W. E. Smythe

Smythe saw farmers abandoning their land and, within sight of creeks that had carried water a year before, shoot their livestock because they couldn't prevent the beasts from dying of thirst.[1] Smythe organized a cooperative settlement called New Plymouth in Idaho and advised developers near Sacramento, California, and in Lassen County, where he founded the town of Standish.He moved to San Diego in 1902 and promptly ran unsuccessfully for Congress in the newly created Eighth District, as a Democrat, garnering 40.8 percent of the vote.This trip earned him the scorn of Harrison Gray Otis's Los Angeles Times, which wrote Investigation shows that the Imperial Water Users' Association has paid Smythe $2000 cash.[6]In 1908 he formed a corporation that bought 700 acres of the Belcher Ranch on the U.S. side of the Tijuana River, which is shared with Mexico, and immediately changed the name of the entire community to San Ysidro, after the patron saint of farmers in Spain.This was the first Little Landers colony, which attracted some 300 families to its promise.Hartranft, a Glendale, California, land developer with utopianist ideas, joined with Smythe in forming a Little Landers colony in Tujunga, just north of the Verdugo Mountains in Los Angeles County.