Rancho Sotoyome and Captain Henry Fitch
Near Healdsburg, California
Before there was a Healdsburg there was a rancho, and behind the rancho a love story. Henry Delano Fitch was a Yankee sea captain who fell in love with Josefa Carrillo, a daughter of a prominent California family. Because he was a foreigner, their marriage was blocked, so the couple famously eloped by ship to South America and married abroad, then returned to California.
Fitch became a Mexican citizen, and in eighteen forty one the governor granted him a vast tract along the Russian River, eight square leagues, later enlarged to roughly forty nine thousand acres. It was called Rancho Sotoyome, and it stretched across what is now Healdsburg and the Alexander Valley. Fitch never really lived on it.
He kept his business down in San Diego and planned to move north after the gold discovery. When Fitch died in eighteen forty nine, just as the gold rush flooded the region with newcomers, his widow Josefa came north with their children to claim and defend the land. She secured the United States patent confirming the grant and began selling off parcels, even as squatters poured onto the property.
The genteel Mexican rancho and the rowdy American gold rush collided right here, and Josefa Carrillo Fitch spent years fighting to hold her late husband's empire together.
