Rancher’s descendant Charles Healey tells the story in new pictorial book
The last roundup of cattle takes place in 1998 at the Main Ranch on Santa Rosa Island. Author Charles Healy explores the ranching era in his new book, ““Santa Rosa Island: A Photographic Panorama.”
Windswept hillsides, ocean vistas and a personal retelling of an often overlooked piece of Santa Barbara County history await readers of a newly-released pictorial book — “Santa Rosa Island: A Photographic Panorama.”
Published under Santa Barbara-based Polyverse Publications, “Santa Rosa Island” visually recounts the history of cattle ranching on the Channel Island and its transition to a national park through the eyes of Charles Healey, the book’s author, curator and photographer.
And he’s a descendant of one of the island’s formative ranchers.
“It all starts with my great-grandfather, Charles Wesley ‘C.W.’ Smith,” Mr. Healey told the News-Press. “He was a Seneca Indian born in New York state in 1869. At the age of 12, he ran away from the orphanage he grew up in and made his way west. He runs into the Ohio River, and from there he makes this way down to New Orleans.”
After taking to the sea and working on ships for close to eight years during which he made port all around the globe, Mr. Smith landed on Santa Catalina Island in 1890 looking for a change in life. It was here that he met Walter Vail Jr., the son of a powerful Arizona cattleman and politician credited with turning ranchers into a cohesive political force in the Sunbelt state.
Finding both a friend and the chance at change he was looking for, Mr. Smith traded surf for turf and began working for Mr. Vail’s cattle ranch on Santa Catalina. Mr. Smith would later leave with him after Mr. Vail leased out the island in 1894 and returned to the family’s Empire Ranch in Arizona.
Throughout his 20 years at Empire, Mr. Smith would rise from a lowly cowpunch to the ranch’s cattle boss entrusted with running the shipping of cattle from Arizona to Kansas. He would then return to California in 1914 to take over as superintendent of the Vail & Vickers cattle operation on Santa Rosa Island, which was purchased in 1901 by Mr. Vail and his close business partner and fellow Arizona cattleman John Van “J.V.” Vickers.
What follows next over the span of nearly 100 years is the formation of a unique community created largely through the shared experiences of the families whose stories and legacies became interwoven on this small island off the coast of Santa Barbara.
Ranching on Santa Rosa would continue up until 1998, with generations of Smiths, Vails and Healeys — among others — growing up with links to the figures and stories that to them defined life on the island.
From those who grew up and lived their lives out on the island — such as the author’s grandfather — to those who later grew up visiting and making memories over their summers, nearly a century of cattle ranching on Santa Rosa Island would serve as a nexus for the beginning of generation-spanning relationships that last to this day.
“From that meeting (between C.W. Smith and Walter Vail Jr.) you get this whole group of people who otherwise would have never known each other,” Karen Healey, the author’s mother and granddaughter of C.W. Smith, told the News-Press. “You looked forward to seeing the people who went out every summer. You saw the kids of everyone you know who used to come out (when you were growing up), so the generations just kind of met each other … it’s just this small but amazing nucleus of people.”
While cattle ranching ended in the late-1990s, the island continued to be privately held for deer and elk hunting — a decades-old tradition that drew small groups to the island from all over the world. This too, however, would come to an end when the National Parks Service completed its takeover of Santa Rosa Island in 2011.
Despite the rich history contained in this chapter of the island’s past, and Mr. Healy’s encyclopedic knowledge of his family’s role in it, the author of “Santa Rosa Island” refrains from dedicating much writing to retelling the tale in full.
Rather, through photos both old and new, original and borrowed — accompanied by captions penned by a descendant of these island ranchers fueled by the written and oral history of his family — readers are instead offered a visual tour into both the intimate familial past and public present of Santa Rosa Island.
The book’s contrasting images of the island’s now-departed human inhabitation alongside those of its wild, unpopulated present capture a story of the stark reality of change slamming like ocean waves against the past.
While cowboys no longer dutifully trod across the windswept Pacific vistas of the Channel Islands, their legacy lives on in the buildings, cattle-blazed trails, and memories of those who survive them. “Santa Rosa Island: A Photographic Panorama” shares the telling of this story with readers by inviting them to peer through a uniquely personal window into the way things were, as well as the way they are now.
email: jdaniels@newspress.com
FYI
“Santa Rosa Island: A Photographic Panorama” by Charles Healey is available for purchase at select local retailers and online at polyversepublications.com.
