XXII. DROUGHTS--THE ADA HANCOCK DISASTER
1862-1863
On the first of January, 1862, after an experience of about five years, I retired from the selling of clothing, which was never congenial to me; and as I had been buying hides and wool on a small scale since the middle of the fifties, I forthwith devoted myself to the commission business. Frenchmen from the Basque country, among whom were Miguel Leonis, Gaston Oxarart, Domingo Amestoy and Domingo Bastanchury, had commenced to appear here in 1858 and to raise sheep; so that in 1859 large flocks were brought into Southern California, the sheep commanding a price of three dollars and a half per head. My own operations, exceedingly small in the beginning, increased in importance, and by 1862 I was fairly equipped for this venture. Corn, barley and wheat were also then being raised, and I busied myself with these commodities as well.
Most of the early sheepmen prospered and in time bought large tracts of land for their flocks, and with all of them I had dealings of more or less importance. Amestoy's career is worthy of particular mention as exemplifying the three cardinal virtues of business: honesty, application and frugality. He and his wife took in washing; and while the husband went from house to house, leading a horse with a large basket strapped to either side, to collect and deliver the clothes, the wife toiled at the tub. In the end, what they together had saved became the foundation of their important investments in sheep and land. Pedro Larronde, another early sheepman, married the widow of his Basque fellow-countryman, Etchemendy, the tippling baker.
Having regularly established a commission business, I brought consignments of varied merchandise from San Francisco on the semi-monthly steamer Goliah, whose Captain at one time was Robert Haley, and at another his brother Salisbury Haley, a brother-in-law of Tom Mott; and I disposed of them to small dealers with whom I thus became pretty well acquainted. These consignments were sold almost as soon as they arrived. I was careful to bring in only staple articles in the grocery line, and it was long before I appreciated the advantage of carrying sufficient stock to supply a regular demand. On the return trips of the steamer to San Francisco I forwarded such produce as I had accumulated.
I do not recall any important changes in 1862, the declining months of which saw the beginning of the two years' devastating drought. The Civil War was in progress, but we were so far from the scene of strife that we were not materially affected. Sympathy was very general here for the Confederate cause, and the Government therefore retained in Wilmington both troops and clerks who were paid in a badly-depreciated currency, which they were obliged to discount at exorbitant rates, to get money at all; while other employees had to accept vouchers which were subject to a still greater discount. Notwithstanding these difficulties, however, pay-day increased the resources of the pueblo considerably.
Hellman & Brother, a partnership consisting of I. M. and Samuel Hellman, dissolved, on January 2d, I. M. continuing in the dry goods business while Sam took the books and stationery. Another brother and associate, H. M. Hellman, a couple of years before had returned to Europe, where he died. If my memory is accurate, I. W. remained with I. M. Hellman until the former, in 1865, bought out A. Portugal. Samuel A. Widney, who later had a curio store, was for a while with Sam Hellman in a partnership known as Hellman & Widney.
On January 17th, Don Louis Vignes passed away in Los Angeles, at the age of ninety-one years.
January also witnessed one of those typical scenes, in the fitting out of a mule- and wagon-train, never likely to be seen in Los Angeles again. Two hundred wagons and twelve hundred mules, mostly brought from San Francisco on steamers, were assembled for a trip across the desert to convey Government stores.
M. J. Newmark became a partner, on February 1st, in the firm of Howard, Butterworth & Newmark, Federal and State Attorneys with offices in the Temple Building, Los Angeles, and Armory Hall, San Francisco; and it was considered at the time a rapid advance for a man of but twenty-three years of age. The Los Angeles Star of that date, in fact, added a word of good fellowship: "We congratulate friend Newmark on the association."
The intimate relations characteristic of a small community such as ours, and the much more general effect then than nowadays of any tragical occurrence have already been described. Deep sympathy was therefore awakened, early in February, on the arrival of the steamer Senator and the rapid dissemination of the report that Dr. Thomas Foster, the ex-Mayor, had been lost overboard, on January 29th, on the boat's trip northward. Just what happened to Foster will never be known; in San Francisco it was reported that he had thrown himself into the sea, though others who knew him well looked upon the cause of his death as accidental.
But slight attention was paid to the report, brought in by horsemen from San Bernardino on February 4th, that an earthquake had occurred there in the morning, until Captain Tom Seeley returned with the Senator to San Pedro and told about a seismic disturbance at sea, during which he struck the wildest storm off Point Concepción, in all his sea-faring experience. Sailors were then better all-round seamen than now; yet there was greater superstition in Jack Tar's mind, and such a storm made a deep impression upon his imagination.
I have alluded to the dependence of Los Angeles on the outside world, no better evidence of which, perhaps, can be cited than that on the twenty-second of February, George W. Chapin & Company of San Francisco advertised here to furnish servants and other help to anyone in the Southland. About the same time, San Bernardino parties, wishing to bore a little artesian well, had to send to the Northern metropolis for the necessary machinery.
In October, 1860, as I have intimated, Phineas Banning took A. F. Hinchman into partnership, the firm being known as Banning & Hinchman, and they seemed to prosper; but on February 12th, 1862, the public was surprised at the announcement of the firm's dissolution. Banning continued as proprietor, and Hinchman became Banning's Los Angeles agent.
Although cattle-raising was the mainstay of Southern California for many years, and gold-mining never played a very important part here, Wells Fargo & Co., during the spring, frequently shipped thousands of dollars' worth of gold at a time, gathered from Santa Anita, San Gabriel and San Fernando placers, while probably an equally large amount was forwarded out through other channels.
I have already pointed to the clever foresight shown by Abel Stearns when he built the Arcadia Block and profited by the unhappy experience of others, with rain that flooded their property; but I have not stated that in elevating his new building considerably above the grade of the street, somewhat regardless of the rights of others, he caused the surplus water to run off into neighboring streets and buildings. Following the great storm of 1861-62, the City sued Stearns for damages, but he won his case. More than that, the overflow was a Godsend to him, for it induced a number of people to move from Mellus's Row to Arcadia Block at a time when the owner of vast ranches and some of the best town property was already feeling the pinch of the alternate dry and over-wet seasons. The fact is, as I shall soon make clear, that before Stearns had seen the end of two or three successive dry seasons yet to come, he was temporarily bankrupt and embarrassed to the utmost.
By April, the walls and roof for the little Protestant Church at Temple and New High streets had been built, and there the matter rested for two years, when the structure, on which the taxes were unpaid, was advertised for sale.
We have seen that the first Jewish services here were held soon after the arrival of Joseph Newmark in 1854; under the same disadvantageous conditions as had hampered the Protestant denominations, Mr. Newmark volunteered to officiate on the principal holidays until 1862, when the Reverend Abraham Wolf Edelman arrived. Born at Warsaw in 1832, Rabbi Edelman came to America in 1851, immediately after he was married to Miss Hannah Pessah Cohn, and settled successively in New York, Paterson and Buffalo. Coming to California in 1859, he resided in San Francisco until 1862, when he was chosen Rabbi of the orthodox Congregation B'nai B'rith of Los Angeles, and soon attained distinction as a Talmudic scholar and a preacher. The first services under Rabbi Edelman were held in Stearns's, or Arcadia Hall; next, the Congregation worshipped in Leck's Hall on Main Street between Second and Third; and finally, through the courtesy of Judge Ygnácio Sepúlveda, the court room was used. In 1873 the Jews of Los Angeles erected their first synagogue, a brick building entered by a steep stairway leading to a platform, and located on the east side of Fort Street between Second and Third, on what is now the site of the Copp Building next to the City Hall. In 1886, when local Jewry instituted a much more liberal ritual, Rabbi Edelman's convictions induced him to resign. The purchase of a lot for a home on the corner of Sixth and Main streets proved a fortunate investment, later enabling him to enjoy a well-deserved comfort and to gratify his charitable inclinations. It is a strange coincidence that Reverend Edelman's first marriage ceremony was that which blessed Samuel Prager; while the last occasion on which he performed the solemn rites for the dead--shortly before his own death in 1907--was for the same friend. A. M. Edelman, the architect, and Dr. D. W. Edelman, both well-known here, are sons of the Rabbi.
As late in the season as April, hail and snow fell in and near Los Angeles. To the North of the city, the white mantle quite hid the mountains and formed a new and lower snow-line; while within the city, the temperature so lowered that at several intervals during the day, huge hail-stones beat against the window-panes--a very unusual experience for Angeleños.
Because of political charges preferred against A. J. King, then Under Sheriff of the County, the latter, on April 10th, was arrested by Henry D. Barrows, United States Marshal, who had been appointed by President Lincoln, the year previous. Colonel Carleton, Commander of the Southern Military Division, however, soon liberated King. On the last day of the year, the Under Sheriff married the estimable Miss Laura C. Evertsen.
Travelers to Europe have often suffered much annoyance through safe-conduct regulations, but seldom have Americans had their liberty thus restricted by their own authorities. Toward the middle of June, word was received in Los Angeles that, owing to the suspicion lest disloyalists were embarking for Aspinwall, all passengers for California via the Isthmus would be required to take out passports.
Anticipating, by forty years or more, Luther Burbank's work, attention was directed, as early as 1862, to the possibility of eating the cactus and thus finding, in this half-despised plant of the desert, relief from both hunger and thirst. Half a century later, in 1913, Los Angeles established the cactus candy industry through which the boiled pulp of the bisnaga, often spoken of as the fishhook, barrel and nigger-head variety, is made deliciously palatable when siruped from ten to thirty days.
Ygnácio Sepúlveda, declared by the Los Angeles Star "a young gentleman of liberal education, and good, natural endowments, already versed in legal studies," on September 6th was admitted to the District Court Bar.
On January 18th, 1860, the first number of the Semi-Weekly Southern News appeared, containing advertisements in both English and Spanish. It was issued by C. R. Conway and Alonzo Waite, who charged twenty-five cents a copy, or seven dollars a year. On October 8th, 1862, the title was changed to the Los Angeles Semi-Weekly News.
In 1860, the Bella Union, as I have said, was under the management of John King, who came here in 1856; while in 1861 J. B. Winston & Company, who were represented by Henry Reed, controlled the hotel. In 1862 or 1863, John King and Henry Hammel were the managers.
I have told of the purchase of the San Pasqual rancho by Dr. J. S. Griffin. On December 11th, Dr. and Mrs. Griffin for five hundred dollars sold to B. D. Wilson and wife some six hundred and forty acres of that property; and a few hours afterward the Wilsons disposed of two hundred and sixty-two acres for one thousand dollars. The purchaser was Mrs. Eliza G. Johnston, wife of General Albert Sidney Johnston. Mrs. Johnston at once built a neat residence on the tract and called it Fair Oaks, after the plantation in Virginia on which she had been born; and from this circumstance the name of the now well-known Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena is derived. At the time of her purchase Mrs. Johnston had hoped to reside there permanently; but the tragic fate of her son in the Ada Hancock disaster, following the untimely death of her husband at Shiloh, and the apparent uselessness of the land, led her to sell to Judge B. S. Eaton what to-day would be worth far more than thousands of acres in many parts of the Southern States. A curious coincidence in the relations of General Sumner, who superseded General Johnston, to the hero of Shiloh is that, later in the War, Sumner led a corps of Union troops at Fair Oaks, Virginia!
Don Ygnácio Coronel, father of António Franco Coronel, and the early school patron to whom I have referred, died in Los Angeles on December 19th, aged seventy years. He had come to California in 1834, and had long been eminent in political councils and social circles. I recall him as a man of strong intellect and sterling character, kind-hearted and popular.
Another effort, without success, to use camels for transportation over the California and adjacent sands, was made in January, 1863, when a camel express was sent out from New San Pedro to Tucson.
Elsewhere I have indicated the condition of the public cemetery. While an adobe wall enclosed the Roman Catholic burial-place, and a brick wall surrounded the Jewish resting-place for the dead, nothing was done until 1863 to improve the Protestant cemetery, although desecration went so far that the little railing around the grave of poor Mrs. Leck, the grocer's wife who had been murdered, was torn down and burned. Finally, the matter cried to Heaven so audibly that in January, Los Angeles Masons appropriated one hundred and fifty dollars, to be added to some five hundred dollars raised by popular subscription; and the Common Council having appointed a committee to supervise the work, William H. Perry put up the fence, making no charge for his services.
About the middle of January word was received in Los Angeles of the death, at Baltimore, of Colonel B. L. Beall, commander for years of the Fort Tejón garrison, and active in the Mojave and Kern River campaigns.
Death entered our home for the first time, when an infant daughter, less than a month old, died this year on February 14th.
In February, the editor of the News advised the experiment of growing cotton as an additional activity for the Colorado Indians, who were already cultivating corn, beans and melons. Whether this suggestion led William Workman into cotton culture, I do not know; at any rate, late in November of the same year F. P. F. Temple was exhibiting about town some well-matured bolls of cotton raised on Workman's ranch, and the next spring saw in El Monte a number of fields planted with cotton seed. A year later, J. Moerenhout sent Los Angeles cotton to an exhibition in France, and received from across the water official assurance that the French judges regarded our product as quite equal to that grown in the Southern States. This gave a slight impetus to cotton-culture here and by January, 1865, a number of immigrants had arrived, looking for suitable land for the production of this staple. They soon went to work, and in August of that year many fields gave promise of good crops, far exceeding the expectations of the experimenters.
In the month of March a lively agitation on behalf of a railroad began in the public press, and some bitter things were said against those who, for the sake of a little trade in horses or draying, were opposed to such a forward step; and under the leadership of E. J. C. Kewen and J. A. Watson, our Assemblymen at that session, the Legislature of 1863 passed an act authorizing the construction of the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad. A public meeting was called to discuss the details and to further the project; but once more no railroad was built or even begun. Strange as it seems, the idea of a railroad for Los Angeles County in 1863 was much too advanced for the times.
Billed as one who had "had the honor of appearing before King William IV. and all the principal crowned heads of Europe," Professor Courtier held forth with an exhibition of magic in the Temple Theatre; drawing the usual crowd of--royalty-haters!
In 1863, Santa Catalina was the scene of a gold-mining boom which soon came to naught, and through an odd enough occurrence. About April, Martin M. Kimberly and Daniel E. Way staked out a claim or two, and some miners agreed on a code of laws for operations in what was to be known as the San Pedro Mining District, the boundaries of which were to include all the islands of the County. Extensive claims, chiefly in Cherry and Joly valleys and on Mineral Hill, were recorded, and streets were laid out for a town to be known as Queen City; but just as the boom seemed likely to mature, the National Government stepped in and gave a quietus to the whole affair. With or without foundation, reports had reached the Federal authorities that the movement was but a cloak to establish there well-fortified Confederate headquarters for the fitting out and repair of privateers intended to prey upon the coast-wise traders; and on February 5th, 1864, Captain B. R. West, commanding the Fourth California Infantry, ordered practically all of the miners and prospectors to leave the island at once. The following September the National troops were withdrawn, and after the War the Federal authorities retained control of a point on the island deemed serviceable for lighthouse purposes.
In the spring of 1863, feeling ill, I went to San Francisco to consult Dr. Toland, who assured me that there was nothing serious the matter with me; but wishing to satisfy myself more thoroughly, I resorted to the same means that I dare say many others have adopted--a medical examination for life insurance! Bernhard Gattel, general agent of the Germania Life Insurance Company, at 315 Montgomery Street, wrote out my application; and on March 20th, a policy, numbered 1472, was issued, making me, since the fall of 1913, the oldest living policy-holder in the Southwest, and the twentieth oldest of the Germania's patrons in the world.
Californians, during that period of the War when the North was suffering a series of defeats, had little use for greenbacks. At one time, a dollar in currency was worth but thirty-five cents, though early in April it was accepted at sixty-five, late in August at ninety, and about the first of October at seventy-five cents; even interest-bearing gold notes being worth no more. This condition of the money market saw little change until some time in the seventies; and throughout the War greenbacks were handled like any other commodity. Frank Lecouvreur, in one of these periods, after getting judgment in a suit against Deputy Surveyor William Moore, for civil engineering services, and being paid some three hundred and eighty-three dollars in greenbacks, was disconcerted enough when he found that his currency would command but one hundred and eighty dollars in gold. San Francisco merchants realized fortunes when a decline occurred, as they bought their merchandise in the East for greenbacks and sold it on the Coast for gold. Los Angeles people, on the other hand, enjoyed no such benefit, as they brought their wares from San Francisco and were therefore obliged to liquidate in specie.
Among the worst tragedies in the early annals of Los Angeles, and by far the most dramatic, was the disaster on April 27th to the little steamer Ada Hancock. While on a second trip, in the harbor of San Pedro, to transfer to the Senator the remainder of the passengers bound for the North, the vessel careened, admitting cold water to the engine-room and exploding the boiler with such force that the boat was demolished to the water's edge; fragments being found on an island even half to three-quarters of a mile away. Such was the intensity of the blast and the area of the devastation that, of the fifty-three or more passengers known to have been on board, twenty-six at least perished. Fortunate indeed were those, including Phineas Banning, the owner, who survived with minor injuries, after being hurled many feet into the air. Among the dead were Thomas W. Seeley, Captain of the Senator; Joseph Bryant, Captain of the Ada Hancock; Dr. H. R. Myles, the druggist, who had been in partnership, opposite the Bella Union, with Dr. J. C. Welch, an arrival of the early fifties who died in 1869; Thomas H. Workman, Banning's chief clerk; Albert Sidney Johnston, Jr.; William T. B. Sanford, once Postmaster; Louis Schlesinger and William Ritchie, Wells Fargo's messenger, to whom was entrusted ten thousand dollars, which, as far as my memory goes, was lost. Two Mormon missionaries, en route to the Sandwich Islands, were also killed. Still another, who lost not only his treasure but his life, was Fred E. Kerlin of Fort Tejón: thirty thousand dollars which he carried with him, in greenbacks, disappeared as mysteriously as did the jewelry on the persons of others, and from these circumstances it was concluded that, even in the presence of Death, these bodies had been speedily robbed. Mrs. Banning and her mother, Mrs. Sanford, and a daughter of B. D. Wilson were among the wounded; while Miss M. Hereford, Mrs. Wilson's sister and the fiancée of Dr. Myles, was so severely injured that, after long suffering, she also died. Although the accident had happened about five o'clock in the afternoon, the awful news, casting a general and indescribable gloom, was not received in town until nearly eight o'clock; when Drs. Griffin and R. T. Hayes, together with an Army surgeon named Todd, hastened in carriages to the harbor where soldiers from Camp Drum had already asserted their authority. Many of the victims were buried near the beach at New San Pedro. While I was calling upon Mrs. Johnston to express my sympathy, the body of her son was brought in; and words cannot describe the pathos of the scene when she addressed the departed as if he were but asleep.
In June the Government demanded a formal profession of loyalty from teachers, when Miss Mary Hoyt and Miss Eliza Madigan took the oath, but Mrs. Thomas Foster and William McKee refused to do so. The incident provoked bitter criticism, and nothing being done to punish the recalcitrants, the Los Angeles Board of Education was charged with indifference as to the allegiance of its public servants.
During 1863 sectional feeling had grown so bitter on account of the War that no attempt was made to celebrate the Fourth of July in town. At Fort Latham, however, on the Ballona Ranch, the soldiers observed the day with an appropriate demonstration. By the end of July, troops had been sent from Drum Barracks to camp in the city--for the protection, so it was asserted, of Union men whose lives were said to be in danger, although some people claimed that this movement was rather for the purpose of intimidating certain leaders with known sympathy for the South. This military display gave Northerners more backbone; and on the twenty-sixth of September a Union mass-meeting was held on Main Street in front of the Lafayette Hotel.
Eldridge Edwards Hewitt, a Mexican War veteran who came to California in 1849 to search for gold, arrived in Los Angeles on July 31st and soon went on a wild-goose chase to the Weaver Diggings in Arizona, actually tramping with luggage over five hundred miles of the way! After his return, he did odd jobs for his board, working in a stationery and toy store on Main Street, kept by the Goldwater Brothers, Joe and Mike, who had arrived in the early sixties; and later he entered the employ of Phineas Banning at Wilmington, with whom he remained until the completion of the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad in 1870, when he became its Superintendent. When the Southern Pacific obtained control of that road in 1873, Hewitt was made Agent, and after the extension of the line from San Francisco he was appointed Division Superintendent. In that capacity he brought Senator Leland Stanford to me, as I shall elsewhere relate, to solicit H. Newmark and Company's patronage.
It was in 1863 that Dr. J. S. Griffin, father of East Los Angeles, purchased two thousand acres in that section, at fifty cents an acre; but even at that price he was only induced to buy it by necessity. Griffin wanted sheep-pasture, and had sought to secure some eight hundred acres of City land along the river; but as this would prevent other cattle or sheep from approaching the water to drink, the Common Council refused Griffin's bid on the smaller area of land and he was compelled to buy the mesa farther back. It seems to me that B. D. Wilson, J. G. Downey and Hancock M. Johnston, General Johnston's son, also had something to do with this transaction. Both Downey and Griffin avenues derived their names from the association of these two gentlemen with that section.
A smallpox epidemic which had started in the previous fall spread through Los Angeles in 1863, and owing possibly to the bad sanitary and climatic conditions much vigilance and time were required to eradicate it; compulsory vaccination not having been introduced (as it finally was at the suggestion of Dr. Walter Lindley) until the summer of 1876. The dread disease worked its ravages especially among the Mexicans and Indians, as many as a dozen of them dying in a single day; and these sufferers and their associates being under no quarantine, and even bathing ad libitum in the zanjas, the pest spread alarmingly. For a time fatalities were so frequent and the nature of the contagion so feared that it was difficult to persuade undertakers to bury the dead, even without funeral or other ceremony.
Following the opening of the Owens River Mines this year, Los Angeles merchants soon established a considerable trade with that territory. Banning inaugurated a system of wagon-trains, each guarded by a detachment of soldiers. The San Fernando mountains, impassable for heavy teaming, were an obstacle to regular trade with the new country and compelled the use of a circuitous route over poor roads. It became necessary, therefore, to consider a means of overcoming the difficulty, much money having already been spent by the County in an abortive attempt to build a tunnel. This second plan likewise came to naught, and it was in fact more than a decade before the Southern Pacific finally completed the famous bore.
Largely because of political mistakes, including a manifestation of sympathy for the Southern Confederacy that drew against him Northern resentment and opposition, John G. Downey, the Democratic nominee for Governor, was defeated at the election in September; Frederick F. Low, a Republican, receiving a majority of over twenty thousand votes.
In October, a peddler named Brun was murdered near Chino. Brun's brother, living at San Bernardino and subsequently a merchant of prominence there, offered two hundred dollars of his slender savings as a reward for the capture of the slayer; but nothing ever came of the search.
In November the stern necessities of war were at last driven home to Angeleños when, on the ninth of that somber month, Don Juan Warner, Deputy Provost Marshal, appeared with his big blank books and began to superintend the registering of all able-bodied citizens suitable for military service. To many, the inquisition was not very welcome and, had it not been for the Union soldiers encamped at Drum Barracks, this first step toward compulsory enrollment would undoubtedly have resulted in riotous disturbances.
I have frequently named Tom Mott, but I may not have said that he was one of the representative local Democratic politicians of his day. He possessed, indeed, such influence with all classes that he was not only elected Clerk of Los Angeles County in 1863, but succeeded himself in 1865, 1867 and 1869, afterward sitting in the State Assembly; and in 1876, he was appointed a delegate to the National Convention that nominated Samuel J. Tilden for the Presidency. His relations in time with Stanford, Crocker, Huntington and Hopkins were very close, and for at least twenty-five years he acted as their political adviser in all matters appertaining to Southern California. Tall, erect and dignified, scrupulously attired and distinguished by his flowing beard, Tom was for more than half a century a striking figure in Los Angeles.
A most brutal murder took place on November 15th on the desert not far from Los Angeles, but few days passing before it was avenged. A poor miner, named R. A. Hester, was fatally attacked by a border ruffian known as Boston Daimwood, while some confederates, including the criminals Chase, Ybarra and Olivas, stood by to prevent interference. In a few hours officers and citizens were in the saddle in pursuit of the murderous band; for Daimwood had boasted that Hester was but the first of several of our citizens to whom he intended to pay his respects. Daimwood and his three companions were captured and lodged in jail, and on the twenty-first of November two hundred or more armed Vigilantes forced the jail doors, seized the scoundrels and hung them to the pórtico of the old City Hall on Spring Street. Tomás Sanchez, the Sheriff, talked of organizing a posse comitatus to arrest the committee leaders; but so positive was public sentiment, as reflected in the newspapers, in support of the summary executions, that nothing further was heard of the threat.
An incident of value in the study of mob-psychology accentuated the day's events. During the lynching, the clattering of horses' hoofs was heard, when the cry was raised that cavalry from Drum Barracks was rushing to rescue the prisoners; and in a twinkling those but a moment before most demonstrative were seen scurrying to cover in all directions. Instead, however, of Federal soldiers, the horsemen were the usual contingent of El Monte boys, coming to assist in the neck-tie party.
Besides the murderers lynched, there was an American boy named Wood of about eighteen years; and although he had committed no offense more vicious than the theft of some chickens, he paid the penalty with his life, it having been the verdict of the committee that while they were at it, the jail might as well be cleared of every malefactor. A large empty case was secured as a platform on which the victim was to stand; and I shall never forget the spectacle of the youth, apparently oblivious of his impending doom, as he placed his hands upon the box and vaulted lightly to the top (just as he might have done at an innocent gymnastic contest), and his parting salutation, "I'm going to die a game hen-chicken!" The removal of the case a moment later, after the noose had been thrown over and drawn about the lad's head, left the poor victim suspended beyond human aid.
On that same day, a sixth prisoner barely escaped. When the crowd was debating the lynchings, John P. Lee, a resident of El Monte who had been convicted of murder, was already under sentence of death; and the Vigilantes, having duly considered his case, decided that it would be just as well to permit the law to take its course. Some time later, J. Lancaster Brent, Lee's attorney, appealed the case and obtained for his client a new trial, finally clearing Lee of the charges against him, so that, in the end, he died a natural death.
I frequently saw Lee after this episode, and vividly recall an unpleasant interview years later. The regularity of his visits had been interrupted, and when he reappeared to get some merchandise for a customer at El Monte, I asked him where he had been. He explained that a dog had bitten a little girl, and that while she was suffering from hydrophobia she had in turn attacked him and so severely scratched his hands and face that, for a while, he could not show himself in public. After that, whenever I saw Lee, I was aware of a lurking, if ridiculous, suspicion that the moment might have arrived for a new manifestation of the rabies.
Speaking of the Civil War and the fact that in Southern California there was less pronounced sentiment for the Union than in the Northern part of the State, I am reminded of a relief movement that emphasized the distinction. By the middle of November San Francisco had sent over one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to the United States Sanitary Commission, and an indignant protest was voiced in some quarters that Los Angeles, up to that date, had not participated. In time, however, the friends of the Union here did make up a small purse.
In 1863 interest in the old San Juan Capistrano Mission was revived with the reopening of the historic structure so badly damaged by the earthquake of 1812, and a considerable number of townspeople went out to the first services under the new roof. When I first saw the Mission, near Don Juan Forster's home, there was in its open doors, windows and cut-stone and stucco ruins, its vines and wild flowers, much of the picturesque.
On November 18th, 1862, our little community was greatly stirred by the news that John Rains, one of Colonel Isaac Williams' sons-in-law and well known in Los Angeles, had been waylaid and killed on the highway near the Azusa rancho the night before. It was claimed that one Ramón Carrillo had hired the assassins to do the foul deed; and about the middle of February, 1863, a Mexican by the name of Manuel Cerradel was arrested by Thomas Trafford, the City Marshal, as a participant. In time, he was tried and sentenced to ten years in San Quentin Prison. On December 9th, Sheriff Tomás Sanchez started to take the prisoner north, and at Wilmington boarded the little steamer Cricket to go out to the Senator, which was ready to sail. A goodly number of other passengers also boarded the tugboat, though nothing in particular was thought of the circumstance; but once out in the harbor, a group of Vigilantes, indignant at the light sentence imposed, seized the culprit at a prearranged signal, threw a noose about his neck and, in a jiffy, hung him to the flagstaff. When he was dead, the body was lowered and stones--brought aboard in packages by the committee, who had evidently considered every detail--were tied to the feet, and the corpse was thrown overboard before the steamer was reached. This was one of the acts of the Vigilantes that no one seemed to deprecate.
Toward the end of 1861, J. E. Pleasants, while overseeing one of Wolfskill's ranches, hit the trail of some horse thieves and, assisted by City Marshal William C. Warren, pursued and captured several, who were sent to the penitentiary. One, however, escaped. This was Charles Wilkins, a veritable scoundrel who, having stolen a pistol and a knife from the Bella Union and put the same into the hands of young Wood (whose lynching I have described), sent the lad on his way to the gallows. A couple of years later Wilkins waylaid and murdered John Sanford, a rancher living near Fort Tejón and a brother of Captain W. T. B. Sanford, the second Postmaster of Los Angeles; and when the murderer had been apprehended and was being tried, an exciting incident occurred, to which I was an eye-witness. On November 16th, 1854, Phineas Banning had married Miss Rebecca Sanford, a sister of the unfortunate man; and as Banning caught sight of Wilkins, he rushed forward and endeavoured to avenge the crime by shooting the culprit. Banning was then restrained; but soon after, on December 17th, 1863, he led the Vigilance Committee which strung up Wilkins on Tomlinson & Griffith's corral gateway where nearly a dozen culprits had already forfeited their lives.
XXIII. ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN
1864-1865
Of all years of adversity before, during or since the Civil War, the seemingly interminable year of 1864 was for Southern California the worst. The varying moves in the great struggle, conducted mostly by Grant and Lee, Sherman and Farragut, buoyed now one, now the other side; but whichever way the tide of battle turned, business and financial conditions here altered but little and improved not a whit. The Southwest, as I have already pointed out, was more dependent for its prosperity on natural conditions, such as rain, than upon the victory of any army or fleet; and as this was the last of three successive seasons of annihilating drought, ranchman and merchant everywhere became downhearted. During the entire winter of 1862-63 no more than four inches of rain had fallen, and in 1864 not until March was there a shower, and even then the earth was scarcely moistened. With a total assessment of something like two million dollars in the County, not a cent of taxes (at least in the city) was collected. Men were so miserably poor that confidence mutually weakened, and merchants refused to trust those who, as land and cattle-barons, but a short time before had been so influential and most of whom, in another and more favorable season or two, were again operators of affluence. How great was the depreciation in values may be seen from the fact that notes given by Francis Temple, and bearing heavy interest, were peddled about at fifty cents on the dollar and even then found few purchasers.
As a result of these very infrequent rains, grass started up only to wither away, a small district around Anaheim independent of the rainfall on account of its fine irrigation system, alone being green; and thither the lean and thirsty cattle came by thousands, rushing in their feverish state against the great willow-fence I have elsewhere described. This stampede became such a menace, in fact, that the Anaheimers were summoned to defend their homes and property, and finally they had to place a mounted guard outside of the willow enclosures. Everywhere large numbers of horses and cattle died, as well as many sheep, the plains at length being strewn with carcasses and bleached bones. The suffering of the poor animals beggars description; and so distressed with hunger were they that I saw famished cattle (during the summer of 1864 while on a visit to the springs at Paso de Robles) crowd around the hotel veranda for the purpose of devouring the discarded matting-containers which had held Chinese rice. I may also add that with the approach of summer the drought became worse and worse, contributing in no small degree to the spread of smallpox, then epidemic here. Stearns lost forty or fifty thousand head of live stock, and was much the greatest sufferer in this respect; and as a result, he was compelled, about June, 1865, to mortgage Los Alamitos rancho, with its twenty-six thousand acres, to Michael Reese of San Francisco, for the almost paltry sum of twenty thousand dollars. Even this sacrifice, however, did not save him from still greater financial distress.
In 1864, two Los Angeles merchants, Louis Schlesinger and Hyman Tischler, owing to the recent drought foreclosed a mortgage on several thousand acres of land known as the Ricardo Vejar property, lying between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Shortly after this transaction, Schlesinger was killed while on his way to San Francisco, in the Ada Hancock explosion; after which Tischler purchased Schlesinger's interest in the ranch and managed it alone.
In January, Tischler invited me to accompany him on one of the numerous excursions which he made to his newly-acquired possession, but, though I was inclined to go, a business engagement interfered and kept me in town. Poor Edward Newman, another friend of Tischler's, took my place. On the way to San Bernardino from the rancho, the travelers were ambushed by some Mexicans, who shot Newman dead. It was generally assumed that the bullets were intended for Tischler, in revenge for his part in the foreclosure; at any rate, he would never go to the ranch again, and finally sold it to Don Louis Phillips, on credit, for thirty thousand dollars. The inventory included large herds of horses and cattle, which Phillips (during the subsequent wet season) drove to Utah, where he realized sufficient from their sale alone to pay for the whole property. Pomona and other important places now mark the neighborhood where once roamed his herds. Phillips died some years ago at the family residence which he had built on the ranch near Spadra.
James R. Toberman, after a trying experience with Texan Redskins, came to Los Angeles in 1864, President Lincoln having appointed him United States Revenue Assessor here, an office which he held for six years. At the same time, as an exceptional privilege for a Government officer, Toberman was permitted to become agent for Wells Fargo & Company.
Again the Fourth of July was not celebrated here, the two factions in the community still opposing each other with bitterness. Hatred of the National Government had increased through an incident of the previous spring which stirred the town mightily. On the eighth or ninth of May, a group stood discussing the Fort Pillow Massacre, when J. F. Bilderback indiscreetly expressed the wish that the Confederates would annihilate every negro taken with arms, and every white man, as well, who might be found in command of colored troops; or some such equally dangerous and foolish sentiment. The indiscretion was reported to the Government authorities, and Bilderback was straightway arrested by a lieutenant of cavalry, though he was soon released.
Among the most rabid Democrats, particularly during the Civil War period, was Nigger Pete the barber. One hot day in August, patriotic Biggs vociferously proclaimed his ardent attachment to the cause of Secession; whereupon he was promptly arrested, placed in charge of half a dozen cavalrymen, and made to foot it, with an iron chain and ball attached to his ankle, all the way from Los Angeles to Drum Barracks at Wilmington. Not in the least discouraged by his uncertain position, however, Pete threw his hat up into the air as he passed some acquaintances on the road, and gave three hearty cheers for Jeff Davis, thus bringing about the completion of his difficulty.
For my part, I have good reason to remember the drought and crisis of 1864, not alone because times were miserably hard and prosperity seemed to have disappeared forever, or that the important revenue from Uncle Sam, although it relieved the situation, was never sufficient to go around, but also because of an unfortunate investment. I bought and shipped many thousands of hides which owners had taken from the carcasses of their starved cattle, forwarding them to San Francisco by schooner or steamer, and thence to New York by sailing vessel. A large number had commenced to putrefy before they were removed, which fact escaped my attention; and on their arrival in the East, the decomposing skins had to be taken out to sea again and thrown overboard, so that the net results of this venture were disastrous. However, we all met the difficulties of the situation as philosophically as we could.
There were no railroads in California until the late sixties and, consequently, there was no regular method of concentration, nor any systematic marketing of products; and this had a very bad economic effect on the whole State. Prices were extremely high during her early history, and especially so in 1864. Barley sold at three and a half cents per pound; potatoes went up to twelve and a half cents; and flour reached fifteen dollars per barrel, at wholesale. Much flour in wooden barrels was then brought from New York by sailing vessels; and my brother imported a lot during a period of inflation, some of which he sold at thirteen dollars. Isaac Friedlander, a San Francisco pioneer, who was not alone the tallest man in that city but was as well a giant operator in grain and its products, practically monopolized the wheat and flour business of the town; and when he heard of this interference, he purchased all the remainder of my brother's flour at thirteen dollars a barrel, and so secured control of the situation.
Just before this transaction, I happened to be in San Francisco and noticing the advertisement of an approaching flour auction, I attended the sale. This particular lot was packed in sacks which had been eaten into by rats and mice and had, in consequence, to be resacked, sweepings and all. I bought one hundred barrels and shipped the flour to Los Angeles, and B. Dubordieu, the corpulent little French baker, considered himself fortunate in obtaining it at fifteen dollars per barrel.
Speaking of foodstuffs, I may note that red beans then commanded a price of twelve and a half cents per pound, until a sailing vessel from Chile unexpectedly landed a cargo in San Francisco and sent the price dropping to a cent and a quarter; when commission men, among them myself, suffered heavy losses.
In 1864, F. Bachman & Company sold out. Their retirement was ascribed in a measure to the series of bad years, but the influence of their wives was a powerful factor in inducing them to withdraw. The firm had been compelled to accept large parcels of real estate in payment of accounts; and now, while preparing to leave, Bachman & Co. sacrificed their fine holdings at prices considered ridiculous even then. The only one of these sales that I remember was that of a lot with a frontage of one hundred and twenty feet on Fort Street, and a one-story adobe house, which they disposed of for four hundred dollars.
I have told of Don Juan Forster's possessions--the Santa Margarita rancho, where he lived until his death, and also the Las Flores. These he obtained in 1864, when land was worth but the merest song, buying the same from Pio Pico, his brother-in-law. The two ranches included over a hundred and forty thousand acres, and pastured some twenty-five thousand cattle, three thousand horses and six or seven thousand sheep; yet the transaction, on account of the season, was a fiscal operation of but minor importance.
The hard times strikingly conduced to criminality and, since there were then probably not more than three or four policemen in Los Angeles, some of the desperadoes, here in large numbers and not confined to any particular nationality or color, took advantage of the conditions, even making several peculiar nocturnal assaults upon the guardians of the peace. The methods occasionally adopted satisfied the community that Mexican bandidos were at work. Two of these worthies on horseback, while approaching a policeman, would suddenly dash in opposite directions, bringing a reata (in the use of which they were always most proficient) taut to the level of their saddles; and striking the policeman with the hide or hair rope, they would throw him to the ground with such force as to disable him. Then the ingenious robbers would carry out their well-planned depredations in the neighborhood and disappear with their booty.
J. Ross Browne, one of the active Forty-niners in San Francisco and author of Crusoe's Island and various other volumes dealing with early life in California and along the Coast, was on and off a visitor to Los Angeles, first passing through here in 1859, en route to the Washoe Gold fields, and stopping again in 1864.
Politics enlivened the situation somewhat in the fall of this year of depression. In September, the troops were withdrawn from Catalina Island, and the following month most of the guard was brought in from Fort Tejón; and this, creating possibly a feeling of security, paved the way for still larger Union meetings in October and November. Toward the end of October, Francisco P. Ramirez, formerly editor of El Clamor Público, was made Postmaster, succeeding William G. Still, upon whose life an attempt had been made while he was in office.
As an illustration of how a fortunate plunger acquired property now worth millions, through the disinclination on the part of most people here to add to their taxes in this time of drought, I may mention two pieces of land included in the early Ord survey, one hundred and twenty by one hundred and sixty-five feet in size--one at the southwest corner of Spring and Fourth streets, the other at the southeast corner of Fort and Fourth--which were sold on December 12th, 1864, for two dollars and fifty-two cents, delinquent taxes. The tax on each lot was but one dollar and twenty-six cents, yet only one purchaser appeared!
About that very time, there was another and noteworthy movement in favor of the establishment of a railroad between Los Angeles and San Pedro. In December, committees from outside towns met here with our citizens to debate the subject; but by the end of the several days' conference, no real progress had been made.
The year 1865 gave scant promise, at least in its opening, of better times to come. To be sure, Northern arms were more and more victorious, and with the approach of Lincoln's second inauguration the conviction grew that under the leadership of such a man national prosperity might return. Little did we dream that the most dramatic of all tragedies in our history was soon to be enacted. In Southern California the effects of the long drought continued, and the certainty that the cattle-industry, once so vast and flourishing, was now but a memory, discouraged a people to whom the vision of a far more profitable use of the land had not yet been revealed.
For several years my family, including three children, had been shifting from pillar to post owing to the lack of residences such as are now built to sell or lease, and I could not postpone any longer the necessity of obtaining larger quarters. We had occupied, at various times, a little shanty on Franklin Street, owned by a carpenter named Wilson; a small, one-story brick on Main Street near First, owned by Henne, the brewer; and once we lived with the Kremers in a one-story house, none too large, on Fort Street. Again we dwelt on Fort Street in a little brick house that stood on the site of the present Chamber of Commerce building, next door to Governor Downey's, before he moved to Main Street. The nearest approach to convenience was afforded by our occupancy of Henry Dalton's two-story brick on Main Street near Second. One day a friend told me that Jim Easton had an adobe on Main Street near Third, which he wished to sell; and on inquiry, I bought the place, paying him a thousand dollars for fifty-four feet, the entire frontage being occupied by the house. Main Street, beyond First, was practically in the same condition as at the time of my arrival, no streets running east having been opened south of First.
After moving in, we were inconvenienced because there was no driveway, and everything needed for housekeeping had to be carried, in consequence, through the front door of the dwelling. I therefore interviewed my friend and neighbor, Ygnácio Garcia, who owned a hundred feet adjoining me, and asked him if he would sell or rent me twenty feet of his property; whereupon he permitted me the free use of twenty feet, thus supplying me with access to the rear of my house. A few months later, Alfred B. Chapman, Garcia's legal adviser (who, by the way, is still alive)[25] brought me a deed to the twenty feet of land, the only expense being a fee of twenty-five dollars to Chapman for making out the document; and later Garcia sold his remaining eighty feet to Tom Mott for five dollars a foot. This lot is still in my possession. In due time, I put up a large, old-fashioned wooden barn with a roomy hay-loft, stalls for a couple of horses or mules, and space for a large flat-truck, the first of the kind for years in Los Angeles. John Simmons had his room in the barn and was one of my first porters. I had no regular driver for the truck, but John usually served in that capacity.
Incidentally to this story of my selecting a street on which to live, I may say that during the sixties Main and San Pedro streets were among the chief residential sections, and Spring Street was only beginning to be popular for homes. The fact that some people living on the west side of Main Street built their stables in back-yards connecting with Spring Street, retarded the latter's growth.
Here I may well repeat the story of the naming of Spring Street, particularly as it exemplifies the influence that romance sometimes has upon affairs usually prosaic. Ord, the surveyor, was then more than prepossessed in favor of the delightful Señorita Trinidad de la Guerra, for whose hand he was, in fact, a suitor and to whom he always referred as Mi Primavera--"My Springtime;" and when asked to name the new thoroughfare, he gallantly replied, "Primavera, of course! Primavera!"
On February 3d, a wind-storm, the like of which the proverbial "oldest inhabitant" could scarcely recall, struck Los Angeles amidships, unroofing many houses and blowing down orchards. Wolfskill lost heavily, and Banning & Company's large barn at the northeast corner of Fort and Second streets, near the old schoolhouse, was demolished, scarcely a post remaining upright. A curious sight, soon after the storm began to blow, was that of many citizens weighing down and lashing fast their roofs, just as they do in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland, to keep them from being carried to unexpected, not to say inconvenient, locations.
In early days, steamers plying up and down the Pacific Coast, as I have pointed out, were so poor in every respect that it was necessary to make frequent changes in their names, to induce passengers to travel on them at all. As far back as 1860, one frequently heard the expression, "the old tubs;" and in 1865, even the best-known boat on the Southern run was publicly discussed as "the rotten old Senator," "the old hulk" and "the floating coffin." At this time, there was a strong feeling against the Steam Navigation Company for its arbitrary treatment of the public, its steamers sometimes leaving a whole day before the date on which they were advertised to depart; and this criticism and dissatisfaction finally resulted in the putting on of the opposition steamer Pacific which for the time became popular.
In 1865, Judge Benjamin S. Eaton tried another agricultural experiment which many persons of more experience at first predicted would be a failure. He had moved into the cottage at Fair Oaks, built by the estimable lady of General Albert Sidney Johnston, and had planted five thousand or more grapevines in the good though dry soil; but the lack of surface water caused vineyardists to shake their heads incredulously. The vines prospered so well that, in the following year, Eaton planted five or six times as many more. He came to the conclusion, however, that he must have water; and so arranged to bring some from what is now known as Eaton's Cañon. I remember that, after his vines began to bear, the greatest worry of the Judge was not the matter of irrigation, but the wild beasts that preyed upon the clustering fruit. The visitor to Pasadena and Altadena to-day can hardly realize that in those very localities both coyotes and bears were rampant, and that many a night the irate Judge was roused by the barking dogs as they drove the intruders out of the vineyard.
Tomlinson & Company, always energetic competitors in the business of transportation in Southern California, began running, about the first of April, a new stage line between Los Angeles and San Bernardino, making three trips a week.
On the fifteenth of April, my family physician, Dr. John S. Griffin, paid a professional visit to my house on Main Street, which might have ended disastrously for him. While we were seated together by an open window in the dining-room, a man named Kane ran by on the street, shouting out the momentous news that Abraham Lincoln had been shot! Griffin, who was a staunch Southerner, was on his feet instantly, cheering for Jeff Davis. He gave evidence, indeed, of great mental excitement, and soon seized his hat and rushed for the door, hurrahing for the Confederacy. In a flash, I realized that Griffin would be in awful jeopardy if he reached the street in that unbalanced condition, and by main force I held him back, convincing him at last of his folly. In later years the genial Doctor frankly admitted that I had undoubtedly saved him from certain death.
This incident brings to mind another, associated with Henry Baer, whose father, Abraham, a native of Bavaria and one of the earliest tailors here, had arrived from New Orleans in 1854. When Lincoln's assassination was first known, Henry ran out of the house, singing Dixie and shouting for the South; but his father, overtaking him, brought him back and gave him a sound whipping--an act nearly breaking up the Baer family, inasmuch as Mrs. Baer was a pronounced Secessionist.
The news of Lincoln's assassination made a profound impression in Los Angeles, though it cannot be denied that some Southern sympathizers, on first impulse, thought that it would be advantageous to the Confederate cause. There was, therefore, for the moment, some ill-advised exultation; but this was promptly suppressed, either by the military or by the firm stand of the more level-headed members of the community. Soon even radically-inclined citizens, in an effort to uphold the fair name of the town, fell into line, and steps were taken fittingly to mourn the nation's loss. On the seventeenth of April, the Common Council passed appropriate resolutions; and Governor Low having telegraphed that Lincoln's funeral would be held in Washington on the nineteenth, at twelve o'clock noon, the Union League of Los Angeles took the initiative and invited the various societies of the city to join in a funeral procession.
On April 19th all the stores were closed, business was suspended and soldiers as well as civilians assembled in front of Arcadia Block. There were present United States officers, mounted cavalry under command of Captain Ledyard; the Mayor and Common Council; various lodges; the Hebrew Congregation B'nai-B'rith; the Teutonia, the French Benevolent and the Junta Patriotica societies, and numerous citizens. Under the marshalship of S. F. Lamson the procession moved slowly over what to-day would be regarded as an insignificantly short route: west on Arcadia Street to Main; down Main Street to Spring as far as First; east on First Street to Main and up Main Street, proceeding back to the City Hall by way of Spring, at which point the parade disbanded.
Later, on the same day, there were memorial services in the upper story of the old Temple Court House, where Rev. Elias Birdsall, the Episcopal clergyman, delivered a splendid oration and panegyric; and at the same time, the members of the Hebrew Congregation met at the house of Rabbi A. W. Edelman. Prayers for the martyred President were uttered, and supplication was made for the recovery of Secretary of State Seward. The resolutions presented on this occasion concluded as follows:
RESOLVED, that with feelings of the deepest sorrow we deplore the loss our country has sustained in the untimely end of our late President; but as it has pleased the Almighty to deprive this Country of its Chief and great friend, we bow with submission to the All-wise Will.
I may add that, soon after the assassination of the President, the Federal authorities sent an order to Los Angeles to arrest anyone found rejoicing in the foul deed; and that several persons, soon in the toils, were severely dealt with. In San Francisco, too, when the startling news was flashed over the wires, Unionist mobs demolished the plants of the Democratic Press, the News Letter and a couple of other journals very abusive toward the martyred Emancipator; the editors and publishers themselves escaping with their lives only by flight and concealment.
Notwithstanding the strong Secessionist sentiment in Los Angeles during much of the Civil War period, the City election resulted in a Unionist victory. José Mascarel was elected Mayor; William C. Warren, Marshal; J. F. Burns, Treasurer; J. H. Lander, Attorney; and J. W. Beebe, Assessor. The triumph of the Federal Government doubtless at once began to steady and improve affairs throughout the country; but it was some time before any noticeable progress was felt here. Particularly unfortunate were those who had gone east or south for actual service, and who were obliged to make their way, finally, back to the Coast. Among such volunteers was Captain Cameron E. Thom who, on landing at San Pedro, was glad to have J. M. Griffith advance him money enough to reach Los Angeles and begin life again.
Outdoor restaurant gardens were popular in the sixties. On April 23d, the Tivoli Garden was reopened by Henry Sohms, and thither, on holidays and Sundays, many pleasure-lovers gravitated.
Sometime in the spring and during the incumbency of Rev. Elias Birdsall as rector, the Right Reverend William Ingraham Kip, who had come to the Pacific Coast in 1853, made his first visit to the Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, as Bishop of California, although really elevated to that high office seven years before. Bishop Kip was one of the young clergy who pleaded with the unresponsive culprits strung up by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856; and later he was known as an author. The Reverend Birdsall, by the way, was Rector of St. Paul's School on Olive Street, between Fifth and Sixth, as late as 1887.
John G. Downey subdivided the extensive Santa Gertrudis rancho on the San Gabriel River in the spring, and the first deed was made out to J. H. Burke, a son-in-law of Captain Jesse Hunter. Burke, a man of splendid physique, was a blacksmith whose Main Street shop was next to the site of the present Van Nuys Hotel. Downey and he exchanged properties, the ex-Governor building a handsome brick residence on Burke's lot, and Burke removing his blacksmith business to Downey's new town where, by remaining until the property had appreciated, he became well-to-do.
I have alluded to the Dominguez rancho, known as the San Pedro, but I have not said that, in 1865, some four thousand acres of this property were sold to Temple & Gibson at thirty-five cents an acre, and that on a portion of this land G. D. Compton founded the town named after him and first called Comptonville. It was really a Methodist Church enterprise, planned from the beginning as a pledge to teetotalism, and is of particular interest because it is one of the oldest towns in Los Angeles County, and certainly the first "dry" community. Compton paid Temple & Gibson five dollars an acre.
Toward the end of the War, that is, in May, Major-General Irwin McDowell, the unfortunate commander of the Army of the Potomac who had been nearly a year in charge of the Department of the Pacific, made Los Angeles a long-announced visit, coming on the Government steamer Saginaw. The distinguished officer, his family and suite were speedily whirled to the Bella Union, the competing drivers shouting and cursing themselves hoarse in their efforts to get the General or the General's wife, in different stages, there first. As was customary in those simpler days, most of the townsfolk whose politics would permit called upon the guest; and Editor Conway and other Unionists were long closeted with him. After thirty-six hours or more, during which the General inspected the local Government headquarters and the ladies were driven to, and entertained at, various homes, the party, accompanied by Collector James and Attorney-General McCullough, boarded the cutter and made off for the North.
Anticipating this visit of General McDowell, due preparations were made to receive him. It happened, however, as I have indicated, that José Mascarel was then Mayor; and since he had never been able to express himself freely in English, though speaking Spanish as well as French, it was feared that embarrassment must follow the meeting of the civil and military personages. Luckily, however, like many scions of early well-to-do American families, McDowell had been educated in France, and the two chiefs were soon having a free and easy talk in Mascarel's native tongue.
An effort, on May 2d, better to establish St. Vincent's College as the one institution of higher learning here was but natural at that time. In the middle of the sixties, quite as many children attended private academies in Los Angeles County as were in the public schools, while three-fifths of all children attended no school at all. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, two-thirds of all the children in the county attended public schools.
FOOTNOTE:
[25] Died, January 22d, 1915.
XXIV. H. NEWMARK & CO.--CARLISLE-KING DUEL
1865-1866
From 1862 I continued for three years, as I have told, in the commission business; and notwithstanding the bad seasons, I was thus pursuing a sufficiently easy and pleasant existence when a remark which, after the lapse of time, I see may have been carelessly dropped, inspired me with the determination to enter again upon a more strenuous and confining life.
On Friday, June 18th, 1865, I was seated in my little office, when a Los Angeles merchant named David Solomon, whose store was in the Arcadia Block, called upon me and, with much feeling, related that while returning by steamer from the North, Prudent Beaudry had made the senseless boast that he would drive every Jew in Los Angeles out of business. Beaudry, then a man of large means, conducted in his one-story adobe building on the northeast corner of Aliso and Los Angeles streets the largest general merchandise establishment this side of San Francisco. I listened to Solomon's recital without giving expression to my immediately-formed resolve; but no sooner had he left than I closed my office and started for Wilmington.
During the twelve years that I had been in California the forwarding business between Los Angeles and the Coast had seen many changes. Tomlinson & Company, who had bought out A. W. Timms, controlled the largest tonnage in town, including that of Beaudry, Jones, Childs and others; while Banning & Company, although actively engaged in the transportation to Yuma of freight and supplies for the United States Government, were handicapped for lack of business into Los Angeles. I thought, therefore, that Phineas Banning would eagerly seize an opportunity to pay his score to the numerous local merchants who had treated him with so little consideration. Besides, a very close intimacy existed between him and myself, which may best be illustrated by the fact that, for years past when short of cash, Banning used to come to my old sheet-iron safe and help himself according to his requirements.
Arriving in Wilmington, I found Banning loading a lot of teams with lumber. I related the substance of Solomon's remarks and proposed a secret partnership, with the understanding that, providing he would release me from the then existing charge of seven dollars and a half per ton for hauling freight from Wilmington to Los Angeles, I should supply the necessary capital, purchase a stock of goods, conduct the business without cost to him and then divide the profits if any should accrue. Banning said, "I must first consult Don David," meaning Alexander, his partner, promising at the same time to report the result within a few days. While I was at dinner, therefore, on the following Sunday, Patrick Downey, Banning's Los Angeles agent, called on me and stated that "the Chief" was in his office in the Downey Block, on the site of Temple's old adobe, and would be glad to see me.
Without further parleying, Banning accepted my proposition; and on the following morning, or June 21st, I rented the last vacant store in Stearns's Arcadia Block on Los Angeles Street, which stands to-day, by the way, much as it was erected in 1858. It adjoined John Jones's, and was nearly opposite the establishment of P. Beaudry. There I put up the sign of H. Newmark, soon to be changed to H. Newmark & Company; and it is a source of no little gratification to me that from this small beginning has developed the wholesale grocery firm of M. A. Newmark & Company.[26]
At that time, Stearns's property was all in the hands of the Sheriff, Tomás Sanchez, who had also been appointed Receiver; and like all the other tenants, I rented my storeroom from Deputy A. J. King. Rents and other incomes were paid to the Receiver, and out of them a regular monthly allowance of fifty dollars was made to Stearns for his private expenses. The stock on Stearns's ranches, by the way, was then in charge of Pierre Domec, a well-known and prosperous man, who was here perhaps a decade before I came.
My only assistant was my wide-awake nephew, M. A. Newmark, then fifteen years of age, who had arrived in Los Angeles early in 1865. At my request Banning & Company released their bookkeeper, Frank Lecouvreur, and I engaged him. He was a thoroughly reliable man and had, besides, a technical knowledge of wagon materials, in which, as a sideline, I expected to specialize. While all of these arrangements were being completed, the local business world queried and buzzed as to my intentions.
Having rented quarters, I immediately telegraphed my brother, J. P. Newmark, to buy and ship a quantity of flour, sugar, potatoes, salt and other heavy staples; and these I sold, upon arrival, at cost and steamer freight plus seven dollars and a half per ton. Since the departure of my brother from Los Angeles for permanent residence in San Francisco (where he entered into partnership with Isaac Lightner, forming J. P. Newmark & Company), he had been engaged in the commission business; and this afforded me facilities I might otherwise not have had. Inasmuch also, as all of my neighbors were obliged to pay this toll for hauling, while I was not, they were forced to do business at cost. About the first of July, I went to San Francisco and laid in a complete stock paralleling, with the exception of clothing and dry goods, the lines handled by Beaudry. Banning, who was then building prairie schooners for which he had ordered some three hundred and fifty tons of iron and other wagon materials, joined me in chartering the brig Tanner on which I loaded an equal tonnage of general merchandise, wagon parts and blacksmith coal. The very important trade with Salt Lake City, elsewhere described, helped us greatly, for we at once negotiated with the Mormon leaders; and giving them credit when they were short of funds, it was not long before we were brought into constant communication with Brigham Young and through his influence monopolized the Salt Lake business.
Thinking over these days of our dealings with the Latterday Saints, I recall a very amusing experience with an apostle named Crosby, who once brought down a number of teams and wagons to load with supplies. During his visit to town, I invited him and several of his friends to dinner; and in answer to the commonplace inquiry as to his preference for some particular part of a dish, Crosby made the logical Mormonite reply that quantity was what appealed to him most--a flash of wit much appreciated by all of the guests. During this same visit, Crosby tried hard to convert me to Mormonism; but, after several ineffectual interviews, he abandoned me as a hopeless case.
At another time, while reflecting on my first years as a wholesale grocer, I was led to examine a day-book of 1867 and to draw a comparison between the prices then current and now, when the high cost of living is so much discussed. Raw sugar sold at fourteen cents; starch at sixteen; crushed sugar at seventeen; ordinary tea at sixty; coal oil at sixty-five cents a gallon; axle-grease at seventy-five cents per tin; bluing at one dollar a pound; and wrapping paper at one dollar and a half per ream. Spices, not yet sold in cans, cost three dollars for a dozen bottles; yeast powders, now superseded by baking powder, commanded the same price per dozen; twenty-five pounds of shot in a bag cost three dollars and a half; while in October of that year, blacksmith coal, shipped in casks holding fifteen hundred and ninety-two pounds each, sold at the rate of fifty dollars a ton.
The steamers Oriflamme, California, Pacific and Sierra Nevada commenced to run in 1866 and continued until about the middle of the seventies. The Pacific was later sunk in the Straits of San Juan de Fuca; and the Sierra Nevada was lost on the rocks off Port Harford. The Los Angeles, the Ventura and the Constantine were steamers of a somewhat later date, seldom going farther south than San Pedro and continuing to run until they were lost.
To resume the suggestive story of I. W. Hellman, who remained in business with his cousin until he was able in 1865 to buy out Adolph Portugal and embark for himself, at the corner of Main and Commercial streets: during his association with large landowners and men of affairs, who esteemed him for his practicality, he was fortunate in securing their confidence and patronage; and being asked so often to operate for them in financial matters, he laid the foundation for his subsequent career as a banker, in which he has attained such success.
The Pioneer Oil Company had been organized about the first of February, with Phineas Banning, President; P. Downey, Secretary; Charles Ducommon, Treasurer; and Winfield S. Hancock, Dr. John S. Griffin, Dr. J. B. Winston, M. Keller, B. D. Wilson, J. G. Downey and Volney E. Howard among the trustees; and the company soon acquired title to all brea, petroleum or rock oil in San Pasqual rancho. In the early summer, Sackett & Morgan, on Main Street near the Post Office, exhibited some local kerosene or "coal-oil;" and experimenters were gathering the oil that floated on Pico Spring and refining it, without distillation, at a cost of ten cents a gallon. Coming just when Major Stroble announced progress in boring at la Cañada de Brea, these ventures increased here the excitement about oil and soon after wells were sunk in the Camulos rancho.
On Wednesday afternoon, July 5th, at four o'clock, occurred one of the pleasant social occasions of the mid-sixties--the wedding of Solomon Lazard and Miss Caroline, third daughter of Joseph Newmark. The bride's father performed the ceremony at M. Kremer's residence on Main Street, near my own adobe and the site on which, later, C. E. Thom built his charming residence, with its rural attractions, diagonally across from the pleasant grounds of Colonel J. G. Howard. The same evening at half-past eight a ball and dinner at the Bella Union celebrated the event.
While these festivities were taking place, a quarrel, ending in a tragedy, began in the hotel office below. Robert Carlisle, who had married Francisca, daughter of Colonel Isaac Williams, and was the owner of some forty-six thousand acres comprising the Chino Ranch, fell into an altercation with A. J. King, then Under Sheriff, over the outcome of a murder trial; but before any further damage was done, friends separated them.
About noon on the following day, however, when people were getting ready to leave for the steamer and everything was life and bustle about the hotel, Frank and Houston King, the Under Sheriff's brothers, passing by the bar-room of the Bella Union and seeing Carlisle inside, entered, drew their six-shooters and began firing at him. Carlisle also drew a revolver and shot Frank King, who died almost instantly. Houston King kept up the fight, and Carlisle, riddled with bullets, dropped to the sidewalk. There King, not yet seriously injured, struck his opponent on the head, the force of the blow breaking his weapon; but Carlisle, a man of iron, put forth his little remaining strength, staggered to the wall, raised his pistol with both hands, took deliberate aim and fired. It was his last, but effective shot, for it penetrated King's body.
Carlisle was carried into the hotel and placed on a billiard-table; and there, about three o'clock, he expired. At the first exchange of shots, the people nearby, panic-stricken, fled, and only a merciful Providence prevented the sacrifice of other lives. J. H. Lander was accidentally wounded in the thigh; some eight or ten bystanders had their clothes pierced by stray bullets; and one of the stage-horses dropped where he stood before the hotel door. When the first shot was fired, I was on the corner of Commercial Street, only a short distance away, and reached the scene in time to see Frank King expire and witness Carlisle writhing in agony--a death more striking, considering the murder of Carlisle's brother-in-law, John Rains. Carlisle was buried from the Bella Union at four o'clock the next day. King's funeral took place from A. J. King's residence, two days later, at eight o'clock in the morning.
Houston King having recovered, he was tried for Carlisle's murder, but was acquitted; the trial contributing to make the affair one of the most mournful of all tragic events in the early history of Los Angeles, and rendering it impossible to express the horror of the public. One feature only of the terrible contest afforded a certain satisfaction, and that was the splendid exhibition of those qualities, in some respects heroic, so common among the old Californians of that time.
July was clouded with a particularly gruesome murder. George Williams and Cyrus Kimball of San Diego, while removing with their families to Los Angeles, had spent the night near the Santa Ana River, and while some distance from camp, at sunrise next morning, were overtaken by seven armed desperadoes, under the leadership of one Jack O'Brien, and without a word of explanation, were shot dead. The women, hearing the commotion, ran toward the spot, only to be commanded by the robbers to deliver all money and valuables in their possession. Over three thousand dollars--the entire savings of their husbands--was secured, after which the murderers made their escape. Posses scoured the surrounding country, but the cutthroats were never apprehended.
Stimulated, perhaps, by the King-Carlisle tragedy, the Common Council in July prohibited everybody except officers and travelers from carrying a pistol, dirk, sling-shot or sword; but the measure lacked public support, and little or no attention was paid to the law.
Some idea of the modest proportion of business affairs in the early sixties may be gathered from the fact that, when the Los Angeles Post Office, on August 10th, was made a money-deposit office, it was obligatory that all cash in excess of five hundred dollars should be despatched by steamer to San Francisco.
In 1865, W. H. Perry, having been given a franchise to light the city with gas, organized the Los Angeles City Gas Company, five years later selling out his holdings at a large profit. A promise was made to furnish free gas for lamps at the principal crossings on Main Street and for lights in the Mayor's office, and the consumers' price at first agreed upon was ten dollars a thousand cubic feet.
The history of Westlake Park is full of interest. About 1865, the City began to sell part of its public land, in lots of thirty-five acres, employing E. W. Noyes as auctioneer. Much of it went at five and ten dollars an acre; but when the district now occupied by the park and lake was reached, the auctioneer called in vain for bids at even a dollar an acre; nobody wanted the alkali hillocks. Then the auctioneer offered the area at twenty-five cents an acre, but still received no bids, and the sale was discontinued. In the late eighties, a number of citizens who had bought land in the vicinity came to Mayor Workman and promised to pay one-half of the cost of making a lake and laying out pleasure grounds on the unsightly place; and as the Mayor favored the plan, it was executed, and this was the first step in the formation of Westlake Park.
On September 2d, Dr. J. J. Dyer, a dentist from San Francisco, having opened an office in the Bella Union hotel, announced that he would visit the homes of patrons and there extract or repair the sufferers' teeth. The complicated equipment of a modern dentist would hardly permit of such peripatetic service to-day, although representatives of this profession and also certain opticians still travel to many of the small inland towns in California, once or twice a year, stopping in each for a week or two at a time.
I have spoken of the use, in 1853, of river water for drinking, and the part played by the private water-carrier. This system was still largely used until the fall when David W. Alexander leased all the public water-works for four years, together with the privilege of renewing the lease another four or six years. Alexander was to pay one thousand dollars rental a year, agreeing also to surrender the plant to the City at the termination of his contract. On August 7th, Alexander assigned his lease to Don Louis Sainsevain, and about the middle of October Sainsevain made a new contract. Damien Marchessault associated himself with Don Louis and together they laid pipes from the street now known as Macy throughout the business part of the city, and as far (!) south as First Street. These water pipes were constructed of pine logs from the mountains of San Bernardino, bored and made to join closely at the ends; but they were continually bursting, causing springs of water that made their way to the surface of the streets.
Conway & Waite sold the News, then a "tri-weekly" supposed to appear three times a week, yet frequently issued but twice, to A. J. King & Company, on November 11th; and King, becoming the editor, made of the newspaper a semi-weekly.
To complete what I was saying about the Schlesingers: In 1865, Moritz returned to Germany. Jacob had arrived in Los Angeles in 1860, but disappearing four years later, his whereabouts was a mystery until, one fine day, his brother received a letter from him dated, "Gun Boat Pocahontas." Jake had entered the service of Uncle Sam! The Pocahontas was engaged in blockade work under command of Admiral Farragut; and Jake and the Admiral were paying special attention to Sabine Pass, then fortified by the Confederacy.
On November 27th, Andrew J. Glassell and Colonel James G. Howard arrived together in Los Angeles. The former had been admitted to the California Bar some ten or twelve years before; but in the early sixties he temporarily abandoned his profession and engaged in ranching near Santa Cruz. After the War, Glassell drifted back to the practice of law; and having soon cast his lot with Los Angeles, formed a partnership with Alfred B. Chapman. Two or three years later, Colonel George H. Smith, a Confederate Army officer who in the early seventies lived on Fort Street, was taken into the firm; and for years Glassell, Chapman and Smith were among the leading attorneys at the Los Angeles Bar. Glassell died on January 28th, 1901.
To add to the excitement of the middle sixties, a picturesque street encounter took place, terminating almost fatally. Colonel, the redoubtable E. J. C. Kewen, and a good-natured German named Fred Lemberg, son-in-law to the old miller Bors, having come to blows on Los Angeles Street near Mellus's Row, Lemberg knocked Kewen down; whereupon friends interfered and peace was apparently restored. Kewen, a Southerner, dwelt upon the fancied indignity to which he had been subjected and went from store to store until he finally borrowed a pistol; after which, in front of John Jones's, he lay in wait. When Lemberg, who, because of his nervous energy, was known as the Flying Dutchman, again appeared, rushing across the street in the direction of Mellus's Row, the equally excited Colonel opened fire, drawing from his adversary a retaliatory round of shots. I was standing nearly opposite the scene and saw the Flying Dutchman and Kewen, each dodging around a pillar in front of The Row, until finally Lemberg, with a bullet in his abdomen, ran out into Los Angeles Street and fell to the ground, his legs convulsively assuming a perpendicular position and then dropping back. After recovering from what was thought to be a fatal wound, Lemberg left Los Angeles for Arizona or Mexico; but before he reached his destination, he was murdered by Indians.
I have told of the trade between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, which started up briskly in 1855, and grew in importance until the completion of the transcontinental railroad put an end to it. Indeed, in 1865 and 1866 Los Angeles enterprise pushed forward until merchandise was teamed as far as Bannock, Idaho, four hundred and fifty miles beyond Salt Lake, and Helena, Montana, fourteen hundred miles away. This indicates to what an extent the building of railroads ultimately affected the early Los Angeles merchants.
The Spanish drama was the event of December 17th, when Señor Don Guirado L. del Castillo and Señora Amelia Estrella del Castillo played La Trenza de sus Cabellos to an enthusiastic audience.
In 1865 or 1866, William T. Glassell, a younger brother of Andrew Glassell, came to Los Angeles on a visit; and being attracted by the Southwest country, he remained to assist Glassell & Chapman in founding Orange, formerly known as Richland. No doubt pastoral California looked good to young Glassell, for he had but just passed eighteen weary months in a Northern military prison. Having thought out a plan for blowing up the United States ironclads off Charleston Harbor, Lieutenant Glassell supervised the construction of a cigar-shaped craft, known as a David, which carried a torpedo attached to the end of a fifteen-foot pole; and on October 5th, 1863, young Glassell and three other volunteers steamed out in the darkness against the formidable new Ironsides. The torpedo was exploded, doing no greater damage than to send up a column of water, which fell onto the ship, and also to hurl the young officers into the bay. Glassell died here at an early age.
John T. Best, the Assessor, was another pioneer who had an adventurous life prior to, and for a long time after, coming to California. Having run away to sea from his Maine home about the middle fifties, Best soon found himself among pirates; but escaping their clutches, he came under the domination of a captain whose cruelty, off desolate Cape Horn, was hardly preferable to death. Reaching California about 1858, Best fled from another captain's brutality and, making his way into the Northern forests, was taken in and protected by kind-hearted woodmen secluded within palisades. Successive Indian outbreaks constantly threatened him and his comrades, and for years he was compelled to defend himself against the savages. At last, safe and sound, he settled within the pale of civilization, at the outbreak of the Civil War enlisting as a Union officer in the first battalion of California soldiers. Since then Best has resided mostly in Los Angeles.
The year 1866 is memorable as the concluding period of the great War. Although Lee had surrendered in the preceding April, more than fifteen months elapsed before the Washington authorities officially proclaimed the end of the Titanic struggle which left one-half of the nation prostrate and the other half burdened with new and untold responsibilities. By the opening of the year, however, one of the miracles of modern history--the quiet and speedy return of the soldier to the vocations of peace--began, and soon some of those who had left for the front when the War broke out were to be seen again in our Southland, starting life anew. With them, too, came a few pioneers from the East, harbingers of an army soon to settle our valleys and seasides. All in all, the year was the beginning of a brighter era.
Here it may not be amiss to take up the tale of the mimic war in which Phineas Banning and I engaged, in the little commercial world of Los Angeles, and to tell to what an extent the fortunes of my competitors were influenced, and how the absorption of the transportation charge from the seaboard caused their downfall. O. W. Childs, in less than three months, found the competition too severe and surrendered "lock, stock and barrel;" P. Beaudry, whose vain-glorious boast had stirred up this rumpus, sold out to me on January 1st, 1866, just a few months after his big talk. John Jones was the last to yield.
In January, 1866, I bought out Banning, who was soon to take his seat in the Legislature for the advancing of his San Pedro Railroad project, and agreed to pay him, in the future, seven dollars and a half per ton for hauling my goods from Wilmington to Los Angeles, which was mutually satisfactory; and when we came to balance up, it was found that Banning had received, for his part in the enterprise, an amount equal to all that would otherwise have been charged for transportation and a tidy sum besides.
Sam, brother of Kaspare Cohn, who had been in Carson City, Nevada, came to Los Angeles and joined me. We grew rapidly, and in a short time became of some local importance. When Kaspare sold out at Red Bluff, in January, 1866, we tendered him a partnership. We were now three very busy associates, besides M. A. Newmark, who clerked for us.
Several references have been made to the trade between Los Angeles and Arizona, due in part to the needs of the Army there. I remember that early in February not less than twenty-seven Government wagons were drawn up in front of H. Newmark & Company's store, to be loaded with seventy to seventy-five tons of groceries and provisions for troops in the Territory.
Notwithstanding the handicaps in this wagon-train traffic, there was still much objection to railroads, especially to the plan for a line between Los Angeles and San Pedro, some of the strongest opposition coming from El Monte where, in February, ranchers circulated a petition, disapproving railroad bills introduced by Banning into the Legislature. A common argument was that the railroad would do away with horses and the demand for barley; and one wealthy citizen who succeeded in inducing many to follow his lead, vehemently insisted that two trains a month, for many years, would be all that could be expected! By 1874, however, not less than fifty to sixty freight cars were arriving daily in Los Angeles from Wilmington.
Once more, in 1866, the Post Office was moved, this time to a building opposite the Bella Union hotel. There it remained until perhaps 1868, when it was transferred to the northwest corner of Main and Market streets.
In the spring of 1866, the Los Angeles Board of Education was petitioned to establish a school where Spanish as well as English should be taught--probably the first step toward the introduction into public courses here of the now much-studied castellano.
In noting the third schoolhouse, at the corner of San Pedro and Washington streets, I should not forget to say that Judge Dryden bought the lot for the City, at a cost of one hundred dollars. When the fourth school was erected, at the corner of Charity and Eighth streets, it was built on property secured for three hundred and fifty dollars by M. Kremer, who served on the School Board for nine years, from 1866, with Henry D. Barrows and William Workman. There, a few years ago, a brick building replaced the original wooden structure. Besides Miss Eliza Madigan, teachers of this period or later were the Misses Hattie and Frankie Scott, daughters of Judge Scott, the Misses Maggie Hamilton, Eula P. Bixby, Emma L. Hawkes, Clara M. Jones, H. K. Saxe and C. H. Kimball; a sister of Governor Downey, soon to become Mrs. Peter Martin, was also a public school teacher.
Piped gas as well as water had been quite generally brought into private use shortly after their introduction, all pipes running along the surface of walls and ceilings, in neither a very judicious nor ornamental arrangement. The first gas-fixtures consisted of the old-fashioned, unornamented drops from the ceiling, connected at right angles to the cross-pipe, with its two plain burners, one at either end, forming an inverted T ([Symbol: upside-down T]); and years passed before artistic bronzes and globes, such as were displayed in profusion at the Centennial Exposition, were seen to any extent here.
In September, Leon Loeb arrived in Los Angeles and entered the employ of S. Lazard & Company, later becoming a partner. When Eugene Meyer left for San Francisco on the first of January, 1884, resigning his position as French Consular Agent, Loeb succeeded him, both in that capacity and as head of the firm. After fifteen years' service, the French Government conferred upon Mr. Loeb the decoration of an Officer of the Academy. As Past Master of the Odd Fellows, he became in time one of the oldest members of Lodge No. 35. On March 23d, 1879, Loeb married my eldest daughter, Estelle; and on July 22d, 1911, he died. Joseph P. and Edwin J. Loeb, the attorneys and partners of Irving M. Walker, (son-in-law of Tomás Lorenzo Duque),[27] are sons of Leon Loeb.
In the summer there came to Los Angeles from the Northern part of California an educator who had already established there and in Wisconsin an excellent reputation as a teacher. This was George W. Burton, who was accompanied by his wife, a lady educated in France and Italy. With them they brought two assistants, a young man and a young woman, adding another young woman teacher after they arrived. The company of pedagogues made quite a formidable array; and their number permitted the division of the school--then on Main near what is now Second Street--into three departments: one a kind of kindergarten, another for young girls and a third for boys. The school grew and it soon became necessary to move the boys' department to the vestry-room of the little Episcopal Church on the corner of Temple and New High streets.
Not only was Burton an accomplished scholar and experienced teacher, but Mrs. Burton was a linguist of talent and also proficient in both instrumental and vocal music. Our eldest children attended the Burton School, as did also those of many friends such as the Kremers, Whites, Morrises, Griffiths, the Volney Howards, Kewens, Scotts, Nichols, the Schumachers, Joneses and the Bannings.
Daniel Bohen, another watchmaker and jeweler, came after Pyle, establishing himself, on September 11th, on the south side of Commercial Street. He sold watches, clocks, jewelry and spectacles; and he used to advertise with the figure of a huge watch. S. Nordlinger, who arrived here in 1868, bought Bohen out and continued the jewelry business during forty-two years, until his death in 1911, when, as a pioneer jeweler, he was succeeded by Louis S. and Melville Nordlinger, who still use the title of S. Nordlinger & Sons.
Charles C. Lips, a German, came to Los Angeles from Philadelphia in 1866 and joined the wholesale liquor firm of E. Martin & Company, later Lips, Craigue & Company, in the Baker Block. As a volunteer fireman, he was a member of the old Thirty-Eights; a fact adding interest to the appointment, on February 28th, 1905, of his son, Walter Lips, as Chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
On October 3d, William Wolfskill died, mourned by many. Though but sixty-eight years of age, he had witnessed much in the founding of our great Southwestern commonwealth; and notwithstanding the handicaps to his early education, and the disappointments of his more eventful years, he was a man of marked intelligence and remained unembittered and kindly disposed toward his fellow-men.
A good example of what an industrious man, following an ordinary trade, could accomplish in early days was afforded by Andrew Joughin, a blacksmith, who came here in 1866, a powerful son of the Isle of Man, measuring over six feet and tipping the beam at more than two hundred pounds. He had soon saved enough money to buy for five hundred dollars a large frontage at Second and Hill streets, selling it shortly after for fifteen hundred. From Los Angeles, Joughin went to Arizona and then to San Juan Capistrano, but was back here again in 1870, opening another shop. Toward the middle seventies, Joughin was making rather ingenious plows of iron and steel which attracted considerable attention. As fast as he accumulated a little money, he invested it in land, buying in 1874, for six thousand dollars, some three hundred and sixty acres comprising a part of one of the Ciénega ranchos, to which he moved in 1876. Seven years later, he purchased three hundred and five acres once called the Tom Gray Ranch, now known by the more pretentious name of Arlington Heights. In 1888, three years after he had secured six hundred acres of the Palos Verdes rancho near Wilmington, the blacksmith retired and made a grand tour of Europe, revisiting his beloved Isle of Man.
Pat Goodwin was another blacksmith, who reached Los Angeles in 1866 or 1867, shoeing his way, as it were, south from San Francisco, through San José, Whisky Flat and other picturesque places, in the service of A. O. Thorn, one of the stage-line proprietors. He had a shop first on Spring Street, where later the Empire Stables were opened, and afterward at the corner of Second and Spring streets, on the site in time bought by J. E. Hollenbeck.
Still another smith of this period was Henry King (brother of John King, formerly of the Bella Union), who in 1879-80 served two terms as Chief of Police. Later, A. L. Bath was a well-known wheelwright who located his shop on Spring Street near Third.
In 1866, quite a calamity befell this pueblo: the abandonment by the Government of Drum Barracks. As this had been one of the chief sources of revenue for our small community, the loss was severely felt, and the immediate effect disastrous. About the same time, too, Samuel B. Caswell (father of W. M. Caswell, first of the Los Angeles Savings Bank and now of the Security), who had come to Los Angeles the year before, took into partnership John F. Ellis, and under the title of Caswell & Ellis, they started a good-sized grocery and merchandise business; and between the competition that they brought and the reduction of the circulating medium, times with H. Newmark & Company became somewhat less prosperous. Later, John H. Wright was added to the firm, and it became Caswell, Ellis & Wright. On September 1st, 1871, the firm dissolved.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Fifty years after this unpretentious venture in Arcadia Block, that is, in the summer of 1915, the half-centenary of M. A. Newmark & Company and their predecessors was celebrated with a picnic in the woodlands belonging to Universal City, the holiday and its pleasures having been provided by the firm as a compliment to its employees. On that occasion, a loving-cup was presented by the employees to M. A. Newmark, who responded feelingly to the speech by M. H. Newmark. Another, but somewhat differently inscribed cup was tendered Harris Newmark in an address by Herman Flatau, bringing from the venerable recipient a hearty reply, full of genial reminiscence and natural emotion, in which he happily likened his commercial enterprise, once the small store in Los Angeles Street, to a snowball rolling down the mountain-side, gathering in momentum and size and, fortunately, preserving its original whiteness. Undoubtedly, this Fifty-Year Jubilee will take its place among the pleasantest experiences of a long and varied career.--THE EDITORS.
[27] Died on April 6th, 1915.
XXV. REMOVAL TO NEW YORK, AND RETURN
1867-1868
The reader may already have noted that more than one important move in my life has been decided upon with but little previous deliberation. During August, 1866, while on the way to a family picnic at La Ballona, my brother suggested the advisability of opening an office for H. Newmark & Company in New York; and so quickly had I expressed my willingness to remove there that, when we reached the rancho, I announced to my wife that we would leave for the East as soon as we could get ready. Circumstances, however, delayed our going a few months.
My family at this time consisted of my wife and four children; and together on January 29th, 1867, we left San Pedro for New York, by way of San Francisco and Panamá, experiencing frightfully hot weather. Stopping at Acapulco, during Maximilian's revolution, we were summarily warned to keep away from the fort on the hill; while at Panamá yellow fever, spread by travelers recently arrived from South America, caused the Captain to beat a hasty retreat. Sailing on the steamer Henry Chancey from Aspinwall, we arrived at New York on the sixth of March; and having domiciled my family comfortably, my next care was to establish an office on the third floor at 31 and 33 Broadway, placing it in charge of M. J. Newmark, who had preceded me to the metropolis a year before. In a short time, I bought a home on Forty-ninth Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, then an agreeable residence district. An intense longing to see my old home next induced me to return to Europe, and I sailed on May 16th for Havre on the steam-propeller Union; the band playing The Highland Fling as the vessel left the pier. In mid-ocean, the ship's propeller broke, and she completed the voyage under sail. Three months later, I returned on the Russia. The recollection of this journey gives me real satisfaction; for had I not taken it then, I should never again have seen my father. On the twenty-first of the following November, or a few months after I last bade him good-bye, he died at Loebau, in the seventy-fifth year of his age. My mother had died in the summer of 1859.
It was during this visit that, tarrying for a week in the brilliant French capital, I saw the Paris Exposition, housed to a large extent in one immense building in the Champ de Mars. I was wonderfully impressed with both the city and the fair, as well as with the enterprising and artistic French people who had created it, although I was somewhat disappointed that, of the fifty thousand or more exhibitors represented, but seven hundred were Americans.
One little incident may be worth relating. While I was standing in the midst of the machinery one day, the gendarmes suddenly began to force the crowd back, and on retreating with the rest, I saw a group of ladies and gentlemen approaching. It was soon whispered that they were the Empress Eugénie and her suite, and that we had been commanded to retire in order to permit her Majesty to get a better view of a new railroad coach that she desired to inspect.
Not long ago I was reading of a trying ordeal in the life of Elihu B. Washburne, American Minister to France, who, having unluckily removed his shoe at a Court dinner, was compelled to rise with the company on the sudden appearance of royalty, and to step back with a stockinged foot! The incident recalled an experience of my own in London. I had ordered from a certain shoemaker in Berlin a pair of patent-leather gaiters which I wore for the first time when I went to Covent Garden with an old friend and his wife. It was a very warm evening and the performance had not progressed far before it became evident that the shoes were too small. I was, in fact, nearly overcome with pain, and in my desperation removed the gaiters (when the lights were low), quietly shoved them under the seat and sat out the rest of the performance with a fair degree of comfort and composure. Imagine my consternation, however, when I sought to put the shoes on again and found the operation almost impossible! The curtain fell while I was explaining and apologizing to my friends; and nearly every light was extinguished before I was ready to emerge from the famous opera house and limp to a waiting carriage.
A trifling event also lingers among the memories of this revisit to my native place. While journeying towards Loebau in a stage, I happened to mention that I had married since settling in America; whereupon one of my fellow-passengers inquired whether my wife was white, brown or black?
Major Ben C. Truman was President Johnson's private secretary until he was appointed, in 1866, special agent for the Post Office department on the Pacific Coast. He came to Los Angeles in February, 1867, to look after postal matters in Southern California and Arizona, but more particularly to reëstablish, between Los Angeles and points in New Mexico, the old Butterfield Route which had been discontinued on account of the War. Truman opened post offices at a number of places in Los Angeles County. On December 8th, 1869, the Major married Miss Augusta Mallard, daughter of Judge J. S. Mallard. From July, 1873, until the late summer of 1877, he controlled the Los Angeles Star, contributing to its columns many excellent sketches of early life in Southern California, some of which were incorporated in one or more substantial volumes; and of all the pioneer journalists here, it is probable that none have surpassed this affable gentleman in brilliancy and genial, kindly touch. Among Truman's books is an illustrated work entitled Semi-Tropical California, dedicated, with a Dominus vobiscum, to Phineas Banning and published in San Francisco, 1874; while another volume, issued seven years later, is devoted to Occidental Sketches.
A fire, starting in Bell's Block on Los Angeles Street, on July 13th, during my absence from the city, destroyed property to the value of sixty-four thousand dollars; and the same season, S. Lazard & Company moved their dry goods store from Bell's Row to Wolfskill's building on Main Street, opposite the Bella Union hotel.
Germain Pellissier, a Frenchman from the Hautes-Alpes, came to Los Angeles in August, and for twenty-eight years lived at what is now the corner of Seventh and Olive streets. Then the land was in the country; but by 1888, Pellissier had built the block that bears his name. On settling here, Pellissier went into sheep-raising, scattering stock in Kern and Ventura counties, and importing sheep from France and Australia in order to improve his breed; and from one ram alone in a year, as he demonstrated to some doubting challengers, he clipped sixty-two and a half pounds of wool.
P. Beaudry began to invest in hill property in 1867, at once improving the steep hillside of New High Street, near Sonora Town, which he bought in, at sheriff's sale, for fifty-five dollars. Afterward, Beaudry purchased some twenty acres between Second, Fourth, Charity and Hill streets, for which he paid five hundred and seventeen dollars; and when he had subdivided this into eighty lots, he cleared about thirty thousand dollars. Thirty-nine acres, between Fourth and Sixth, and Pearl and Charity streets, he finally disposed of at a profit, it is said, of over fifty thousand dollars.
John G. Downey having subdivided Nieto's rancho, Santa Gertrudis, the little town of Downey, which he named, soon enjoyed such a boom that sleepy Los Angeles began to sit up and take notice. Among the early residents was E. M. Sanford, a son-in-law of General John W. Gordon, of Georgia. A short time before the founding of Downey, a small place named Galatin had been started near by, but the flood of 1868 caused our otherwise dry rivers to change their courses, and Galatin was washed away. This subdividing at once stimulated the coming of land and home-seekers, increased the spirit of enterprise and brought money into circulation.
Soon afterward, Phineas Banning renewed the agitation to connect Los Angeles with Wilmington by rail. He petitioned the County to assist the enterprise, but the larger taxpayers, backed by the over-conservative farmers, still opposed the scheme, tooth and nail, until it finally took all of Banning's influence to carry the project through to a successful termination.
George S. Patton, whose father, Colonel Patton of the Confederate Army, was killed at Winchester, September 19th, 1864, is a nephew of Andrew Glassell and the oldest of four children who came to Los Angeles with their mother and her father, Andrew Glassell, Sr., in 1867. Educated in the public schools of Los Angeles, Patton afterward attended the Virginia Military Institute, where Stonewall Jackson had been a professor, returning to Los Angeles in September, 1877, when he entered the law firm of Glassell, Smith & Patton. In 1884, he married Miss Ruth, youngest daughter of B. D. Wilson, after which he retired to private life. One of Patton's sisters married Tom Brown; another sister became the wife of the popular physician, Dr. W. Le Moyne Wills. In 1871, his mother, relict of Colonel George S. Patton, married her kinsman, Colonel George H. Smith.
John Moran, Sr., conducted a vineyard on San Pedro Street near the present Ninth, in addition to which he initiated the soda-water business here, selling his product at twenty-five cents a bottle. Soda water, however, was too "soft" a drink to find much favor and little was done to establish the trade on a firm basis until 1867, when H. W. Stoll, a German, drove from Colorado to California and organized the Los Angeles Soda Water Works. As soon as he began to manufacture the aerated beverages, Stevens & Wood set up the first soda-water fountain in Los Angeles, on North Spring Street near the Post Office. After that, bubbling water and strangely-colored syrups gained in popularity until, in 1876, quite an expensive fountain was purchased by Preuss & Pironi's drug store, on Spring Street opposite Court. And what is more, they brought in hogsheads from Saratoga what would be difficult to find in all Los Angeles to-day: Congress, Vichy and Kissingen waters. Stoll, by the way, in 1873, married Fräulein Louisa Behn, daughter of John Behn.
An important industry of the late sixties and early seventies was the harvesting of castor beans, then growing wild along the zanjas. They were shipped to San Francisco for manufacturing purposes, the oil factories there both supplying the ranchmen with seed and pledging themselves to take the harvest when gathered. In 1867, a small castor-oil mill was set up here.
The chilicothe--derived, according to Charles F. Lummis, from the Aztec, chilacayote, the wild cucumber, or echinocystes fabacea--is the name of a plaything supplied by diversified nature, which grew on large vines, especially along the slope leading down to the river on what is now Elysian Park, and in the neighborhood of the hills adjacent to the Mallard and Nichols places. Four or five of these chilicothes, each shaped much like an irregular marble, came in a small burr or gourd; and to secure them for games, the youngsters risked limb, if not life, among the trees and rocks. Small circular holes were sometimes cut into the nuts; and after the meat, which was not edible, had been extracted, the empty shells were strung together like beads and presented, as necklaces and bracelets, to sisters and sweethearts.
Just about the time when I first gazed upon the scattered houses of our little pueblo, the Pacific Railway Expedition, sent out from Washington, prepared and published a tinted lithograph sketch of Los Angeles, now rather rare. In 1867, Stephen A. Rendall, an Englishman of Angora goat fame, who had been here, off and on, as a photographer, devised one of the first large panoramas of Los Angeles, which he sold by advance subscription. It was made in sections; and as the only view of that year extant, it also has become notable as an historical souvenir.
Surrounded by his somewhat pretentious gallery and his mysterious darkroom on the top floor of Temple's new block, V. Wolfenstein also took good, bad and indifferent photographs, having arrived here, perhaps, in the late sixties, and remaining a decade or more, until his return to his native Stockholm where I again met him. He operated with slow wet-plates, and pioneers will remember the inconvenience, almost tantamount to torture, to which the patron was subjected in sitting out an exposure. The children of pioneers, too, will recall his magic, revolving stereoscope, filled with fascinating views at which one peeped through magnifying glasses.
Louis Lewin must have arrived here in the late sixties. Subsequently, he bought out the stationery business of W. J. Brodrick, and P. Lazarus, upon his arrival from Tucson in 1874, entered into partnership with him; Samuel Hellman, as was not generally known at the time, also having an interest in the firm which was styled Louis Lewin & Company. When the Centennial of the United States was celebrated here in 1876, a committee wrote a short historical sketch of Los Angeles; and this was published by Lewin & Company. Now the firm is known as the Lazarus Stationery Company, P. Lazarus[28] being President. Lewin and Lazarus married into families of pioneers: Mrs. Lewin is a daughter of S. Lazard, while Mrs. Lazarus is a daughter of M. Kremer. Lewin died at Manilla on April 5th, 1905.
On November 18th, the Common Council contracted with Jean Louis Sainsevain to lay some five thousand feet of two- and three-inch iron pipe at a cost of about six thousand dollars in scrip; but the great flood of that winter caused Sainsevain so many failures and losses that he transferred his lease, in the spring or summer of 1868, to Dr. J. S. Griffin, Prudent Beaudry, and Solomon Lazard, who completed Sainsevain's contract with the City.
Dr. Griffin and his associates then proposed to lease the water-works from the City for a term of fifty years, but soon changed this to an offer to buy. When the matter came up before the Council for adoption, there was a tie vote, whereupon Murray Morrison, just before resigning as President of the Council, voted in the affirmative, his last official act being to sign the franchise. Mayor Aguilar, however, vetoed the ordinance, and then Dr. Griffin and his colleagues came forward with a new proposition. This was to lease the works for a period of thirty years, and to pay fifteen hundred dollars a year in addition to performing certain things promised in the preceding proposition.
At this stage of the negotiations, John Jones made a rival offer, and P. McFadden, who had been an unsuccessful bidder for the Sainsevain lease, tried with Juan Bernard to enter into a twenty-year contract. Notwithstanding these other offers, however, the City authorities thought it best, on July 22d, 1868, to vote the franchise to Dr. Griffin, S. Lazard and P. Beaudry, who soon transferred their thirty-year privileges to a corporation known as the Los Angeles City Water Company, in which they became trustees. Others associated in this enterprise were Eugene Meyer, I. W. Hellman, J. G. Downey, A. J. King, Stephen Hathaway Mott--Tom's brother--W. H. Perry and Charles Lafoon. A spirited fight followed the granting of the thirty-year lease, but the water company came out victorious.
In the late sixties, when the only communities of much consequence in Los Angeles County were Los Angeles, Anaheim and Wilmington, the latter place and Anaheim Landing were the shipping ports of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Arizona. At that time, or during some of the especially prosperous days of Anaheim, the slough at Anaheim Landing (since filled up by flood) was so formed, and of such depth, that heavily-loaded vessels ran past the warehouse to a considerable distance inland, and there unloaded their cargoes. At the same time the leading Coast steamers began to stop there. Not many miles away was the corn-producing settlement, Gospel Swamp.
I have pointed out the recurring weakness in the wooden pipes laid by Sainsevain and Marchessault. This distressing difficulty, causing, as it did, repeated losses and sharp criticism by the public, has always been regarded as the motive for ex-Mayor Marchessault's death on January 20th, when he committed suicide in the old City Council room.
Jacob Loew arrived in America in 1865 and spent three years in New York before he came to California in 1868. Clerking for a while in San Francisco, he went to the Old Town of San Diego, then to Galatin, and in 1872 settled in Downey; and there, in conjunction with Jacob Baruch, afterward of Haas, Baruch & Company, he conducted for years the principal general merchandise business of that section. On coming to Los Angeles in 1883, he bought, as I have said, the Deming Mill now known as the Capitol Mills. Two years later, on the second of August, he was married to my daughter Emily.
Dr. Joseph Kurtz, once a student at Giessen, arrived in Los Angeles on February 3d, with a record for hospital service at Baltimore during the Civil War, having been induced to come here by the druggist, Adolf Junge, with whom for a while he had some association. Still later he joined Dr. Rudolph Eichler in conducting a pharmacy. For some time prior to his graduation in medicine, in 1872, Dr. Kurtz had an office in the Lanfranco Building. For many years, he was surgeon to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and consulting physician to the Santa Fé Railroad Company, and he also served as President of the Los Angeles College Clinical Association. I shall have further occasion to refer to this good friend. Dr. Carl Kurtz is distinguishing himself in the profession of his father.
Hale fellow well met and always in favor with a large circle, was my Teutonic friend, Lewis Ebinger, who, after coming to Los Angeles in 1868, turned clay into bricks. Perhaps this also recalled the days of his childhood when he made pies of the same material; but be that as it may, Lewis in the early seventies made his first venture in the bakery business, opening shop on North Spring Street. In the bustling Boom days when real estate men saw naught but the sugar-coating, Ebinger, who had moved to elaborate quarters in a building at the southwest corner of Spring and Third streets, was dispensing cream puffs and other baked delicacies to an enthusiastic and unusually large clientele. But since everybody then had money, or thought that he had, one such place was not enough to satisfy the ravenous speculators; with the result that John Koster was soon conducting a similar establishment on Spring Street near Second, while farther north, on Spring Street near First, the Vienna Bakery ran both Lewis and John a merry race.
Dr. L. W. French, one of the organizers of the Odontological Society of Southern California, also came to Los Angeles in 1868--so early that he found but a couple of itinerant dentists, who made their headquarters here for a part of the year and then hung out their shingles in other towns or at remote ranches.
One day in the spring of 1868, while I was residing in New York City, I received a letter from Phineas Banning, accompanied by a sealed communication, and reading about as follows:
DEAR HARRIS:
Herewith I enclose to you a letter of the greatest importance, addressed to Miss Mary Hollister (daughter, as you know, of Colonel John H. Hollister), who will soon be on her way to New York, and who may be expected to arrive there by the next steamer.
This letter I beg you to deliver to Miss Hollister personally, immediately upon her arrival in New York, thereby obliging
Yours obediently,
(Signed) PHINEAS BANNING.
The steamer referred to had not yet arrived, and I lost no time in arranging that I should be informed, by the company's agents, of the vessel's approach, as soon as it was sighted. This notification came, by the by, through a telegram received before daylight one bitterly cold morning, when I was told that the ship would soon be at the dock; and as quickly as I could, I procured a carriage, hastened to the wharf and, before any passengers had landed, boarded the vessel. There I sought out Miss Hollister, a charming lady, and gave her the mysterious missive.
I thought no more of this matter until I returned to Los Angeles when, welcoming me back, Banning told me that the letter I had had the honor to deliver aboard ship in New York contained nothing less than a proposal of marriage, his solicitation of Miss Hollister's heart and hand!
One reason why the Bella Union played such an important rôle in the early days of Los Angeles, was because there was no such thing as a high-class restaurant; indeed, the first recollection I have of anything like a satisfactory place is that of Louis Vielle, known by some as French Louis and nicknamed by others Louis Gordo, or Louis the Fat. Vielle came to Los Angeles from Mexico, a fat, jolly little French caterer, not much over five feet in height and weighing, I should judge, two hundred and fifty pounds; and this great bulk, supported as it was by two peg-like legs, rendered his appearance truly comical. His blue eyes, light hair and very rosy cheeks accentuated his ludicrous figure. Louis, who must have been about fifty-four years of age when I first met him, then conducted his establishment in John Lanfranco's building on Main Street, between Commercial and Requena; from which fact the place was known as the Lanfranco, although it subsequently received the more suggestive title, the What Cheer House. Louis was an acknowledged expert in his art, but he did not always choose to exert himself. Nevertheless his lunches, for which he charged fifty or seventy-five cents, according to the number of dishes served, were well thought of, and it is certain that Los Angeles had never had so good a restaurant before. At one time, our caterer's partner was a man named Frederico Guiol, whom he later bought out. Louis could never master the English language, and to his last day spoke with a strong French accent. His florid cheeks were due to the enormous quantity of claret consumed both at and between meals. He would mix it with soup, dip his bread into it and otherwise absorb it in large quantities. Indeed, at the time of his fatal illness, while he was living with the family of Don Louis Sainsevain, it was assumed that over-indulgence in wine was the cause. Be that as it may, he sickened and died, passing away at the Lanfranco home in 1872. Vielle had prospered, but during his sickness he spent largely of his means. After his death, it was discovered that he had been in the habit of hiding his coin in little niches in the wall of his room and in other secret places; and only a small amount of the money was found. A few of the real pioneers recollect Louis Gordo as one who added somewhat to the comfort of those who then patronized restaurants; while others will associate him with the introduction here of the first French dolls, to take the place of rag-babies.
Both Judge Robert Maclay Widney and Dr. Joseph P. Widney, the surgeon, took up their residence in Los Angeles in 1868. R. M. Widney set out from Ohio about 1855 and, having spent two years in exploring the Rockies, worked for a while in the Sacramento Valley, where he chopped wood for a living, and finally reached Los Angeles with a small trunk and about a hundred dollars in cash. Here he opened a law and real-estate office and started printing the Real Estate Advertiser. Dr. Widney crossed the Continent in 1862, spent two years as surgeon in the United States Army in Arizona, after which he proceeded to Los Angeles and soon became one of the charter members of the Los Angeles Medical Society, exerting himself in particular to extend Southern California's climatic fame.
I have spoken of the ice procured from the San Bernardino mountains in rather early days, but I have not said that in summer, when we most needed the cooling commodity, there was none to be had. The enterprising firm of Queen & Gard, the first to arrange for regular shipments of Truckee River ice in large quantities by steamer from the North, announced their purpose late in March, 1868, of building an ice house on Main Street; and about the first of April they began delivering daily, in a large and substantial wagon especially constructed for that purpose and which, for the time being, was an object of much curiosity. Liberal support was given the enterprise; and perhaps it is no wonder that the perspiring editor of the News, going into ecstasies because of a cooling sample or two deposited in his office, said, in the next issue of his paper:
The founding of an ice depot is another step forward in the progress that is to make us a great City. We have Water and Gas, and now we are to have the additional luxury of Ice!
Banning's fight for the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad has been touched upon more than once. Tomlinson, his rival, opposed the project; but his sudden death, about two weeks before the election in 1868, removed one of the serious obstacles. When the vote was taken, on March 24th, as to whether the City and County should bond themselves to encourage the building of the railroad, seven hundred votes were cast in favor of, and six hundred and seventy-two votes against, the undertaking, leaving Banning and his associates ready to go ahead. By the way, as a reminder of the quondam vogue of Spanish here, it may be noted that the proclamation regarding the railroad, published in 1868, was printed in both English and Spanish.
On May 16th, Henry Hamilton, whose newspaper, the Star, during part of the War period had been suspended through the censorship of the National Government, again made his bow to the Los Angeles public, this time in a half-facetious leader in which he referred to the "late unpleasantness" in the family circle. Hamilton's old-time vigor was immediately recognized, but not his former disposition to attack and criticize.
Dr. H. S. Orme, once President of the State Board of Health of California, arrived in Los Angeles on July 4th and soon became as prominent in Masonic as in medical circles. Dr. Harmon, an early successor to Drs. Griffin and Den, first settled here in 1868, although he had previously visited California in 1853.
Carl Felix Heinzeman, at one time a well-known chemist and druggist, emigrated from Germany in 1868 and came direct to Los Angeles, where after succeeding J. B. Saunders & Company, he continued, in the Lanfranco Building, what grew to be the largest drug store south of San Francisco. Heinzeman died on April 29th, 1903. About the same period, a popular apothecary shop on Main Street, near the Plaza, was known as Chevalier's. In the seventies, when hygiene and sanitation were given more attention, a Welshman named Hughes conducted a steam-bath establishment on Main Street, almost opposite the Baker Block, and the first place of its kind in the city.
Charles F. Harper[29] of Mississippi, and the father of ex-Mayor Harper, in 1868 opened with R. H. Dalton a hardware store in the Allen Block, corner of Spring and Temple streets, thus forerunning Coulter & Harper, Harper & Moore, Harper, Reynolds & Company and the Harper-Reynolds Company.
Michel Lèvy, an Alsatian, arrived in San Francisco when but seventeen years of age, and after various experiences in California and Nevada towns, he came to Los Angeles in 1868, soon establishing, with Joe Coblentz, the wholesale liquor house of Lèvy & Coblentz. The latter left here in 1879, and Lèvy continued under the firm name of M. Lèvy & Company until his death in 1905.
Anastácio Cárdenas, a dwarf who weighed but one and a half pounds when born, came to Los Angeles in 1867 and soon appeared before the public as a singer and dancer. He carried a sword and was popularly dubbed "General." A brother, Ruperto, long lived here.
When the Canal & Reservoir Company was organized with George Hansen as President and J. J. Warner as Secretary, P. Beaudry contributed heavily to construct a twenty-foot dam across the cañon, below the present site of Echo Park, and a ditch leading down to Pearl Street. This first turned attention to the possibilities in the hill-lands to the West; and in return, the City gave to the company a large amount of land, popularly designated as canal and reservoir property.
In 1868, when there was still not a three-story house in Los Angeles, James Alvinza Hayward, a San Franciscan, joined John G. Downey in providing one hundred thousand dollars with which to open, in the old Downey Block on the site of the Temple adobe, the first bank in Los Angeles, under the firm name of Hayward & Company. The lack of business afforded this enterprise short shrift and they soon retired. In July of the same year, I. W. Hellman, William Workman, F. P. F. Temple and James R. Toberman started a bank, with a capital of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, under the title of Hellman, Temple & Company, Hellman becoming manager.
I do not remember when postal lock-boxes were first brought into use, but I do recollect that in the late sixties Postmaster Clarke had a great deal of trouble collecting quarterly rents, and that he finally gave notice that boxes held by delinquents would thereafter be nailed up.
A year or two after the Burtons had established themselves here, came another pedagogue in the person of W. B. Lawlor, a thick-set, bearded man with a flushed complexion, who opened a day-school called the Lawlor Institute; and after the Burtons left here to settle at Portland, Oregon, where Burton became headmaster of an academy for advanced students, many of his former pupils attended Lawlor's school. The two institutions proved quite different in type: the Burton training had tended strongly to languages and literature, while Lawlor, who was an adept at short-cut methods of calculation, placed more stress on arithmetic and commercial education. Burton, who returned to Los Angeles, has been for years a leading member of the Times editorial staff, and Burton's Book on California and its Sunlit Skies is one of this author's contributions to Pacific Coast literature; his wife, however, died many years ago. Lawlor, who was President of the Common Council in 1880, is also dead.
The most popular piano-teacher of about that time was Professor Van Gilpin.
William Pridham came to Los Angeles in August, having been transferred from the San Francisco office of Wells Fargo & Company, in whose service as pony rider, clerk at Austin, Nevada, and at Sacramento, and cashier in the Northern metropolis he had been for some ten years. Here he succeeded Major J. R. Toberman, when the latter, after long service, resigned; and with a single office-boy, at one time little Joe Binford, he handled all the business committed to the company's charge. John Osborn was the outside expressman. Then most of the heavy express matter from San Francisco was carried by steamers, but letters and limited packages of moment were sent by stage. With the advent of railroads, Pridham was appointed by Wells Fargo & Company Superintendent of the Los Angeles district. On June 12th, 1880, he married Miss Mary Esther, daughter of Colonel John O. Wheeler, and later moved to Alameda. Now, after fifty-one years of association with the express business, Pridham still continues to be officially connected with the Wells Fargo company.
Speaking of that great organization, reminds me that it conducted for years a mail-carrying business. Three-cent stamped envelopes, imprinted with Wells Fargo & Company's name, were sold to their patrons for ten cents each; and to compensate for this bonus, the Company delivered the letters entrusted to them perhaps one to two hours sooner than did the Government.
This recalls to me a familiar experience on the arrival of the mail from the North. Before the inauguration of a stage-line, the best time in the transmission of mail matter between San Francisco and Los Angeles was made by water, and Wells Fargo messengers sailed with the steamers. Immediately upon the arrival of the boat at San Pedro, the messenger boarded the stage, and as soon as he reached Los Angeles, pressed on to the office of the Company, near the Bella Union, where he delivered his bagful of letters. The steamer generally got in by five o'clock in the morning; and many a time, about seven, have I climbed Signal or Pound Cake Hill--higher in those days than now, and affording in clear weather a view of both ocean and the smoke of the steamer--upon whose summit stood a house, used as a signal station, and there watched for the rival stages, the approach of which was indicated by clouds of dust. I would then hurry with many others to the Express Company's office where, as soon as the bag was emptied, we would all help ourselves unceremoniously to the mail.
In August, General Edward Bouton, a Northern Army officer, came to Los Angeles and soon had a sheep ranch on Boyle Heights--a section then containing but two houses; and two years later he camped where Whittier now lies. In 1874, he bought land for pasture in the San Jacinto Valley, and for years owned the ocean front at Alamitos Bay from Devil's Gate to the Inlet, boring artesian wells there north of Long Beach.
Louis Robidoux, who had continued to prosper as a ranchero, died in 1868 at the age of seventy-seven years.
With the usual flourish of spades, if not of trumpets, ground was broken for the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad at Wilmington on September 19th, and toward the end of November, the rails had been laid about a mile out from Wilmington.
The last contract for carrying the Overland Mail was given to Wells Fargo & Company on October 1st and pledged a round remuneration of one million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars per annum, while it also permitted passengers and freight to be transported; but the Company came to have a great deal of competition. Phineas Banning, for example, had a stage-line between Los Angeles and Yuma, in addition to which mail and passengers were carried in buckboards, large wagons and jerkies. Moreover there was another stage-line between Tucson and El Paso, and rival stage-lines between El Paso and St. Louis; and in consequence, the Butterfield service was finally abandoned.
This American vehicle, by the by, the jerky, was so named for the very good reason that, as the wagon was built without springs, it jerked the rider around unmercifully. Boards were laid across the wagon-box or bed for seats, accommodating four passengers; and some space was provided in the back for baggage. To maintain one's position in the bumping, squeaking vehicle at all, was difficult; while to keep one's place on the seat approached the impossible.
Of the various Los Angeles roadways in 1868, West Sixth Street was most important in its relation to travel. Along this highway the daily Overland stages entered and departed from the city; and by this route came all the Havilah, Lone Pine, Soledad and Owens River trade, as well as that of the Ballona and Ciénega districts. Sixth Street also led to the Fair Grounds, and over its none too even surface dashed most of the sports and gallants on their way to the race course.
I have said that I returned to New York, in 1867, presumably for permanent residence. Soon after I left Los Angeles, however, Samuel Cohn became desperately ill, and the sole management of H. Newmark & Company suddenly devolved on Sam's brother Kaspare. This condition of affairs grew so bad that my return to Los Angeles became imperative. Accordingly, leaving my family, I took passage on October 31st, 1868, for San Francisco, and returned to Los Angeles without delay. Then I wired my wife to start with the children for the Coast, and to have the furniture, including a Chickering grand piano, just purchased, shipped after them; and when they arrived, we once more took possession of the good old adobe on Main Street, where we lived contentedly until 1874. This piano, by the way, which came by freight around Cape Horn, was one of the first instruments of the kind seen here, John Schumacher having previously bought one. While we were living in New York, Edward J. Newmark, my wife's brother, died here on February 17th, 1868.
Before I left for New York, hardly anything had been done, in subdividing property, save perhaps by the Lugos and Downey, and at Anaheim and Wilmington. During the time that I was away, however, newspapers and letters from home indicated the changes going on here; and I recall what an impression all this made upon me. On my way down from San Francisco on Captain Johnson's Orizaba in December--about the same time that the now familiar locomotive San Gabriel reached Wilmington--land-agents were active and people were talking a great deal about these subdivisions; and by the time I reached Los Angeles I, too, was considerably stirred up over the innovations and as soon as possible after my return hastened out to see the change. The improvements were quite noticeable, and among other alterations surprising me were the houses people had begun to build on the approaches to the western hills. I was also to learn that there was a general demand for property all over the city, Colonel Charles H. Larrabee, City Attorney in 1868, especially having bought several hundred feet on Spring and Fort streets. Later, I heard of the experiences of other Angeleños aboard ship who were deluged with circulars advertising prospective towns.
To show the provincial character of Los Angeles fifty years ago, I will add an anecdote or two. While I was in New York, members of my family reported by letter, as a matter of extraordinary interest, the novelty of a silver name-plate on a neighboring front door; and when I was taken to inspect it, a year later, I saw the legend, still novel:
Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Meyer
In the metropolis I had found finger-bowls in common use, and having brought back with me such a supply as my family would be likely to need, I discovered that it had actually fallen to my lot to introduce these desirable conveniences into Los Angeles.
William Ferguson was an arrival of 1868, having come to settle up the business of a brother and remaining to open a livery stable on North Main Street near the Plaza, which he conducted for ten years. Investing in water company stock, Ferguson abandoned his stable to make water-pipes, a couple of years later, perhaps, than J. F. Holbrook had entered the same field. Success enabled Ferguson to build a home at 303 South Hill Street, where he found himself the only resident south of Third.
This manufacture here of water pipe recalls a cordial acquaintance with William Lacy, Sr., an Englishman, who was interested with William Rowland in developing the Puente oil fields. His sons, William, Jr., and Richard H., originators of the Lacy Manufacturing Company, began making pipe and tanks a quarter of a century ago.
C. R. Rinaldi started a furniture business here in 1868, opening his store almost opposite the Stearns's home on North Main Street. Before long he disposed of an interest to Charles Dotter, and then, I think, sold out to I. W. Lord and moved to the neighborhood of the San Fernando Mission. About the same time, Sidney Lacey, who arrived in 1870 and was a popular clerk with the pioneer carpet and wall-paper house of Smith & Walter, commenced what was to be a long association with this establishment. In 1876, C. H. Bradley bought out Lord, and the firm of Dotter & Bradley, so well known to householders of forty years ago, came into existence. In 1884, H. H. Markham (soon to be Congressman and then Governor of the State), with General E. P. Johnson bought this concern and organized the Los Angeles Furniture Company, whose affairs since 1910, (when her husband died), have been conducted by the President, Mrs. Katherine Fredericks.
Conrad Hafen, a German-Swiss, reached Los Angeles in December, 1868, driving a six-horse team and battered wagon with which he had braved the privations of Death Valley; and soon he rented a little vineyard, two years later buying for the same purpose considerable acreage on what is now Central Avenue. Rewarded for his husbandry with some affluence, Hafen built both the old Hafen House and the new on South Hill Street, once a favorite resort for German arrivals. He retired in 1905.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] Died on September 30th, 1914.
[29] Died on September 13th, 1915.
XXVI. THE CERRO GORDO MINES
1869
It was early in 1869 that I was walking down Spring Street one day and saw a crowd at the City Hall. On a large box stood Mayor Joel H. Turner, and just as I arrived a man leaning against the adobe wall called out, "Seven dollars!" The Mayor then announced the bid--for an auction was in progress--"Seven dollars once, seven dollars twice, seven dollars three times!" and as he raised his hand to conclude the sale, I called out, "A half!" This I did in a spirit of fun; in fact, I did not even know what was being offered! "Seven dollars fifty once, seven dollars fifty twice, seven dollars fifty three times, and sold--to Harris Newmark!" called the Mayor. I then inquired what I had bought, and was shown the location of about twenty acres, a part of nine hundred being sold by the City at prices ranging from five to ten dollars an acre.
The piece purchased was west of the city limits, and I kept it until 1886 when I had almost forgotten that I was the owner. Then George Williamson, one of the first salesmen of H. Newmark & Company, who became a boomer of the period, bought it from me for ten thousand dollars and resold it within two weeks for fourteen thousand, the Sunset Oil Company starting there, as the land was within what was known as the oil district. Since the opening of streets in all directions, I have lost trace of this land, but incline to the belief that it lies in the immediate vicinity of the Wilshire district.
My experience reminds me of Colonel John O. Wheeler's investment in fifty or sixty acres at what is now Figueroa and Adams streets. Later, going to San Francisco as a Customs officer, he forgot about his purchase until one day he received a somewhat surprising offer.
On January 1st, A. J. King and R. H. Offutt began to publish a daily edition of the News, hitherto a semi-weekly, making it strongly Democratic. There was no Sunday issue and twelve dollars was the subscription. On October 16th, Offutt sold his interest to Alonzo Waite, and the firm became King & Waite. In another year King had retired.
How modest was the status of the Post Office in 1869 may be gathered from the fact that the Postmaster had only one assistant, a boy, both together receiving fourteen hundred dollars in greenbacks, worth but a thousand dollars in gold.
Henry Hammel, for years connected with the Bella Union, and a partner named Bremerman leased the United States Hotel on February 1st from Louis Mesmer; and in March, John King succeeded Winston & King as manager of the Bella Union. King died in December, 1871.
In the winter of 1868-69, when heavy rains seriously interfered with bringing in the small supply of lumber at San Pedro, a coöperative society was proposed, to insure the importation each summer of enough supplies to tide the community over during the wintry weather. Over one hundred persons, it was then estimated, had abandoned building, and many others were waiting for material to complete fences and repairs.
Thanks to Contractor H. B. Tichenor's vigor in constructing the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad, public interest in the venture, by the beginning of 1869, had materially increased. In January, a vessel arrived with a locomotive and a steam pile-driver; and a few days later a schooner sailed into San Pedro with ties, sleepers and rails enough for three miles of the track. Soon, also, the locomotive was running part of the way. The wet winter made muddy roads, and this led to the proposal to lay the tracks some eight or ten miles in the direction of Los Angeles, and there to transfer the freight to wagons.
Stearns Hall and the Plaza were amusement places in 1869. At the latter, in January, the so-called Paris Exposition Circus held forth; while Joe Murphy and Maggie Moore, who had just favored the passengers on the Orizaba, on coming south from San Francisco, with a show, trod the hall's more classic boards.
Ice a quarter of an inch thick was formed here for several days during the third week in January, and butchers found it so difficult to secure fat cattle that good beef advanced to sixteen and a quarter cents a pound.
On January 20th, I purchased from Eugene Meyer the southern half of lots three and four in block five, fronting on Fort Street between Second and Third, formerly owned by William Buffum and J. F. Burns. Meyer had paid one thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty feet front and three hundred and thirty feet depth; and when I bought half of this piece for one thousand dollars, it was generally admitted that I had paid all that it was worth.
Isaac Lankershim--father of J. B. Lankershim and Mrs. I. N. Van Nuys--who first visited California in 1854, came from San Francisco in 1869 and bought, for one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, part of Andrés Pico's San Fernando rancho, which he stocked with sheep. Levi Strauss & Company, Scholle Brothers, L. and M. Sachs & Company of San Francisco and others, were interested in this partnership, then known as the San Fernando Farm Association; but Lankershim was in control until about one year later, when Isaac Newton Van Nuys arrived from Monticello, where he had been merchandising, and was put permanently in charge of the ranch. At this period Lankershim lived there, for he had not yet undertaken milling in Los Angeles. A little later, Lankershim and Van Nuys successfully engaged in the raising of wheat, cultivating nearly sixty thousand acres, and consigning some of their harvests to Liverpool. This fact recalls a heavy loss in the spring of 1881, when the Parisian, which left Wilmington under Captain Reaume, foundered at sea with nearly two hundred and fifty tons of wheat and about seventy-five tons of flour belonging to them.
J. B. Lankershim, owner of the well-known hotel bearing his name, after the death of his father made some very important investments in Los Angeles real estate, including the northwest corner of Broadway and Seventh Street, now occupied by the building devoted to Bullock's department store.
M. N. Newmark, a nephew of mine and President of the Newmark Grain Company, arrived in 1869, and clerked for H. Newmark & Company until 1871, in which year he established a partnership with S. Grand in Compton, selling general merchandise. This partnership lasted until 1878, when Newmark bought out Grand. He finally disposed of the business in 1889 and, with D. K. Edwards, organized the firm of Newmark & Edwards. In 1895 Edwards sold out his interest.
Victor Ponet, a native of Belgium, and once Belgian Consul here, while traveling around the world, landed in California in 1867 and two years later came to Los Angeles. Attracted by the climate and Southern California's possible future, Ponet settled here, engaging first in the pioneer manufacture and importation of mirrors and picture frames; and before his retirement to live in Sherman, he had had experience both as undertaker and banker.[30]
In 1869, General W. S. Rosecrans came south in the interest of the proposed San Diego & Gila Railroad, never constructed. The General, as a result, took up land around Sausal Redondo, and there by the summer of 1869 so many people (who insisted that Rosecrans had appropriated public land) had squatted, that he was put to no end of trouble in ejecting them.
Though I have witnessed most of the progress in Southern California, it is still difficult to realize that so much could have been accomplished within the life-time of one man. During 1868-69 only twenty-two hundred boxes of oranges were shipped from Los Angeles, while the Southern counties' crop of oranges and lemons for 1913-14 is estimated, I am told, at about twelve million boxes!
Due to the eight-day shindy marking the celebration of the Chinese New Year, demand for a more concentrated rumpus was voiced in February, 1869, threatening an agitation against John Chinaman.
The same month, residents, wishing a school in which German should be taught, and a gymnasium, petitioned the Common Council to acquire a lot in New High Street for the purpose.
About 1869, the Los Angeles Social Club which, to the best of my recollection, was the first of its kind in the city, was organized, with headquarters in the earliest building erected by I. W. Hellman, at the northwest corner of Los Angeles and Commercial streets. Among other pioneer members were Captain Cameron E. Thom, Tom Mott, Eugene Meyer, Sam and Charles Prager, Tom Rowan, I. W. and H. W. Hellman, S. Lazard, W. J. Brodrick, John Jones, Kaspare Cohn, A. C. Chauvin, M. and J. L. Morris, Leon Loeb, Sam Meyer, Dr. F. A. McDougal, B. Cohn and myself. Somewhat later, the Club moved to the east side of Los Angeles Street, between Commercial and Aliso. Still later, it dissolved; and although it did not become the direct ancestor of any of the several well-known social organizations in the Los Angeles of to-day, I feel that it should be mentioned as having had the honor of being their precursor and model.
Speaking of social organizations, I may say that several Los Angeles clubs were organized in the early era of sympathy, tolerance and good feeling, when the individual was appreciated at his true worth and before the advent of men whose bigotry has sown intolerance and discord, and has made a mockery of both religion and professed ideals.
It must have been early in the sixties that Alexander Bell sold the southern end of his property to H. Heinsch, the saddler. On February 23d, 1869, the directors of the San Pedro Railroad selected the Mike Madigan lot on Alameda Street, on a part of which the owner was conducting a livery-stable, as the site for the depot in Los Angeles; and Heinsch having allowed the authorities to cut through his property, the extension of Commercial and Requena streets eastward from Los Angeles to Alameda was hastened.
Late on February 14th, the news was circulated of a shocking tragedy in the billiard saloon of the Lafayette Hotel, and at once aroused intense regret, affecting, as the affair did, the standing and happiness of two well-known Los Angeles families. About eight o'clock, Charles Howard, a young lawyer of prominence and a son of Volney E. Howard, met Daniel B. Nichols, son of the ex-Mayor; and some dispute between them having reached its climax, both parties drew weapons and fired. Howard was killed and Nichols wounded, though not fatally, as was at first thought. The tragedy--the cause of which was never generally known--made a profound impression.
The work of extending water mains along Fort, Spring and other streets progressed steadily until the Los Angeles Water Company struck a snag which again demonstrated the city's dependence. Difficulty in coupling pipes called a halt, and the management had to send all the way to San Francisco for a complete set of plumbers' tools!
In the spring, Tileston, Emery & Company, a Los Angeles and San Gabriel firm, brought south the first steam separator seen here and took contracts to thrash the farmers' grain. On June 3d they started the machine, and many persons went out to see it work. Among features pointed out were precautions against fire from the engine, which the contractors declared made "everything perfectly safe."
From its inception, Wilmington sought, in one way or another, to rival Los Angeles, and in April threw down the gauntlet. A. A. Polhamus, a workshop engineer of the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad, (in 1887, a manufacturer of straw wrapping paper somewhere between here and Wilmington,) had built a velocipede; and no sooner was it noised about than John Goller set to work to eclipse the achievement. About one o'clock, therefore, on April 25th one of Goller's apprentices suddenly appeared ready to make the first experiment. The streets were soon crowded and interest was at fever heat. The young fellow straddled the wheels, moved about half a block, and then, at the junction of Main and Spring streets, executed a first-class somersault! Immediately, however, other intrepid ones tried their skill, and the velocipede was voted a successful institution of our young and progressive city.
By the first week in May, the velocipede craze had spread, crowds congregating daily on Main Street to see the antics of the boys; and soon H. F. Laurence announced the opening in Stearns's Hall, on May 14th, of a Velocipede School, where free instruction would be given: afternoons to ladies and evenings to men; and to further stimulate interest, Laurence announced a raffle on May 15th of "a splendid velocipede." By May 22d, J. Eastman had obtained permission of the Common Council to build a velocipede track on the historic old Plaza; but evidently he did not make use of the privilege, for a newspaper writer was soon giving vent to the following sarcasm:
Our City Fathers tried to make a little coin by leasing the Plaza as a velocipede circle or square; but, so far, the velocipedist has failed to connect. I dare say the cost of cleaning up the place of weeds backed the poor soul out!
It happened in 1869 that Judson, the financier, and Belshaw, a practical miner, began working their lead mines in Cerro Gordo, in the Owens River country; and as the handling of the ore necessitated a great many wagons, Remi Nadeau obtained the contract for the transportation of the ore brought down to Wilmington and then shipped by boat to San Francisco. Remi had returned here about 1866, after having been in San Francisco for four or five years; and eventually he built the Nadeau Hotel at the corner of Spring and First streets, where A. Bouelle, father of Frank A. Bouelle, had formerly kept a little grocery store in an adobe. This ore was loaded on to very large wagons, each drawn on level stretches by twelve or fourteen mules, but requiring as many as twenty or more mules while crossing the San Fernando Mountains--always regarded as one of the worst places on the route. In order not to return with empty wagons, Nadeau purchased supplies of every description, which he sold to people along the route; and in this way he obtained the best financial results. This was about the same time that Victor Beaudry (Prudent's brother, who came in 1855, to mine at San Gabriel) opened a store at Camp Independence, Inyo County, and became a stockholder in the Cerro Gordo mines. In the early eighties, Beaudry was interested with his brother in local real estate movements. He died in Montreal in 1888.
After a time, the mines yielded so much ore that Nadeau found himself short of transportation facilities; but with the assistance of Judson & Belshaw, as well as H. Newmark & Company, he was enabled to increase his capacity until he operated thirty-two teams. Los Angeles was then the southern terminus of his operations, although, during the building of the numerous Southern Pacific tunnels, his headquarters were removed to San Fernando, and still later, on the completion of the railroad, to Mojave. Nadeau's assistant, Willard G. Halstead, son-in-law of H. K. W. Bent, handled most of the business when Nadeau was absent; A. E. Lott was foreman of teams and continually rode up and down the line of operations; while Thomas O'Brien was station-agent at Cerro Gordo. The contract had been very profitable to Judson & Belshaw; yet when the agreement expired on January 1st, 1872, they wished to renew it at a lower figure. Nadeau, believing that no one else could do the work satisfactorily, refused the new terms offered; whereupon Judson & Belshaw entered into an arrangement with William Osborn, a liveryman, who owned a few teams.
The season of 1871-72 was by no means a good one and barley was high, involving a great expense to Nadeau in feeding four or five hundred animals; and right there arose his chief difficulty. He was in debt to H. Newmark & Company and therefore proposed that he should turn his outfit over to us; but as we had unlimited confidence both in his integrity and in his ability, we prevailed on him to keep and use his equipment to the best advantage. The suggestion was a fortunate one, for just at this time large deposits of borax were discovered in the mountains at Wordsworth, Nevada, and Nadeau commenced operations there with every promise of success. In his work of hauling between Cerro Gordo and Los Angeles, Nadeau had always been very regular, his teams with rare exceptions arriving and leaving on schedule time; and even when, occasionally, a wagon did break down, the pig-lead would be unloaded without delay, tossed to the side of the trail and left there for the next train; a method that was perfectly safe, since thieves never disturbed the property. Osborn, on the other hand, soon proved uncertain and unreliable, his wagons frequently breaking down and causing other accidents and delays. To protect themselves, Judson & Belshaw were compelled to terminate their contract with him and reopen negotiations with Nadeau; but the latter then rejected their advances unless they would buy a half-interest in his undertaking and put up one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the construction and maintenance of the numerous stations that had become necessary for the proper development of his business. Nadeau also made it a condition that H. Newmark & Company be paid. The stations already constructed or proposed were Mud Springs, Lang's Station, Mojave, Red Rock, Panamint, Indian Wells, Little Lake, Haiwee Meadows and Cartago. Before these were built, the teamsters camped in the open, carrying with them the provisions necessary for man and beast. Cartago was on the south side of Owens Lake, Cerro Gordo being on the north side, eighteen miles opposite; and between these points the miniature side-wheeler Bessie, of but twenty tons capacity, operated.
An interesting fact or two in connection with Owens Lake may be recorded here. Its water was so impregnated with borax and soda that no animal life could be sustained. In the winter, the myriads of wild duck were worth talking about; but after they had remained near the lake for but a few days, they were absolutely unpalatable. The teamsters and miners operating in the vicinity were in the habit of sousing their clothes in the lake for a few minutes, and when dried, the garments were found to be as clean as if they had passed through the most perfect laundry. Even a handful of the water applied to the hair would produce a magnificent lather and shampoo.
Judson & Belshaw were compelled to accept Nadeau's terms; and Nadeau returned from Nevada, organized in 1873 the Cerro Gordo Freighting Company, and operated more extensively than ever before until he withdrew, perhaps five years after the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad and just before the petering out of the Cerro Gordo Mines. In their palmy days, these deposits were the most extensive lead-producers of California; and while the output might not have been so remarkable in comparison with those of other lead mines in the world, something like eighty-five to ninety bars, each weighing about one hundred pounds, were produced there daily. Most of this was shipped, as I have said, to San Francisco; and for a while, at least, from there to Swansea, Wales.
Nadeau at one time was engaged in the industry of raising sugar-beets at the Nadeau rancho, near Florence, now Nadeau Station; and then he attempted to refine sugar. But it was bad at best, and the more sugar one put in coffee, the blacker the coffee became.
On April 24th, 1869, under Mayor Joel Turner's administration, the Los Angeles Board of Education came into existence.
In the early sixties, the City authorities promised to set out trees at the Plaza, providing neighboring property-owners would fence in the place; but even though Governor Downey supplied the fence, no trees were planted, and it was not until the spring of 1869 that any grew on the public square. This loud demand for trees was less for the sake of the usual benefits than to hide the ugliness of the old water tank.
On May 9th, F. G. Walther issued the first number of the Los Angeles Chronik, a German weekly journal that survived scarcely three months.
The tenth of May was another red-letter day for the Pacific Coast, rejoicing, as it did, in the completion of the Central Pacific at Promontory Point in Utah. There, with a silver hammer, Governor Stanford drove the historic gold spike into a tie of polished California laurel, thus consummating the vast work on the first trans-continental railroad. This event recalls the fact that, in the railway's construction, Chinese labor was extensively employed, and that in 1869 large numbers of the dead bodies of Celestials were gathered up and shipped to Sacramento for burial.
William J. Brodrick, after wandering in Peru and Chile, came to Los Angeles in 1869 and started as a stationer; then he opened an insurance office, and still later became interested in the Main Street Railway and the water company. On May 8th, 1877, Brodrick married Miss Laura E., daughter of Robert S. Carlisle. On October 18th, 1898, Brodrick died, having been identified with many important activities.
Hacks and omnibuses first came into use in 1869. Toward the end of May of that year, J. J. Reynolds, who had long been popular as a driver between Los Angeles and Wilmington, purchased a hack and started in business for himself, appealing to his "reputation for good driving and reliability" as a reasonable assurance that he would bring his patrons right side up to their scattered homes; and so much was he in demand, both in the city and its suburbs, that a competitor, J. Hewitt, in the latter part of June ordered a similar hack to come by steamer. It arrived in due time and was chronicled as a "luxurious vehicle." Hewitt regularly took up his stand in the morning in front of the Lafayette Hotel; and he also had an order slate at George Butler's livery-stable on Main Street.
During the sixties, Dr. T. H. Rose, who had relinquished the practice of medicine for the career of a pedagogue, commenced work as Principal of the Boys' Grammar School on Bath Street, and in 1869 was elected Superintendent of City Schools. He held this office but about a year, although he did not resign from educational work here until 1873. During his incumbency, he was Vice-Principal of the first Teachers' Institute ever held here, contributing largely toward the founding of the first high school and the general development of the schools prior to the time when Dr. Lucky, the first really professional teacher, assumed charge. On leaving Los Angeles, Dr. Rose became Principal of the school at Healdsburg, Sonoma County, where he married a Mrs. Jewell, the widow of an old-time, wealthy miner; but he was too sensitive and proud to live on her income and, much against her wishes, insisted on teaching to support himself. In 1874, he took charge of the high school at Petaluma, where the family of Mrs. Rose's first husband had lived; and the relationship of the two families probably led to Rose and his wife separating. Later, Dr. Rose went to the Sandwich Islands to teach, but by 1883, shortly before he died, he was back in Los Angeles, broken in health and spirit. Dr. Rose was an excellent teacher, a strict disciplinarian and a gentleman.
The retirement of Dr. Rose calls to mind a couple of years during which Los Angeles had no City School Superintendent. While Rose was Principal, a woman was in charge of the girls' department; and the relations between the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress were none too friendly. When Dr. Rose became Superintendent, the schoolma'am instantly disapproved of the choice and rebelled; and there being no law which authorized the governing of Los Angeles schools in any other manner than by trustees, the new Superintendent had no authority over his female colleague. The office of Superintendent of City Schools, consequently, remained vacant until 1873.
Dr. James S. Crawford had the honor, as far as I am aware, of being one of the first regular dentists to locate in Los Angeles. As an itinerant he had passed the winters of 1863, 1864 and 1865 in this city, afterward going east; and on his return to California in 1869 he settled in the Downey Block at Spring and Main streets, where he practiced until, on April 14th, 1912, he died in a Ventura County camp.
In 1864, the California Legislature, wishing to encourage the silk industry, offered a bounty of two hundred and fifty dollars for every plantation of five thousand mulberry trees of two years' growth, and a bounty of three hundred dollars for each one hundred thousand salable cocoons; and in three years an enormous number of mulberry trees, in various stages of growth, was registered. Prominent among silk-growers was Louis Prévost, who rather early had established here an extensive mulberry-tree nursery and near it a large cocoonery for the rearing of silk worms; and had planned, in 1869, the creation of a colony of silk-worms whose products would rival even those of his native belle France. The California Silk Center Association of Los Angeles was soon formed, and four thousand acres of the rancho once belonging to Juan Bandini, fourteen hundred and sixty acres of the Hartshorn Tract and three thousand one hundred and sixty-nine acres of the Jurupa, on the east side of the Santa Ana River, were purchased. That was in June or July; but on August 16th, in the midst of a dry season, Louis Prévost died, and the movement received a serious setback. To add to the reverses, the demand for silk-worm eggs fell off amazingly; while finally, to give the enterprise its death-blow, the Legislators, fearful that the State Treasury would be depleted through the payment of bounties, withdrew all State aid.
The Silk Center Association, therefore, failed; but the Southern California Colony Association bought all the land, paying for it something like three dollars and a half an acre. To many persons, the price was quite enough: old Louis Robidoux had long refused to list his portion for taxes, and some one had described much of the acreage as so dry that even coyotes, in crossing, took along their canteens for safety! A town called at first Jurupa, and later Riverside, was laid out; a fifty thousand-dollar ditch diverted the Santa Ana River to a place where Nature had failed to arrange for its flowing; and in a few months a number of families had settled beside the artificial waterway. Riversiders long had to travel back and forth to Los Angeles for most of their supplies (a stage, still in existence, being used by ordinary passengers), and this made a friendly as well as profitable business relation with the older and larger town; but experiments soon showing that oranges could grow in the arid soil, Riverside in course of time had something to sell as well as to buy.
Who was more familiar both to the youth of the town and to grown-ups than Nicolás Martinez, in summer the purveyor of cooling ice cream, in winter the vender of hot tamales! From morning till night, month in and month out during the sixties and seventies, Martinez paced the streets, his dark skin made still swarthier in contrast to his white costume--a shirt, scarcely tidy, together with pantaloons none too symmetrical and hanging down in generous folds at the waist. On his head, in true native fashion, he balanced in a small hooped tub what he had for sale; he spoke with a pronounced Latin accent, and his favorite method of announcing his presence was to bawl out his wares. The same receptacle, resting upon a round board with an opening to ease the load and covered with a bunch of cloths, served both to keep the tamales hot and the ice cream cool; while to dispense the latter, he carried in one hand a circular iron tray, in which were holes to accommodate three or four glasses. Further, for the convenience of the exacting youth of the town, he added a spoon to each cream-filled glass; and what stray speck of the ice was left on the spoon after the youngster had given it a parting lick, Nicolás, bawling anew to attract the next customer, fastidiously removed with his tobacco-stained fingers!
FOOTNOTE:
[30] Died, February 9th, 1914.
XXVII. COMING OF THE IRON HORSE
1869
The Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad continued in 1869 to be the local theme of most importance, although its construction did not go on as rapidly as had been promised. The site for a depot, it is true, had been selected; but by June 14th, only six miles were finished. Farmers were loud in complaints that they had been heavily taxed, and in demanding that the road be rushed to completion, in order to handle the prospectively-large grain crop. Additional gangs were therefore employed, and by the twentieth of July, seven more miles of track had been laid. In the meantime, the Sunday School at Compton enjoyed the first excursion, the members making themselves comfortable on benches and straw in some freight cars.
As the work on the railroad progressed, stages, in addition to those regularly running through from Los Angeles to Wilmington, began connecting with the trains at the temporary terminus of the railroad. People went down to Wilmington to see the operations, not merely on the track, but in the machine shops where the cars for freight, express, baggage, smoking and passenger service (designed by A. A. Polhamus, the machinist) were being built under the superintendence of Samuel Atkinson, who had been brought West by the San Francisco & San José Valley Railroad, because of a reputation for railroad experience enjoyed by few, if by any other persons on the Coast. The Company also had a planing mill and wheelwright shop under the charge of George W. Oden.
By the first of August, both the railroad and connecting stages were advertising Sunday excursions to the beach, emphasizing the chance to travel part of the way by the new means of transit. Curiously, however, visitors were allowed to enjoy the sea-breezes but a short time: arriving at Wilmington about ten or half-past, they were compelled to start back for Los Angeles by four in the afternoon. Many resorters still patronized the old service; and frequently the regular stages, racing all the way up from the steamer, would actually reach the city half an hour earlier than those transferring the passengers from the railway terminus which was extended by August 1st to a point within four miles of town.
When eighteen miles had been finished, it was reported that General Stoneman and his post band would make an excursion on the first train, accompanied by General Banning and leading citizens of the town; but strong opposition to the Company laying its tracks through the center of "The Lane," now Alameda Street, having developed, the work was stopped by injunction. The road had been constructed to a point opposite the old Wolfskill home, then "far from town," and until the matter was settled, passengers and freight were unloaded there.
Great excitement prevailed here shortly after sundown on Wednesday evening, August 21st, when the mail-stage which had left for Gilroy but a short time before came tearing back to town, the seven or eight passengers excitedly shouting that they had been robbed. The stage had proceeded but two miles from Los Angeles when four masked highwaymen stepped into the road and ordered, "Hands up!" Among the passengers was the well-known and popular Ben Truman who, having learned by previous experience just what to do in such a ticklish emergency and "being persuaded that the two barrels of cold steel had somewhat the proportions of a railway tunnel," sadly but promptly unrolled one hundred and eighty dollars in bills, and quite as sadly deposited, in addition, his favorite chronometer. The highwayman picked up the watch, looked it over, shook his head and, thanking Ben, returned it, expressing the hope that, whatever adversity might overwhelm him, he should never be discovered with such a timepiece! All in all, the robbers secured nearly two thousand dollars; but, strange to relate, they overlooked the treasure in the Wells Fargo chest, as well as several hundred dollars in greenbacks belonging to the Government. Sheriff J. F. Burns and Deputy H. C. Wiley pursued and captured the robbers; and within about a week they were sent to the Penitentiary.
On the same evening, at high tide, the little steamer christened Los Angeles and constructed by P. Banning & Company to run from the wharf to the outside anchorage, was committed to the waters, bon-fires illuminating quite distinctly both guests and the neighboring landscape, and lending to the scene a weird and charming effect.
In a previous chapter I have given an account of Lady Franklin's visit to San Pedro and Los Angeles, and of the attention shown her. Her presence awakened new interest in the search for her lamented husband, and paved the way for the sympathetic reception of any intelligence likely to clear up the mystery. No little excitement, therefore, was occasioned eight years later by the finding of a document at San Buenaventura that seemed "like a voice from the dead." According to the story told, as James Daly (of the lumber firm of Daly & Rodgers) was walking on the beach on August 30th, he found a sheet of paper a foot square, much mutilated but bearing, in five or six different languages, a still legible request to forward the memoranda to the nearest British Consul or the Admiralty at London. Every square inch of the paper was covered with data relating to Sir John Franklin and his party, concluding with the definite statement that Franklin had died on June 11th, 1847. Having been found within a week of the time that the remnant of Dr. Hall's party, which went in search of the explorer, had arrived home in Connecticut with the announcement that they had discovered seven skeletons of Franklin's men, this document, washed up on the Pacific Coast, excited much comment; but I am unable to say whether it was ever accepted by competent judges as having been written by Franklin's associates.
In 1869, the long-familiar adobe of José António Carrillo was razed to make way for what, for many years, was the leading hotel of Los Angeles. This was the Pico House, in its decline known as the National Hotel, which, when erected on Main Street opposite the Plaza at a cost of nearly fifty thousand dollars, but emphasized in its contrasting showiness the ugliness of the neglected square. Some thirty-five thousand dollars were spent in furnishing the eighty-odd rooms, and no little splurge was made that guests could there enjoy the luxuries of both gas and baths! In its palmy days, the Pico House welcomed from time to time travelers of wide distinction; while many a pioneer, among them not a few newly-wedded couples now permanently identified with Los Angeles or the Southland, look back to the hostelry as the one surviving building fondly associated with the olden days. Charles Knowlton was an early manager; and he was succeeded by Dunham & Schieffelin.
Competition in the blacking of boots enlivened the fall, the Hotel Lafayette putting boldly in printer's ink the question, "Do You Want to Have Your Boots Blacked in a Cool, Private Place?" This challenge was answered with the following proclamation:
Champion Boot-Black! Boots Blacked Neater and Cheaper than Anywhere Else in the City, at the Blue Wing Shaving Saloon by D. Jefferson.
Brickmaking had become, by September, quite an important industry. Joe Mullally, whose brickyard was near the Jewish Cemetery, then had two kilns with a capacity of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; and in the following month he made over five hundred thousand brick.
In course of time, the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad was completed to the Madigan lot, which remained for several years the Los Angeles terminus; and justly confident that the difficulty with the authorities would be removed, the Company pushed work on their depot and put in a turn-table at the foot of New Commercial Street. There was but one diminutive locomotive, though a larger one was on its way around the Horn from the East and still another was coming by the Continental Railway; and every few days the little engine would go out of commission, so that traffic was constantly interrupted. At such times, confidence in the enterprise was somewhat shaken; but new rolling stock served to reassure the public. A brightly-painted smoking-car, with seats mounted on springs, was soon the "talk of the town."
I have spoken of J. J. Reynolds's early enterprise and the competition that he evoked. Toward the end of July, he went up to San Francisco and outdid Hewitt by purchasing a handsome omnibus, suitable for hotel service and also adapted to the needs of families or individuals clubbing together for picnics and excursions. This gave the first impetus to the use of hotel 'buses, and by the first Sunday in September, when the cars from Wilmington rolled in bringing passengers from the steamer Orizaba, the travelers were met by omnibuses and coaches from all three hotels, the Bella Union, the United States and the Lafayette; the number of vehicles, public and private, giving the streets around the railroad depot a very lively appearance.
Judge W. G. Dryden, so long a unique figure here, died on September 10th and A. J. King succeeded him as County Judge.
A notable visit to Los Angeles was that of Secretary William H. Seward who, in 1869, made a trip across the Continent, going as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico, and being everywhere enthusiastically received. When Seward left San Francisco for San Diego, about the middle of September, he was accompanied by Frederick Seward and wife (his son and daughter-in-law), General W. S. Rosecrans, General Morton C. Hunter, Colonel Thomas Sedgwick and Senator S. B. Axtell; and the news of their departure having been telegraphed ahead, many people went down to greet them on the arrival of the steamer Orizaba. After the little steamer Los Angeles had been made fast to the wharf, it was announced, to everyone's disappointment, that the Secretary was not coming ashore, as he wished to continue on his way to San Diego.
Meanwhile, the Common Council had resolved to extend the hospitality of the City to the distinguished party; and by September 19th, posters proclaimed that Seward and his party were coming and that citizens generally would be afforded an opportunity to participate in a public reception at the Bella Union on September 21st. A day in advance, therefore, the Mayor and a Committee from the Council set out for Anaheim, where they met the distinguished statesman on his way, whence the party jogged along leisurely in a carriage and four until they arrived at the bank of the Los Angeles River; and there Seward and his friends were met by other officials and a cavalcade of eighty citizens led by the military band of Drum Barracks. The guests alighted at the Bella Union and in a few minutes a rapidly-increasing crowd was calling loudly for Mr. Seward.
The Secretary, being welcomed on the balcony by Mayor Joel H. Turner, said that he had been laboring under mistakes all his life: he had visited Rome to witness celebrated ruins, but he found more interesting ruins in the Spanish Missions (great cheers); he had journeyed to Switzerland to view its glaciers, but upon the Pacific Coast he had seen rivers of ice two hundred and fifty feet in breadth, five miles long and God knows how high (more cheers); he had explored Labrador to examine the fisheries, but in Alaska he found that the fisheries came to him (Hear! hear! and renewed applause); he had gone to Burgundy to view the most celebrated vineyards of the world, but the vineyards of California far surpassed them all! (Vociferous and deafening hurrahs, and tossing of bouquets.)
The next day the Washington guests and their friends were shown about the neighborhood, and that evening Mr. Seward made another and equally happy speech to the audience drawn to the Bella Union by the playing of the band. There were also addresses by the Mayor, Senator Axtell, ex-Governor Downey and others, after which, in good old American fashion, citizens generally were introduced to the associate of the martyred Lincoln. At nine o'clock, a number of invited guests were ushered into the Bella Union's dining-room where, at a bounteous repast, the company drank to the health of the Secretary. This brought from the visitor an eloquent response with interesting local allusions.
Secretary Seward remarked that he found people here agitated upon the question of internal improvements--for everywhere people wanted railroads. Californians, if they were patient, would yet witness a railroad through the North, another by the Southern route, still another by the Thirty-fifth parallel, a fourth by the central route, and lastly, as the old plantation song goes, one "down the middle!" California needed more population, and railroads were the means by which to get people.
Finally, Mr. Seward spoke of the future prospects of the United States, saying much of peculiar interest in the light of later developments. We were already great, he affirmed; but a nation satisfied with its greatness is a nation without a future. We should expand, and as mightily as we could; until at length we had both the right and the power to move our armies anywhere in North America. As to the island lying almost within a stone's throw of our mainland, ought we not to possess Cuba, too?
Other toasts, such as "The Mayor and Common Council," "The Pioneers," "The Ancient Hospitality of California," "The Press," "The Wine Press" and "Our Wives and Sweethearts," were proposed and responded to, much good feeling prevailing notwithstanding the variance in political sentiments represented by guests and hosts; and everyone went home, in the small hours of the morning, pleased with the manner in which Los Angeles had received her illustrious visitors. The next day, Secretary Seward and party left for the North by carriages, rolling away toward Santa Barbara and the mountains so soon to be invaded by the puffing, screeching iron horse.
Recollecting this banquet to Secretary Seward, I may add an amusing fact of a personal nature. Eugene Meyer and I arranged to go to the dinner together, agreeing that we were to meet at the store of S. Lazard & Company, almost directly opposite the Bella Union. When I left Los Angeles in 1867, evening dress was uncommon; but in New York I had become accustomed to its more frequent use. Rather naturally, therefore, I donned my swallowtail; Meyer, however, I found in a business suit and surprised at my query as to whether he intended going home to dress? Just as we were, we walked across the street and, entering the hotel, whom should we meet but ex-Mayor John G. Nichols, wearing a grayish linen duster, popular in those days, that extended to his very ankles; while Pio and Andrés Pico came attired in blue coats with big brass buttons. Meyer, observing the Mayor's outfit, facetiously asked me if I still wished him to go home and dress according to Los Angeles fashion; whereupon I drew off my gloves, buttoned up my overcoat and determined to sit out the banquet with my claw-hammer thus concealed. Mr. Seward, it is needless to say, was faultlessly attired.
The Spanish archives were long neglected, until M. Kremer was authorized to overhaul and arrange the documents; and even then it was not until September 16th that the Council built a vault for the preservation of the official papers. Two years later, Kremer discovered an original proclamation of peace between the United States and Mexico.
Elsewhere I allude to the slow development of Fort Street. For the first time, on the twenty-fourth of September street lamps burned there, and that was from six to nine months after darkness had been partially banished from Nigger Alley, Los Angeles, Aliso and Alameda streets.
Supplementing what I have said of the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad depot: it was built on a lot fronting three hundred feet on Alameda Street and having a depth of one hundred and twenty feet, its situation being such that, after the extension of Commercial Street, the structure occupied the southwest corner of the two highways. Really, it was more of a freight-shed than anything else, without adequate passenger facilities; a small space at the North end contained a second story in which some of the clerks slept; and in a cramped little cage beneath, tickets were sold. By the way, the engineer of the first train to run through to this depot was James Holmes, although B. W. Colling ran the first train stopping inside the city limits.
About this time the real estate excitement had become still more intense. In anticipation of the erection of this depot, Commercial Street property boomed and the first realty agents of whom I have any recollection appeared on the scene, Judge R. M. Widney being among them. I remember that two lots--one eighty by one hundred and twenty feet in size at the northwest corner of First and Spring streets, and the other having a frontage of only twenty feet on New Commercial Street, adjacent to the station--were offered simultaneously at twelve hundred dollars each. Contrary, no doubt, to what he would do to-day, the purchaser chose the Commercial Street lot, believing that location to have the better future.
Telegraph rates were not very favorable, in 1869, to frequent or verbose communication. Ten words sent from Los Angeles to San Francisco cost one dollar and a half; and fifty cents additional was asked for the next five words. After a while, there was a reduction of twenty-five per cent, in the cost of the first ten words, and fifty per cent, on the second five.
Twenty-four hundred voters registered in Los Angeles this year.
In the fall, William H. Spurgeon founded Santa Ana some five miles beyond Anaheim on a tract of about fifty acres, where a number of the first settlers experimented in growing flax.
It is not clear to me just when the rocky Arroyo Seco began to be popular as a resort, but I remember going there on picnics as early as 1857. By the late sixties, when Santa Monica Cañon also appealed to the lovers of sylvan life, the Arroyo had become known as Sycamore Grove--a name doubtless suggested by the numerous sycamores there--and Clois F. Henrickson had opened an establishment including a little "hotel," a dancing-pavilion, a saloon and a shooting-alley. Free lunch and free beer were provided for the first day, and each Sunday thereafter in the summer season an omnibus ran every two hours from Los Angeles to the Sycamores. After some years, John Rumph and wife succeeded to the management, Frau Rumph being a popular Wirtin; and then the Los Angeles Turnverein used the grove for its public performances, including gymnastics, singing and the old-time sack-racing and target-shooting.
James Miller Guinn, who had come to California in November, 1863 and had spent several years in various counties of the State digging for gold and teaching school, drifted down to Los Angeles in October and was soon engaged as Principal of the public school at the new town of Anaheim, remaining there in that capacity for twelve years, during part of which time he also did good work on the County School Board.
Under the auspices of the French Benevolent Society and toward the end of October, the corner-stone of the French Hospital built on City donation lots, and for many years and even now one of the most efficient institutions of our city, was laid with the usual ceremonies.
On October 9th, the first of the new locomotives arrived at Wilmington and a week later made the first trial trip, with a baggage and passenger car. Just before departure a painter was employed to label the engine and decorate it with a few scrolls; when it was discovered, too late, that the artist had spelled the name: LOS ANGEL_O_S. On October 23d, two lodges of Odd Fellows used the railway to visit Bohen Lodge at Wilmington, returning on the first train, up to that time, run into Los Angeles at midnight.
October 26th was a memorable day, for on that date the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad Company opened the line to the public and invited everybody to enjoy a free excursion to the harbor. Two trains were dispatched each way, the second consisting of ten cars; and not less than fifteen hundred persons made the round trip. Unfortunately, it was very warm and dusty, but such discomforts were soon forgotten in the novelty of the experience. On the last trip back came the musicians; and the new Los Angeles depot having been cleared, cleaned up and decorated for a dedicatory ball, there was a stampede to the little structure, filling it in a jiffy.
Judge H. K. S. O'Melveny, who first crossed the Plains from Illinois on horseback in 1849, came to Los Angeles with his family in November, having already served four years as a Circuit Judge, following his practice of law in Sacramento. He was a brother-in-law of L. J. Rose, having married, in 1850, Miss Annie Wilhelmina Rose. Upon his arrival, he purchased the southwest corner of Second and Fort streets, a lot one hundred and twenty by one hundred and sixty-five feet in size, and there he subsequently constructed one of the fine houses of the period; which was bought, some years later, by Jotham Bixby for about forty-five hundred dollars, after it had passed through various hands. Bixby lived in it for a number of years and then resold it. In 1872, O'Melveny was elected Judge of Los Angeles County; and in 1887, he was appointed Superior Judge. H. W. O'Melveny, his second son, came from the East with his parents, graduating in time from the Los Angeles High School and the State University. Now he is a distinguished attorney and occupies a leading position as a public-spirited citizen, and a patron of the arts and sciences.
In his very readable work, From East Prussia to the Golden Gate, Frank Lecouvreur credits me with having served the commonwealth as Supervisor. This is a slight mistake: I was an unwilling candidate, but never assumed the responsibilities of office. In 1869, various friends waited upon me and requested me to stand as their candidate for the supervisorship; to which I answered that I would be glad to serve my district, but that I would not lift a finger toward securing my election. H. Ábila was chosen with six hundred and thirty-one votes, E. M. Sanford being a close second with six hundred and sixteen; while five hundred and thirty-seven votes were cast in my favor.
Trains on the new railway began to run regularly on November 1st; and there still exists one of the first time-tables, bearing at the head, "Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad" and a little picture of a locomotive and train. At first, the train scheduled for two stated round trips a day (except on steamer days, when the time was conditioned by the arrival and departure of vessels) left Wilmington at eight o'clock in the morning and at one o'clock in the afternoon, returning at ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. The fare between Los Angeles and Wilmington was one dollar and fifty cents, with an additional charge of one dollar to the Anchorage; while on freight from the Anchorage to Los Angeles, the tariff was: dry goods, sixteen dollars per ton; groceries and other merchandise, five dollars; and lumber, seven dollars per thousand feet.
After the formal opening of the railroad, a permanent staff of officers, crew and mechanicians was organized. The first Superintendent was H. W. Hawthorne, who was succeeded by E. E. Hewitt, editor of the Wilmington Journal. N. A. McDonald, was the first conductor; Sam Butler was the first and, for a while, the only brakeman, and the engineers were James McBride and Bill Thomas. The first local agent was John Milner; the first agent at Wilmington, John McCrea. The former was succeeded by John E. Jackson, who from 1880 to 1882 served the community as City Surveyor. Worthy of remark, perhaps, as a coincidence, is the fact that both Milner and McCrea ultimately became connected in important capacities with the Farmers & Merchants Bank.
The first advertised public excursion on the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad after its opening was a trip to Wilmington and around San Pedro Harbor, arranged for November 5th, 1869. The cars, drawn by the locomotive Los Angeles and connecting with the little steamer of the same name, left at ten and returned at three o'clock in the afternoon. Two dollars was the round-trip fare, while another dollar was exacted from those who went out upon the harbor.
In the late seventies, a Portuguese named Fayal settled near what is now the corner of Sixth and Front streets, San Pedro; and one Lindskow took up his abode in another shack a block away. Around these rude huts sprang up the neighborhoods of Fayal and Lindville, since absorbed by San Pedro.
Probably the first attempt to organize a fire company for Los Angeles was made in 1869, when a meeting was called on Saturday evening, November 6th, at Buffum's Saloon, to consider the matter. A temporary organization was formed, with Henry Wartenberg as President; W. A. Mix, Vice-President; George M. Fall, Secretary; and John H. Gregory, Treasurer. An initiation fee of two dollars and a half, and monthly dues of twenty-five cents, were decided upon; and J. F. Burns, B. Katz, Emil Harris, George Pridham, E. B. Frink, C. D. Hathaway, P. Thompson, O. W. Potter, C. M. Small and E. C. Phelps were charter members. A committee appointed to canvass for subscriptions made little progress, and the partial destruction of Rowan's American Bakery, in December, demonstrating the need of an engine and hose cart, brought out sharp criticism of Los Angeles's penuriousness.
About the middle of November, Daniel Desmond, who had come on October 14th of the preceding year, opened a hat store on Los Angeles Street near New Commercial, widely advertising the enterprise as a pioneer one and declaring, perhaps unconscious of any pun, that he proposed to fill a want that had "long been felt." The steamer Orizaba, which was to bring down Desmond's goods, as ill luck would have it left half of his stock lying on the San Francisco pier; and the opening, so much heralded, had to be deferred several weeks. As late as 1876, he was still the only exclusive hatter here. Desmond died on January 23d, 1903, aged seventy years, and was succeeded by his son, C. C. Desmond. Another son, D. J. Desmond, is the well-known contractor.
Toward the close of November, Joseph Joly, a Frenchman, opened the Chartres Coffee Factory on Main Street opposite the Plaza, and was the pioneer in that line. He delivered to both stores and families, and for a while seemed phenomenally successful; but one fine morning in December it was discovered that the "Jolly Joseph" had absconded, leaving behind numerous unpaid bills.
The first marble-cutter to open a workshop in Los Angeles was named Miller. He came toward the end of 1869 and established himself in the Downey Block. Prior to Miller's coming, all marble work was brought from San Francisco or some source still farther away, and the delay and expense debarred many from using that stone even for the pious purpose of identifying graves.
With the growth of Anaheim as the business center of the country between the new San Gabriel and the Santa Ana rivers, sentiment had been spreading in favor of the division of Los Angeles County; and at the opening of the Legislature of 1869-70, Anaheim had its official representative in Sacramento, ready to present the claims of the little German settlement and its thriving neighbors. The person selected for this important embassy was Major Max von Stroble; and he inaugurated his campaign with such sagacity and energy that the bill passed the Assembly and everything pointed to an early realization of the scheme. It was not, however, until Los Angeles awoke to the fact that the proposed segregation meant a decided loss, that opposition developed in the Senate and the whole matter was held up.
Stroble thereupon sent posthaste to his supporters for more cash, and efforts were made to get the stubborn Senate to reconsider. Doubtless somebody else had a longer purse than Stroble; for in the end he was defeated, and the German's dream did not come true until long after he had migrated to the realms that know no subdivisions. One of the arguments used in favor of the separation was that it took two days's time, and cost six dollars, for the round trip to the Los Angeles Courthouse; while another contention then regarded as of great importance was that the one coil of hose pipe owned by the County was kept at Los Angeles! Stroble, by-the-way, desired to call the new county Anaheim.
Major von Stroble was a very interesting character. He was a German who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel in the German Revolution of 1848, and who, after having taken part in the adventures of Walker's filibustering expedition to Nicaragua, finally landed in Anaheim, where he turned his attention to the making of wine. He soon tired of that, and in 1867 was found boring for oil on the Brea Ranch, again meeting with reverses where others later were so successful. He then started the movement to divide Los Angeles County and once more failed in what was afterward accomplished. Journalism in Anaheim next absorbed him and, having had the best of educational advantages, Stroble brought to his newspaper both culture and the experience of travel.
The last grand effort of this adventurous spirit was the attempt to sell Santa Catalina Island. Backed by the owners, Stroble sailed for Europe and opened headquarters near Threadneedle Street in London. In a few weeks he had almost effected the sale, the contract having been drawn and the time actually set for the following day when the money--a cool two hundred thousand pounds--was to be paid; but no Stroble kept tryst to carry out his part of the transaction. Only the evening before, alone and unattended, the old man had died in his room at the very moment when Fortune, for the first time, was to smile upon him! Eighteen or twenty years later, Catalina was sold for much less than the price once agreed upon.
XXVIII. THE LAST OF THE VIGILANTES
1870
As I have somewhere related, I began buying hides as far back as 1855, but it was not until 1870 that this branch of our business assumed such importance as to require more convenient quarters. Then we bought a place on the southeast corner of Alameda and Commercial streets, facing sixty feet on Alameda and having a depth of one hundred and sixty-five feet, where we constructed a hide-house and erected a press for baling. We paid P. Beaudry eleven hundred dollars for the lot. The relatively high price shows what the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad depot had done for that section. In the days when hides were sent by sailing-vessels to the East, a different method of preparing them for shipment was in vogue. The wet hides having been stretched, small stakes were driven into the ground along the edge of, and through the skins, thus holding them in place until they had dried and expanding them by about one-third; in this condition they were forwarded loose. Now that transportation is more rapid and there are tanneries in California, all hides are handled wet.
In 1870, business life was centered on Los Angeles Street between Commercial and Arcadia; and all the hotels were north of First Street. Fort Street ended in a little bluff at a spot now between Franklin and First streets. Spring Street was beginning to take on new life, and yet there was but one gas lamp along the entire roadway, though many were the appeals to add another lamp, "say, as far as First Street!"
Sometime in January, a number of ladies of this city met and, through the exertions of Mrs. Rosa Newmark, wife of Joseph Newmark, formed the Ladies' Hebrew Benevolent Society. Mrs. Newmark, as was once pointed out in a notable open-air meeting of women's clubs (to which I elsewhere refer), never accepted any office in the Society; but for years she was untiring in her efforts in the cause of charity. The first officers were: President, Mrs. W. Kalisher; Vice-President, Mrs. Harris Newmark; Treasurer, Mrs. John Jones; Secretary, Mrs. B. Katz; and Collector, Mrs. A. Baer. Three Counselors--Henry Wartenberg, I. M. Hellman and myself--occasionally met with the ladies to advise them.
Aside from the fact of its importance as the pioneer ladies' benevolent organization instituted in Los Angeles, the Society found a much-needed work to do. It was then almost impossible to obtain nurses, and the duty devolved on members to act in that capacity, where such assistance was required, whether the afflicted were rich or poor. It was also their function to prepare the dead for interment, and to keep proper vigil over the remains until the time of burial.
During the year 1869 or 1870, as the result of occasional gatherings in the office of Dr. Joseph Kurtz, the Los Angeles Turnverein was organized with eleven members--Emil Harris leading in the movement, assisted by Dr. Kurtz, Ed. Preuss, Lorenzo Leck, Philip and Henry Stoll, Jake Kuhrts, Fred Morsch, C. C. Lips and Isaac Cohn. Dr. Kurtz was elected President. They fraternized for a while at Frau Wiebecke's Garden, on the west side of Alameda near First Street, about where the Union Hardware and Metal Company now stands; and there, while beer and wine were served in the open air, the Teutons gratified their love of music and song. Needing for their gymnastics more enclosed quarters, the Turnverein rented of Kalisher & Wartenberg the barn on Alameda Street between Ducommon and First, used as a hide-house; and in that rough-boarded shack, whose none too aromatic odors are still a souvenir to many a pioneer resident, the Turners swung and vaulted to their heart's content. Classes were soon arranged for boys; and the envy of all was the lad who, after numerous risks to limb and neck, proudly topped the human pyramid. Another garden of this period often patronized by the Turnverein was Kiln Messer's, on First Street between Alameda and the river.
The Post Office was moved this year from the corner of North Main and Market streets to the middle of Temple Block, but even there the facilities were so inadequate that Wells Fargo & Company, in June, put up a letter-box at the corner of Main and Commercial streets which was emptied but once a day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, save on steamer days when letters were taken out at half-past nine. One other box was at the sole railroad depot, then at the corner of Alameda and Commercial streets. The Post Office at that time was also so miserably illuminated that citizens fumbled about to find their letter-boxes, and ladies were timid about entering the building at night. Postmasters were allowed small reserves; and for some time in 1870 the Los Angeles Post Office was entirely out of one- and two-cent stamps.
In February, the way was prepared for the first city directory when the houses of Los Angeles were ordered to be numbered, a public discussion of the need for a directory having taken place the previous December. When the collaborators began to collect names and other data, there were many refusals to answer questions; but the little volume of seventy pages was finally published in 1871.
Until 1870 Los Angeles had no bookbinder, all binding having had to be sent to San Francisco; and a call was then sent out to induce a journeyman to settle here.
On the fourteenth of February, Phineas Banning was married to Miss Mary, daughter of Colonel J. H. Hollister--the affair being the consummation of a series of courtly addresses in which, as I have related, it was my pleasurable privilege to play an intermediary part. As might be expected of one who was himself an experienced and generous entertainer, the wedding was a social event to be long and pleasantly remembered by the friends of the bride and groom. Mrs. Banning, who for years maintained an attractive home on Fort Hill, is now living on Commonwealth Avenue.
About this time, Colonel Isaac R. Dunkelberger came to Los Angeles to live, having just finished his fifth year in the army in Arizona, following a long service under Northern banners during the Civil War. While here, the Colonel met and courted Miss Mary Mallard, daughter of Judge Mallard; and on February 26th, 1867, they were married. For eight years, from March, 1877, Dunkelberger was Postmaster. He died on December 5th, 1904, survived by his widow and six children. While writing about this estimable family, it occurs to me that Mary, then a little girl, was one of the guests at my wedding.
Frank Lecouvreur, who was Surveyor of Los Angeles County from 1870 until 1873, was a native of East Prussia and like his predecessor, George Hansen, came to California by way of the Horn. For a while, as I have related, he was my bookkeeper. In 1877, he married Miss Josephine Rosanna Smith who had renounced her vows as a nun. Ten years later he suffered a paralytic stroke and was an invalid until his death, on January 17th, 1901.
Once introduced, the telegraph gradually grew in popularity; but even in 1870, when the Western Union company had come into the field and was operating as far as the Coast, service was anything but satisfactory. The poles between Los Angeles and San Francisco had become rotten and often fell, dragging the wires with them, and interrupting communication with the North. There were no wires, up to that time, to Santa Bárbara or San Bernardino; and only in the spring of that year was it decided to put a telegraph line through to San Diego. When the Santa Bárbara line was proposed, the citizens there speedily subscribed twenty-two hundred and forty-five dollars; it having been the company's plan always to get some local stockholders.
As the result of real estate purchases and exchanges in the late sixties and early seventies between Dr. J. S. Griffin, Phineas Banning, B. D. Wilson, P. Beaudry and others, a fruit-growing colony was planned in April, when it was proposed to take in some seventeen hundred and fifty acres of the best part of the San Pasqual rancho, including a ten-thousand-dollar ditch. A company, with a capital stock of two hundred thousand dollars divided into four thousand shares of fifty dollars each, was formed to grow oranges, lemons, grapes, olives, nuts and raisins, John Archibald being President; R. M. Widney, Vice-President; W. J. Taylor, Secretary; and the London & San Francisco Bank, Treasurer. But although subscription books were opened and the scheme was advertised, nothing was done with the land until D. M. Berry and others came from Indiana and started the Indiana Colony.
A rather uncommon personality for about thirty years was Fred Dohs, who came from Germany when he was twenty-three and engaged in trading horses. By 1870 he was managing a barber shop near the Downey Block, and soon after was conducting a string band. For many years, the barber-musician furnished the music for most of the local dances and entertainments, at the same time (or until prices began to be cut) maintaining his shop, where he charged two bits for a shave and four bits for a hair-cut. During his prosperity, Dohs acquired property, principally on East First Street.
The first foot-bridge having finally succumbed to the turbulent waters of the erratic Los Angeles River, the great flood of 1867-68 again called the attention of our citizens to the necessity of establishing permanent and safe communication between the two sides of the stream; and this agitation resulted in the construction by Perry & Woodworth of the first fairly substantial bridge at the foot of the old Aliso Road, now Macy Street, at an outlay of some twenty thousand dollars. Yet, notwithstanding the great necessity that had always existed for this improvement, it is my recollection that it was not consummated until about 1870. Like its poor little predecessor carried away by the uncontrolled waters, the more dignified structure was broken up by a still later flood, and the pieces of timber once so carefully put together by a confident and satisfied people were strewn for a mile or two along the river banks.
'Way back in the formative years of Los Angeles, there were suddenly added to the constellation of noteworthy local characters two jovial, witty, good-for-nothing Irishmen who from the first were pals. The two were known as Dan Kelly and Micky Free. Micky's right name was Dan Harrington; but I never knew Kelly to go under any other appellation. When sober, which was not very frequent, Dan and Micky were good-natured, jocular and free from care, and it mattered not to either of them whether the morrow might find them well-fed and at liberty or in the jail then known as the Hotel de Burns: "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" was the only philosophy they knew. They were boon companions when free from drink; but when saturated, they immediately fought like demons. They were both in the toils quite ten months of the year, while during the other two months they carried a hod! Of the two, Micky was the most irredeemable, and in time he became such a nuisance that the authorities finally decided to ship him out of the country and bought him a ticket to Oregon. Micky got as far as San Pedro, where he traded his ticket for a case of delirium tremens; but he did something more--he broke his leg and was bundled back to Los Angeles, renewing here the acquaintance of both the bartender and the jailer. Some years later, he astonished the town by giving up drink and entering the Veterans's Home. When he died, they gave him a soldier's honors and a soldier's grave.
In 1870, F. Bonshard imported into Los Angeles County some five or six hundred blooded Cashmere goats; and about the same time or perhaps even earlier, J. E. Pleasants conducted at Los Nietos a similar enterprise, at one time having four or five hundred of a superior breed, the wool of which brought from twenty-five to thirty-five cents a pound. The goat-fancying Pleasants also had some twelve hundred Angoras.
On June 1st, Henry Hamilton, who two years before had resumed the editorship of the Los Angeles Star, then a weekly, issued the first number of the Daily Star. He had taken into partnership George W. Barter, who three months later started the Anaheim Gazette. In 1872, Barter was cowhided by a woman, and a committee formally requested the editor to vamose the town! Barter next bought the Daily Star from Hamilton, on credit, but he was unable to carry out his contract and within a year Hamilton was again in charge.
At the beginning of this decade, times in Arizona were really very bad. H. Newmark & Company, who had large amounts due them from merchants in that Territory, were not entirely easy about their outstanding accounts, and this prompted Kaspare Cohn to visit our customers there. I urged him to consider the dangers of the road and to abandon his project; but he was determined to go. The story of the trip, in the light of present methods and the comparative safety of travel, is an interesting one, and I shall relate his experiences as he described them to me.
He started on a Saturday, going by stage (in preference to buckboard) from Los Angeles to San Bernardino, and from there rode, as the only passenger, with a stage-driver named Brown, passing through Frink's Ranch, Gilman's, White River, Agua Caliente, Indian Wells, Toros, Dos Palmas, Chuckawalla, Mule Springs and Willow Springs. H. Newmark & Company had forwarded, on a prairie schooner driven by Jesse Allen of Los Angeles, a considerable amount of merchandise which it was their intention should be sold in Arizona, and the freighting charge upon which was to be twelve and a half cents per pound. In Chuckawalla, familiarly called Chucky Valley, the travelers overtook Allen and the stock of goods; and this meeting in that lonesome region was the cause of such mutual rejoicing that Kaspare provided as abundant an entertainment as his limited stores would permit. Resuming their journey from Chuckawalla, the driver and his companion soon left Allen and his cumbersome load in the rear.
It was near Granite Wash, as they were jogging along in the evening, that they noticed some Indian fire signals. These were produced by digging a hole in the ground, filling it with combustible material, such as dry leaves, and setting fire to it. From the smoldering that resulted, smoke was emitted and sparks burst forth. Observing these ticklish warnings, the wayfarers sped away and escaped--perhaps, a tragic fate. Arriving at Ehrenberg on a Tuesday morning, Kaspare remained there all night. Still the only passenger, he left the next day; and it may be imagined how cheering, after the previous experience, was the driver's remark that, on account of the lonesome character of the trip, and especially the danger from scalping Apaches, he would never have departed without some company!
Somewhere between Granite Wash and Wickenberg, a peculiar rattling revealed a near-by snake, whereupon Kaspare jumped out and shot the reptile, securing the tail and rattles. Changing horses or resting at Tyson's Wells, McMullen's and Cullen's Station, they arrived the next night at Wickenberg, the location of the Vulture Mines, where Kaspare called upon the Superintendent--a man named Peoples--to collect a large amount they owed us. Half of the sum was paid in gold bars, at the rate of sixteen dollars per ounce, while the other half we lost.
A niece of M. Kremer lived in Wickenberg, where her husband was in business. She suffered a great deal from headaches, and a friend had recommended, as a talisman, the possession of snake rattles. Kaspare, with his accustomed gallantry, produced the specimen which he had obtained and gave it to the lady; and it is to be hoped that she was as permanently relieved of her pain as so many nowadays are cured of imaginary troubles by no more substantial superstitions.
Making short stops at Wilson's Station, Antelope Station, Kirkland Valley, Skull Valley and Mint Valley, Kaspare reached Prescott, some four hundred and thirty miles from San Bernardino, and enquired after Dan Hazard, the ex-Mayor's brother and one of our customers--who died about the middle of the eighties--and learned that he was then on his way to St. Louis with teams to haul back freight for Levi Bashford who, in addition to being an important trader, was Government Receiver of Public Moneys. Kaspare decided to remain in Prescott until Hazard returned; and as Jesse Allen soon arrived with the merchandise, Kaspare had ample time to sell it. Bashford, as a Government official, was not permitted to handle such goods as matches and cigars, which bore revenue stamps, but Kaspare sold him quantities of lard, beans, coffee, sugar and other supplies. He sold the revenue-stamped articles to Buffum & Campbell, the former of whom had once been a well-known resident of Los Angeles. He also disposed of some goods to Henderson Brothers, afterward prominent bankers of Tucson and Globe, Arizona. In the meantime, Dan Hazard returned and settled his account in full.
Kaspare remained in Prescott nearly four weeks. Between the collections that he made and the money which he received for the consigned merchandise, he had about thirteen thousand dollars in currency to bring back with him. With this amount of money on his person, the return trip was more than ever fraught with danger. Mindful of this added peril, Kaspare kept the time of his departure from Prescott secret, no one, with the exception of Bashford, being in his confidence. He prepared very quietly; and at the last moment, one Saturday afternoon, he slipped into the stage and started for California. Brown was again his companion as far as Ehrenberg. There he met Frank Ganahl and Charles Strong, both soon to become Southern Californians; and knowing them very well, their companionship contributed during the rest of the trip not only pleasure but an agreeable feeling of security. His arrival in Los Angeles afforded me much relief, and the story of his adventures and success added more than a touch of interest.
The first street-sprinklers in Los Angeles were owned and operated about the middle of July by T. W. McCracken, who was allowed by the Council to call upon residents along the route for weekly contributions to keep the water wagon going.
I have told of the establishing of Hellman, Temple & Company as bankers. In September, the first-named bought out his partners and continued, until 1871, as Hellman & Company.
With the commencement of autumn, when the belief prevailed that little or nothing could be done toward persuading the Common Council to beautify the Plaza, a movement to lay out and embellish the five-acre tract bounded by Hill and Olive, and Fifth and Sixth streets, met with such favor that, by the first week in October, some eight hundred dollars had been subscribed for the purpose. On November 19th a public meeting was held, presided over by Prudent Beaudry, Major H. M. Mitchell serving as Secretary; and it was suggested to call the proposed square the Los Angeles Park, and to enclose it, at a cost of about five hundred dollars, with a fence. Another two hundred dollars was soon made up; and the services of L. Carpenter, who offered to plow the land prior to sowing grass-seed, were accepted in lieu of a subscription. Both George Lehman and Elijah Workman showed their public spirit by planting what have since become the largest trees there. Sometime later, the name was changed to Central Park, by which it is still known.
The first hackney coach ever built in Los Angeles was turned out in September by John Goller for J. J. Reynolds--about the same time that the Oriental Stage Company brought a dozen new Concord coaches from the East--and cost one thousand dollars. Goller was then famous for elaborate vehicles and patented spring buggies which he shipped even to pretentious and bustling San Francisco. Before the end of November, however, friends of the clever and enterprising carriage-maker were startled to hear that he had failed for the then not insignificant sum of about forty thousand dollars.
Up to the fall of the year, no connection existed between Temple and First Streets west of Spring; but on the first day of September, a cut through the hill, effected by means of chain-gang labor and continuing Fort Street north, was completed, to the satisfaction of the entire community.
About the middle of October, a petition was presented to the Common Council calling attention to the fact that the Los Angeles Water Company two years before had agreed to erect a fountain on the Plaza; and declaring that the open place was little short of a "scarecrow for visitors." The Company immediately replied that it was ready to put up the fountain; and in November the Council ordered the brick tank taken away. At the beginning of August, 1871, the fountain began playing.
During the second marshalship of William C. Warren, when Joe Dye was one of his deputy officers, there was great traffic in Chinese women, one of whom was kidnaped and carried off to San Diego. A reward of a hundred dollars was offered for her return, and she was brought back on a charge of theft and tried in the Court of Justice Trafford, on Temple Street near Spring. During the trial, on October 31st, 1870, Warren and Dye fell into a dispute as to the reward; and the quarrel was renewed outside the courtroom. At a spot near the corner of Spring and Temple streets Dye shot and killed Warren; and in the scrimmage several other persons standing near were wounded. Dye was tried, but acquitted. Later, however, he himself was killed by a nephew, Mason Bradfield, whose life he had frequently threatened and who fired the deadly bullet from a window of the New Arlington Hotel, formerly the White House, at the southeast corner of Commercial and Los Angeles streets. Mrs. C. P. Bradfield, Bradfield's mother and a teacher, who came in 1875, was the author of certain text-books for drawing, published by A. S. Barnes & Company of New York.
Failures in raising and using camels in the Southwest were due, at least partially, to ignorance of the animal's wants, a company of Mexicans, in the early sixties, overloading some and treating them so badly that nearly all died. Later, Frenchmen, who had had more experience, secured the two camels left, and by 1870 there was a herd of no less than twenty-five on a ranch near the Carson River in Nevada, where they were used in packing salt for sixty miles or more to the mills.
On October 31st, the first Teacher's Institute held in Los Angeles County was opened, with an attendance of thirty-five, in the old Bath Street schoolhouse, that center being selected because the school building at Spring and Second streets, though much better adapted to the purpose, was considered to be too far out of town! County Superintendent W. M. McFadden was President; J. M. Guinn was Vice-President; and P. C. Tonner was Secretary; while a leader in discussions was Dr. Truman H. Rose, who there gave a strong impetus to the founding of the first high school.
Soon after this Institute was held, the State Legislature authorized bonds to the amount of twenty thousand dollars for the purpose of erecting another schoolhouse; and the building was soon to be known as the Los Angeles High School. W. H. Workman, M. Kremer and H. D. Barrows were the building committee.
Mentioning educators, I may introduce the once well-known name of Professor Adams, an instructor in French who lived here in the early seventies. He was so very urbane that on one occasion, while overdoing his polite attention to a lady, he fell off the sidewalk and badly broke his leg!
In a previous chapter I have spoken of a Frenchman named Lachenais who killed a fellow-countryman at a wake, the murder being one of a succession of crimes for which he finally paid the penalty at the hands of a Vigilance Committee in the last lynching witnessed here.
Lachenais lived near where the Westminster Hotel now stands, on the northeast corner of Main and Fourth streets, but he also had a farm south of the city, adjoining that of Jacob Bell who was once a partner in sheep-raising with John Schumacher. The old man was respectable and quiet, but Lachenais quarreled with him over water taken from the zanja. Without warning, he rode up to Bell as he was working in his field and shot him dead; but there being no witnesses to the act, this murder remained, temporarily, a mystery. One evening, as Lachenais (to whom suspicion had been gradually directed), was lounging about in a drunken condition, he let slip a remark as to the folly of anyone looking for Bell's murderer; and this indiscretion led to his arrest and incarceration.
No sooner had the news of Lachenais's apprehension been passed along than the whole town was in a turmoil. A meeting at Stearns's Hall was largely attended; a Vigilance Committee was formed; Lachenais's record was reviewed and his death at the hands of an outraged community was decided upon. Everything being arranged, three hundred or more armed men, under the leadership of Felix Signoret, the barber--Councilman in 1863 and proprietor of the Signoret Building opposite the Pico House--assembled on the morning of December 17th, marched to the jail, overcame Sheriff Burns and his assistants, took Lachenais out, dragged him along to the corral of Tomlinson & Griffith (at the corner of Temple and New High streets) and there summarily hanged him. Then the mob, without further demonstration, broke up; the participants going their several ways. The reader may have already observed that this was not the first time that the old Tomlinson & Griffith gate had served this same gruesome purpose.
The following January, County Judge Y. Sepúlveda charged the Grand Jury to do its duty toward ferreting out the leaders of the mob, and so wipe out this reproach to the city; but the Grand Jury expressed the conviction that if the law had hitherto been faithfully executed in Los Angeles, such scenes in broad daylight would never have taken place. The editor of the News, however, ventured to assert that this report was but another disgrace.