The Road To Mexico
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Walter Nordhoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 27, 1858. He studied engineering at Yale University, and from there went West to work for a time in Nevada, a record of which appears in the 1880 census. He later moved back East to take a job with the New York Herald. It was about that time that he met Sarah Cope Whitall, and soon after, on October 6th, 1885, they were married in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
They moved to England, where Walter took up assignment as London correspondent for the Herald. Sarah was pregnant, and following the latest wisdom of the times, prepared herself for motherhood by absorbing the finest classical music, reading classical literature, and taking art lessons, while lamenting the absence of a last recommended necessity; a proper garden in which to walk at their home in London. On February 1, 1887, their first son, Charles Bernard, was born.
After Charles was born, Walter was reassigned to Berlin, where the family lived in an apartment on the edge of the Tiergarten. It was here that young Charles would begin to explore an interest in the natural world, as noted by Sarah in her memoirs:
"Charlie undoubtedly began his study of water fowl, as his daily outing in a small pram or push cart led him first to the bakeries for a supply of stale buns and back to the lake to feed the ducks."
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While Walter and Sarah were living in London, Walter's father, Charles, had arranged the purchase of a large tract of land in Mexico through the Mexican International Company of Hartford. It was the Todos Santos tract in Baja California, fifty thousand acres of coastal land, just fifteen miles south of Ensenada, that included the Punta Banda Cape on its northwest corner. He paid the taxes up through 1942 and gave the land to Walter.
In Winter 1889, the young family left Berlin and sailed for Philadelphia. Soon after arrival, they moved into Overlook, the Nordhoff family summer home on the Hudson, and Walter commuted to work at the paper in New York. Finally in September 1890, they traveled to the West Coast and from there on to their land in Mexico. Of the trip Sarah wrote:
Todos Santos"How strange and wild the arrival was. The beautiful bay, Mexicans speaking Spanish, the dusty little town, the point with its very agreeable colony of English people- and the lovely long drive on the mesa through the river bottom to the ranch house on the flat...I had a very sleepy little boy of three and a half years on my lap during that rough drive, and I wondered how I should manage to make a home there where he might flourish. It was a strange experience for a young woman who only knew housekeeping in London and Berlin; to be put down in our lonely settlement...with everything to organize, sources of supply very vague and distant, little knowledge of country life and hardly any knowledge of cookery. Father was wonderful in his sureness and hope- and somehow we made a home and were fed and washed and had a good time, with little Charles the life of the place."
They called it Rancho Ramajal, the place where young Charles would grow up, surrounded by the wild splendor of nature.