The Historical Prequel to Petaluma’s Longest Running Land-War Drama
Kevin Costner is dressed in a tux, carrying a rifle.
Playing the role of land baron John Dutton in the TV series “Yellowstone,” he confronts a group of Chinese tourists on his property. One of them scolds him, calling it obscene that one man should own so much of the earth. He runs them off with a gunshot to the air.
“This is America,” he shouts. “We don’t share land.”
For the past 30 years, Petaluma has endured its own version of “Yellowstone” over Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain. It began when the city decided to shut down its century-old water works on the property and convert the 270 acres into a public park. Peter Pfendler, the millionaire owner of 800 acres abutting Lafferty, responded by firing off a shotgun brief to City Hall. Local officials naively brushed it off.[1]
“I think this could be a little war up there in the hills,” said one city council member. “Mr. Pfendler has threatened to call in his posse of lawyers, but you can’t keep 45,000 people off their property.”[2]
This is America. With enough lawyers, guns, and money, one can certainly try.
Faced with a costly lawsuit, the city quickly backed down. Years of plot twists followed—public protests, proposed land swaps, property access battles, backroom deals, ballot fraud, polarized elections, rifle shots, environmental damage suits, Pfendler’s death—making “Lafferty” the city’s longest running class-war series drama.[3]
As with “Yellowstone,” the series came with historical prequels featuring two of Petaluma’s early land barons, General Mariano Vallejo and banker William Hill. Land for these men, as for Pfendler, was not only an object of lust but a source of legitimacy, power, and identity. The more they owned, the more they mattered.
It wasn’t always so. Prior to being “discovered” by Europeans, Sonoma Mountain was inhabited for millennia by the Coast Miwok. In their origin myth, it was an island in a primordial ocean at the beginning of time, a place where the world began. They called it Oona-pa’is. [4]
For tribal members, the mountain was a cultivated garden they carefully nurtured and co-existed with. During hunting and gathering seasons, they dispersed from villages on the valley floor to small encampments on the mountain near fresh water sources, including presumably the two springs comprising the Adobe Creek headwaters on today’s Lafferty Ranch.
Then came the colonizers. To their eyes, the land appeared as an uncivilized wilderness upon which to project their dreams, aspirations, and greed. First, the Franciscan padres claimed it for their Sacred Expedition, driving the Coast Miwok into mission servitude and conversion, then the Mexican government secularized the mission lands, carving them up for private ranchos.[5]
Vallejo laid claim to the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma, stocking it with imported sheep and longhorn cattle. He shipped their hides, tallow, and wool to Europe and New England, where they fetched good prices for making leather goods, blankets, candles, and soap. After the livestock decimated the perennial native fescue, or bunch grass, it was replaced by Mediterranean annual grasses. Better suited for heavy grazing, they turned the hills golden in summer.[6]
Vallejo lost his herd to American cattle rustlers during the Mexican-American War. To fill his coffers, he ventured into real estate, selling off subdivisions of Rancho Petaluma to land-hungry Americans, many of them disappointed lost boys from the Gold Rush. In 1859, Marshall Lafferty purchased 270 acres on Sonoma Mountain from Vallejo for $52,500 in today’s currency.[7]
Born in North Carolina in 1808 and raised in Kentucky, Lafferty descended from early colonial stock. At 17, he married Elizabeth Criss from Pennsylvania. The couple had 13 children, eventually settling in Illinois. There, Lafferty served in the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War, putting down a revolt by Native Americans evicted from tribal land they had secured in a treaty.[8]
In 1850, Lafferty headed west for the Gold Rush, returning home four years later. In 1857, he took his wife and children out to California via covered wagon, initially settling in the city of Vallejo before purchasing property on Sonoma Mountain.[9]
Like other “pioneers,” he looked upon the land with the boom-and-bust mentality of a gold miner.[10] The cycle began in the 1850s with a potato boom, which quickly faded because of overproduction and soil depletion. A cattle boom followed, fizzling out in the early 1860s due to overbreeding and competition. Then came the California wheat boom. Accelerating during the Civil War, which cut off Midwest wheat exports to Europe, it went bust in the 1880s due to soil erosion and competition.[11]
The steep terrain of Lafferty’s ranch lent itself more to cattle grazing than farming. Its elevation above the fog line and year-round water supply from Adobe Creek also made it feasible for growing imported fruit trees. The orchard had plenty of sunlight as most of the mountain’s native oaks had been logged out. Cut and piled into large mounds, they were covered with dirt and slowly burned to charcoal, which was shipped to San Francisco as a coal substitute for heating homes, businesses, and steam engines.[12]
In 1867, Marshall Lafferty sold his ranch to his two youngest sons, Isaac Newton Lafferty and Jeremiah Henry Clay Lafferty. Isaac left to pursue a teaching career, eventually becoming a school superintendent in Washington Territory. Jerry maintained the ranch, adding a large vineyard to the fruit orchard, and hosting deer hunting parties as well as social dances, where he played the violin. He eventually married and started a family, while continuing to care for his aging parents.[13]
Meanwhile, the thriving river port of Petaluma found itself hindered by water restrictions. Early residents near the river drew their water from wells and natural springs, but those buying into the new hillside developments were dependent upon water cart deliveries. The scarcity created a need for careful planning that clashed with the pioneering spirit of the times.Water became money.[14]
In the early 1870s, two groups of venture capitalists launched competing initiatives to pipe water into town from three creeks on Sonoma Mountain, Copeland, Lynch, and Adobe. By 1877, the two consolidated into the privately-owned Sonoma County Water Company.[15]
In 1888, the Lafferty brothers sold their ranch for $170,000 in today’s currency, purchasing a new ranch in Glen Ellen, where Marshall Lafferty spent his final years until his death in 1892 at the age of 87.[16]
The Lafferty Ranch was purchased by William Hill, president of the Bank of Sonoma County, one of four locally financed banks in Petaluma. The other three controlled by John McNear, Isaac Wickersham, and Hiram Fairbanks. Together with Hill, they were the wealthiest men in Petaluma and also its largest landowners. Hill’s holdings alone comprised 6,000 acres.[17]
Hill was also president of the Sonoma County Water Company. He first purchased the water rights to Lafferty Ranch in 1887, before purchasing the ranch itself the following year in order to secure the headwaters of Adobe Creek for the water company, which he quickly flipped the property to for a nominal $10. For income, the company leased the ranch out for livestock grazing.[18]
Changing hands a few times, the Sonoma County Water Company served as Petaluma’s main water source until 1959, when it was purchased, along with Lafferty Ranch, by the city. The voter-approved bond used to acquire the waterworks also funded an underground aqueduct for transporting water from a new dam on the Russian River to Petaluma, facilitating the city’s suburban housing boom.[19]
Proposals to convert Lafferty Ranch into a community park began with Petaluma’s 1962 general plan. In the early 1970s, Petaluma schools were allowed to use the ranch for limited educational and environmental purposes. Meanwhile, the city continued leasing out grazing rights to the property.[20]
In 1992, the Sonoma Mountain waterworks were shut down after Lawler Reservoir, which Adobe Creek fed into, was declared vulnerable to earthquakes. The City of Petaluma then decided to convert Lafferty Ranch into a public park, launching the longest running political drama in Petaluma history.[21]
After Lafferty’s adjacent neighbors sought to block public access to the ranch by claiming ownership of a small strip of land between the ranch and the public road, in 2013 the City filed a lawsuit against them, claiming a historic public easement to the land. In 2019, the City dismissed the lawsuit after Pfendler’s widow, Kimberley Pfendler, agreed to no longer finance the opposition to developing Lafferty as a public park. [22]
In 2022, the city began piloting guided hikes on the property through a partnership with the non-profit LandPaths. Many people on a recent hike said they were seeking an experience of the land before European contact. . [23]
Lafferty Ranch is sadly far from that. It remains scarred from two centuries of being logged out, worked, and grazed upon since the Coast Miwok were driven from the area. The upcoming new season of “Lafferty” will hopefully be a quiet drama, one of gradual restoration and renewed stewardship of the land.
******
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 7, 2023.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “City Opts to Keep Ranch Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1992; “Ranch Access May Be Stalled,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1992; “Petaluma Land Swap Foes Won’t Give Up,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1995.
[2] “This is Your Land—Mostly,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 23, 1992.
[3] M.V. Wood, “Lafferty,” North Bay Bohemian, October 3-9, 2002; “Chronology of the Lafferty Ranch Controversy,” Laffertyranch.org/timeline
[4] M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pgs. 1, 135; Merriam, C. Hart Merriam, editor, The Dawn of the World, Myths and Weird Tales Told by the Mewan (Miwok) Indians of California (Cleveland ,Ohio: Arthur H. Clarke Co, 1910). p. 203.
[5] Anderson, pp. 2-3; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “We Feel the Want of Protection: the Politics of Law and Race in California, 1848-1878,” Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California, Burns and Orsi, editors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) pp. 96-120.
[6]Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americas (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 1995); Anderson, pp. 76-77; Michael Ellis, “How Our Hills Got Golden,” KQED, July 9, 2010. www.kqed.org/perspectives.
[7] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 12, page 185, August 1, 1859: sale by Mariano G. Vallejo to Marshall Lafferty for $1,348.75 lot 361 of Rancho Petaluma consisting of 169.75 acres.
[8] Sonoma Index-Tribune, February 20, 1892, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/217655953/marshall-lafferty.
[9] “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,” An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474.
[10] “Opening Address,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1870.
[11] James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002
[12] Arthur Dawson, “The History of Sonoma County’s Woodlands,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 26, 2017; J. Charles Watford, “Charcoal Making In Sonoma County,” Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Whatford.pdf
[13] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 21 of Deeds, page 321, June 29, 1867, and Liber 79 of Deeds, page 603, July 3, 1872; “School Statistics,” Marin County Journal, September 24, 1870; “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,” An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474; “Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1880; Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, September 1, 1880; “Agricultural Outlook,” Petaluma Courier, April 13, 1881; “H.C. Lafferty of Glen Ellen Dead,” Sonoma Press Democrat, May 9, 1914.
[14] Alexandra Wormley, Michael Varnum, “Nearly 20% of the Cultural Differences Between Societies Boil Down to Ecological Factors,” The Conversation, June 6, 2023. Theconversation.com.
[15] “Prospect Ahead for Good Water,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.
[16] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, pp. 279-81 (pg. 787 in online deeds site), January 11, 1888: deed of I.N. Lafferty of Washington Territory and William Hill for $2,400, for half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Rancho Petaluma; Liber 109, pp.634-635, January 11, 1888, deed of J.H.C. Lafferty to William Hill, for $2,400 half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Petaluma Rancho; Liber 113, pp.184-186, April 29, 1887, sale of water rights lot 361 to on Petaluma Rancho by I. N. Lafferty and J. H.C. Lafferty to William Hill for $500 gold coin. (total sale for land and water rights $5,300).
[17] “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902.
[18] “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902; Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, page 282, January 25, 1888: deed of William Hill selling Lafferty Ranch to the Sonoma County Water Company: $10 sale for 169.75 acres, Lot 361 of the Rancho Petaluma.
[19] “Petaluma Aqueduct Contract Signed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 1960.
[20] “Petaluma’s New General Plan Aired April 25,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 5, 1961; “Commission Approves Ranch Use,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 1, 1970; “Study Trails Agreement Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 9, 1970.
[21] “Petaluma May Mothball ‘Unsafe’ Lawler Dam,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 22, 1992.
[22] “City Joins Lafferty Ranch Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 19, 2013; “Lafferty Proponents Claim New Evidence in Access Fight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 17, 2013; “Petaluma Forging Ahead with Lafferty Ranch Plans after Dropping Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 6, 2019; Email from attorneys Mike Healy and Lawrence King to John Sheehy.
[23] Sheri Cardo, “Exciting Changes at Petaluma’s Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain,” Sonoma County Gazette, September 21, 2022.