The annual memorial golf tournament is named for late Sam Petersen. He was a past president of the Rotary Club of Arden Arcade. As a resident of the Arden Arcade community, an owner of a local brewery and a constant supporter of Children’s Receiving Home, Sam gave his time, talent and hard-earned cash to disadvantaged children in Sacramento.

Incoming President of the Arden Arcade Rotary Club Jeri Petersen – and widow of Sam – continues to lead this golf fund-raiser as an embodiment of Sam’s good works.

There’s a Dimple Drop, live and silent auctions and a dinner following 18 holes of golf.

Shotgun start is schedule for 12:30 p.m. The tournament is sponsored by the Rotary Club of Arden Arcade and the Children’s Receiving Home of Sacramento.

Players may sign up at www.crhkids.org or contact Jeri Petersen at jerisen@gmail.com.

 

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part series regarding the historic Rancho del Paso Mexican land grant.

 

Many Arden and Carmichael residents undoubtedly share many similarities, from living in the same county to shopping at the same stores to attending the same community activities. But a little lesser known fact is that a good number of these residents also reside in an area that was once part of a 44,374-acre Mexican land grant.

Known as Rancho del Paso (“Ranch of the Pass”), this grant was roughly located within the modern boundaries of Northgate Boulevard to the west, the American River to the south, Manzanita Avenue to the east and a little south of Elverta Road in the vicinity of U Street to the north.

In being that Rancho del Paso did not extend to the east beyond the present day Manzanita Avenue and a parallel route from this avenue to the river, the more eastern part of Carmichael lies within the site of another historic Mexican land grant, which was known as Rancho San Juan.

Today, the Rancho del Paso acreage includes such notable sites as Town and Country Village, Del Paso Country Club, Arden Fair Mall, Country Club Plaza, Loehmann’s Plaza and McClellan Field.

The property that became the Rancho del Paso land grant did not appear in recorded history until 1839 with the arrival of Captain John A. Sutter.

Sutter, who held the rights to the Mexican land grant, New Helvetia, where Sutter’s Fort was constructed and the city of Sacramento was later founded, also claimed rights to Rancho del Paso.

Four years after acquiring New Helvetia, Sutter deeded Rancho del Paso to Eliab Grimes, Hiram Grimes and John Sinclair as a possible payment for supplies.

Rancho del Paso Historical Society President Bob Kent said that Sutter did not actually own the land that he deeded to these three men.

“John Sutter deeded a big hunk of land to two guys named Grimes and John Sinclair,” Kent said. “Sutter probably owed these men money, because he worked on credit and these were guys who had money. Except Sutter didn’t own the property. Later on, (Sutter) was granted a second grant that went way up into Marysville, called the Sobrante grant. The Sobrante grant came a few months after (John Sinclair and the Grimeses were deeded Rancho del Paso), so (Sutter) may have anticipated that he was going to get the (Sobrante grant) and he decided to give them a hunk of it to settle some credit claims.”

John Sinclair, who was a native of Scotland, settled on the rancho, which was named after a ford in the river, with his wife, Mary, and began raising cattle, sheep and hogs.

Kent said that John and Mary Sinclair had children together and resided “down by the pass in the river,” near today’s H Street Bridge.

“(John and Mary Sinclair) had a little family and they had a nice place,” Kent said. “It was reported that their ranch house was of the Eastern style, which means that it was made from lumber.”

Desiring a better title to this land, Eliab, who was a naturalized Mexican citizen, petitioned the Mexican government, which on Dec. 20, 1844 responded by making Rancho del Paso an official Mexican land grant.

According to research by former McClellan Air Force Base historian Raymond Oliver, John Sinclair and Eliab Grimes held rodeos on the ranch on May 29, 1847 and on Nov. 5, 1847.

Eliab passed away at the age of 69 on Nov. 11, 1848 and according to the Nov. 18, 1858 edition of The Sacramento Union, he had willed “all his right, title and interest in the land embraced in the grant” to Hiram, who was his nephew.

Rancho del Paso was sold to Samuel Norris on Aug. 8, 1849, and Hiram later acquired the 19,982-acre Rancho San Juan, which was located on the north side of the American River, opposite the Leidesdorff Rancho. This latter land transfer occurred in July 1860.

Norris, who was born Gotthilf Wilhelm Becher Christensen, in Denmark in 1822, had met the Grimeses and John Sinclair in the Sandwich Islands (present day Hawaii), where they had lived for some time prior to coming to California.

The Placer Times reported on March 9, 1850 that in addition to owning Rancho del Paso, Norris was in the process of establishing his own town, “Norristown.” Founded near his ranch on the south bank of the American River in the area where Sacramento State University is now located, the town, which was renamed Hoboken, functioned in its civic capacity for at least three years.

James Ben Ali Haggin and his brother-in-law Lloyd Tevis became the new owners of the rancho in 1862, and Norris returned to the Sandwich Islands.

Haggin, who arrived in California from Kentucky at the age of 29 in 1850, was the most renowned owner of the property.

The rancho remained under the ownership of Haggin and Tevis until 1869, when Rancho del Paso was transferred to the Sacramento Farm Homestead Association, whose trustees included former California Gov. Leland Stanford and the well-known banker D.O. Mills. The association had intended to subdivide and sell the property, but this endeavor failed, apparently due to the land’s insufficient number of reliable water wells.

The rancho, which once included Central Pacific Railroad tracks that were part of the first Transcontinental Railroad, was recognized as the site of orchards, vineyards, groves of oaks, and alfalfa, hops and other fields.

But much more notable than the rancho’s agricultural assets were Haggin’s nationally-renowned racehorses, which included his most famous horse, Ben Ali, who won the 1886 Kentucky Derby.

In recognizing Haggin’s stock farm, which also specialized in the raising of sheep and cattle, The Union described Rancho del Paso on Feb. 9, 1884 as “second to no other stock farm on the continent.”

Sailing long distances on the Pacific Ocean, Michael Caplan says, is “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”

The boredom, Caplan said, includes spending hours on watch in some of the remotest spots on the globe, complete with hallucinations and some conversation with yourself, seeing one’s life compartmentalized into only periods of light and periods of darkness, and repeated meals of the same tired pasta dishes and preserved canned banality.

At the other end of the seagoing spectrum are the otherworldly, sailors-only occurrences and interactions that the landlocked will never experience: eyeball-to-eyeball meetings with whales, endless seascapes seemingly meant solely for the viewing pleasure of those lucky few on board to view them at that particular moment and latitude, and occasional moments of mortal terror.

Caplan, a Sacramento realtor and a member of the Rotary Club of Arden-Arcade, recently completed his sixth Pacific Cup, a yacht race that takes competitors 2,070 miles from San Francisco to the Kaneohe Yacht Club on the windward side of Oahu, Hawaii. Fifty-six boats participated in the 2010 event, the race’s sixteenth running.

The Pacific Cup, Caplan explained, is a race primarily for amateur crews, unlike the Trans-Pacific Race, which is held in odd-numbered years and draws professional racers.

“In the Trans-Pac, the more money you have, the better your chances to win,” he said. “The Pacific Cup is an amateur race, run usually with older boats and amateur crews, and there is an enormous recidivist rate. It really gets in your blood.”

A “water-oriented” upbringing in paradise

Sailing got into Caplan’s blood early; his family moved to Hawaii from Sacramento when he was just four.

“My whole recreational perspective was water-oriented. I learned to surf before I learned to swim,” he recalled. “I started sailing

when I was 12; one of my teenage jobs was sailing in Hawaii. The ocean became my comfort zone.”

Caplan returned to the mainland for college and resettled in Sacramento. As soon as he felt he had the discretionary time he needed to be able to do so, he resumed sailing, first on San Francisco Bay, then on the Pacific Ocean. He entered his first Pacific Cup in 1990 and competed in the 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, and 2010 races. Over the years, Caplan has helped oversee and supervise the race in a variety of roles, including once serving as race commodore, a post he recalls as being “a great deal of fun and very time-consuming.”

How the race was run

A veteran Pacific Ocean sailor, Caplan knows well the sea and its capriciousness. During one race, his boat went from upright to capsized in the blink of an eye.

“One moment, it was five-foot seas and a 25-knot breeze, and then around 3 a.m., a squall hit us. The winds went from 25 miles per hour to 55, and we went from upright and controlled to on our ear with the boat on its side,” he said. “We went from tranquility to utter chaos in seconds.”

Handling the challenges of the rapidly-changing seascape is the true test of a sailor’s abilities, Caplan maintains.

“Usually during a race, there’s a middle ground,” he said. “You’re on the edge, and anything can happen at any time, but you’re managing it well. You’re completely focused on this 30- to 50-foot long piece of flotation.”

This year’s race, Caplan said, was marked by poor sailing conditions, and the conditions influence how fast each race is run. During this summer’s race, Caplan and his shipmates aboard the Whistler V took 16 days to complete the nearly 2,100-mile course; the boat he was on during the 2004 race finished in just 11 days.

“The conditions really were about as bad as you could imagine this year,” Caplan said. “The weather was either calm or unfavorable. Our boat performed pretty poorly, and this race was just slow; even the fastest boats performed below capacity.”

All hands on deck (and in the galley)

Participating in six Pacific Cup races has given Caplan insight into how to assemble a crew for a race. The main trait he looks for in prospective crew members is reliability.

“Each person on that boat depends totally on every other person and their ability to perform,” said Caplan. “And it’s true what they say, a quiet boat is the most efficient boat.”

Caplan also looks for people who are experienced ocean sailors, and possessing additional desirable skills like the ability to cook or prior medical training or experience, helps one’s resumé. For the record, family ties hold no sway when Caplan is gathering his crew.

“My son-in-law is the only member of my family that I deem reliable enough for this,” he said. “I hope that just he and I can go sailing one of these days.”

For safety’s sake, each boat in the Pacific Cup is required to carry certain amounts of potable water, provisions, anchors, feet of chain, and the like. Expecting the trip from San Francisco to Hawaii to take between 12 and 14 days, Caplan prefers to take provisions for 16 to 18 days, just to be safe. Caplan also supplements the provisions by fishing from the boat; during this year’s Pacific Cup, he caught and prepared four mahi-mahi. Even with the occasional fresh catch, meals and accommodations aboard the boat grow tiresome quickly, Caplan admits.

“There is no shower, no comfortable way to sleep, so you basically race all day, eat, crash, and wait until you’re called for your next watch,” he said. “As far as food, we have each crew member bring in his or her favorite dish frozen, and we eat those first. Then we get into the fortified protein shakes, pasta, Vienna sausages, Spam, that sort of thing.”

The things you see at sea

Asked about his most memorable moments and sights on a boat, Caplan recalls seeing living “Rembrandt paintings” stretch out before him at sunset, scenes so beautiful that exhausted crew members would interrupt their hard-earned naps to take them in.

He remembers feeling like his “whole soul had been sucked up into the Milky Way” one night under the stars. He tells of flying fish and flying squid inexplicably landing with a plop on the deck of the boat and of birds lighting on one of the ropes or rails and hitchhiking for days. Perhaps most stirring are the encounters with whales.

“They make eye contact with you, and you’re looking at them and they’re looking back at you, and you can’t help but wonder, ‘What the hell is this animal thinking?’”

Unfortunately, Caplan also has seen how human thoughtlessness is impacting the oceans.

“I’ve observed a lot of trash in the open ocean: ropes, parts of fishing nets, and of course plastic bottles and other plastic things,” he said. “It’s really discouraging and disheartening. The nets and ropes are the most disheartening objects, since they can trap fish, dolphins, and turtles.”

Caplan credits his Hawaiian upbringing for his fondness for the ocean and its inhabitants.

“The ocean has always been dear to me; chalk it up to being raised on an island in the middle of the Pacific,” he said. “Spending time ‘out there’ just strengthens the commitment to preserving our natural resources.  I think that most of us that sail feel similarly.”

 

June 13, 2013 Edition

Regularly found at the most popular businesses in the area, the Arden-Carmichael News paper is known for its in-depth coverage of this unincorporated part of Sacramento County. The only paper currently offering exclusive coverage of the Arden Arcade community, this publication reaches a diverse population of families in one of the county’s wealthiest areas. This area also includes Jesuit High School, where many families throughout the region pick up the paper and get caught up on local news.