Two Women From Two Worlds

Traveling the difficult route along the coast in October 1869, Michael and Babara Pfeiffer were forced to winter in Big Sur and decided to stay, with their eleven-month-old daughter Julia. She grew up at their Sycamore Canyon Ranch and helped her father run it until her mid-forties. In 1915, Julia married fellow homesteader John Burns. They leased a ranch at Burns Creek and ran cattle on Saddle Rock Ranch. Julia’s niece, Ester Ewoldsen, wrote in a 1985 memoir that Julia and John lived and worked together in great contentment, sharing inside and outside chores and caring for the cattle, with Julia riding pell-mell up and down the hills while John made his way more slowly on foot or horseback. Helen Hooper Brown was an East Coast heiress who, after being orphaned at fifteen, inherited $10,0000,000. In 1911, she married Lathrop Brown, a close friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Browns purchased Saddle Rock Ranch in 1924, and the Waterfall House was completed there in 1940. During the last years of Julia’s life before her death in 1928, Julia and Helen, though from different worlds, developed a close friendship.

California · United States