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| Warren Earp, youngest of the famed Earp brothers |
Most think the term "wild and woolly West" didn't apply to Orange County. They're shocked to learn we had cowboys, Indians, shoot-outs in saloons, posses chasing horse thieves, and every other Old West cliche you care to mention. Admittedly, we weren't home to many of the big names from the history books, but we weren't exactly out of the picture either.
For instance, there's no record of famous lawman Wyatt Earp visiting Orange County, but some of his famous family spent time here.
In a 1930s interview with historian Terry E. Stephenson, Orange County pioneer Henry Sterling Pankey recalled Nicholas Porter "Nick" Earp, who’d been a friendly neighbor living near his bee ranch on the Temescal side of the Santa Ana Mountains by Lake Elsinore. He noted that the Earps would sometimes find their way to the other side of the mountains.
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| Henry S Pankey, circa 1885 |
"[Nick] Earp was the father of the well-known Western marshals and gunmen, Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil, and Warren,” said Pankey. “Morg, I believe, was killed at Tombstone while the Earps were here. The elder Earp and his wife and daughter, and son-in-law, Will Edwards, and Warren Earp, were on the place. These three men all worked for me at different times. Warren worked for me at Santa Ana, on my property southwest of Santa Ana in the Gospel Swamp section."
Indeed, by the mid-1870s, Pankey owned parts of Lots 1 and 3 (the Isaac and William J. Williams allotments, respectively,) of the Williams Tract, which had been subdivided in 1874. This land was along the east side of what was then the course of the Santa Ana River, somewhere in the general vicinity of what's now the intersection of MacArthur Blvd and Harbor Blvd in Santa Ana.
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| Detail of map of Gospel Swamp in 1870s, drawn by Frank Salter from memory in 1940. (Click to embiggen) |
Warren wasn't with his brothers at the famous O.K. Corral shoot-out in Tombstone in 1881, but he helped Wyatt hunt down the man who killed their brother, Morgan. Later in life, Warren took to trading on his brothers’ notoriety, became a well-known bully, and in 1900 was shot dead in Wilcox, Arizona during an altercation with cattleman John Boyett.
It may be a thin thread connecting O.C. to the O.K. Corral, but it's interesting that any thread exists at all.
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| Williams Tract map, 1874 (Click to enlarge) |
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christian, Carolyn. "Contested Boundaries and Intertwined Realities: Gospel Swamp and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in Orange County," Orange Countiana, Vol.10, Orange County Historical Society, 2014, pp 17-33.
Pankey, Edgar & Libby Pankey. Love of the Land: The Pankeys of Orange County, Seven Locks Press, 2000.
Pankey, Edgar & Bonnie Pendelton. Edgar & Elizabeth Pankey: Family Life in Early Orange County, Orange County Pioneer Council, 1992.
Salter, Frank C. The Original Setlers [sic] of Gospel Swamp in the 1870s (map), 1940, Bowers Museum.
Stephenson, Terry E. & H. S. Pankey. "From Texas to California in 1869," Orange County History Series, Vol. 3, Orange County Historical Society, 1939.
Williams, Byron. "The Williams Settlement of Gospel Swamp," Orange Countiana, Vol. 11, Orange County Historical Society, 2015.
Williams Tract map, 1874, Los Angeles Maps Book 3, page 114, Orange County Archives.
4 comments:
Very cool Chris
Especially since I've lived in Lake Elsinore in the past. Wonder how far I was from their place. :)
Jim from TX
I have a Santa Ana newspaper from 1882 with a small article reporting the shooting of Virgil Earp in Tombstone. Interesting to see in a Santa Ana paper.
In trying to expand upon this article, I wanted to come up with the exact location of the parcel on which Warren Earp once worked. I briefly took a wrong turn, when I couldn't find land owned by Pankey in Gospel Swamp, but DID find land owned by Pankey in similarly marshy Westminster. I figured it was just another case of the "Gospel Swamp" name drifting (in human memory) increasingly far from its actual boundaries.
But then I rediscovered a map showing the actual Gospel Swamp as it looked in about 1870, and THERE was Pankey's name again! So his Westminster property wasn't relevant after all. Still, it was interesting enough to post about here as a sort of footnote:
Pankey purchased property in “Las Bolsas” (as in Rancho las Bolsas) in the very early 1870s. According to his 1889 tax assessments, his 78 acres was in what’s now part of the city of Westminster: A rectangle bounded (in modern terms) by Newland St. on the west, Magnolia St. on the east, McFadden Ave. on the north, and a line between Palos Verdes Ave and Emerald Ave on the south. (Excepting a 2-acre parcel on the southwest corner of Magnolia and McFadden.) Pankey's name actually appears on this spot in S. H. Finley's 1889 map of Orange County. Today, all this land is covered in tract housing and the northernmost edge of Russell C. Paris Park.
Thanks to Nick Papadiuk for helping me work on the Westminster angle. It may have ended up being a wild goose chase, but the efforts and expertise are appreciated.
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