Today, California pioneering trailblazer, mountain man and horticulturalist William Wolfskill’s legacy rests on two primary accomplishments in his colorful life: blazing the Old Spanish Trail that connected the foothills communities to the Santa Fe Trail and planting Southern California’s first commercial citrus grove in what is today downtown Los Angeles.
Yet, while those events should have guaranteed Wolfskill a vaunted place in the pantheon of legendary California pioneers, his reputation was forever marred by tales of his initiating Southern California’s first and most notorious Indian massacre – one that probably didn’t happen.
Looking for ghosts?
For years, amateur ghost hunters growing up in Orange County thrilled to legends of the famous Black Star Canyon massacre in the early 1830s in which Wolfskill and a band of vigilantes reportedly pursued a band of Shoshone horse thieves into the Santa Ana Mountains and massacred them as they feasted on purloined horseflesh.
Afterward, ghostly screams of the wounded and dying were said to reverberate through the canyon on moonless nights.
The legend began when Wolfskill came to California as a fur trapper in 1831 after leading a trek across the southwest where he rubbed shoulders with the other great trailblazers of
America’s westward push such as Kit Carson and Jedidiah Smith.
In a supreme irony of history, the generous hospitality of various Ute, Mohave and Shoshone tribes they encountered along the way probably spared their lives on several occasions as they blazed the Old Spanish Trail from the Santa Fe Trail’s end in New Mexico to its terminus in today’s downtown Upland.
Bandits and raiders In the 1830s, local rancheros in what is today Orange County found themselves plagued with bands of horse thieves who would swoop down from the safety of the canyons and raid local ranchos. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the Californio (Mexican-American) rancheros, Wolfskill reportedly organized a mounted posse to rid them of the renegades who were depleting their most valuable assets. With guns blazing, Wolfskill’s posse wiped the renegades out.
Like San Juan Capistrano’s legend of the weeping woman, the tale became a staple of Halloween feature pages for over a century until OC Weekly magazine launched a historical investigation and found little more than an urban legend springing from an offhand conversation decades before.
The investigation, reported writer Gustavo Arellano, “found there is no concrete evidence the 1831 bloodbath ever happened.” Arel lano found the source material for the legend “wasn’t a first-hand account by men who were there, but rather a third-hand reference – a historian writing in 1931 that a 91-year-old man told him that Wolfskill had confessed to the slaughter 70 years earlier.”
It mattered little to Wolfskill. He married Magdalena Lugo – niece of Lugo family patriarch Don Antonio Maria Lugo – and lived out his years as a respected and prosperous vineyard and citrus rancher until his death in 1866.
Yet it didn’t stem the legend. That same year another local paper sent a team to the canyon to investigate the hauntings and found their photographic equipment mysteriously switching off.
