History
The Mission Gabriel established the Rancho Cucamonga as a site for grazing their cattle. In 1839, the rancho was granted by the Mexican governor of California to Tiburcio Tapia, a wealthy Los Angeles merchant. Tapia transferred his cattle to Cucamonga and built a fort-like adobe house on Red Hill. The Rancho was inherited by Tapia's daughter, Maria Merced Tapia de Prudhomme, and her husband Leon Victor Prudhomme.
With the cession of California to the United States following the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided that the land grants would be honored. As required by the Land Act of 1851, a claim for Rancho Cucamonga was filed with the Public Land Commission in 1852, and the grant was patented to Leon V. Prudhomme in 1872.
Rancho Cucamonga was sold in 1858 to John Rains. Rains in 1856 married Maria Merced Williams, the daughter of Rancho Santa Ana del Chino owner Isaac Williams and granddaughter of Antonio Maria Lugo, owner of Rancho San Bernardino. Maria was thus a wealthy heiress, and Rains invested in three ranchos and the Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles. John Rains was murdered on November 17, 1862. Three men including Tomas Procopio Bustamante were accused but only Manuel Cerrada was caught. Cerrada claimed he, Precopio and four others were paid $500 by Ramon Carrillo, another ranchero and political opponent, to kill Rains. Cerrada was soon lynched and Carrillo, examined in court was released, no evidence having been found against him. Ramon Carrillo always maintained his innocence of the crime, but was shot in the back from ambush and killed on the Los Angeles road west of Cucamonga on May 21, 1864 in another unsolved murder.
Maria Merced married José Carrillo in 1864. She had nine children in all: five with Rains, and four with Carrillo. Isaias W. Hellman, a Los Angeles banker, acquired Rancho Cucamonga at a sheriff’s sale in 1871.
In 1977 three unincorporated communities which had emerged on the old ranch lands — Alta Loma, Cucamonga and Etiwanda— became the city of Rancho Cucamonga.
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