USA > California > A history of California: the American period > Part 27
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Most adobes were but one story in height, although there were a few two-story houses; and it is my recollection that, in such cases, the second story was reached from the outside. Everything about such an abode was emblematic of hospitality: the doors, heavy and often apparently homemade, were wide, and the windows were deep. In private houses, the doors were locked with a key; but in some of the stores, they were fastened with a bolt fitted into iron receptacles on either side. The windows, swinging on hinges, opened inward and were locked in the center. There were few curtains or blinds; wooden shutters, an inch thick, also fastening
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in the center, being generally used instead. If there were such conveniences as hearths and fireplaces, I cannot recollect them, although I think that here and there the brasero, or pan and hot coals, was still employed. There were no chimneys, and the smoke, as from the kitchen stove, escaped through the regular stacks leading out through a pane in the window or a hole in the wall. The porches, also spoken of as verandas, and rather wide, were supported by equidistant posts; and when an abode had two stories, the veranda was also double-storied. Few if any vines grew around these verandas in early days, largely because of the high cost of water. For the same reason, there were almost no gardens."
Everything in the town was primitive-society, business, and government. The chief amusements were balls, bull fights, gambling, and horse races.2 A "Hop " at the Bella Union Hotel, which stood on Main Street above Commercial, and served as the center of social gayety, was thus described by the local editor:
"A large assemblage of elegant ladies, good music, choice re- freshments, gay gents-all that contributes to a merry meeting was there, and it was fully enjoyed."
On a similar occasion, at the home of Don Abel Stearns, the enjoyment was not quite so unalloyed; for certain un- bidden guests, apparently annoyed at their failure to receive an invitation, surrounded Don Abel's residence and fired upon the dancers. A pitched battle then ensued, in which two men were killed and two seriously wounded. The occur- rence called forth the following curiously worded comment in the next morning's Star:
"Men hack one another in pieces with pistols and other cutlery as if God's image were of no more worth than the life of one of the two or three thousand dogs that prowl about our streets."
Of the primitiveness of the courts and city government of that time there is humorous and ample evidence. Prob- ably no better illustration can be given, however, than a
2 Theatrical performances were most part were given by companies brought down from San Francisco.
later added to the list. These for the
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municipal ordinance enacted March 8, 1852, when Manuel Requena was President of the Common Council and B. D. Wilson was Mayor. It read as follows:
"All persons who may find it necessary to wash articles of any kind near the habitable portions of the city, will do it in the water canal that runs from the little river, but will be careful to place their board or washer on the outer edge of the canal by which means, although they use the water, yet the washings from the dirty articles are not permitted under any pretense to again mix with the water intended for drinking purposes.
The infraction of this ordinance will subject the delinquent to a fine, which shall not pass three dollars, at the discretion of the Mayor."
The population of Los Angeles was composed mainly of three races-Indians, Mexicans, and Americans. But the lines of social cleavage did not follow this racial division. The better class Americans and the wealthier Mexican families were closely associated in control of the city's political, business, and social life. The poorer Mexicans and a rough American element came next in the scale; while lowest of all were the Indian laborers.
Gambling dens and saloons operated without restraint, and neither San Francisco nor the worst of the mining camps furnished a more fertile field for vice than Los Angeles. A short street, leading from the Plaza to Aliso Street, and known to fame as Calle de Los Negros, or Nigger Alley, constituted the center of the city's wickedness. The only houses on it were brothels, saloons, and gambling halls. Murder and robbery were of almost nightly occurrence in this notoriously evil street; but no one ever thought of bringing the criminals to justice.
The Indian laborers came to town each Saturday night to spend their weeks' pay for liquor, or to lose it in any one of a number of equally unfruitful ways. How many of these poor unfortunates were murdered in the dives of Nigger Alley, or died in drunken brawls, or perished as a result of unbridled debauchery and poisoned drink cannot be known. But one has only to read the brief newspaper notices of
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such deaths by violence and disease to understand the rapid disappearance of the Indian population from Los Angeles county. It is one of the tragic episodes in California history.
Crime and violence, however, were not confined to Nigger Alley, or indulged in solely at the expense of the hapless Indians. For the whole of Southern California, like the rest of the state, suffered seriously from lawlessness and dis- order during these rough years of adjustment and changing conditions. "Human life at this period was about the cheapest thing in Los Angeles," says one who lived through this exciting period. Murder and robbery were the common- est of the major crimes and were due in large part to drunk- enness, the universal practice of carrying arms, and the general unsettled state of society.
A definite criminal element, consisting chiefly of renegade Mexicans, also existed in Los Angeles, and after the first Vigilante movement in San Francisco this class received considerable reënforcement from the undesirables driven down out of the north. The law, unfortunately, did little to punish even the most notorious offenders, with the inevitable results that always follow such a failure. Crime increased at such an alarming rate that the people them- selves undertook at last to administer justice with the hangman's noose.
The Star of September 27, 1851, printed this pointed interrogation,
"During the past year no less than thirty-one murders have been committed in the city of Los Angeles and its vicinity and who today can name one instance in which a murderer has been punished?"
Two weeks later the same editor published the following indictment of the county officials:
"The Deputy Sheriff has handed us a list of forty four homi- cides which have been committed in this county within the last fifteen months. . .. With very few exceptions, the perpetrators of the murders remain undiscovered. No person has been con- victed, and if we are correctly informed, there has been but one
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person tried for murder since the county was organized and the defendant was acquitted."
Prisoners confined in the city jail were nearly always able to escape with the aid of friends or through connivance of the guard. And in the case of at least one notorious criminal, a Mexican named Camarillo, the obliging jailer himself furnished the necessary tools with which the prisoner dug his way to freedom. Such conditions could not long be endured by the respectable citizens of the county. So, in 1852, when a prominent American named Bean was held up and murdered not far from San Gabriel, a Citizen's Committee took the punishment of the criminals into their own hands, and shortly afterward hanged three men sus- pected of the act. Later, the Committee expressed some regret when they discovered that one of these was innocent.
Many of the most atrocious crimes, during the first few years of the decade, were committed by regularly organized bands of desperadoes, most of which were Mexican in mem- bership. One of the earliest of these bandit organizations was that led by Salomon Pico. Beginning its operations in 1851, this band for months terrorized the highways and smaller settlements within a radius of several hundred miles of Los Angeles. A little later, the famous Joaquin Murietta, of whom fiction and romance have made a sort of California Robin Hood, began to favor Southern California, as well as the Sierra mining camps, with his attentions.
So dangerous did this young Mexican and his cut-throat followers ultimately become, that the Committee on Mili- tary Affairs of the State Legislature voted a reward of $5,000 for his capture dead or alive. A minority of the committee, however, objected to the reward on the ground that it "might tempt unscrupulous and unprincipled men to palm off by purchased evidence the head of another for that of Joaquin, and thus defraud the state treasury." "Besides," the objection continued, "the danger of mistaking the identity of individuals in this country is very common."
The $5,000 reward, however, was at last offered; and
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after an unparalleled career of daring and crime, covering almost the entire state, Murietta was run to earth and killed near the Tejon Pass by a small company of rangers under com- mand of Captain Love. Murietta's head, and the hand of one of his chief lieutenants, called "Three Fingered Jack," were pickled in alcohol for purposes of identification, and afterwards auctioned off at a sheriff's sale for $36. The relics were eventually sold for $100 to a merchant known as Natches, who, "having sold a great many revolvers in the life time of the bandit for his destruction," now proposed to use the head as a drawing card in his show window.
The year 1854 was one of the worst in the criminal annals of the south. Los Angeles City alone, it is said, averaged one homicide a day for every day of the year. The citizens organized a company of rangers under command of A. W. Hope, and set to work to remedy the intolerable situation. As a result of their activities,
"the gallows tree on Fort Hill bore gruesome fruit and the beams over corral gates were sometimes festooned with the hangman's noose. In less than a year twenty-two criminals, bandits, mur- derers and thieves, were hung in accordance with the law or with- out the law, whichever was most convenient, or most expeditious; and more than twice that number expatriated themselves for the country's good and their own."
Yet despite such heroic measures, the two years succeed- ing showed little, if any, improvement over 1854. The Southern Californian of March 7, 1855, carried this brief notice, "Last Sunday night was a brisk night for killing. Four men were shot and killed and several wounded in a shooting affray." Roads were unsafe because of regularly organized companies of highwaymen, who robbed and murdered almost at will. Chief of these was a band of Mexicans, fully a hundred in number, led by Juan Flores and Pancho Daniel. For more than a year this band oper- ated almost unmolested.
In January, 1857, Sheriff James R. Barton of Los Angeles set out with a small posse to arrest certain of the Flores-
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Daniel bandits, who had murdered a storekeeper at San Juan Capistrano. Though warned against an ambuscade, Barton and his men were trapped by the outlaws, and all but two of their number killed. This so aroused public sentiment that at least 200 men, including a large company of native Californians led by Andrés Pico, set out to break
up the band. A number of the outlaws were killed out- right. Some were captured and hanged on the spot. At least fifty-two others were lodged in the Los Angeles jail. Eleven of these, among whom was the twenty-two year old Juan Flores himself, were later executed. Pancho Daniel temporarily escaped the fate of his companions; but he was later arrested near San José and after some delays hanged by outraged citizens.
Another menace to life and property was the frequent Indian raids with which the southern ranches were threat- ened during the pioneer fifties. Crossing from the Colorado River, bands of these marauders slipped through the Cajon Pass and drove off the cattle and horses of the Mormons at San Bernardino. Settlers were frequently killed in these attacks, and more than once the little colony was in danger of being exterminated. Other bands of Pah-Utes made a specialty of stealing horses from the large ranches nearer Los Angeles. The stolen animals were driven back into the desert or mountainous regions east of the Sierras where they were killed and eaten, in keeping with the custom of the Horse-Thief Indians of the San Joaquin in earlier days.
A small tribe, inhabiting the mountains between Owen's Lake and the headwaters of the Kern, were especially active in these depredations, and won for themselves an evil reputation among the harassed ranchers. So severe became the losses from this source that in the month of March, 1853, Pío Pico alone lost 500 horses from his Santa Margarita ranch. Posses of course were organized to pur- sue the raiders, and in some cases a large number of the stolen animals were recovered. Pitched battles often occurred; and though the Indians generally suffered severely in these encounters, the pursuing party seldom came off unharmed.
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In 1856 an ominous riot, commonly spoken of as the Great Mob, broke out in Los Angeles and threatened to develop into a serious race war between the turbulent Mexican element of the population and the American resi- dents, who had organized a Vigilance, or Citizen's Committee to check the growth of crime. The trouble arose over the killing of a Mexican prisoner by a deputy constable named Jenkins. An angry crowd of Californians and Mexicans gathered on the hill behind the Plaza Church, and as the marshal was seeking to reconnoiter their position with a handful of men, shot him to death. The mob then marched to the Plaza, but broke up before the Citizen's Committee attempted to disperse them. The situation for a time, however, seemed so grave that the Americans in Los Angeles sent an appeal to El Monte for aid. Thirty-six men were sent by this little community as reinforcements. The city remained under guard for several days, during which time the most intense excitement prevailed.
The year 1856, described by the Pacific Sentinel as a "strange, curious, excitable, volcanic, hot, windy, dusty, thirsty, murdering, bloody, lynching, robbing, thieving sea- son," and the early months of 1857, seem to have marked the climax of lawlessness and crime in Southern California. Yet the successful enforcement of law and the orderly functioning of the courts came but slowly; and as late as 1863, seven men, one of whom alone was known to have killed six per- sons, were lynched in Los Angeles during a single month. As was remarked elsewhere in this chapter, during these early years social conditions in Los Angeles were extremely primi- tive. In this they were typical of all Southern California.
Business life in the fifties was conducted in much the same leisurely fashion that had characterized the old days when Los Angeles was a Mexican pueblo. The city, with an abundance of land inherited from the original grant of the Spanish Crown, sought for two years with poor success to dispose of thirty-five acre tracts, in what is now the main business section, at the exorbitant price of a dollar an acre! The Plaza, as in the period of Spanish-Mexican rule, still
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remained the center of civic activities. From it radiated most of the principal business and residential streets of the little pueblo. These were unpaved, poorly lighted at night, and filled with all manner of unsightly rubbish. The city's water supply came from the Los Angeles River in an open ditch, or zanja; and on its course through the town collected impurities of every kind.
There were no banks in the town, and much of the small change in circulation was of foreign origin. Merchants generally closed their shops during the slack hours of the day, either to go home for meals or to indulge in a friendly game of cards with some competitor.
" To provide a substitute for a table, in these games," wrote one of the contemporaries of that day, " the window sill of the thick adobe wall was used, the visitor seating himself on a box or barrel on the outside, while the host within at the window would make himself equally comfortable."
Much of the business of the merchants was done with the better class native families who lived on the ranches surrounding the pueblo. Travel was still largely on horse- back or by the old solid wheel ox-carts known as carretas. The picturesque arrival of one of these lumbering vehicles is thus described by a pioneer chronicler:
"This sharp squeaking of the carreta, however, while penetrating and disagreeable in the extreme, served a purpose, after all, as the signal that a buyer was approaching town; for the vehicle was likely to have on board one or even two good-sized families of women and children, and the keenest expectation of our little business world was consequently aroused, bringing merchants and clerks to the front of their stores. A couple of oxen, by means of ropes attached to their horns, pulled the carretas, while the men accompanied their families on horseback; and as the roving oxen were inclined to leave the road, one of the riders (wielding a long, pointed stick) was kept busy moving from side to side, prodding the wandering animals and thus holding them to the highway. Following these carretas, there were always from twenty-five to fifty dogs, barking and howling as if mad.
"Some of the carretas had awnings and other tasteful trimmings,
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and those who could afford it spent a great deal of money on saddles and bridles. Each caballero was supplied with a reata (sometimes locally misspelled riata) or leathern rope, one end of which was tied around the neck of the horse while the other- coiled and tied to the saddle when not in use-was held by the horseman when he went into a house or store; for hitching posts were unknown, with the natural result that there were many run- aways. When necessary, the reata was lowered to the level of the ground, to accommodate passers-by. Riders were always provided with one or two pistols, to say nothing of the knife which was frequently a part of the armament; and I have seen even sabers suspended from the saddles."
With the exception of Los Angeles, there were few towns of any importance south of Monterey. San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara were but little changed, either in popu- lation or in any other particular, from the days of the old California régime. San Diego, even with her remarkable natural harbor, grew but slowly. Aside from a premature attempt by William Heath Davis to move the town to its present site,3 and occasional Indian attacks on nearby ranches there was little to record in the city's annals. The prospect of a Pacific Railroad, so often predicted and so long postponed, brought about momentary bursts of excite- ment; but otherwise business and life went on their unhurried and uneventful way.
Nearer Los Angeles, three new communities were estab- lished before 1860. The first of these was founded by a Mormon colony in 1851 on a tract of land not far from the Cajon Pass. The town, laid out somewhat like the City of Salt Lake, was divided into eight acre blocks, with open irrigating ditches running parallel with the streets. The settlement was called San Bernardino, and soon grew to be a thriving agricultural center. The town was also important because of the strategic position it occupied relative to the overland trade with Salt Lake.
3 This was in 1850. At one time there were really three San Diegos- Old Town, Middle Town, and New Town. The last named, where
Davis built his wharf and attempted to found a city, is the site of the modern San Diego.
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About the same time that San Bernardino was founded, a company of Texans established themselves on the east bank of the San Gabriel River, some twelve miles from Los Angeles. The settlement was known as Monte or El Monte. It never grew to large size; but its inhabitants very early acquired an enviable reputation for success in agriculture, unanimous loyalty to the Democratic Party, and an enthu- siastic readiness to hang suspected criminals.
In 1857 a German settlement known as Anaheim was established about twenty-five miles southeast of Los Angeles, on a large tract of land lying close to the Santa Anna River, from which the colony derived its water for irrigation.
" The colonists," says one writer, " were a curious mixture-two or three carpenters, four blacksmiths, three watchmakers, a brewer, an engraver, a shoemaker, a poet, a miller, a bookbinder, two or three merchants, a hatter, and a musician."
But in spite of this medley of professions, the colony flour- ished almost from the beginning; and for many years its name was almost a synonym for prosperity and industry through- out the south.
CHAPTER XXII
CALIFORNIA AND SONORA: THE DAY OF THE FILIBUSTER
THE annexation of California and New Mexico in 1848 represented only a partial realization of the territorial ambitions of American expansionists. During the negotia- tion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a vigorous party had sought the acquisition of the whole of Mexico, and a somewhat more conservative group had urged the absorption of the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Lower California.1 The American expansionists did not imme- diately abandon their ambitions with the ratification of the treaty. Rather, they looked upon the boundary fixed by that agreement as only a temporary stopping place in the southward progress of the United States. Manifest Destiny still called for the further extension of American democracy, American institutions, and American rule.
Conditions in Mexico after 1848 were also such as to invite interference from the outside. The central govern- ment was torn by frequent revolutions, chronically bank- rupt, and on the verge of anarchy. So hopeless was the outlook that thoughtful American and European observers generally agreed that some form of foreign intervention could alone prevent the complete disintegration of the nation.2
Conditions in the frontier provinces of northern Mexico were especially the object of American concern during these years. Almost abandoned by the federal government, distracted by factional struggles for the control of local
1 It is highly probable that only the political rivalries and the dispute over slavery, in which American politics were then involved, prevented the annexation of these four states.
2 As an illustration of this attitude, Senator Houston of Texas proposed
to the 34th Congress the establish- ment of a United States protectorate over Mexico. The object of this measure, as he said, "was not to increase our dominions but to im- prove our neighborhood."
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offices, harassed and kept in constant dread by Indian forays, the inhabitants of these outlying states were ready for almost any change that promised security and peace. The extension of American control over the sparsely settled and harassed territory across the border was not the most illogical method of solving its many problems. The view of many Americans toward these Mexican border states was clearly set forth in 1848 by an American physician attached to Colonel Doniphan's expedition. In his Memoir of a Tour, Dr. Wislizenus wrote:
"The greatest part of this territory has never been occupied or even explored by the Mexicans, and the thin population in the settled parts of it proves that they never had put great value upon it. The greater inducements which the South of Mexico offered on account of mines, climate, commerce, etc., have concentrated there the seven or eight millions of inhabitants that compose the Mexican nation, allowing but a small portion of them for the northern provinces. One half of this northern territory may in fact be a desert, and entirely worthless for agriculture; but to a great commercial nation like the United States, with new States springing up on the Pacific, it will nevertheless be valuable for the new connections that it would open with the Pacific, for the great mineral resources of the country, and for its peculiar adaptation for stock-raising. Mexico itself would lose very little by the States composing this territory, as they always have been more a burden to it than a source of revenue. All the connection which heretofore has existed between Mexico and those States, was, that the general government taxed them as highly as they would submit to, which never was very great, and dragged them as far as possible into the revolutionary vortex in which the South of Mexico was constantly whirling; but it never afforded them any protection against hostile Indians; never stopped their internal strifes, or never promoted the spread of intellect or industry-in short, it heaped, instead of blessing, all the curses of the worst kind of government upon them.
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