cattle market in collapse and besieged by mounting debts, De la Osa converted his house at Rancho Encino into a roadside inn and began to charge patrons for his legendary Californio hospitality. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 disrupted mail service to California from the east via the old southerly "oxbow route". That year, Butterfield obtained a new contract to deliver mail between Los Angeles and San Francisco via a route diverging from the old road at the southeast corner of the Valley and traveling via the former El Camino Real as far as Rancho Encino before striking northwest across the valley floor for Santa Barbara via the recently improved Santa Susana wagon road over the Santa Susana Pass. This road became the main passenger route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, although traffic over the San Fernando Pass to the Central Valley continued. Civil War years The devastation that ravaged the old rancho way of life between 1861 and 1865 had little to do with the Civil War raging to the east. The rains that started shortly before Christmas, 1861, continued for most of the following month. The flooding that followed drowned thousands of cattle and washed away fruit trees and vineyards. The Los Angeles Star reported that No mail was received at Los Angeles for five weeks. After the floods abated, grazing lands were turned into lush meadows and cattle flourished on the abundant grass. Surveyor General Edward Fitzgerald Beale had the damaged cut in the San Fernando Pass deepened to and named the slot-like roadway Beale's Cut. But the reprieve was only brief. The flood of 1861–62 was followed by severe droughts in 1863 and 1864. Cattle perished, or were slaughtered and sold for the salvage value of their hides and horn, and land values plummeted. Ravenous locusts and a major smallpox epidemic completed the devastation. The rancho economy of the Dons and the Californio way of life fell to a wave of overwhelming debt and unpaid taxes, never to rise again. After the Dons New names on the land In the decade after the Civil War, the majority of the old ranchos in the Valley changed hands. In 1867, David Burbank, a dentist and entrepreneur from Los Angeles, purchased Rancho Providencia and of the adjacent Rancho San Rafael. Burbank combined his properties into a nearly sheep ranch. That same year, De La Osa's widow