It may be of interest to some to know how we happened to come into Southern California, and something of the history of the ranches, Los Cerritos, “The Little Hills,” and Los Alamitos, “The Little Cottonwoods”--beautiful, lilting Spanish names, either one of which would have been preferable to the name chosen by those who bought of the ranch lands and promoted the seaside town of Long Beach. I am glad that we are free of responsibility for the choice of that prosaic name, or for the dubbing of Cerritos Hill, Signal, because of the presence on its top of a tripod used as a marker by surveyors. When my father sailed up the western coast on the Fourth of July, 1851, the old S. S. Northerner, unseaworthy, hugged the coast, nearly wrecking herself by the way, on the rocks at Point Firmin; he, from his place on the deck looked across the mesa to Cerritos Hill, and watched the vaqueros at work with cattle, and like many a later comer, was captivated by the country and determined, if possible, sometime to possess a portion of that land. The time came in 1866, when Flint, Bixby & Co. bought from Don Juan Temple the Rancho Los Cerritos, paying him for it in San Francisco twenty thousand dollars in gold, or about seventy-five cents an acre for the twenty-seven thousand acres, without allowing anything for the fine adobe hacienda with its Italian garden. The reason that this was possible was that the owner was growing old and anxious to settle his affairs so that he might go with his family to spend the remainder of his life in Paris. Moreover, business conditions in Southern California were bad at the time, owing not only to the war depression of the country in general, but also to the disastrous drouth during the years ’62-’63 and ’63-’64, during which practically no rain fell. The raising of cattle had been up to this time the chief industry, but with the failure of vegetation thousands of them starved to death. It is told that it became necessary for the citizens of Anaheim, where their fine irrigation system kept their colony green, to use their surrounding willow hedge as a defense and post men to fight off the inrush of the famished cattle. It was the wiping out of this industry that brought about the sale of many of the large holdings of land in Southern California and was the beginning of the development of varied industries and the opening of the land for settlement. The lands which came into the possession of our family about this time were those of Don Abel Stearns and Don Juan Temple, who were both heavy losers as the result of the drouth. Both these men came to Los Angeles from Boston before 1830 and were among the first Americans to settle in the pueblo. They married native Californians and adapted themselves to the life of the community they had chosen for their home, and their names occur frequently in all accounts of early Los Angeles affairs.