That left the military government supported by a few hundred dragoons and sailors, and they too were deserting at a rapid clip. Moreover, Mason had to wonder, under what authority could military rule be continued following the ratification of the treaty ending the war? Yet how could it be disbanded? There was neither a civil government to take its place nor hope of one anytime soon. Congress was sharply divided over the question of slavery in the territory ceded by Mexico, and the Polk administration had no backup plan. Not until October did Secretary of State James Buchanan announce the administration’s position, declaring that until Congress acted, “the great law of necessity” justified the continuation of military rule in California as a “government de facto.” Mason had already presumed as much and had acted accordingly. But without troops, his government de facto was, for all practical purposes, no government at all.
The New York volunteers departed Los Angeles on September 18, 1848. They were replaced by a regiment of dragoons under the command of Major Lawrence Graham. During the time Graham’s men were stationed in Los Angeles, more than ten thousand Mexicans passed through town on their way to the northern goldfields. “The pueblo has changed much since you left,” John Griffin wrote from Los Angeles to Colonel Stevenson in Monterey. “It is now thronged with soldiers, quartermaster’s men, Sonoranians, &c., the most vicious and idle set you ever beheld. Gambling, drinking, and whoring are the only occupations, and they seem to be followed with great industry.”
Graham’s dragoons were supposed to preserve order, but the streets were not at all orderly. “Our men seem inclined to keep peace among themselves,” wrote Griffin, “and the Sonoranians and Californians seem very much afraid of them. A Californian is a rare sight now in the streets. You never see them parading about on their fine horses as formerly.” Even this rough order began to break down as the dragoons deserted for the goldfields. The official report of their conduct was scathing. “It is known that these deserters committed many outrages upon the property and it is feared on the persons of the inhabitants they encountered on their route to the mines,” it read. In an attempt to hold on to the few enlisted men who remained, Major Graham was reassigned to San Diego, hoping that the greater distance from the mines would lessen the temptation to desert. And so, on May 17, 1849, the military occupation of Los Angeles finally ended. Whether Americans and Californios would succeed in becoming “one people,” as Governor Mason hoped, remained to be seen.
PART TWO
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CHAPTER 13 •
MOB LAW
BENJAMIN HAYES caught his first glimpse of Los Angeles on the road from Mission San Gabriel late on the morning of Saturday, February 2, 1850. Fording the Los Angeles River, formerly known as Río Porciúncula, he came down Calle del Aliso, passing El Aliso, the winery of Luis Vignes, marked by its towering sycamore. At the intersection with Calle de la Zanja (soon renamed Los Angeles Street) he passed Alexander Bell’s impressive two-story adobe on his left, then the entrance to Calle de los Negros with its saloons and brothels on his right, before coming to Calle Principal. A left turn brought him to the Bella Union Hotel, which occupied the adobe previously known as Government House. It was the dinner hour, so Hayes tied his mule to a post, went inside, and seated himself in what passed for the dining room, crowded with Californios, Mexicanos, and Americans. Los Angeles was a rest stop for hundreds of men headed for the mines.
Hayes looked about for a familiar face, but recognized no one until a large black man named Peter Biggs ambled over to his table. Hayes had known Biggs as the slave of an old friend back in Liberty, Missouri. He had journeyed to Los Angeles with a new master, Lieutenant Andrew Jackson Smith, an officer with the Mormon Battalion, and after the war, when Smith was posted back to the states, he made Biggs an offer he couldn’t refuse: his freedom if he would agree to remain behind, saving Smith the cost of his transport. In a ramshackle shed next door to the Bella Union, Biggs opened the “New Orleans Shaving Saloon,” the pueblo’s first barbershop. Known to Californios as “Don Pedro,” to Americans as “Nigger Pete,” Biggs was acquainted with virtually every resident of Los Angeles, and he obligingly directed Hayes to other Missourians in town. Hayes spent the afternoon wandering the dusty streets, greeting old acquaintances, and picking up interesting tidbits of news. “I remained a few hours in the pueblo, long enough to learn that an infinite amount of gambling was going on, and that the price of a small loaf of bread was 25 cents,” nearly ten times what it cost back in Missouri.
Benjamin Ignatius Hayes, a man in his midthirties, had grown up in a Catholic household in Baltimore, the eldest son of an enterprising master mechanic who served a term as the city’s sheriff. Hayes attended St. Mary’s, a seminary dedicated to the education of young men for the priesthood. Although Hayes would remain spiritually and intellectually engaged by Catholicism all his life, he turned to the law. He went west to make his fortune and spent several years as an attorney on Missouri’s western border. In 1848 he married Emily Chauncey of St. Louis, planning to make a home in Liberty, now a suburb of Kansas City. Not long after their wedding, however, Hayes was swept up in the excitement of the Gold Rush.
“I threw myself alone upon the road to ‘El Dorado,’ ” he wrote in his diary. There would be plenty of work out there for lawyers, he reasoned, and he would send for Emily as soon as he found a favorable position. His first day on the road was a series of small disasters. By noon he had “burnt” his right hand from the friction of the new rope running through it, and unable to use it effectively, “I found myself going over the head of my mule, my gun going one way, and the mule another.” Distracted, he took a wrong turn and got lost. At twilight he spied a light, and heading toward it he came to a cabin, whose occupant agreed to put him up for five dollars, a princely sum, but Hayes was desperate. The next morning his host guided him back to the main road, three or four miles distant. As they rode along, the man gave Hayes a sidelong glance and out of the blue remarked, “How easy I could kill you now, and nobody would ever know it!” Hayes was cradling a double-barreled shotgun in his arms and had an “Allen’s revolver,” a mean-looking little six-shooter known as a “pepperbox,” tucked in his coat pocket, but the weapons made him feel no safer. This inauspicious beginning gave Hayes pause. “Last night, as I lay wrapped in my blanket, I dreamt of home and my dear wife,” he wrote to Emily. “How much I desire success for your sake. You must always pray for me, dearest.”
At Council Grove on the Kansas prairie, 150 miles from home, Hayes joined a company of travelers. From that point the trail was crowded with men headed for California. Hayes had read accounts of the march of General Kearny’s dragoons as well as the Mormon Battalion, so he was not surprised by the hard traveling along the southern trail. He completed it unscathed, maintaining throughout the journey a lively interest in the things he saw and the people he met. He found New Mexicans “a polite, kind, mild, well-meaning people, respecting the laws, and eminently religious in their feelings,” which appealed to his own Catholic piety. At Warner’s Ranch he enjoyed several days of recuperation, soaking in the hot pools, “surrounded by squaws and muchachos, all naked, dabbling in the water.” Hayes spoke a little Spanish—he could read and write the language quite well—and he conversed with some of the Cupeños. “One Indian told me the people are todos Cristianos,” he reported, but “sadly corrupted” by alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. Hayes noted this as “an example of ‘Anglo-Saxon progress.’” Hayes himself had a drinking problem. He had taken the temperance pledge and been sober since his wedding day.
He arrived at Rancho Santa Ana del Chino on January 30, 1850. A company of immigrants from Missouri had just come in, ending a grueling trip across the desert from Great Salt Lake, and Hayes compared notes of travel with several of the men. The next morning he pressed on, stopping midday at John Rowland’s Rancho La Puente, where he found more immigrants encamped. “Rowland is married to a New Mexican lady, whose manners are very agreeable, a delightful little wom
an,” Hayes noted. “They have several interesting little children, live well.” Nearby were the residences of Rowland’s sons-in-law, John Reed and James Barton, volunteers under Archibald Gillespie and veterans of the battles at Rancho San Pedro, San Pasqual, Paso de Bartolo, and La Mesa. Rowland provided Hayes with an account of his imprisonment in Los Angeles during the fighting.
By the time Hayes arrived at Mission San Gabriel, the bells were announcing vespers. “Twilight had just gone, lights were flickering in the various rooms of the mission; men, women, and children flocking around; and from the whole neighborhood the murmurs of voices indicated a populous village.” He attended chapel and found himself deeply moved.
The whole scene, American by the side of Mexican (to adopt the language of the day), Indian and white, trader and penitent, gayety, bustle and confusion on the one side and religious solemnity on the other, was singular to me. A beggar at the door, as we sallied out, at the conclusion of the service, struck my attention, although I did not understand the language in which he now chanted and again prayed, as many in passing placed their alms in his hand.
It was a world untold, but with the familiar, comforting universality of the mother church. Hayes had come to California with every expectation of looking for work in the north. But the south appealed. After his initial visit to the pueblo, he decided he would take temporary lodgings and inquire into the local prospects for a lawyer.
HAYES SOUGHT OUT the only practicing attorney in Los Angeles, a young Peruvian named Manuel Clemente Rojo, who graciously introduced him to local notables, including the patriarch of Angeleno politics, José Antonio Carrillo. Don José invited Hayes to visit his home at the southwest corner of the Plaza, where in 1834 he had hosted Pío Pico’s grand wedding ball. Carrillo proudly displayed the lance he carried as a squadron commander and spoke about his military career. Hayes was appropriately admiring, and Don José responded with the offer of room and board in his house for thirty-one dollars a month. Hayes accepted and over the next several months became a familiar figure in the Carrillo household.
The previous fall Carrillo had been a reluctant delegate to the state constitutional convention. Congress, divided over the issue of slavery in the territories, had failed to establish a territorial authority. American settlers in communities throughout California agitated for a provisional republican government. In Los Angeles, those efforts were supported by a number of leading men, including Agustín Olvera, Antonio Coronel, Andrés Pico, and other Californios who joined forces in an informal group, or junta, with Americans such as Abel Stearns, Benjamin Davis Wilson, and Stephen Clark Foster. Carrillo, however, was strongly opposed, fearing the loss of the familiar governmental institutions the Californio elite had utilized to achieve their rise to power. At one such gathering Carrillo denounced the agitation, declaring that he could neither countenance nor support a movement that aimed to overthrow the existing system. “And thereupon,” wrote John S. Griffin, who was present, “he left the meeting in high dudgeon.”
But the movement for home rule was unstoppable, and bowing to the pressure, California’s military governor called an election for delegates to an officially sanctioned constitutional convention. Southern California was apportioned five delegates, and the Los Angeles junta, in the words of ranchero Benjamin Davis Wilson, “held a public meeting and selected the best men we could find.” Three Anglos—Abel Stearns, Stephen Foster, and Hugo Reid, each married to a daughter of the country and sympathetic to Californio concerns. And two Californios—Manuel Domínguez, proprietor of Rancho San Pedro and a longtime supporter of American annexation, and José Antonio Carrillo himself, the most prominent critic of the American occupation, who had been persuaded by fellow rancheros that his presence would be critical to the credibility of the proceedings. The slate was endorsed in a election notable for its low turnout. “So little interest was felt,” wrote Foster, that “only forty-eight votes were polled,” most of them cast by members of the junta.
When the constitutional convention opened in Monterey in September 1849, it seated a total of forty-eight delegates, only eight of them Californios. The remarkable thing, delegate Charles Botts of Monterey declared, was not that there were so few but that there were any at all. “It has been the custom of other nations to trample to the dust the rights of the conquered,” he said. “But what do you see here? You see these gentlemen admitted to exactly the same platform that you occupy yourselves—taken to your hearts as friends and brothers. . . . Is not that a guaranty—a sufficient guaranty—that they who have done this will never do them wrong?” With this bit of self-congratulation, the conquerors moved to create a state structured entirely in the American mold. William M. Gwin, who would join John C. Frémont as one of California’s first two senators, expressed the prevailing point of view at the opening session. “It was not for the native Californians we were making this Constitution,” he declared, but “for the great American population, comprising four-fifths of the population of this country.”
His comment elicited a retort from the sharp-tongued Carrillo, who “begged leave to say, that he considered himself as much an American citizen as the gentleman.” It was the first time Carrillo had publicly accepted the fact of the conquest. He had strong views on many issues, but the Californios had no power at the convention and had almost no impact on the outcome. Carrillo came home in a funk and thereafter played no role in local politics. During the time Hayes roomed at his house, Don José was rarely home, but off with his cronies rehearsing old struggles.
MANUEL CLEMENTE ROJO also introduced Hayes to Abel Stearns, who was serving a term as the pueblo’s assistant alcalde. Stearns had declared himself neutral during the late war, which left him unscathed. When Hayes arrived at the alcalde’s office, Stearns was in the midst of a court proceeding adhering to Mexican legal protocol that Hayes had difficulty following. Once the hearing was adjourned the two men spoke. Hayes asked about the prospects for an attorney in the pueblo, and Stearns inquired about his visitor’s background. Learning that he was literate en español, Stearns offered to hire him as an assistant. Hayes went back to Carrillo’s with a Mexican law book under his arm.
Stearns needed help dealing with the increasing disorder in Los Angeles. The war had ended two years before. Congress remained deadlocked over the question of statehood, but the proposed state constitution had been ratified at the polls, and men throughout California were engaged in the formation of state, county, and municipal institutions. For the time being, however, Los Angeles continued to be governed under Mexican law, with locally elected alcaldes and council. Preconquest governance was weak, ineffective, and discriminatory, particularly when it came to Indians, who made up a considerable portion of the population and performed much of the necessary labor.
After the conquest, with bodies and souls still wounded and broken, the task of administering justice became even more difficult. Crowds of migrants passed through Los Angeles on their way to and from the mines. Mexicans and Americans—Sonoreños and Texans, mostly—established encampments on the outskirts of town, and each night men thronged the saloons and brothels along Calle de los Negros. Violent mayhem became a regular occurrence on what English-speakers called “Negro Alley” (or sometimes “Nigger Alley”). Yet Alcalde Stearns had neither a police force nor an effective court system at his disposal.
Two violent incidents stood out as particularly threatening. One Friday evening in January, about a month before Hayes arrived, a group of drunken Americans emerged from a saloon shouting epithets at passing Californios and Mexicans. Such behavior was commonplace. But this time the situation got out of hand. Placido Yeasa was minding his own business, pissing against the adobe wall in front of Benjamin Davis Wilson’s casa, when one of those men, a curly-headed Texan named James Ollin, charged up on horseback, clubbed him with a pistol, and took a potshot at Maxiano Oliveras, who was unloading a carreta nearby. The ball entered Oliveras’s right arm and passed into his chest, lodging against a rib. He
had no idea, he told Stearns from his sickbed the next morning, why the American had shot him. Family and friends demanded action, but Ollin and his American companions were nowhere to be found.
Several nights later a group of Californios, bent on revenge, exchanged blows with another group of Americans on the street, but the affray ended without the display or use of firearms. Some hours later, however, as the Californios relaxed at Santiago Monnet’s saloon, a group of Americans charged in with guns blazing, wounding several men. Examined by Alcalde Stearns, Dionisio Alipás, brother of the late Gervasio Alipás and a veteran of the Battle of San Pasqual, testified that they had been attacked “without any provocation.” The Americans, he said, were creating a “public havoc.” But Stearns declined to prosecute. Some time later Alipás was involved in another violent exchange with an American who took offense after Alipás called him a “gringo.” Two years after the end of the war the hostility between Californios and Americans appeared as strong as ever, driven not only by ethnic antagonism but by lawless behavior.
In February 1850, at the same time he hired Benjamin Hayes to help with these cases, Stearns recruited John H. Purdy, another American, as town marshal, in charge of a small constabulary. Purdy, a single man in his early fifties who had just arrived in an overland caravan from Ohio, impressed Stearns as a tough customer. He proved it several days later when called to a saloon where a drunk by the name of Patrick Mooney was creating a public disturbance by indiscriminately firing his pistol. As Marshal Purdy entered the establishment, Mooney rose from the monte table and drew his weapon. Purdy fearlessly rushed forward and grabbed the gun by the barrel, demanding that Mooney surrender it in compliance with the municipal law prohibiting the carriage of fireams within the city limits. That ordinance had been passed by the ayuntamiento some years before, but this was the first time anyone had attempted to enforce it. The two men continued to struggle until one of Purdy’s deputies rushed in and overpowered Mooney, who was dragged off to jail. Later that night the prisoner escaped with the assistance of two friends, who threatened the jailer with a pistol.
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