Last updated: March 28, 2021
Place
Hyder Ranch
Courtesy Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
Quick Facts
Amenities
1 listed
Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits
Alvin Hyder, lived on the island along with his extended family from 1914 to 1922. What follows is a detailed history of the Hyder family on Santa Barbara Island. For an abridged version please visit the Arch Point or Signal Peak Trail Stop 2.
Alvin Hyder acquired the Board of Lighthouses lease of Santa Barbara Island on June 16, 1914. Alvin Hyder's son, Denton O. "Buster" Hyder, spoke with Don Meadows in 1940, Ralph Philbrick in 1970, Ron Morgan in 1979 and with Marla Daily many times between 1986 and 1991. The following narrative has been written based on notes and tape recordings of these interviews.
Alvin Hyder was born in a log cabin near Claremore, Missouri, one of twelve children. His father died while he was a young boy and in 1892 the mother brought the family to Huntington Beach. When Alvin was 14, he went to sea on a sailing vessel for two years. By 1900 he and his brother had a small boat in which they went around the various islands picking up crayfish on a regular route. In 1904 Alvin built the Nora, a 65-foot, 15-ton boat used to haul sheep to and from the Channel Islands. In the summers he used it to haul fish for the canneries. This boat burned off the coast of San Juan Capistrano. Hyder then had the 16-ton Nora II built by Fellows and Stuart in Wilmington. She was 65 feet long with an 18-foot beam, and traveled at nine knots. Hyder equipped her deck with sheep pens built of one-by-sixes.
On January 16, 1916, his lease of Santa Barbara Island in hand, Hyder set out in the rain with his wife Annie and two children Nora and Buster to establish a farm and sheep ranch on the island. They took with them household goods, furniture and lumber to build a house. They saw only one house on the island when they arrived. It stood on the north side of the present landing. A bridge ran across the cove from the south side to the house, reportedly that of Chinese lobster trappers who had lived there previously. Otherwise, according to Buster, "there was nothing but wild cats and all kinds of mice all over."
The Hyders had visited the island for a night some years before obtaining the lease. Buster Hyder recalled staying in the lobster fisherman's shack at the landing when he was about five years old. He described the "shaky" bridge (it had a handrail) and remembered two or three bunks in the house; his parents slept in the upper bunk, he and his sister in the lower. A pair of skids allowed the former fishermen to pull their skiff up to the shack. When the Hyders returned in 1916, the house was gone but the bridge remained.
The year previous to the families' arrival Hyder and his brothers had built a house near the edge of the island 100 yards south of and 150 feet above the landing. Built from lumber salvaged from the mainland, it had two rooms: one for Alvin and his family and the other for his brother Clarence, his wife Kelly and their four children. The house was anchored to the ground by cables so the wind wouldn't blow it off the cliff. It had no electricity. The two families arrived in January so as to be able to plant crops and take advantage of the winter rains.
Hyder rebuilt the pier at the landing, where they unloaded supplies and equipment with a boom. Hyder rigged a sled on wood tracks down the steep slope between the landing and house: "We had a sled on the track that we let up and down with a long rope. That was all volcanic rock we had to drill to cement those spikes in for the track. Talk about workin'. We done it all with pick and shovel. The tracks went right up over the top of the hill. We used the sled for getting everything heavy to the top of the island or back down. The bottom of the track was set on the landing, and when the sled would come down, we would come down, we'd fill it up."
Buster Hyder recalled keeping the rounded out two-by-four wooden tracks greased with oil. A horse pulled the sled up the track, and the people lowered it by hand. The horse named Dan, listened for a signal from below to start hauling, and stopped in just the right place when the load was at the barn. Hyder family members widened the existing narrow trail from the landing to the houses, breaking up the volcanic rock with picks; ten-year-old Buster was then assigned to keep it clear of rocks and dirt with a shovel.
Alvin and Clarence's brother Cleve and his wife Margaret also lived on the island. They mainly fished for lobster. Cleve built a house near the upper part of the landing in 1918. The one-room cabin had a shed roof and windows looking out onto the landing cove. A picket fence surrounded the yard, making a fairly picturesque scene. Tanks around the house collected rainwater off the roofs. The house was built in the middle of a drainage on a leveled area with a retaining wall; Hyder constructed a drainage ditch to keep water flowing down the canyon from flooding the house. Margaret Hyder taught school to the six island children in her house, using "old apple boxes" for chairs. She joined her husband lobster fishing much of the time. They built another cabin at Webster Point for convenience.
A man named George Sands and his wife Effee joined the community, fished for crayfish and lived in a tent near the barn; they left after two years. Paul Wills worked as a laborer for the Hyders; he lived in a 10 by 12-foot house southwest of the double-room house. At one time around 1915 some 15 people lived on the little island.
The family cooked on a coal-oil stove. Friends in fishing boats and family members transported supplies and groceries to the island. Often they traded mutton with fishermen for groceries. The water shortage ruled out planting an orchard, but the family attempted a garden. They adapted to island life to the point that Buster brushed his teeth with green coreopsis branches.
Since the island had no springs or flowing water, the Hyders constructed a system of reservoirs. They built two large concrete cisterns at the house. The Hyders brought water on Nora II in twenty-five 50-gallon barrels from the mainland, piping the water to the house reservoir through a one-and-a-half-inch pipe. In 1918 they installed a Rambler auto engine to pump the water. They searched the island for water sources, even looked for fresh water deep in sea caves. Any collecting method possible would be used, no matter how disgusting. Buster Hyder cleaned the bird droppings off of the roof every year before the rains came, because the drain water went to the cistern. Buster recalled how "you had to limit your drinking water. It had to last a year. Then it got stagnant. Many times when it was raining I'd drink water out of horse tracks. No kiddin'." Buster had the job of removing dead mice from the drinking water supply every day. "Boy, it was hard to drink it. But when you don't have anything else, you have to drink it."
The Hyders constructed two water catchment basins on the island for the livestock and crops. Alvin and Buster built a "big dam" on the west side near Webster Point, using two mules and a scraper. The pond filled with water draining off the west slope of the island. "It's all hard rock under there. It stayed full of water pretty near a year because of the hard pans there."
On the east slope of Signal Peak near Cat Canyon the Hyders had another system of reservoirs. Water running off the side of the hill was collected into concrete ditches that fed into a wooden settling tank, and then fell into the reservoir that measured about 70 by 100 feet. Buster Hyder described building the ditches when he was fifteen years old, around 1920: "There are two ditches coming off the mountain gully, one to the north and one on the south of a bald spot. We used them both. They both come together. The ditches were made of cement. I got all the volcanic rock and sand to build these. We hauled the water for the cement over in the wagon. It had great big wheels on it. I'd fill ‘em up with salt water, pump ‘em full and then I'd bring them over . . . . We built forms and cemented it."
When it rained, Alvin Hyder paid close attention to this particular reservoir system. He came out, even in the middle of the night, to make sure no water would get diverted away from the collection system. He and Buster cleaned out the concrete ditches regularly.
The Hyders built a substantial barn measuring 60 by 40 feet and a stable with two stalls for their two horses; they also had two mules. They brought farming equipment to the island and set to work. The island was covered with foxtails, ice plant and jungles of coreopsis, which the Hyders called cabin stock. They cleared land for hay fields and crops by hand, pulling up coreopsis and cutting the ice plant, which was then dried and burned. They burned parts of the island annually to encourage grasses. In 1918 they burned the entire island but still found they had to pull the coreopsis. The Hyders plowed the land with a moldboard plow hitched to four horses. They grew five acres of potatoes and corn on the west terrace and 150 acres of barley on the larger and more fertile east slope. The rich soil produced plentiful barley, which was cut, baled and shipped on Nora II to the mainland fifteen tons at a time. The potato crop failed ("too much guano in the ground . . . it burned ‘em," according to Buster Hyder), and most were left to rot in the ground. They also grew hay between 1918 and 1922.
"We grew hay all the way out to where those badlands are, clear through that whole area. We planted from the foot of the mountain clear to the south end of the island . . . . We could have made money on all of our hay, too. We shipped it to the beach there on 6th Street. We sold our hay to this guy, and he went bankrupt. We lost all our feed and all our work for one year. We got skunked."
Buster Hyder told of hauling a precious hay baler up the steep cliff only to have it slip and plunge into the water. The men rescued the baler and, with the help of a blacksmith, "straightened it out" and put it to work.
The Hyders brought about 300 sheep to Santa Barbara Island in 1915, the first known sheep to graze there, at least in many years. Alvin Hyder bought fine Rambouillet sheep from the Caires of Santa Cruz Island. The Hyder sheep were fattened and sold for meat, but in the meantime were shorn in corrals on the west side near the reservoir. Buster Hyder watered the sheep every day, taking a bucket to the reservoir and dipping water out into wooden troughs. At shipping time, the sheep were driven into wing fences, which funneled them into pens by the landing. The Hyders lowered them down to the boat ten at a time. "We'd hog tie them, load them into the sled, and then let it down the hill." After the Hyder's lease ran out, Buster returned with a herd of sheep to fatten them, living alone on the island for six months in the late 1920s.
The Hyders kept goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys and geese, often feeding them broken seagull eggs. The high winds wreaked havoc on the chickens and geese: ". . . we watched more gosh darn chickens and turkeys and our stuff blow out in that ocean-blow ‘em clear out."
The Hyder horses and mules did much of the work on the island. Horses named Dan and Charlie performed chores such as hauling the wagon, herding sheep and transporting the Hyders across the island. Charlie died after slipping and falling over a cliff during a sheep drive at Graveyard Canyon. Dan, who knew so well the routine of pulling the cart rope at the landing, died while being loaded onto the boat as the Hyders were vacating the island. The island ranch had two mules. Jack, a hard worker who hauled loads of water and rock among other things, died of a heart attack while hauling gravel from Arch Point. The Hyders left Beck, a white mule, on the island when they left, and suspected that soon fishermen had eaten the lonely mule.
In the early decades of the century, people made good money raising rabbits, marketing the meat and selling the pelts. Following the trend, the Hyders brought hundreds of pure black and pure white Belgian hares out to the island and turned them loose. At the time, feral cats roamed the island and feasted on the rabbits, as did the resident eagles. The Hyders responded by poisoning cats with strychnine-laced rabbit carcasses. Four hogs brought to the island also died from eating the poisoned rabbits, and no doubt a number of eagles died as well. Years later Buster Hyder brought hunters to the island to shoot rabbits. "They'd go up and they'd come back with just tons of rabbits. Freeze them all down and eat them later."
The amount of work on the island ranch was staggering. Alvin Hyder and his family members took care of the animals, crops, buildings, equipment, supplies and each other. Buster Hyder described his father: "The ol' man got up with a lantern and went to bed with a lantern. Eight hours was just getting' started. He worked all the time. He was a hard working man who never knew when to stop."
The Hyder lease expired in 1919 but they stayed on anyway. After seven years of hard work and frustration, they decided to leave the island in 1922. They took their twelve goats, 300 sheep, dogs and four horses to their homestead in Cuyama Valley north of Santa Barbara. Following the terms of the lease, they tore down the buildings and brought the materials to the mainland, although they failed to remove the main house. Reportedly Alvin Hyder tried to lease Santa Barbara Island for another term without success; an entrepreneur from Venice outbid him. Nevertheless, he took 250 sheep back to the island for fattening many years after their lease had run out.
In 1936 Alvin Hyder and his son Buster were loading wool on San Nicolas Island. A swell came up and rolled the boat, killing Alvin Hyder. Buster went on to run a sport fishing business out of San Pedro, founding the 22nd Street Landing. He died in 1994 at age 87 on the land his father had homesteaded in Cuyama Valley.