WHEN THE LAW CAIVIE
Say, what was your name in the states?
Was it Brown or Jackson or Bates
Did you murder your wife and flee for your life?
Say, what was your name in the states?
—Popular frontier ditty
IN THE BEGINNING, IT WAS NOT TOMBSTONE, DEADWOOD, OR Dodge City that laid claim to being the most violent of American outposts. It was Los Angeles County, although LA is not thought of as being part of the West, or even the Wild West for that matter. LA is the place that manufactures the West, or at least America’s idea of the West—and itself. But there was a time that LA itself was the Wild West of mythology—and nearly as sprawling as half of California. While today LA County is as big as Rhode Island—2,200 square miles—in 1850, when the boundaries were first drafted, it was over twice the size, with a sparse population of a little over 7,000 people spread out across a vast area that was bigger than many eastern states. West to east, the county line ran from the Pacific Ocean to the Colorado River, and north to south from Santa Barbara to the far edge of San Juan Capistrano. About half of the population lived in the pueblo of Los Angeles—the hive that flourished and festered around a plaza downtown, encircled by adobe houses and, beyond that, private farms and community grazing areas as the city radiated outward. During a one-year period from 1850 to 1851, the murder rate was one per day—the highest rate reported in any city at any time in American history. In fact, the figure was probably higher; it does not include homicides in which the victims were Indians (in 1852, the majority of LA County’s population), blacks, Asians, and Mexicans, which were not considered crimes. And it does not include murders that nobody ever knew about in the vast California wilderness.
Much of the reported violence took place in what is now downtown Los Angeles, originally known as El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles—“the town of the queen of the angels.” The place with the beautiful name was a squalid enclave of brawls, knifings, and human trafficking, where blood ran in the arroyos and dead dogs often floated by. “Los Angeles was a town of dust and mud and flies,” writes Nat B. Read in Don Benito Wilson: From Mountain Man to Mayor, Los Angeles, 1841 to 1878. “There were so many flies that Frenchman John La Rue would simply dip his fingers in to fish out a fly before serving the cup of coffee to a guest in his eating joint. . . . There were more wild dogs than humans. . . . Roving in large packs, they hounded carts, killed humans with their rabies, and created an awful din.” Locals would toss poison into the streets to get rid of the marauding dogs, and their corpses floated down the zanjas—the canals that provided the city’s drinking water. The affliction of the day was gold fever, which drove countless newcomers to California—a region with no government except Miner’s Law, the gnarly code that prevailed at the many camps that sprouted across the mountains and deserts of the West. The pilgrims came by land and by sea, on foot and horseback, quickly displacing Mexican ranchers who had settled on land granted to their ancestors by the king of Spain, along with Native Americans whose populations had already been decimated by the early Spanish incursions into the New World. Joining these emigrants were prostitutes and outlaws, themselves heading for LA. Their community came to be known as Sonora Town, after the most violent of the High Sierra mining camps. If LA didn’t work out for the misfits of gold country, they quickly headed for Mexico, as local attorney and writer Horace Bell noted at the time. Mexican outlaws had the same idea in reverse, often heading for California. On the dusty streets of the pueblo, the pirates would meet, fight, and frequently kill each other, in disputes that were resolved immediately.
From out of the city of angels flowed endless vectors of conflict, creating violence across all pockets of the far-flung region. Highwaymen preyed on wayfarers riding the Butterfield stagecoach across the Old Spanish Trail and its desert tributaries as they headed to Southern California. Other outposts up and down El Camino Real along the coast were magnets for raids. East of the old pueblo, the mission at San Gabriel—today a quaint and often bypassed historic site off the Santa Ana freeway—was the site of the biggest horse theft in frontier history, with the mountain man Peg-Leg Smith and the Ute Indian Wakara making off with thousands of mustangs, driving them through the Cajon Pass and into the Mojave, kicking up a trail of dust that could be seen from downtown Los Angeles. There were shoot-outs in the passes and draws where nowadays traffic is stalled for hours, and bloody standoffs in seaside outposts today known for good surf. Hastily formed posses drawn from dirty dozens in bars, the streets, and inmates in LA County lockup would pursue the outlaws. All too often the vigilantes would hang the fugitives, on the spot or right in the center of the City of the Queen of the Angels, as citizens cheered them on. Between 1850 and 1865, there were thirty-five unlawful executions, in addition to the many legal executions of record. “A person could be tried and condemned at six in the evening,” wrote one local, “and hanged at sunrise the following morning, if not sooner. It all depended on the mood of the moment. As one publication noted, ‘Life was cheaper than printer’s ink and white space.’”
It was amid this little-known creation myth of Los Angeles that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was born, decades before lawmen such as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Pat Garrett galloped across the mesas into the American dreamtime. The early sheriffs of LA County were involved in deadly episodes that are hard to picture in a place that is the national epicenter of the here and now, where the tides and the light and the winds are engaged in a constant sweeping of what just happened, where no one cares where you came from and little for where you are going. The first sheriff in these parts was George Thompson Burrill, a classic prototype for a long line of colorful sheriffs who have presided over this troubled, far western frontier. Elected in 1851, Burrill was a handsome dark-haired man with a handlebar mustache who generally sported an infantry dress sword, a flourish he acquired while living in Mexico. As sheriff, he found himself in charge of a burgeoning county whose residents harbored a deep distrust of rules and those who enforced them, which is why he was paid the unusually high salary of $10,000 per year. At the time, officials didn’t really know exactly how they were supposed to run things. Several, including Burrill, penned a letter to Peter Burnett, the state’s first governor, asking for guidelines. “In the absence of laws,” they wrote, “it has been found impractical to organize the courts, or otherwise enter upon the discharge of their duties. . . . We would respectfully ask Your Excellency for some suitable instructions.”
Among the sheriff’s first tasks was tax collection for a new local government from recent settlers who had no desire to hand over official revenue, and from Native Americans, who had no reason—a desert version of “taxation without representation.” The Indians themselves were engaged in a battle with arriviste marauders. A band of Cupenos had been fending off the Jim Irving gang, outlaws who had been raiding ranches across LA and San Diego counties, preying on remote homesteads and settlements where Indians had lived for centuries. In a battle near latter-day Palm Springs, the Cupenos killed a number of outlaws, and residents on the coast became nervous. Enter Sheriff Burrill, accompanied by a posse from Los Angeles—the first official sheriff’s mounted posse in the region, armed with government-issued lances and any weapons the men provided on their own. In an operation that foreshadowed modern SWAT teams, this small tactical unit mustered fast and joined other lawmen in a desert pursuit, soon capturing the Indians. Within weeks, the leaders of the revolt were tried and executed by firing squad. Pockets of Native American resistance continued across Southern California, culminating in the early-twentieth-century hunt for Willie Boy, the notorious Chemehuevi Indian who killed a tribal chief and then ran away with his daughter, pursued by three armed posses for over two weeks across the Mojave. “He was a bad Indian,” a wire service reporter wrote of the man who became known as “the last Indian hold-out.” “The white man said so,” the reporter explained. “So the white man hunted him down, just as though he had
been a wild beast, until a 30–30 bullet made him a good Indian.”
Sheriff Burrill was engaged in other violent episodes, including one in which the Irving gang resurfaced, riding into downtown LA in an attempt to kidnap men in jail and hold them for ransom. But the sheriff had been tipped off, and the vigilantes were confronted by a team of federal troops and told to head for Mexico. They did, raiding a ranch outside of town, only to be ambushed in a mountain pass by a band of Cahuilla Indians. Burrill went on to serve one more term and was succeeded on January 1, 1852, by Sheriff James R. Barton, a carpenter who had served with Capt. Steven Kearny’s Army of the West. The army had helped wrest New Mexico and California from Spanish rule in fierce battles at Santa Fe and San Diego. Like Burrill, Barton soon found himself in confrontations with vigilantes, embroiled in the daily violence of maelstrom Los Angeles. He would be killed in action on January 23, 1857—the first LA County lawman to lose his life in the line of duty. But before that final first, Barton would oversee the first legal use of the death penalty since the county was formed. It was applied to Ygnacio Herrera, a young Mexican who was accused of killing a man who had reportedly flirted with his girlfriend. According to local papers, Herrera was “freed from his worldly existence” by Sheriff Barton, as thousands of Angelenos gathered to watch the public hanging.
In that hyperviolent era, there was yet one more first for the second sheriff of LA County; this was the lynching of a prisoner by vigilantes (such things had happened before, but not under the watch of the newly formed department). The hanged man was one Dave Brown, who had murdered someone in Los Angeles. Although he had been condemned, his execution was stayed, angering local citizens, including Mayor Stephen C. Foster, who immediately resigned and led a party of vigilantes to the jail. Barton and his small band of deputies were unable to fend off the mob, which battered down the jail doors, dragged Brown across the street, and hanged him from a crossbeam above the gates to a corral. So popular was the act that Foster was reelected as mayor. Sheriff Barton stepped down in repudiation, returning a year later for two more terms.
By then, Los Angeles County was diminishing in size. San Bernardino had become its own jurisdiction, but fewer square miles did not reduce the county’s violence. It was during Barton’s final term that he led one of the great manhunts of the nineteenth century, the one that took his life.
In January 1857, a band of Mexican outlaws escaped from San Quentin State Prison and headed south for the border—joining a pantheon of future renegades such as Joaquin Murrietta and Tiburcio Vazquez, Jesse James–like figures whose desert flights were later recalled during the fevered hunt for Donald Kueck. Among the fugitives from San Quentin was Juan Flores, who had been sent to jail for horse theft two years earlier. Like Murrietta and Vazquez, Flores would be immortalized in a cottage industry of pulp literature and ripped-from-the-headlines drama, portrayed as a martyr or demon. But after his capture, he never had a proper trial, and to this day his story is retold and debated. However, of one thing we can be sure: kill a sheriff, and all bets are off, especially if you mutilate the body and flee.
After breaking out of San Quentin, it didn’t take long for Juan Flores to get into trouble again. Arriving in San Juan Capistrano after a day or two on the road, las Manillas—or “the hands,” as his gang was known—killed a storekeeper while he was preparing dinner, then placed his body on the table and ate his meal. Meanwhile other banditos ran amok through town, plundering stores and terrorizing merchants. Receiving word of the murder, Sheriff Barton called for volunteers to ride with him to San Juan Capistrano. On the night of January 22, he and six men left Los Angeles and headed south, stopping for breakfast at Refugio, the main house owned by Jose Sepulveda, one of California’s wealthiest dons. Among the vaqueros and servants at the don’s house was Juan Flores’s Indian sweetheart. Leaving their guns in an outbuilding, Sheriff Barton and his men sat down for their morning meal, during which they were warned that Flores was well armed and mounted, with a force of fifty or sixty men, greatly outnumbering the members of county law enforcement. But Barton would not wait for reinforcements, and rode on for twelve miles until he and his men were ambushed by las Manillas in Santiago Canyon. Grabbing their guns to return fire, they realized that someone—Flores’s girlfriend?—had removed the ammunition from their weapons. Sheriff Barton and three deputies were killed, while the others fled to Los Angeles.
As word of the murders spread, LA erupted in frenzy. Committees of Safety and Vigilance were quickly assembled, the latter to “avenge the foul deed and bring the culprits,” wrote an eyewitness. “The El Monte boys, as usual, took an active part. The city was placed under martial law. . . . Suspicious houses were searched, and forty or fifty persons were arrested.” Within hours, eleven of these men were lynched, and the state legislature released funds for the pursuit.
Four posses totaling over one hundred men formed immediately, joined by federal troops from Ft. Tejon and Indian crews from the Mojave. As they headed south into the high chaparral, troops from San Diego poured in, mounted rangers began to scour the countryside, and “American, German, and French citizens vied with one another for the honor of risking their lives,” reported an eyewitness, “along with two detachments of Californios.” The outlaws were chased into the mountains, and the horses of the lead posse gave out as others galloped into the higher elevations, trailed by horse-drawn wagons carrying coffins for the slain sheriffs. Soon, the mangled and defaced bodies of Sheriff Barton and his three deputies were discovered. Placed in the coffins, they were escorted back to Los Angeles. At noon on the following Sunday, the city closed down and went into mourning. On the following day the funerals were held, attended by thousands.
Meanwhile the fugitives pushed deeper into the Santa Ana Range. Most were soon captured. Two were hanged on the spot. Fifty-two were arrested and taken to the LA County jail. Eleven were lynched or legally hanged. Flores was caught on top of a peak in what is today the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary in Orange County. It’s a scenic remove where many animals and plants perished in the Santiago fire in 2007, one of the worst cases of arson in California’s history, touched off by someone who remains at large—the kind of person who is the most bizarre sort of killer, enraged at the land. Two days later, Juan Flores escaped again, this time from Don Sepulveda’s ranch, where he was being held pending return to Los Angeles. It happened eleven days later. “All those in favor of hanging Juan Flores will signify by saying, ‘Aye!’” the judge said at the courthouse in the City of the Queen of the Angels, where people sat in judgment after he was taken in for the last time.
“Aye!” said the citizens.
Then they marched to the jail, secured Flores, and escorted him to Fort Hill—a rise behind the jail with a temporary gallows. He was promptly dispatched in front of a crowd that seemed to include “practically every man, woman, and child in the pueblo,” according to an eyewitness, “not to mention many people from various parts of the State who had flocked into town.”
No one knows what happened to the body of Juan Flores. And the place where he died is not marked. Where he was caught, however, is another matter: the mountain in the Cleveland National Forest is called Flores Peak; although its notoriety is not advertised and means little to most people, the tribute places him on par with John Dillinger, the Clanton Brothers, and other American outlaws whose last taste of freedom has been memorialized and marketed at the point of capture.
The sheriff too is commemorated, where he drew his last breath. This is the site known as California Historical Landmark number 218, aka Barton Mound, on the southeast corner of Interstate 405 and State Highway 133, two miles south of East Irvine. It says: “Juan Flores, who had escaped from San Quentin, was being sought by James Barton with a posse of five men. Near this mound, Flores surprised Barton and three of his men; all four were killed. When Los Angeles learned of the slaughter, posses were formed, and Flores and his men were captured.” But you’ll never be able to read the plaque in person;
it’s buried under landscaping for a housing development.
The first decade of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would see one more sheriff gunned down. This was twenty-three-year-old Sheriff Billy Getman, a member of the posse that had captured Juan Flores. He was killed on January 7, 1858, one year after Sheriff Barton lost his life. The episode involved someone whom local papers referred to as “a maniac,” and it may be the region’s first recorded suicide by cop. A heavily armed man had barricaded himself inside a pawn shop in downtown Los Angeles. With his two revolvers, pair of derringers, and Bowie knife, he was trying to provoke the store proprietor into killing him—or possibly contacting law enforcement for aid, which would then trigger a shoot-out. When Getman arrived and tried to force the door open, the man burst through, firing point blank at Getman and killing him instantly. Then he fled. A running gun battle in the streets of Los Angeles ensued, with armed locals joining in and killing the fugitive after firing at least thirty rounds. In El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, Sheriff Getman had been in office for seven days. At his funeral two days later, citizens poured out en masse to mourn another sheriff. Some began to wonder if Los Angeles County was too unruly for law enforcement. With its bloated dog carcasses floating through town, gangsters plying the outlying trails, public lynchings and daily homicides, was it a God-forsaken region at the mercy of forces in play since Cain and Abel? Or would higher angels prevail in the land whose name invoked them? Sheriff Lee Baca—the thirtieth sheriff of the county and a spiritual man—often finds himself wrestling with such questions. In 2003, shortly after he received word that a deputy had been killed in a remote pocket of the Antelope Valley, he choppered out to the crime scene, stood before cameras, and issued an answer. “We’re down to what’s known in this business as dead or alive,” he said, and soon flyers bearing the ancient message were plastered across the Mojave.
A Desert Reckoning Page 2
