Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. Harris Newmark
and to hell with all of you!"
After making due allowance for primitive conditions, it must be admitted that many and needless were the evils incidental to court administration. There was, for instance, the law's delay, which necessitated additional fees to witnesses and jurors and thus materially added to the expenses of the County. Juries were always a mixture of incoming pioneers and natives; the settlers understood very little Spanish, and the native Californians knew still less English; while few or none of the attorneys could speak Spanish at all. In translating testimony, if the interpreter happened to be a friend of the criminal (which he generally was), he would present the evidence in a favorable light, and much time was wasted in sifting biased translations. Of course, there were interpreters who doubtless endeavored to perform their duties conscientiously. George Thompson Burrill, the first Sheriff, received fifty dollars a month as court interpreter, and Manuel Clemente Rojo translated testimony as well; officials I believe to have been honest and conscientious.
While alluding to court interpreters and the general use of Spanish during at least the first decade after I came to California, I am reminded of the case of Joaquín Carrillo, who was elected District Judge, in the early fifties, to succeed Judge Henry A. Tefft of Santa Bárbara, who had been drowned near San Luis Obispo while attempting to land from a steamer in order to hold court. During the fourteen years when Carrillo held office, he was constantly handicapped by his little knowledge of the English language and the consequent necessity of carrying on all court proceedings in Spanish, to say nothing of the fact that he was really not a lawyer. Yet I am told that Carrillo possessed common sense to such a degree that his decisions were seldom set aside by the higher courts.
Sheriff Burrill had a brother, S. Thompson Burrill, who was a lawyer and a Justice of the Peace. He held court in the Padilla Building on Main Street, opposite the present site of the Bullard Block and adjoining my brother's store; and as a result of this proximity we became friendly. He was one of the best-dressed men in town, although, when I first met him, he could not have been less than sixty years of age. He presented me with my first dog, which I lost on account of stray poison: evil-disposed or thoughtless persons, with no respect for the owner, whether a neighbor or not, and without the slightest consideration for pedigree, were in the habit of throwing poison on the streets to kill off canines, of which there was certainly a superabundance.
Ygnácio Sepúlveda, the jurist and a son of José Andrés Sepúlveda, was living here when I arrived, though but a boy. Born in Los Angeles in 1842, he was educated in the East and in 1863 admitted to the Bar; he served in the State Legislature of the following winter, was County Judge from 1870 to 1873, and District Judge in 1874. Five years later he was elected Superior Judge, but resigned his position in 1884 to become Wells Fargo & Company's representative in the City of Mexico, at which capital for two years he was also American Chargé d'Affaires. There to my great pleasure I met him, bearing his honors modestly, in January, 1885, during my tour of the southern republic.[3] Sepúlveda Avenue is named for the family.
Horace Bell was a nephew of Captain Alexander Bell, of Bell's Row; and as an early comer to Los Angeles, he joined the volunteer mounted police. Although for years an attorney and journalist, in which capacity he edited the Porcupine, he is best known for his Reminiscences of a Ranger, a volume written in rather a breezy and entertaining style, but certainly containing exaggerations.
This reference to the Rangers reminds me that I was not long in Los Angeles when I heard of the adventures of Joaquín Murieta, who had been killed but a few months before I came. According to the stories current, Murieta, a nephew of José María Valdez, was a decent-enough sort of fellow, who had been subjected to more or less injustice from certain American settlers, and who was finally bound to a tree and horsewhipped, after seeing his brother hung, on a trumped-up charge. In revenge, Murieta had organized a company of bandits, and for two or three years had terrorized a good part of the entire State. Finally, in August, 1853, while the outlaw and several of his companions were off their guard near the Tejón Paso, they were encountered by Captain Harry Love and his volunteer mounted police organized to get him, "dead or alive;" the latter killed Murieta and another desperado known as Three-fingered Jack. Immediately the outlaws were despatched, their heads and the deformed hand of Three-fingered Jack were removed from the bodies and sent by John Sylvester and Harry Bloodsworth to Dr. William Francis Edgar, then a surgeon at Fort Miller; but a flood interfering, Sylvester swam the river with his barley sack and its gruesome contents. Edgar put the trophies into whiskey and arsenic, when they were transmitted to the civil authorities, as vouchers for a reward. Bloodsworth died lately.
Daredevils of a less malicious type were also resident among us. On the evening of December 31st, 1853, for example, I was in our store at eight o'clock when Felipe Rheim—often called Reihm and even Riehm—gloriously intoxicated and out for a good time, appeared on the scene, flourishing the ubiquitous weapon. His celebration of the New Year had apparently commenced, and he was already six sheets in the wind. Like many another man, Felipe, a very worthy German, was good-natured when sober, but a terror when drunk; and as soon as he spied my solitary figure, he pointed his gun at me, saying, at the same time, in his vigorous native tongue, "Treat, or I shoot!" I treated. After this pleasing transaction amid the smoky obscurity of Ramón Alexander's saloon, Felipe fired his gun into the air and disappeared. Startling as a demand like that might appear to-day, no thought of arrest then resulted from such an incident.
The first New Year's Eve that I spent in Los Angeles was ushered in with the indiscriminate discharging of pistols and guns. This method of celebrating was, I may say, a novelty to me, and no less a surprise; for of course I was unaware of the fact that, when the city was organized, three years before, a proposition to prohibit the carrying of firearms of any sort, or the shooting off of the same, except in defense of self, home or property, had been stricken from the first constitution by the committee on police, who reported that such an ordinance could not at that time be enforced. Promiscuous firing continued for years to be indulged in by early Angeleños, though frequently condemned in the daily press, and such was its effect upon even me that I soon found myself peppering away at a convenient adobe wall on Commercial Street, seeking to perfect my aim!
CHAPTER VI
MERCHANTS AND SHOPS
1853
Trivial events in a man's life sometimes become indelibly impressed on his memory; and one such experience of my own is perhaps worth mentioning as another illustration of the rough character of the times. One Sunday, a few days after my arrival, my brother called upon a tonsorial celebrity, Peter Biggs, of whom I shall speak later, leaving me in charge of the store. There were two entrances, one on Main Street, the other on Requena. I was standing at the Main Street door, unconscious of impending excitement, when a stranger rode up on horseback and, without the least hesitation or warning, pointed a pistol at me. I was not sufficiently amused to delay my going, but promptly retreated to the other door where the practical joker, astride his horse, had easily anticipated my arrival and again greeted me with the muzzle of his weapon. These maneuvers were executed a number of times, and my ill-concealed trepidation only seemed to augment the diversion of a rapidly-increasing audience. My brother returned in the midst of the fun and asked the jolly joker what in hell he meant by such behavior; to which he replied: "Oh, I just wanted to frighten the boy!"
Soon after this incident, my brother left for San Francisco; and his partner, Jacob Rich, accompanied by his wife, came south and rented rooms in what was then known as Mellus's Row, an adobe building for the most part one-story, standing alone with a garden in the rear, and occupying about three hundred feet on the east side of Los Angeles Street, between Aliso and First. In this row, said by some to have been built by Barton & Nordholt, in 1850, for Captain Alexander Bell, a merchant here since 1842, after whom Bell Street is named, and by others claimed to have been the headquarters of Frémont, in 1846, there was a second-story at the corner of Aliso, provided with a large veranda; and there the Bell and Mellus families lived. Francis Mellus, who arrived in California in 1839, had married the niece of Mrs. Bell, and Bell having sold the building to Mellus, Bell's Row