Inhabiting a fire-adapted land

The land used to be inhabited. People lived some or all of the year in almost every place in California, with exceptions of extreme high elevations and extreme desert. This made tending the land feasible--over 4 million acres could be burned each year easily, in areas where people were intimately familiar with the vegetation and weather, around people's homes, without traveling long distances to conduct the burns. Networks of trails--dense in inhabited places--would have been natural fire breaks under these conditions.

Today, much of the land is uninhabited, except temporarily by rangers and recreationists. The inhabited landscape has shrunk to a small fraction of California, and even there, outside of Southern California chaparral ecosystems where fire frequency has increased, most burning has been suppressed. So we have a build up of fuels in forests, a takeover of grasslands by non-native invasive weeds, and general ecosystem degradation.

Simply increasing the acreage burned each year would be a feasible approach to solving this problem if the land was still inhabited. But it is not. So people unfamiliar with the land (topography, vegetation, weather) must travel long distances to conduct controlled burns. This model is expensive, inefficient, and not scalable to the acreages that need to be burned each year--estimated to be over 4 million acres that burned in pre-European times and that is a sustainable level for maintaining California's ecosystems with a natural fire regime, and lessening the likelihood of catastrophic fires.

In addition, large areas of federal public land, formerly inhabited by Indians or patrolled by rangers, have been defunded by Congress year after year to the point where it is rare to see a ranger. The uninformed and uneducated public trashes these lands without guidance or oversight. And the neglected lands have a fire recurrence and intensity that is out of whack and getting wackier.

Hiring more rangers who actually manage and live and camp on the land is one way to solve this problem. Inviting indigenous people to live on and manage land is another. Both approaches should be used to get our public--and private--lands back in balance.

My great-grandmother was born in Mazatlan

Going through old papers, we had another family history breakthrough. Enough new information to make me want to revise former posts (see To Los Angeles in the 1840s), but I'll let them stand for now and put all the updates here.

A long-standing mystery has been where (and under what circumstances) was my great-grandmother born, and how and when did she get to L.A. We thought the Homestead Blog had answered the question August 24, 2019, when it stated:

"According to a genealogical source, the Bilderrains were living in Mulegé, Baja California, now a town of about 4,000 on the east coast of the peninsula along the Bay of California.  Based on somewhat conflicting census records (how many of these aren’t?), it appears that Ygnacio Bilderrain and his wife María Encarnación Martinez migrated to Los Angeles about 1847 or 1848 (a 1900 census listing for their son, Jesús, recorded his arrival in the area in 1846).

In the 1850 and 1860 censuses, there is no listed occupation for Ygnacio, so, whether he came north with some means is not known, but the family occupied the adobe house shown in the photograph and there were at least seven children.  Jesús, the eldest, and brother Guillermo and sisters Eduarda and Domitia, were all born in Baja, while three boys, Andrés, Refugio and Ygnacio, and a girl, Guadalupe, were born in Los Angeles."

This was fantastic information, pushing our knowledge forward (or more accurately, back). Mulege, an oasis near a desert sea, is a pretty cool place to have ancestors from--I spent an afternoon and a night near there and have fond memories of that area. So for about three years now we've assumed our great-grandmother Domitila was born in Baja.

Well, it turns out she was born in Mazatlan on January 1st, 1845 while the family was on a business trip. According to a "Vital Statistics and Historical Record" filled out on March 5th, 1947 by my dad's aunt, Lillian Caroline Orr:

"Father was of German descent. Came with his brother to California in their youth, from Ohio during the Gold Rush. Both located in Los Angeles in 1850 where my father and mother were married June 11, 1868. Mother was of Spanish descent, born Jan. 1st, 1845 at Mazatlan, Mexico while her father was on a journey with his wife and children and a stock or [sic] merchandise from Mexico to Los Angeles where in due course they established their home and business. Mother died in Los Angeles in 1942."

Henry Starr-Domatilda Bildarrain marriage license
and certificate, June 11, 1868, Los Angeles, CA.
My great-grandmother died on the
74th anniversary of her wedding at age 97. 

As always, new information raises new questions. What was her father's business, and what merchandise was he bringing from Mazatlan to L.A. on January 1st, 1845? Why were they living in Mulege and why did they relocate to L.A. just as the U.S. began to invade California? Gold was first discovered in California in 1842, and the U.S. declared war on Mexico in May 1846, so there were a lot of reasons to migrate (or not migrate) in the late 1840s.

On a side note, Aunt Lillian's vital record also records very interesting historical information about her late husband, Oscar Owen Orr:

"...at the time of our marriage my husband was associated with the Banning Company and the Catalina Island Company in Los Angeles, Calif, and so continued until February 1903, when he entered the business of Life Insurance. From July 1907 to February 1939 he was Gneral Agent for the Prudential Insurance of American first at Denver (1907 to 1910) and then at San Francisco from 1910 to 1939."

The house on Hobart St. in L.A. where my dad lived with his mom, aunts, uncle, and his grandma Domitila Bilderrain during her last decades.

The IRS really could make this easier on us

It usually is a simple process to file our federal taxes each year, copying more or less what we did the previous year. Free Fillable Forms generally works well, but it is always apparent that the instructions are written from the point of view of the IRS and not with the audience in mind. This year, I started running into confusing things right away--kind of ridiculous no one noticed and fixed these problems--and I decided to keep track here of all the confusion and how much extra time it took.