Heirs Apparently Presentation on Merced and Francisca Williams in Ontario

Well, it rained pretty hard not long before tonight's "Heirs Apparently: The Tumultuous Lives of Francisca and Merced Williams" talk at Ontario's Ovitt Family Community Library, but about 40 people came out to hear the presentation.

With a very nice flyer created by library staff to promote the event, the first in a series on local history that the institution is hosting, and attendance from representatives of historical societies and museums in La Verne, Ontario, Pomona, Rancho Cucamonga (the Rains House), and Brea (Olinda Oil Museum), we had a very interested crowd who had lots of questions afterward.

The details of the stories of the Williams sisters, who as teens inherited over 35,000 acres comprising the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, which extended well into Carbon Canyon, and their domineering husbands, John Rains and Robert Carlisle, have been covered pretty extensively on this blog.

Rains took his wife's half-share of Chino and sold it quickly to the Carlisles to buy Rancho Cucamonga and then poured large sums to improve and develop it, including the building of the house that is a historic site today.  He also invested in other real estate in San Diego County and Los Angeles, though the economic conditions of the region were in a downward turn.

Desperate to save the situation, he borrowed large amounts of money and was heading to Los Angeles for more when he was killed in what is now San Dimas.  Carlisle then secured power of attorney for Merced Rains and was accused of mismanagement and fraud and was removed from that position.

Embittered, he attacked Andrew Jackson King, the new attorney-in-fact, at the Los Angeles hotel Rains once owned and then was involved in a shootout the next day with King's brothers that left one of the latter and Carlisle dead in an epic gunbattle long remembered in the city.  Left behind after both killings were the young widows, whose fortunes diverged wildly afterward.

The 1850 federal census, taken in early 1851 because of California's admission to the Union in September 1850, and showing the Isaac Williams household at Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, including his daughters Maria [Merced[ and Francisca.

Merced Rains was forced to leave Cucamonga when it was foreclosed upon, with little or nothing left of her inheritance, married twice more, and spent much of her later years with a daughter from Rains and her husband, Henry Gage, who went on to be governor of California.  She died in 1907.

Francisca Carlisle, who also remarried twice, the second time to a much-younger man which scandalized her family, kept the Chino ranch for another fifteen years, married a wealthy doctor and Los Angeles mayor, and retained a substantial fortune for the rest of her long life, which ended in the late 1920s.

It's pretty hard to find much information about women in the 19th century generally, much less Latinas in greater Los Angeles.  The stories of Merced and Francisca Williams are a rare exception and it was a lot of fun to share them tonight with an appreciative and engaged audience.