Workman–Temple family
When William was eleven years old, his father inherited a substantial home and property in nearby Clifton from a childless aunt and uncle and relocated his family there.
In September of that year, a group of up to sixty-five or so members, including Americans, Europeans and New Mexicans, left New Mexico and took the Old Spanish Trail to the Los Angeles pueblo.
The 1,200-mile (1,900 km) journey was completed by late fall, when John Rowland presented a letter of recommendation from New Mexico's American consul and a list of expedition members to the authorities in Los Angeles.
[3] Workman commemorated his arrival in Southern California with a glass plaque (still in family hands) that dated his landfall as November 5, 1841,[4] a British national holiday called Guy Fawkes' Day.
Early in 1842, John A. Rowland obtained a Mexican land grant to Rancho La Puente, at that time 18,000 acres (73 km2), from Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado.
In July 1845, Governor Pío Pico amended the La Puente grant, adding Workman's name officially as owner and expanding the rancho to the maximum allowable under Mexican land law, eleven square leagues, or almost 49,000 (48,790.55) acres, 48,790-acre (197 km2).
Together with his plan to move the customs house to San Pedro Bay, among other issues, this roused northerner José Castro to mount a challenge to Pico's authority.
A group of Americans, including Benjamin D. Wilson and Rowland, were seized in late summer 1846 at the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino house of Isaac Williams.
Workman met Stockton at Mission San Juan Capistrano just after New Year's Day 1847 and arranged an amnesty for all Californios who would resist the American retaking of Los Angeles.
"[citation needed] Suspicion by the US military was also cast toward the motives of ranchero and major landowner Hugo Reid, who had settled in California after immigrating from Scotland.
Nine days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by the Mexican Congress, James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill on 24 January 1848.
The wealth generated allowed Workman to expand his ranching enterprises, enlarge his house, build a cemetery and chapel on his grounds, and acquire real estate.
[citation needed] Although the cattle industry was buffeted by the decline of the Gold Rush and battered by the importation of better breeds from Texas, environmental disasters decimated it as a mainstay of the regional economy.
Fortunately for Workman, his friend, William Wolfskill, found water and grass in the Mojave Desert, in today's Apple Valley area.
By 1870, Los Angeles was growing rapidly and Workman joined his ambitious son-in-law, F. P. F.(Francis Pliny Fisk) Temple, in the emerging business arena of the nascent city.
The two men invested in real estate subdivisions, notably: Lake Vineyard in today's Alhambra and San Marino in the San Rafael Hills; and Centinela near the Centinela Adobe area in Rancho Aguaje de la Centinela-Rancho Sausal Redondo, in the present day Los Angeles International Airport-LAX area; some of the first oil speculating in the Santa Susana Mountains near present-day Santa Clarita, and others.
Further, the bank's investments in a wide range of projects were dangerously depleting cash reserves, especially after the state economy collapsed in a silver mining stock speculation fever at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada in late August 1875.
"Lucky" Baldwin, a San Francisco capitalist who precipitated the Virginia City crisis by selling off huge amounts of stock and who was investing in Los Angeles area real estate.
With confidence in the bank irrevocably shaken, depositors quietly drained the institution dry of the borrowed funds and Temple and Workman closed on 13 January 1876.
Pliny Fisk Temple-F.P.T was named for a Congregationalist missionary in Palestine, was born to Jonathan Temple and Lucinda Parker in Reading, Massachusetts, near Boston.
After completing his education, he took ship around Cape Horn to California in January 1841, hoping to meet his half-brother, Jonathan Temple, who was twenty-six years older.
Jonathan had left for the Sandwich Islands-Hawaiian Islands in the early 1820s before Pliny was born, then relocated to Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1828 and opened the town's first store.
This was followed by F.P.Temple's return to Los Angeles, around which time William Workman granted them half of the 2,363-acre (9.56 km2) Rancho La Merced in the Whittier Narrows near today's South El Monte, California.
The Temples built a single-story adobe house, said to have measured 70 x 110 feet (34 m), and which later had a second floor of wood and was accompanied, by the 1870s, by a two-story French Second Empire (architecture)-style brick dwelling.
By the time Los Angeles experienced its first significant growth after the United States Civil War, F.P.Temple dove headlong into business projects that were intended to ride the wave of the boom.
Living in an 1869 adobe built by Rafael Basye, the Temples ranched and farmed on their new holdings when their eldest child, Thomas, discovered oil in Spring 1914.
Their daughter Josephine Workman became silent movie actress Mona Darkfeather (January 13, 1883–September 3, 1977), who portrayed American Indian women in films.
