The Kenney Stables of Carbon Canyon, Part 3

Here is the third and final part of the story of the Kenney Stables, located on what is now Carbon Canyon Regional Park, which celebrates its 40th anniversary at a special event this Saturday.  Thanks to Matthew Kenney for the text and photos used on this post.

By 1971 we were moving along nicely with construction. We had successfully built a rodeo arena, graded for the three riding arenas, and ran a 3" main waterline to feed the complex. The water line was no small task as we had to bore under the highway to hook onto the main water line which was on the opposite side of the road. 

It was accomplished with a home brew horizontal drilling rig my Dad built. The county engineers said it would never work but Dad talked them into issuing the permit anyway. The main line got hooked up in about a week. We had done a septic tank for the initial complex and moved in a single wide mobile home for our base of operations. The main steel framing for the 50 stall barn was up and bolted together. In early 1971 we sold the house in Fullerton and moved into the canyon that summer.

The Aeromotor steel windmill brought from the Hellman Ranch at Seal Beach to the Kenney stables in Carbon Canyon, September 1972.  Photo courtesy of Matthew Kenney.  Click on any image to see them enlarged in a separate window.

In mid 1972 we obtained what would have been the centerpiece for the main entrance which is the main park entrance today. It was an Aeromotor steel windmill. I think it came from the Hellman  ranch in Seal Beach which was being demolished at the time. 

[Editor's note:  Isaias W. Hellman (1842-1920) came to Los Angeles in the 1850s and established a popular store, in which he conducted an informal banking business.  In 1868, he opened the second bank in the city with ranchers William Workman and F.P.F. Temple and called Hellman, Temple and Company and then dissolved that to form Farmers and Merchants.  By the 1890s he was a powerful figure in Los Angeles and expanded his banking empire to San Francisco. Hellman, one of the wealthiest persons in western America, also owned Rancho Cucamonga and, in 1881, bought Rancho Los Alamitos with the Bixby family--this is where the windmill was from.]

Nice size windmill, but how to get it to the canyon? For every problem there is a solution. One of the neighbors up the canyon had a big giant four-wheel drive truck with a lumber rack on it. We loaded the windmill on the truck in one piece, strapped it down and hung some flags on it. It was a little bit (a lot!) over the oversize limit. I can't imagine what people thought as we motored it down the road all the way to the canyon. 

The easy part was putting it up. A small crane and several sets of hands and it was bolted in place. As I looked at all the pictures of this process I wondered why I was not in any of them.........then it occurred to me that it was because I was the one taking the pictures!

The installation of the windmill at the Kenney stables, Carbon Canyon, September 1972.

By late 1972 it all started to unravel. We had formed a corporation with a "friend". He convinced us that doing so would make it easier and cheaper to obtain the insurance and funding that would be needed to operate. He also promised laborers to help with some of the grunt work since he ran a small company that provided migrant labor for some of the area citrus growers. He took care of forming the corporation with him being the controlling partner. He said he could secure more funding for us, as cash money was our weak spot. We believed him and went ahead with the deal. As we learned later (too late!) he had no intention of making good on his promises. This was strike one.

In 1972 our lease came up for renewal for the basin. The parcel where the actual stable sat was a separate property that was owned by CWOD [formerly the Chanslor-Canfield Midway Oil Company--editor]. That was the access land to the basin. That was a different lease negotiated with the county and CWOD. The deal was that when the county and the Corps of Engineers decided to go ahead with the regional park plan, our equestrian complex would be included providing we were operational. The county would buy the property and would act as our landlord.

We put our bid in for the basin lease and were very surprised to find out someone had bid a much higher amount. It seems our operation had caught the attention of some greedy folks from the valley that had a small horse operation in one of the flood control basins there. They figured they would take over the lease and push us out. We could have fought it and taken it to court and won but they had one thing we didn't........money. 

Much to their surprise we had them fenced out of the stable property in record breaking time. They were too stupid to know that it was two properties. They were very upset when they had to file for an easement with the county to access their newly acquired land! They then also found out they couldn't build anything on the Corps of Engineers land. Not a happy day for them to find out they wasted their money. 

The barn on the Kenney stables looking east, Carbon Canyon, June 1972.  The hill at the right behind the trees is where the park is separated from the tract homes on the Yorba Linda side.  In the distance are the hills in and around Soquel Canyon.

They then resorted to more and more desperate means to push us out. They complained to the county regularly. They would harass us by cutting fence and running livestock in our property that we had to constantly round up. It then turned violent with open threats to our family, the end result being a man almost getting himself killed in a planned assault that took place at our trailer one afternoon. The Sheriff's report of that incident made its way to the county planners. They did not want to be mixed up in any kind of land feud, so they accelerated the timetable for the park development. There was strike two.

In 1969 California experienced some torrential rains in the early part of the year. The end result was the basin filled with a great deal of water and debris from the canyon above. It did it's job. Enough silt washed in to completely bury the bottom basin cross fence, about 6 feet at the tallest post. You could only see the top 3 inches, if you could find them at all. When the water dried up we had to clean up the debris. Logs, tires, entire trees, you name it. It took almost 7 months of work to get it done. That was a major setback in the way of time spent on building the stable, but we forged ahead. The county and the Corps of Engineers later used that as an excuse to kick us out.

In early 1974 we received a letter from the county about their intent to buy the stable property so that the Corps of Engineers could start grading for the regional park. This was a full three years ahead of schedule—it seemed like they changed their mind about us over night. They wanted us out. The county stated the reason was because we were not operational yet, when, in fact, we were maybe five months away from renting the first ten stalls that were finished save for the plumbing. 

Then the Corps of Engineers canceled any lease to be held on the basin on the basis that it was not "cleaned of flood debris" in a proper and timely way nor were the fences being maintained. We were paid pennies on the dollar by the county for the improvements to the property. We were set to battle it out in court but our business partner put a stop to that. We found out the hard way that he was not only greedy but had no spine as well. Since he had controlling interest in the corporation he was able to dissolve it and walk away with the lion's share of our money without making good on a single one of his promises. Strike three, you're out!

The single-wide mobile home that was the residence of the Kenney family at the stables in Carbon Canyon, June 1972.

Carbon Canyon has a long list of failed business ventures attached to it—ours was one of many. It didn't have to be that way—there was plenty of the horse business to go around for everyone. All it took was the greed of a few people to wipe over ten years worth of work away. In the end, none of them really gained anything. 

Carbon Canyon is so built up now I don't know if we would have survived even if we had been successful in finishing the equestrian complex. This story should, however, serve as a cautionary tale to anyone planning to start a business on that scale. Simply put, be careful!

The thing that made me the most sad about the whole deal was not having 24/7 access to the canyon anymore. In the short time we lived there it was like Adventureland USA. History could be dug right up out of the dirt sometimes without even a shovel. You can bet there are many more stories of the things my brother Khris and I did in the hills of the canyon. There were many more good things that happened than bad in our short stay. 

But, then, life goes on, we all got over it and never looked back.

There's just a small side note on a recent event related to Iron Eyes Cody. Someone told me that the guys on the "American Pickers" TV show had bought some Iron Eyes Cody memorabilia on one of their recent programs. I don't watch much television so I looked it up on a video-streaming service, as I wanted to see what they bought. One of the things they got was Iron Eyes personal teepee. I sent them a brief history of it as it wound up being donated to the Buffalo Bill Museum in LeClaire, Iowa. They didn't know what it looked like set up or its age, so I sent them some of the pictures I sent along with the story. It's the teepee in the picture of the whole family in the canyon in 1968 [shown in the last post].            

In 1975, Carbon Canyon Regional Park opened to the public.  This Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., the 40th-anniversary celebration will be held at the 124-acre facility, located at 4442 Carbon Canyon Road in Brea.  Activities include guided hikes of the park's redwood grove, live animals, presentations on canyon history and the Olinda Oil Museum, and, for the first 100 participants, lunch.

For more information, call (714) 973-3160 or email carboncanyon@ocparks.com                    

The Kenney Stables of Carbon Canyon, Part 2

As the 40th anniversary celebration of Carbon Canyon Regional Park approaches this weekend, here is the second part of Matthew Kenney's recollections of his family's stable on leased land behind Carbon Canyon Dam.  Matthew's title for the first story is:

Please pass the dynamite; One stick or two?

Or

What goes up, must come down

A rodeo arena needs to be about 150' x 250' to be regulation size that would host most events. The perfect place for it was at the far west end of what is now Carbon Canyon Regional Park. The only small problem was that there was a small grove of eucalyptus trees in the way. One of the engineers that my Dad worked with fancied himself a lumberjack and loved to cut down trees.......I think he liked the big crash when the hit the ground! 

We got most of the trees felled and dug out the stumps with a backhoe. All except the last one, it was truly a giant-sized tree. That one took about a week to get cut up once it came down, what a crash it made! Now to the stump. We tried with the backhoe, but it didn't come loose. We tried digging and cutting roots, but there were too many. It was decided that more drastic means had to be employed...........dynamite.

C. Bob Kenney and Iron Eyes Cody with an unidentified child, Kenney Stables, Carbon Canyon, 1968.  All photos courtesy of Matthew Kenney.  Click on one to see them in enlarged views in a separate window.

In the 1960's blasting supplies could be obtained at most hardware stores if you filled out the right paperwork and had an agricultural permit, which we did. Rather than buy one stick which would have done the job, two sticks were purchased along with 10' of medium-burn fuse and a couple of blasting caps. The extra stick was to make sure the job got done. 

So, we drilled the hole in the stump, crimped the fuse on the caps and put the caps in the dynamite which were then lowered into the bore hole in the stump. Using 5' of fuse allowed for plenty of time to get out of the way. My Dad lit the fuse and made his way to the pickup which was parked about 200' away. We all crouched behind the truck waiting........and then BOOM! It felt like we bounced about an inch off the ground. We all stood up and looked over where the stump should be, it was gone. 

But, then we had to duck for cover because it rained toothpick-sized pieces of wood for what seemed like an eternity. We had just experienced a simple law of physics..........what goes up, must come down.

The Rodeo Arena

After some grading was done, the rodeo arena was built.  Carbon Canyon had more than it's share of characters in the 1960s and 1970s. As we progressed on the project, more and more canyon residents stopped in to see what we were up to. When the rodeo arena went up, so did our rate of daily visitors.... except for law enforcement. 

Those living in the canyon today must understand that you are in a kind of law enforcement dead zone being on the outlying borders of two counties. It was even worse in the 1960s/70s. You couldn't let anything sit out more than a day without it disappearing. Theft and other petty crime were pretty high.

Iron Eyes Cody with Indian tepees near Kenney Stables, Carbon Canyon, 1968.

And then there were all the traffic accidents. Arrival time for any law enforcement was at least an hour. Once we moved in and started living there, things took an interesting twist. We knew some of the sheriffs deputies from both counties and a few of the CHP officers from dealings at our stable business in Fullerton. 

All it took was an offer of a place to take a coffee break to the Sheriff's deputies.  We started seeing them more often in a month than then we ever did in the previous seven years. Word got around to all the "cop shops". Then the CHP officers would show up regularly. They were always greeted with a friendly cup of coffee and sometimes even lunch. Traffic accidents, petty theft and other crime went to an all time low in our area. 

Iron Eyes Cody and family, Carbon Canyon, 1968.

Soon some of the locals from Sleepy Hollow and a little beyond became regulars. They stopped to chat if they saw the main gate open (this is where the main gate for the park is today). Often times Dad would talk them into helping with the work! A little hospitality went a long way. Even today that simple idea could work if a local from the canyon stepped up to the plate.

Lindey Litton, a Real-Life Wild West Cowboy

We met a real diverse slice of people in the canyon, but none were more interesting than some of the area's cowboys and ranchers. We had a conflict with someone who I would say is the closest thing I've ever seen to a real-life Wild West cowboy by the name of Lindey Litton. 

I remember him more than any other simply because he had such a right-in-your-face manner. We met him in the back property that butts up next to Yorba Linda. He was cutting our fence to let his cattle in to graze. This had been going on for some while and we finally caught him in the act. My Dad yelled at him to stop; he was about 60 feet away. 

Bob Kenney and Iron Eyes Cody swap hats, Carbon Canyon, 1970.

Lindey pulled this hand-cannon out of his gun belt and said "make me". My dad swung the shotgun he was holding up and said "this shotgun has a slug in it with his your name on it, make your play" to Lindey. My Dad said he had no intention of letting anyone pull a gun on him and his sons. Lindey then apologized for pulling his gun saying he never drew his gun when kids were around. After we fixed the fence together my Dad invited him to the trailer for lunch!  It was there they found out they had a lot in common in the way of where they had been on the rodeo circuit in their youth. 

Lindey had a bad habit of pulling his gun on people, something that never changed. It was part of his "Wild West" persona. One day, he was in the trailer swapping stories with my Dad and two sheriff's department cars rolled up. I guess they had received a complaint of a man brandishing a firearm earlier in the day and knew it was Lindey from past encounters with him. 

The deputies knew where to find him, he was having a coffee break! They got on the PA and said "Lindey Litton, come out with your hands up!". He gave his gun to my Dad and complied. My Dad gave the gun to the deputy, while Lindy was put in cuffs and loaded into one of the sheriff's cars, which then left. The other deputy stayed and had lunch with us. Lindey was back a couple days later, and said it was a misunderstanding. Canyon life could be interesting. Even though Lindey had his personality flaws, he sure could "cowboy" when he wanted to. 

Iron Eyes Cody's Indian Pow-Wows

Around about 1968 before we moved there, a group decided to have a benefit Indian Pow-Wow on a neighboring property to the east where the redwood trees stand today. The weekend of the Pow-Wow was a total disaster because of some unexpected Santa Ana winds..........it blew all the teepees down and made a real mess. 

We helped with some of the cleanup and found out one of the leaders of the group putting on the Pow-Wow was Iron Eyes Cody. My Dad knew him from many years earlier and offered him a spot to hold the Pow-Wow for free in our newly created rodeo arena.

Bob Kenney in Iron Eyes Cody's Indian costume near a tepee, Carbon Canyon, 1968.

We had the best Pow-Wows there for three years running. All I have to prove it is some pictures of the events, doesn't seem like any of the papers picked up on it at the time. I've also recreated the sign(s) we put up to advertise the Pow-Wow that first year as they just don't exist anymore. How could I remember what they looked like? It's because I made them. I was always a very good artist from an early  age so I always got those type of tasks heaped on me.......but that's a completely other story for another day. 

We used to get Christmas cards from the Codys every year, but lost contact with them in the late 1970s after my Dad passed away. I was sorry to hear of Iron Eyes passing in 1999, but he did make it to the ripe old age of 95!

Matthew Kenney's reproduction signs for the Indian Pow Wows.

Someone told me that the stars of the TV show "American Pickers" had bought some Iron Eyes Cody memorabilia on one of their recent episodes.  I don't watch much television, so I looked it up on a video-streaming service, as I wanted to see what they bought.  One of the things they got was Iron Eyes' personal tepee.  I sent them a brief history of it, as it wound up being donated to the Buffalo Bill Museum in LeClaire, Iowa.  They didn't know what it looked like set up or its age, so I sent them some of the pictures included above, including the one with the Cody family.

Editorial note:  This is a sensitive topic, given the issue of native Indian identity, but it should be noted that "Iron Eyes Cody" was actually Espera Oscar de Corti, the son of Sicilian immigrants and born in Louisiana in 1904 (Cody claimed he was born in Oklahoma and was of Cree and Cherokee descent).  After his parents divorced, Corti moved with his brothers to join their father in Texas and then the trio came to California.  All three worked in the film industry and changed their surname to Cody.

"Iron Eyes" began his movie career in the late 1920s and appeared in something like 200 films, as well as working in television from the early 1950s.  He is most famous to people of a certain age for his appearance in a 1971 commercial for the anti-litter campaign, " Keep America Beautiful."  The commercial showed Cody in his costume shedding a tear as trash lands at his feet from someone tossing it out the window of a car.  His performance was a powerful stimulant to the environmental movement then gaining momentum in America.

Cody married archaeologist and ethnologist Bertha Parker, an Indian through her mother from the Abenaki and Seneca tribes of New York, who was long associated with the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles as an assistant to Mark R. Harrington, who was married to Bertha's aunt. The Codys adopted two sons, said to have Indian blood from Dakota and Maricopa (southern Arizona) tribes.  The photo above shows the family together.

Bertha Parker Cody died in 1978 and Iron Eyes Cody paseed away in early 1999 at the age of 94.  It is said that Iron Eyes did much to benefit native Americans, though others have expressed disappointment at his "passing" as an Indian.

For more, click here for film historian Angela Aleiss's 1996 expose on Cody's Sicilian heritage in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The Kenney Stables of Carbon Canyon, Part 1

Back in the Spring, Matthew Kenney got in contact about sharing his family's Carbon Canyon story.  Specifically, his father, C. Bob Kenney, in the early 1960s, leased the land behind Carbon Canyon Dam, a few years after that flood control mitigation measure was completed.  The family went on to build a barn, stables and had a mobile home situated on the site when they moved onto the property full-time in 1971.

However, after it was decided that Carbon Canyon Regional Park would be built on the site and after the family was told they could continue their stable operation as long as it provided public access, the lease was not renewed.  The Kenneys, having expended much time, energy and money on the enterprise, were forced to leave.

Given that this Saturday is an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Carbon Canyon Regional Park, this seemed an apt time to share the story of the Kenney stables, thanks to Matthew.  The posts are slightly edited from his submission and all photos come from him.

The Kenney family (clockwise from back left: C. Bob, Bette, Khris, Matthew), Fullerton, Thanksgiving 1961.  All photos courtesy of Matthew Kenney.  Click on any photo to see them enlarged in a separate window.

There were four of us—my father C. Bob Kenney, mother Bette, older brother Khris and of course me, Matthew. The first picture shown above is from Thanksgiving at Grandma's house in Fullerton in 1961. Dad wears a suit and tie and works as a aerospace engineer, mom works as a secretary at Chicksan in Brea.......just a normal 60s suburban family right? My mother once told me that when she and dad were dating he would show up nicely dressed and clean. After they got married she said she discovered she married a dirty cowboy......and I do mean a REAL cowboy, not something you see in some movie. Life is full of paradoxes, this was a big one.  The second picture below is of "cowboy Bob," circa 1948.

In Fullerton we leased various properties from the oil companies to run cattle and horses on and in the late 1950s started a small stable operation on Associated Rd.  Our stable consisted of ten stalls that rented for $35 per month and pasture space that cost $15 per month. We limited our total of horses on the property to 50 head and had a waiting list for both pasture and stalls. Then there were feed, tack and care services that we provided. From an early age my brother and I provided the extra helping hands to make it possible. It was a very good business, but very hard work. This was all done while my dad worked the late shift at North American aviation in Seal Beach. He was one of many engineers that helped get the Apollo missions to the moon.

C. Bob Kenney, Fullerton, circa 1948.

With the success of the stable in Fullerton in the early 60s my father was looking to operate on a much bigger scale. He designed a 50-stall bolt-together horse barn that was built entirely out of a material that was very plentiful and inexpensive at the time--two-inch oil well drill tube. There were huge stacks of this stuff available for pennies. We would have a 50 stall barn, regulation size rodeo arena, three riding arenas, a general store that sold feed and tack and about 50 acres of planted pasture space. We would sponsor events (like we did with the Iron Eyes Cody Indian pow-wows of 1968-1972) and host some of the smaller national rodeo events. Carbon Canyon was the perfect spot.......

Since this property was largely undeveloped, the first thing that had to be done was build a perimeter fence. It was the major sticking condition on the lease contract along with cleaning any debris out of the basin that may wash down out of the canyon (that was later to become our undoing). Total mileage on the fence.......just under six miles. Doesn't seem like much, does it?

The Kenney family (right to left, Khris, Bette, Matthew, Bob) with relatives at the Carbon Canyon stable property, 1967.

But that was six miles of new fence where no fence had been before on some of the most rocky, hard packed soil/shale you can imagine.All to built on the weekends by one grown man and two pre-teen kids. Not very likely to succeed in a logistic sense. We built an old-school 4-strand barbed wire fence. By old school I mean done "Plains" style. The fence is laid out with "pull" poles on 16ft centers with 3 steel T-posts pounded in between for wire tie downs. 

"Pull" poles are what you staple the wire to in order to pull the wire tight between runs. One run = 32 feet. The pull poles were old surplus telephone poles which were free at the time (before they gained popularity in landscaping). Pull poles were 8ft long sunk 3ft into the ground. This cycle of fence construction was repeated almost every weekend for five, almost six years (I started when I was about 9 years old). 

Matthew Kenney at the family's Fullerton stable, 1968.

We did have a little Ford tractor with a post hole digger but that could only be used on flat terrain. Better than a third of the fence was built on hills of shale which is not easy to dig in. A lot of the rocky areas tore up the post hole digger auger, so my Dad designed and made some special digging tools like the changeable tool steel cutters for the post hole digger auger. 

Concerning some of the fence building tools, what we each had on us in our tool belt, with the exception of the nail puller (used for mistakes stapling the wire,) was a good 24-ounce hammer, a pair of fence pliers and a wrecking bar. I say wrecking bar because there is a difference between it and a simple crow bar. A wrecking bar is longer and has less of a crook on the neck giving you better leverage to pull the wire on the post. 

Some of the tools used by the Kenneys to build their six-mile long barbed wire fence around the Carbon Canyon stable property over a six-year period.

We also used just your normal set of post hole diggers alongside the most important tool we had......the digging bar, or just simply "the bar". It was one of the first home brew tools my Dad made. It was made from an old handmade axe head that was submerged in a flux mixture of flourides and oxides, welded to a high carbon tool steel tube, and then tempered in an oven (thanks to the huge tempering oven at my Dad's work). The end opposite the axe head was left open for the tempering operation. Once tempered, the tube was filled 2/3 full of sand and then the end plug was welded in (a sucker rod threaded end, this had more uses than just digging). It acts much like a dead blow hammer, you can knock a hole in solid pavement in a matter of minutes. The whole thing is 9ft long, weighs about 45 pounds. I've used it for countless things over the past 50 years, just recently doing a rock retaining wall. Need to lift a 400 pound hunk of stone? It's easy when you have the best lever in the world and a couple tackle blocks.

Of course we had a small complement of hand tools, gloves, and etc. There was also a digging shovel for each of us.  I also found artifacts while we were building fence, including about 500 feet of Brink ribbon wire with a field splice on it, found in the back corner of the basin near the Yorba Linda side and an 1859 one-cent piece.  I found the coin digging a post hole around where the town of Olinda used to be. It has been in my pocket for 50 years (my lucky penny). 

Here's what six miles of fence comes to in materials that we paid for:

• About 2000 pull poles
• 6,000 steel T posts
• 126,720 feet of barb wire (four strand fence)
• An estimated 100 pounds of hot dip galvanized staples
• Five-six years of building
• An infinite amount of blisters

On the left, a standard post hole digger and, on the right, Bob Kenney's custom-made digging bar.

I'm not sure what is left of the fence, but I know that parts of it along Carbon Canyon Road were still there ten years ago. It appears to be all gone now from looking at the area through a Google Maps street view.

There were some other minor obstacles:

• Getting the poles and wire up the hills was a challenge. We made a sled of sorts that kind of looked like a dog sled........and we were the dogs. Sometimes it would take two or three weekends just to place the materials for a section of fence. None of that ever got stolen, they were too heavy to pack out.
• Dirt bike enthusiasts had a habit of cutting and tearing up the new fence.....there was a guy that would actually show up on the weekends and sell admission to "his" newly fenced motorcycle park!
• Neighboring ranchers that wanted "free range" cutting and tearing up new fence.
• Road wrecks on the canyon road cutting and tearing up new fence (a monthly deal).
• People regularly stealing materials an equipment.....we lost two post hole diggers that way. As everyone knows, the canyon is kind of a no mans land for law enforcement.

Because the property was just a short drive from Fullerton where we lived, we learned to check on everything every couple of days. That went on until we actually moved there in late 1971.

Coming next is part two of the series!