton’s twenty daughters) somehow managed to find a Hispanic bride in the extended Dominguez family.
That would explain my father’s reference to distant relative Leo Carrillo and to the old matriarch that he met in the 1930’s.
And, why she might want to meet young Richard Manning.
It’s a theory, as good an explanation as I can imagine.
It could even be true.