Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

  But the more immediate tension was racial, and Rains’s murder unmasked long-simmering hostility between the Californios and Anglos. The influx of settlers from the United States was squeezing out the Mexican-born natives who had long dominated California’s culture, language, and economy. Californios regarded whites as invaders and, eventually, conquerors. The white newcomers were disdainful of the languid way of life of their predecessors. “The men are thriftless, proud, extravagant, and very much given to gambling; the women have but little education … And their morality, of course, is none of the best,” one observer wrote.51 In the span of a few decades, the Californios would see their ranchos lost to debt and trickery and would go from ruling the state to being ruled.

  Deadly clashes between the two groups were frequent. Just a few years earlier, in 1857, the Los Angeles sheriff, James Barton, and three members of a posse were killed in the mountains near Los Angeles while chasing a gang of bandits led by Juan Flores.

  From the time Rains’s disappearance was first noted, rumors swirled that Californios had killed him. And in a lawless region like southern California, rumors were dangerous. Even though Sheriff Sánchez ostensibly was leading the investigation, his authority was so weak that vigilante justice was common—and accepted. Just days after Rains’s murder, Carlisle, his brother-in-law, had vowed to go “out tomorrow on a rampage, that is, in search of the murderers, and to seek a clue to this great crime.”52

  Speculation about the killer or killers started almost immediately and whispers and innuendo soon were interpreted as facts. Suspicion landed early on Ramón Carrillo, a descendant of an old Californio family who became Rains’s majordomo in 1861. Carrillo represented everything Americans respected and feared. He was a renowned vaquero, or horseman, and expert lassoer, able to cast a rope over a steer from a long distance. He was one of the area’s leading bear wrestlers. But he had also fought against the Americans during the Mexican-American War, earning special recognition for his role in what was known as the Battle of Chino. In September 1846, Carrillo had led a group of fifty Californios who captured twenty-four Americans who were hiding in Isaac Williams’s adobe at Rancho Chino. The Californios marched their prisoners twelve miles to the eastern side of Los Angeles, where they were eventually released. The skirmish was militarily insignificant, but it embarrassed the Americans, who never quite forgave Carrillo.

  * * *

  Soon people were gossiping that Carrillo and Doña Merced were in love—and that Carrillo paid a group of men to murder Rains. There were also rumors that Rains had fired Carrillo after the pair exchanged “high words.”53

  Within days of Rains’s funeral, Judge Hayes issued a warrant for Carrillo’s arrest and set bail at $13,000. Carrillo appeared before Hayes, who let him go after Carrillo presented proof that he had been in Los Angeles on the day of Rains’s murder.

  But that explanation did not satisfy Carlisle and other men who were out for vengeance. They kept insisting, despite the lack of proof, that Carrillo was the mastermind behind Rains’s death. The rumors got so loud that the Los Angeles Star printed articles declaring that Carrillo had ordered his gang to kill Rains. “Justice will eventually overtake these murderers and rid the earth of such fiends in human shape,” an article in the paper noted on February 20, 1863.

  Names of other of Rains’s suspected assailants began to circulate, leading Judge Hayes to issue an arrest warrant for Manuel Ceredel, a field hand and laborer and a low-level outlaw, who had frequently been charged, but never convicted, of stealing horses, bridles, and saddles. As soon as the warrant was issued, Carlisle and his posse, not the sheriff, went looking for Ceredel. They had heard he was hiding in El Monte, a Confederate stronghold about twelve miles east of Los Angeles known for its lawless and violent ways. In mid-December 1862, just before some of the heaviest rains in California history would deluge the state and two weeks after Rains’s murder, Carlisle rode to El Monte, but Ceredel was nowhere to be found.

  Ceredel was finally captured in February 1863 and was led to the county jail. He was very sick—sallow, wheezing, and weak, and believed he was about to die of tuberculosis. He confessed to authorities that he and four other men had been hired by Carrillo to kill Rains, although the only proof was his word. “It appears Mr. Rains was met on the road by five men, whose names are given,” an article in the Los Angeles Star on Feb. 14, 1863 noted. “One of them asked where he was going; he replied, to town. ‘I think not, we have got you now,’ said the assassin, or words to that effect.”

  Men like Carlisle and his friends continued to insist that Carrillo had been involved. In September 1863, responding to another warrant for his arrest, Carrillo appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom. He was allowed to leave after the district attorney “stated the people of California had no complaint against Carrillo and the District Attorney didn’t know of any such testimony against him,” according to the newspaper.

  But the findings of two courts that Carrillo had nothing to do with Rains’s murder did little to assuage those convinced he was involved. The legal decision stirred up even more anti-Californio sentiment and prompted a group of men to vow to capture Carrillo. The papers also began to report that Carrillo and a group of fifteen to thirty men had banded together and taken to the hills to rob and kill Americans. “Ramón Carrillo, it is stated, is the leader of this band of cut-throats … It was, without a doubt, some of this band who murdered John Rains.”54

  Ceredel went on trial in this atmosphere of distrust and suspicion. He had not been charged with killing Rains, but for attacking the sheriff who came to arrest him for Rains’s murder. After a brief trial on December 5, 1863, Ceredel was convicted and sentenced to ten years’ confinement at San Quentin state prison near San Francisco.

  The vigilantes wanted blood for Rains’s murder and the fact Ceredel had not been convicted of that crime infuriated them. Here, they thought, was one of the region’s most prosperous citizens, cut down in broad daylight. Yet his murder went unavenged.

  On December 9, 1863, Sheriff Sánchez and his undersheriff, A. J. King, brought a group of prisoners out to the new port in Wilmington to take them to San Quentin. The harbor was too shallow for steamboats to come to shore, so lighters, ferries, and tugboats met passengers at the dock and ferried them out to deeper waters. The sheriff and his prisoners boarded the tugboat Crickett for the trip to the steamer The Senator. Dozens of others crammed on board, some to go to the boat and some just to take a ride for pleasure on the water.

  When the Crickett had pulled away from the dock and was chugging toward the larger boat, a group of men approached Sánchez and his prisoners. At a prearranged signal, the men, vigilantes who had disguised themselves as tourists, grabbed Ceredel and pulled him away from the sheriff. They brought out a noose, twisted it around his neck, and strung it on the yardarm hanging off the boat. Ceredel must have struggled and swung his legs in a frenzied attempt to find traction, any traction to stop the asphyxiation, but after twenty minutes it was over. He was dead. His body hung limply over the water. The vigilantes reached into their pockets and pouches and brought out rocks they had carried from the shore. They loaded them into Ceredel’s pockets and threw him overboard to sink into the water, making him the second man with connections to Rancho Cucamonga to die.

  The lynching of Ceredel did little to relieve the vigilantes’ distrust of Carrillo, whom many suspected was the ringleader of the ambush.

  Carrillo felt like a marked man. He knew that the white hostility against him in a region where impulse and prejudice carried more weight than facts and justice meant he might not live long. He came to believe that Carlisle was responsible for the spread of false rumors and accusations against him. Carlisle was eager to get rid of Carrillo, who had influence with Dõna Merced, so he could maintain control of Dõna Merced’s fortune. “The person who has always persecuted me is a man by the name of Bob Carlisle,” Carrillo wrote his brother Julio on April 16, 1864. “He does not do it personally, but through
others paid by him. The reason for this continued abuse is because I did not abandon my place as superintendent of the stock at the time of John Rains’ death, and that I still hold the position.… Carlisle … cannot conduct the business with as much liberty as he could if I was out of the way. He is trying to get the power which I have from the widow herself, who is the absolute owner of the property.

  “Now I will tell you that if by bad luck I should happen to disappear, Bob Carlisle will know and he will be the cause of my disappearance and he is the one whom you should prosecute. I am satisfied that while awake he thinks of nothing else by a half chance to assassinate me so that he can do with the widow what he sees fit. I am resolved to protect her, if it cost me my life.”55

  Carrillo’s words proved to be prophetic.

  * * *

  Around 8:30 a.m. on May 21, 1864, Doña Merced, her six-year-old daughter Cornelia, and her half sister Conchita left the brick house in Rancho Cucamonga and got into a carriage for a trip to visit an ill friend. The driver, a thirteen-year-old worker named Jesus, took up the reins and turned the carriage in a southeasterly direction toward the San Bernardino Road. Doña Merced must have been feeling relieved. A day earlier, her representatives had served papers on Carlisle informing him that he no longer had any jurisdiction over the affairs of Rancho Cucamonga.

  Ramón Carrillo and another man, Santos Ruiz, rode their horses next to Doña Merced’s group. Carrillo had been staying in Merced’s house for the previous three weeks while he recovered from an injury to his arm. Jesus drove the carriage through the rancho’s front gate and steered it across the creek. The vast Cucamonga vineyard lay south of the San Bernardino Road. In late May, the vines were covered with bright green leaves and the buds of grapes were just beginning to appear.

  When the carriage had traveled about 300 feet on the road, a shot rang out from a clump of sycamore trees a short distance away. The whizzing bullet hit Carrillo. It entered his back and exited on the right side of his upper chest.

  Carrillo dug his heels into his horse, which then galloped toward the carriage. “They have wounded me,” he cried. As Carrillo started to slump, Doña Merced yelled out to Ruiz, “Don’t let him fall! Oh God, what is this?” Ruiz quickly dismounted and ran up to Carrillo’s horse just as the man was falling off. Ruiz set him on the ground. Blood gushed from the bullet wound. “Leave this place!” Ruiz shouted to Merced. The carriage carrying her and her family took off down the road, dust flying out behind it as it gathered speed. Ruiz, no hero, got back on his horse and galloped east as fast as he could, leaving the wounded Carrillo on the dusty road.

  Carrillo managed to stagger down the road toward Rubottom’s, a hotel and grocery store, clutching a handkerchief against his chest. Jose Ynocente Ybarra was sitting on the porch talking to Mrs. Rubottom when he saw Carillo approach. He ran over to assist. “They have wounded me,” said Carrillo as Ybarra helped him over to the store.

  “Who has wounded you?” asked Ybarra.

  “Gillette and Viall [Gillette was the postmaster and Viall worked at the vineyard] and another person I did not recognize very well but I think he is Bob Carlisle,” said Carrillo.

  Carrillo thought his biggest fear had come true, that Carlisle, angered over losing control of Rancho Cucamonga, furious that a Californio, not a white man, had greater influence than he, had masterminded the ambush.

  Carrillo lay inside the store for three hours, his breath growing shallower and his skin growing paler as time passed on. He repeated the name of his attackers to two other people. Ruiz returned and sat with him but could see recovery was futile. “During all the interval I stayed with him; his head generally in my lap, blood flowing freely from the wound all the time,” Ruiz said in an affidavit.56 “His countenance was much changed, very pale. He talked a good deal. About a minute before he died he complained of violent pain below the wound and almost immediately the blood came into his mouth. He spat it out, saw the blood and said ‘Yo no soy muy bueno.’ Almost at the same moment he grasped my hand and said ‘Adiós, amigos.’ And at once he died.”

  It was around three p.m., four hours after he had been shot. Carrillo was forty-one years old and the third man to die because of a dispute over Rancho Cucamonga.

  “The narrative is short and simple,” read an article in the Los Angeles Star on May 28, 1864. “The click of a trigger and a human being is hurried into the darkness of death and the silence of the grave.”

  The murder of Carrillo immediately put the Californio community even more on edge. “You have little idea of the quiet, deep-seated rage of the Californians on the subject,” Hayes wrote after Carrillo’s murder: “I think I understand them perfectly. They ask me continually if the authorities of San Bernardino are going to do something in relation to it. But in general they say little about it—so much the worse. If they were excited and passionate and clamorous, I should have less apprehension.”57

  Hayes was so fearful that a fight would break out that he pleaded with a Col. J. P. Curtis to send a group of mounted infantrymen known as Dragoons to protect Doña Merced at Rancho Cucamonga.

  “The death of Ramón Carrillo caused a great excitement among the Mexican Californians & they threatened the whites with seceshion & all its bloody consequences, so Col Curtis, who is in command at Drum barracks, send 15 of us out here to keep the peace,” wrote John W. Teal in his diary.

  Doña Merced was terrified, and kept close to home. Yet another man to whom she was close had been murdered. She felt frightened and alone. “It is imposibel for me to be amongst so many theaves and murders,” Doña Merced wrote to Hayes six days after Carrillo’s murder. “I wish to cleir everybody out of this place. Receive a heart feeld with grief.”

  Merced was sufficiently scared that she hurried to align herself with another male protector, someone who could act as a shield between her and the world. A month after Carrillo’s murder, she hastily married José Clemente Carrillo (no relation to Ramón Carrillo), the Los Angeles constable who had come to investigate the case.

  * * *

  About fourteen months after Merced and Carlisle paid for dueling newspaper notices, a judge cancelled Carlisle’s power of attorney, effectively dismissing him from overseeing Merced’s affairs. He ruled that Carlisle had obtained the power of attorney by fraud and deceit. The order meant that the power Carlisle had yielded the past two and half years, ever since that afternoon in the back parlor in the brick house on Rancho Cucamonga, was gone. He no longer had control over the 13,000-acre Rancho Cucamonga, the income from its vineyards, or the income from Doña Merced’s other property. He could no longer enrich himself at his sister-in law’s expense.

  The judge appointed the thirty-one-year-old Los Angeles undersheriff Andrew J. King, known as Jack, in Carlisle’s stead. It proved to be a calamitous decision for all involved.

  King and Carlisle were similar in many respects: they were both Southerners who had joined California militia units sympathetic to the Confederate cause. King had been born in Georgia in 1833 and had slowly moved across the continent with his family, arriving in the Los Angeles area in 1852. King had studied law, had been elected to the California Assembly in 1859, and had been appointed undersheriff in 1861. He had been on the boat when the vigilantes grabbed and murdered Ceredel.

  King and his brothers—Samuel Houston King and Frank King—had a tough reputation. After their father was gunned down in El Monte, Samuel Houston King shot and killed the murderer in a gun duel. El Monte was a Secessionist hotbed east of Los Angeles and the home of many of the vigilantes who meted out frontier justice against the Californios. In 1862, King brought the huge portrait of Confederate General Beauregard to a cheering crowd at the Bella Union Hotel. The U.S. marshal, Henry Barrows, called King “one of the many dangerous secessionists living in our midst,” and arranged to have him arrested and brought to Camp Drum. King was released after he agreed to swear allegiance to the Union.

  The appointment of King as receiver humiliated Car
lisle, and served as a reminder that he had been called a thief and cheat. Carlisle began to focus on King as the source of his problems. It led to his undoing.

  * * *

  The fifth of July 1865 started off auspiciously enough. Robert Carlisle came into Los Angeles from Rancho Chino with his wife, Francisca. They had been invited to the wedding celebration of Caroline Newmark and Solomon Lazard. It was thought to be the social event of the season. Caroline was the daughter of Joseph Newmark, one of the earliest Jewish settlers in Los Angeles, a man who was instrumental in building the Jewish cemetery and leading worship services. Lazard, a Frenchman, had opened a dry goods store with his cousin Maurice Kremer, and was one of the handful of Europeans and Americans who were determined to transform Los Angeles from a dusty pueblo to a thriving American city.

  The small marriage ceremony took place at the Newmark home. But the dinner and dance afterward were at the Bella Union Hotel, which had been decorated with summer flowers and greenery.

  The guest list was filled with the old Californio elite, as well as the new guard of French, German, Basque, and American merchants. The Civil War—or the War of Northern Aggression, as many in Los Angeles referred to it—had ended a month earlier, which was another reason to celebrate.

  At midnight, a drunken Carlisle walked into the bar at the Bella Union and spotted Andrew J. King standing there. King and his wife, Laura, were also guests at the wedding celebration.

  Carlisle was infuriated at the mere sight of King. It reminded him of his public humiliation, his loss of control of Rancho Cucamonga. “Jack King is a g** d** s*** a**,” shouted Carlisle, grabbing the attention of other men in the bar.