Hidden in O.C.'s foothills, a gnarled reminder of California's past

Wildfires destroy, but they can also reveal. For years, a monument marking the site of one of Orange County's most infamous killings sat largely obscured amid a thicket of mustard plants a hundred yards or so from the Foothill toll road.

But when the 2007 Santiago fire ripped through the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, firefighters discovered something that longtime residents of the rural area and local historians already knew.

People were lynched there.

"Under this tree," reads a plaque, "General Andres Pico Hung Two Banditos of the Flores Gang in 1857."

There are seven foreboding old sycamores in the canyon below the tollway, any of which would've made a fine impromptu gallows to dispense with the two men in a rage of vigilante justice.

"It didn't pay to be a bad guy in those days," said Dave Raetz, director of public programs for the Irvine Ranch Conservancy.

A few months ago the conservancy, which manages thousands of acres of open space in Orange County, began offering docent-led hikes to the Hangman's Tree marker, erected in 1967 by an equestrian group.

The Orange County lynching of Francisco Ardillero and Juan Catabo by a posse led by the brother of California's last Mexican governor is a footnote in a larger story of the notorious outlaw Juan Flores. His gang blazed a trail of robbery extending from Los Angeles to San Juan Capistrano before ambushing Los Angeles County Sheriff James Barton, killing him and three other lawmen.

The "Barton Massacre" and the hunt for Flores, who eventually was captured and strung up before several thousand spectators in downtown Los Angeles, became the stuff of legend.

"Immediately after the plank was drawn from under him, the body of Flores swung in the air," the Los Angeles Star reported. "The fall was too short, and the unfortunate wretch struggled in agony for a considerable time."

Ardillero and Catabo, their ears cut off and displayed as proof of their deaths, were forgotten.

California was littered with enough hanging trees, both real and rumored, to populate a small forest. Sturdy oaks and sycamores with branches plaintively reaching like outstretched arms were the preferred choice.

Most are long gone -- dead from old age and disease, removed for road-widening projects or simply lost to history.

These living monuments have often been treated with a detached whimsy rather than as sobering reminders of the state's long history of extrajudicial killing, much of which was fueled by racism.

In 1930 the developers of an upscale Hollywood neighborhood used a sycamore on the property where more than 30 people were hanged as a marketing tool to lure home buyers.