When the Capes Region first began to be developed as a tourist destination in the 1950s and 60s, warm year-long temperatures were a big part of the attraction. Brochures touted, accurately, the approximately 300 days of cloudless sunshine the region enjoys annually, many during the long cold winters when snowstorms afflict much of the U.S. and Canada. But Los Cabos and the Baja California peninsula also have their storms. They are not frequent but can be devastating in their intensity.

The force and seasonal variation of these storms is reflected in the many terms peninsular residents use for them, words like tormenta, equipata, aguacero, chubasco and huracán. The most violent of these is the chubasco, a late summer or autumn hurricane that typically forms off the Pacific Coast of Central America or southern México, and then churns northward over warm ocean waters with little to no surface resistance. “Their paths,” writer Norman Roberts once noted, “are erratic, often appearing to change course at a whim. When they remain at sea, they do little damage. Those that do reach sufficient size, and move north or northeast from their spawning grounds, wreak havoc when they reach land.”

1939 was a nightmarish year for chubascos in Baja California. Bahía Magdalena, some 170 miles up the Pacific Coast from Cabo San Lucas, was deluged by four chubascos during the month of September, recording a level of precipitation from them that equaled the rainfall the region received during the next 24 years combined! The most ferocious of these cyclonic storms, however, was the one that nearly blew Cabo San Lucas itself right off the map. This was the storm now remembered as la inundación de 1939, when high winds and uncontrolled flooding surged over the territory’s southernmost communities in a raging torrent.

“1907, 1918, oh much suffering; another one in 1927, many animals and fruit trees lost,” recalled local historian and professor Fernando Cota in C.M. Mayo’s superb 2002 travelogue Miraculous Air.  “And then there was the chubasco of 1939…Some people rode it on horseback from Cabo San Lucas – it was impossible to cross El Tule in an automobile – and they told me when they passed by the school:  Cabo San Lucas is gone! So we went there on horses. We sent some mules across El Tule first because they are more surefooted, and if they can cross, the horses follow. We rode and walked through the night and we arrived at sun-up. From the sea to the foothills of the sierra there was nothing but broken pieces of cardón cactus. There were no references, everything had disappeared.

“Not many died, only five, because the chubasco came down in the daytime. Had it been at night, that would have been different. But they lost everything, their clothes, their dishes, their beds. Forty families! The Governor, Lt. Col. Rafael M. Pedrajo, he delivered the material for 40 houses! I don’t know how he did it. The floors and walls were of wood, the roofs of corrugated iron. For 40 families! Incredible, such a work. They should put his name on a street, a monument, something.”

Lt. Col. Pedrajo has yet to be honored for his improvisational heroics and strong leadership in the face of enormous adversity, at least in Cabo San Lucas; there is a street in the pueblo mágico of Todos Santos that bears his name, one that dead-ends at a scenically situated restaurant called El Mirador. Perhaps the emotional aftershocks of the hurricane and its crippling effects were so profound that residents preferred not to remember it with public monuments, lest the memories come flooding back as furiously as the waters that had overrun their roads and the screaming winds that had ripped the roofs from their homes and snapped mature trees like matchsticks.

Certainly, the storm haunted Sanluqueños for a long time afterwards, its lingering pall noted by famed author and future Nobel Prize winning novelist John Steinbeck when he visited the town the following year. Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts–memorialized as the character “Doc” in Cannery Row–had embarked on a voyage to the Sea of Cortés aboard the Western Flyer in order to collect marine invertebrate specimens, a journey remembered in the book Sea of Cortez:  A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (later abridged and republished, somewhat more successfully, as The Log from the Sea of Cortez).

“We went ashore to the cannery and later drove with Chris, the manager, and Señor Luis, the port captain, to the little town of San Lucas,” Steinbeck wrote. “It was a sad little town, for a winter storm and a great surf had wrecked it in a single night. Water had driven past the houses, and the streets of the village had been a raging river. ‘Then there were no roofs over the heads of the people,’ Señor Luis said excitedly. ‘Then the babies cried and there was no food. Then the people suffered.

“The road to the little town, two wheel-ruts in the dust, tossed us about in the cannery truck. The cactus and thorny shrubs ripped at the car as we went by. At last we stopped in front of a mournful cantina where morose young men hung about waiting for something to happen. They had waited a long time – several generations – for something to happen, these good-looking young men. In their eyes there was a hopelessness. The storm of the winter had been discussed so often that it was sucked dry.”

In a cruel twist of fate, Hurricane Odile, the category-4 hurricane that devastated Los Cabos in 2014, happened on the very same day as la inundación de 1939: September 14. During the intervening 75 years, however, the entire landscape of the region had been transformed, and the populations of cape communities Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo multiplied exponentially, driven inexorably upwards by the municipality’s spiraling popularity as an international tourist destination.

All that was still very much in the future, however, when Steinbeck visited in 1940. Not even the region’s pioneer builders and developers had yet grasped its enormous potential. The only man at the time with vision so far-seeing as to almost pierce the future was Francisco J. Múgica, the man who had replaced Pedrajo as governor. As early as 1941, Múgica dreamed of a system of paved roads, a transpeninsular highway that would connect the southern territory to its northern neighbors.

That dream would ultimately be realized, but not until another three decades had passed, and a storm of a different sort was rocking El Sur.

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In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, cape communities San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas settled into a period of relative calm and stability for the next half-century. Although the region would continue to experience the vicissitudes associated with commercial endeavors such as ranching, farming and fishing, its fundamental character would remain essentially unchanged until the age of tourism.

It was a welcome interlude. Both communities had suffered through a difficult drought period prior to the Mexican Revolution. So difficult were the last five years of the 19th century, in fact, that a significant portion of the residents left, many to work in the hellish Rothschild owned El Boleo copper mines in Santa Rosalía. At the advent of the Revolution in 1910, San José del Cabo had a population of 4,300 people, down over 18% from the previous decade. However, since the total population of what is today Baja California Sur amounted to only about 42,500 inhabitants, San José still maintained a robust 10% of the territorial population.

By the early 1920s, San José had not only recovered from the devastating drought years, but was experiencing unheard of levels of prosperity. “In 1924,” observed Alba E. Gámez in her historical account of the area, “the production of the planting and cultivation of sugar cane was processed in 41 mills and up to 690 tons of piloncillo (unrefined whole cane sugar) were produced for export.

Furthermore, 90 tons of tomatoes were harvested. On a smaller scale, mango, avocado, citrus fruits, oregano, and damiana, a native shrub used for medicinal purposes and flavoring liqueur were produced. Parallel to the agricultural prosperity, cattle herds that year totaled more than 24,000 head of cattle.”

This prosperity translated to increased infrastructure and upgrades in public education, as well as the tangible symbols of 20th century modernization. The first road between the San José and San Lucas was established in 1926, with horses increasingly joined by cars on the dirt thoroughfare. The first automobile agency, a Ford dealership, opened in San José in 1930. The following year the first airplane ever seen in the area appeared in the skies over San José.

The plane was piloted by a military aviator named Captain Feliciano “El Piojo” Flores. A veteran of the Mexico City airshow of 1930, Flores thrilled the Josefinos with an arsenal of maneuvers that included dives, somersaults and stalls. When the diminutive Mazatlán native finally landed, he was fêted like a conquering hero, and a dance was immediately organized in his honor (an episode remembered in C.M. Mayo’s superb 2002 travelogue Miraculous Air.).

In Cabo San Lucas, which lacked the fertile soil and abundant water resources of San José del Cabo, the late 19th century drought had also hit hard. Over 1,200 head of cattle were lost between 1895 and 1901, and the already limited planting area decreased by 72% in the space of a single year (1900 t0 1901). Luckily for the beleaguered Sanluqeños, a new commercial enterprise was looming on the horizon.

From 1913, the year the first cannery ship was stationed in Cabo San Lucas Bay, until the 1970s, when tourism became the primary income generator, Cabo San Lucas was first and foremost a commercial fishing town.

By 1917, cannery operations consisted of a four-masted sailing ship anchored near Land’s End, where it was serviced by a fleet of small skiffs and jig boats. The golden age, however, began in 1925 when brothers Carlos and Luis Bernstein Riverol capitalized the Compañia de Productos Marinos with 100,000 pesos, registering the name in Tijuana, and dividing the business into 50,000 shares which sold for the princely sum of two pesos apiece.

Productos Marinos brought in a larger factory ship, which processed and canned seafood caught by four wooden hulled auxiliary vessels, each with a storage hold, but with no cooling capacity. These fishing boats were manned by men from all over the world; men from Italy, Portugal, Yugoslavia and the U.S. Only a few dozen families lived in Cabo San Lucas at this time, and locals were primarily engaged aboard the mother ship, where they gutted, sterilized and canned the catch for export.

A land-based cannery began to be built on Playa Coral Negro in 1927, with operations kicked into overdrive in 1928 after the cooling system caught fire on the factory ship, causing it to sink. The permanent cannery opened in 1929, and over the course of coming decades became the most productive in Latin America, and one of the most productive in the world, accounting at its peak for some 75% of the canned seafood produced in México.

Tuna, first canned in oil in 1930, was by far the most lucrative fish. Productos Marinos eventually employed three fishing ships – the Cabo San Lucas, Cabo Tosca and Punta Redondo – each capable of carrying tons of seafood to the cannery, where it was processed by a crew of around 50 people. Manuel Sarriz was the first manager, and the first man in Cabo San Lucas to buy a car, which he of course acquired from the Ford agency in San José del Cabo.

John Heston took over as manager in 1935, the year the workers decided to unionize, forming what would become the Sindicato de Trabajadores Evolutivos, Estibadores y Pescadores in 1938; when, on the advice of CROM, the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, they split into three factions.

Cabo San Lucas thus became a company town, with one major industry, and a factory whistle that blew daily at 7 a.m., noon, and 1 and 4 p.m.: indicating the start of business, lunch hours, and closing time, respectively.

Elías Pando bought the company in 1948, ushering in a new era with the area’s first dedicated tuna fleet. He acquired some 11 American boats for that purpose, each capable of carrying around 40 tons. That was only the beginning. At the height of its powers, Impresas Pando employed a 1,000-ton ship called the Calmex.

Fishing was not Pando’s only investment, however. He was a businessman with wide interests, diversifying his money in chocolate, perfumes, wines and soap, among other products. Originally born in El Carmen, a small community in the municipality of Ribadesella in northwestern Spain, Pando’s most important move may have been hiring another man from Ribadesella as manager.

“I moved to Cabo with my wife in 1954,” remembered Don Luis Bulnes Molleda in a 1992 interview for Baja Explorer. “We had no children in those days. It was impossible to have children here. No doctors, no medicine, no nothing. It was really isolated. To take a trip to La Paz took five or six hours by car. In the stormy season it could take a week because the road would wash out. Once I had to rebuild the road with my guys. We were isolated for 25 days.”

When Bulnes and his wife Conchita arrived in Cabo San Lucas, the population of the town had grown to about 300 people. Twenty-five years later, in March 1979, when the cannery released its last 300 workers, Bulnes’ Hotel Solmar had been open for five years, and the age of tourism was transforming the region soon to be known as Los Cabos.

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In actuality, it was a soldier and former blacksmith named Manuel de Ocio. 

It’s not a name most people know, since most people don’t know that Baja California was the original California. In fact, from the first landing of Hernán Cortés in La Paz in 1535 until 1769, it was the only part of California to be settled by European colonizers. In this case, Jesuit missionaries and their attendant support staff, which included a few dozen soldiers to protect them from the native tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers they were trying to convert, and a few sailors to help ferry needed supplies from mainland México. 

Ocio was born in 1700 in Andalusia, Spain, but his first documented presence in peninsular California was in 1733, when he was listed on the presidio rolls at Loreto as a soldier at full pay. 

It was the next year, however, that he first stepped into history, helping to save the life of Padre Sigismundo Taraval in Todos Santos, after indigenous Pericúes revolted and killed the Jesuit padres at Santiago (Lorenzo Carranco) and San José del Cabo (Nicolás Tamaral). Ocio and two other soldiers had the foresight to spirit the good father Taraval away before the mission at Todos Santos and that at La Paz were also destroyed during the three-year uprising subsequently known as The Rebellion of the Pericúes. 

Life on the peninsular frontier wasn’t all danger, however. In 1741, Ocio was serving at the mission in San Ignacio when a powerful chubasco threw up an enormous quantity of oyster shells onto beaches at the 28th parallel (near the northern border of modern day Baja California Sur). 

The local Cochimí tribe knew that Spaniards were fond of shiny pearls, so they decided to barter the information in trade for items they found useful. Ocio was one of a few soldiers to learn the news, but the only one with the experience and connections to truly take advantage of the opportunity. He immediately retired as a soldier and hurried off to Guadalajara (then capital of Nueva Galicia) to acquire everything he would need for a full-scale pearling operation, from canoes to crews and more goods to barter with the Cochimí.

Over the next three years, he would harvest over 400 pounds of pearls. They weren’t the best of quality, but they were enough to make him rich and finance his subsequent investments, which included the first peninsular silver mining operation at Santa Ana – just south of modern day mining towns El Triunfo and San Antonio – a ranching business with up to 16,000 head of cattle at its peak, and a merchant store. He also invested his earnings in real estate, buying at least 14 houses in Guadalajara, which he used for rental income. 

Ocio, as the first rich man and the first real taxpayer in California, also acquired the right to impose the “King’s Fifth” on other would-be pearlers. In short, he established a sort of mini business empire in the heart of Jesuit California; which, by the way, brought him continually into conflict and litigation with his former employers over the next 20+ years. 

How did he do it? What were the connections that helped him take advantage of a golden opportunity? Well, for starters, he married well. 

Here’s the story…

Born in Portugal, Esteban Rodríguez Lorenzo was one of the first men recruited by the Jesuits for their California venture, and was one of the original 10 who landed on the beach in Loreto in 1697. He was captain of the presidio for nearly 40 years, making him the highest ranking secular figure on the peninsula. He was, in effect, both governor and justicia mayor, the chief justice in charge of settling civil disputes.

After briefly resigning his post, Rodríguez returned to the mainland, where he met María de Larrea. The two were married in 1707, and became the first settlers to start a family in California, having seven children. Ocio married the sixth, daughter Rosalía, who was born in 1717. Another daughter, María, married Pedro de la Riva, who became lieutenant of the Escuadra del Sur, the presidio substation established in San José del Cabo in the early 1740s.

These connections were crucial to Ocio’s success. His father-in-law expedited his retirement to pursue his pearling opportunity, and his brother-in-law helped defend the Real de Santa Ana mines against native tribes. Unfortunately, wealth would not bring Ocio happiness. His wife and one of his two sons, Mariano, died within five years of the opening of the mines in 1748. 

But Ocio remains a hugely important California historical figure for several reasons. One, he was the first entrepreneur. Two, his money helped finance the settlement of what would become known as Alta California, and eventually the U.S. state of California. 

It happened like this…

After the Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish territories in 1767, and the Franciscans installed in California, Ocio paid to have one of his ships bring visitador generál José del Gálvez to California, and hosted Gálvez when he established his headquarters at Santa Ana. It was Gálvez who planned expansion and oversaw the 1769 expedition of Gaspar de Portolá and Junípero Serra into Alta California, which gave birth to a new territory (with devastating consequences for what, after 1804, would come to be known as Baja California). 

The consequences for Ocio of this generosity would also prove devastating. He was fleeced in card games by officials of Gálvez and, in 1771, murdered by two of Gálvez’s imported miners, who were in the process of robbing Ocio’s storehouse. 

It’s not a storybook ending by any means, but Ocio’s tragic downfall should not obscure the third and most important reason his legacy endures today.

The mines at Real de Santa Ana required a workforce that would eventually reach over 300 people, drawing laborers from the mainland who would not only help populate California, but become the founders of many pioneer peninsular families (like the Cota family), whose descendants are still prominent in Los Cabos today.

In fact, you never know when you might meet one. 

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Saludos from Co-Founders…

Chris Sands – Writer and Michael Mattos

The post The History of Los Cabos –The First Rich Man in California appeared first on CaboViVO.