The cases included sexual assaults on several young girls. The record of one featured the voice of the young victim herself. In 1853 thirteen-year-old Jane Mulkins was sent by her mother to fetch Doctor Thomas Foster so he could examine her sick sister. According to the girl’s testimony, she knocked on Foster’s door, he opened it a crack, and seeing who it was, pulled her inside. “He shut the door and fastened it,” she told the justice, then “put me upon his bed and pulled up my clothes against my will and consent, and put his hand upon my mouth.” She struggled with Foster as he forced himself on her, tearing the paper collar of his boiled shirt. “I was much scared,” she said. She had been absent for nearly half an hour by the time her mother went looking for her tardy daughter, knocking on the doctor’s door and, when there was no response, going to his neighbor, a butcher named William Smith, to ask whether he had seen the girl. As they were speaking, Foster’s door opened and Jane came out, in the words of her mother, “her face much flushed and her clothes much disordered.”
While mother and daughter left to report the incident, another neighbor, attorney Ezra Drown, went to check on Foster. He found the doctor lying on his bed, so drunk he nearly fell as he attempted to get up. Drown assisted him to the basin, where Foster washed his face and changed his shirt, which was spotted with blood. Then the two of them went next door to the butcher shop, where, according to Drown, “Mr. Smith, Foster, and I joked considerably about the occurrence.” For these men the rape of this young girl was a laughing matter. The age of consent in California (and most of the United States) was only ten years, so there was no thought of this being a case of child abuse. Mrs. Mulkins filed charges of rape, but Foster’s attorney argued that she and her daughter were “women of easy virtue,” bent on extorting money from the good doctor, and the grand jury declined to hand down an indictment.
Dr. Foster had come to Los Angeles in 1849 and established the first regular medical practice in the pueblo. People considered him a man of accomplishment and attainment, noted for his extensive library and fine clothes, never appearing in public without starched shirt, frock coat, and silk hat. There was gossip about the rape charge, but it did little to tarnish Foster’s reputation. Two years after the incident he was elected mayor. In 1856 he was joined by his wife, Catherine, and their two daughters. “We congratulate the Doctor on the consummation of his happiness,” read a notice printed in the Star, “and hail the advent of the ladies as a boon conferred on the society of our locality.” But the Foster home was not a happy one. “I am sorry to tell you how Dr. Foster has treated his wife and family since their arrival,” Benjamin Wilson wrote to his wife. “He has been drunk ever since, and they say he has whipped his wife and drawn a pistol on her several times.” Foster was a lonely, unhappy, violent man, one of many in frontier Los Angeles. Traveling to San Francisco on the steamer in 1862, he committed suicide by throwing himself overboard.
He was not the only violent husband in Los Angeles who took his own life. Nicholas Blair came to the pueblo as a private with the New York Regiment of Volunteers and remained after the war, opening a tailor’s shop. In 1851 he married María Jesús Bouchet, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a French widow who owned a substantial vineyard. Several months after the wedding, in the late stages of pregnancy, Doña María filed a common-law suit for divorce. Her husband began mistreating her shortly after their marriage, she told the court, and the torment had grown intolerable. One night, as she was sleeping, he stormed into her room and “violently tore her from her bed by the hair of her head, tore her clothes off her person, then beat her violently with his fist on her face and breast, proceeded to tie her wrists with a reata, and inflicted on her person several severe blows with a horse whip.” As soon as she was able Doña María fled back to her mother’s house.
Blair was served by Sheriff Barton, and the same day he penned a pathetic letter to his estranged wife. “We enjoyed ourselves,” he wrote, “until this sad affair occurred, which has caused me much trouble both night and day.” He noted that she had asked the court for damages. “You cannot collect one cent of me,” he said, but “I’m willing to give it.” He had left a package with papers and some money for her and the child with Abel Stearns. “You shall certainly never see me more,” he concluded. “Good by, good by, I say to my once wife and partner, but now and forevermore a stranger.” The following day, Blair killed himself. Violent men go after not only their wives but other men, and sometimes themselves.
IN 1853 BENJAMIN HAYES was elected to succeed Oliver Witherby as judge of the First Judicial District. Hayes was much more sympathetic than his predecessor to the women who petitioned for divorce. “The California ladies are an interesting race of females in many respects,” he wrote to a friend. “They are a kindhearted, amiable, industrious set of women. I like them much better than I do the men.” Shortly before Hayes took the oath of office, the legislature enacted a liberal divorce law, and he used it to grant relief to nearly every woman who petitioned him for the dissolution of marriage. One of the first cases he decided was Francisca Sepúlveda de Carrillo’s suit for divorce from her husband, José Antonio Carrillo. Boarding with the family during his first months in Los Angeles, Hayes had seen firsthand just how difficult life with Don José could be. He granted the divorce and ordered a lien placed on Carrillo’s townhouse to secure the payment of alimony, attorney fees, and court costs.
Doña Francisca did not charge her husband with cruelty or violence, but with habitual drunkenness and failure to provide support. But violence figured prominently in many of the divorces granted by Judge Hayes. One of the most challenging cases for him was that of Rosaria Díaz. When she was fourteen, in 1850, she married Felipe Rheim, a German immigrant in his late thirties, the owner of Dos Amigos, a saloon near the Plaza that catered to the Indian trade. Doña Rosaria soon discovered that her husband was an alcoholic with a violent temper. Only five weeks after their wedding, she filed a complaint in one of the justice courts. “Felipe Rheim has assaulted and threatened to beat affiant,” read her complaint, “and has used various vulgar and indecent epithets towards affiant such as calling her a whore, a street walker, and has threatened to break affiant’s head with bottles and sticks.” The justice fined Rheim $10, ordered him to pay court costs of $40 more, and sent him home. Seven years later Doña Rosaria filed for divorce in district court. By then she was a mother of three. “While laboring under the influence of intoxicating liquors,” she complained, Rheim “had grossly and violently inflicted severe and cruel corporal punishment upon her, using guns, knives, and any weapons and instruments within his reach.” She had been forced to leave the house to save herself and the children from his “merciless attacks and assaults.” Yet only a week after she filed her complaint, Doña Rosaria withdrew it.
“Violence, like charity, begins at home,” in the words of psychologist James Gilligan. A man who practices domestic tyranny may carry his sense of brutal entitlement into the larger community. Merchant Harris Newmark recalled encountering Rheim one New Year’s Eve, “gloriously intoxicated and out for a good time.” The German pulled out a pistol and aimed it at Newmark’s head. “Treat, or I shoot!” he exclaimed. Newmark treated. “After this pleasing transaction,” wrote Newmark, “amid the smoky obscurity of Ramón Alexander’s saloon, Felipe fired his gun into the air and disappeared.” He took his drunken violence home.
Dona Rosaria was back in court little more than a year later. It no longer mattered whether Rheim was drunk or sober, she testified, his conduct toward her was consistently brutal and threatening. In front of the children, the neighbors, and her friends, he called her a common prostitute and other terrible names, “in a manner that makes marriage life a burden.” He beat her with his fists, with clubs, with whips, and often drew and cocked his pistol, threatening her life. But most shocking to Doña Rosaria was the night when, in the midst of a foaming rage, Rheim took all her clothes, piled them in the street before the house, and set them afire. His conduct had been
“so outrageous, brutal, and inhuman,” she said, she had suffered a miscarriage, and “she now lives in continual fear of him and dread of her life.” But once again, after several weeks, Doña Rosaria withdrew her complaint and went back to her husband.
The record of the past can reveal much but hide even more. Beyond the general understanding that divorce was contrary to cultural and religious norms, that it might leave an indelible stain upon a woman’s reputation, and that the relationship binding spouses is always complicated, the legal archive offers no explanation for Doña Rosaria’s choices. Women frequently return to abusive husbands and lovers. But six months later Doña Rosaria was in Judge Hayes’s court again with a new complaint, one that detailed even more abuse, violence, and terror. By then she had separated from Rheim and was refusing him access to the children, about whose safety she was worried sick. This time she did not withdraw her suit. When Hayes heard the case in the spring of 1860, Rheim failed to appear and was declared in default. There was to be a final hearing, during which Hayes declared the marriage dissolved. But it proved unnecessary. Rheim killed himself with an overdose of laudanum.
Despite the years of abuse and terror, the story of Rosaria Díaz and her children does not end unhappily. In 1866 she married Ygnacio García, a native Angeleno employed as confidential clerk by merchant Jonathan Temple. García formally adopted Doña Rosaria’s children, and the couple had several more of their own. The couple played an active role in the social and cultural life of the pueblo. García was a leader in several mutualistas and fraternal organizations, and Doña Rosaria frequently took part in musical events in town. She was said to have a beautiful, resonant voice, accompanying herself on the guitar, and she filled the lives of her children with music and song. Two of her daughters became accomplished musicians, and at the turn of the century one of them made wax cylinder recordings of several dozen songs taught to her by her mother. In those songs, perhaps, the voice of Doña Rosaria can yet be heard.
Even though you love a man more than your life
Don’t show it, for then you are lost.
¡Ay¡ Mononina mia, because men,
Even when they say they love you, don’t mean it.
I loved a man and he told me
That if I forgot him he would die.
¡Ay! Mononina mia, this is not true,
Because I forgot him and he hasn’t died yet.
•
CHAPTER 15 •
THE LUGO CASE
ON JANUARY 29, 1851—as Francisca Pérez and Pío Pico tangled in district court over the ownership of Rancho Paso de Bartolo—a detachment of soldiers on patrol at Cajon Pass discovered the mangled bodies of two men near their abandoned wagon. The victims had been shot and dragged through the chaparral. The soldiers buried the bodies in shallow graves and returned to their post at Rancho Santa Ana del Chino to report the discovery. Cajon Pass was within the jurisdiction of Los Angeles, although the pueblo was more than seventy miles distant, and it took nearly a month before County Coroner Alpheus P. Hodges and a jury of eight men arrived at the scene to hold an inquest over the bodies. Disinterred, the victims were identified as Patrick McSwiggen and his Creek Indian partner Sam, teamsters who had been hired in Los Angeles to haul heavy equipment to a mining operation in the Mojave Desert. The bodies were reburied, and Hodges returned to Los Angeles to continue his investigation. This murder case would join the predictable with the improbable, igniting the most explosive episode of violence since the conclusion of the war, challenging the trust that both Americans and Californios placed in the system of justice.
The murders occurred in the wake of a raid by a large band of desert Indians, Utes and Mojaves, who swept down Cajon Pass and made off with several hundred horses from ranchos on the eastern frontier, including seventy-five highly trained “gentle horses” from the caballada of José María Lugo of Rancho San Bernardino. Don José María hastily assembled a posse and took off in pursuit of the rustlers.
Coroner Hodges first assumed the murders had been committed by the Indians, but he changed his mind after interrogating the men who rode with the Lugos. The vaqueros acknowledged encountering the teamsters, who reported seeing the Indians earlier that day, driving a large herd of horses toward the desert. The raiders, the teamsters reported, appeared to be lightly armed, without firearms. The posse continued on and later that evening made camp on the bank of the Mojave River, in the vicinity of present-day Victorville, expecting to overtake the raiders the following day. But as the men slept the Indians staged a surprise attack, firing down on the camp with rifles, killing one of the vaqueros in the first barrage. Overpowered and demoralized, the posse turned back, passing the teamsters again on the way home. Hodges believed that members of the posse had committed the murders, angry over the misinformation they had received. The vaqueros admitted being very upset about the death of one of their number, but to a man they denied any knowledge of the crime.
Relations between the Spanish-speaking majority and the Anglo minority in southern California were already at a low point. Thousands of Mexicans continued to pass through the region on their way to and from the northern mines, and there were frequent reports of affrays with itinerant Americans. In the fall of 1850, a group of Sonoreños attacked an American family in their home on the upper Río Santa Ana, brutally murdering the proprietor and his hired man and leaving several others critically injured. Los Angeles county sheriff G. Thompson Burrill arrested several suspects, but they escaped from the poorly secured county jail.
If Americans felt generally fearful and suspicious of Mexicans and Californios, toward the Lugos in particular they were overtly hostile. In large measure their feelings reflected the persistent bitterness of the late war. José del Cármen Lugo had led the attack on Benjamin Davis Wilson’s rangers at Chino and directed the campaign against the Luiseños, who favored the Americans. A more recent incident exacerbated the ill will. The deaths of John Glanton and his gang at the hands of Quechan Indians at the Colorado crossing in the spring of 1850 stirred up considerable outrage, and California’s governor authorized a counterattack by a force of volunteers. In need of horses to outfit the expedition, the militia officer in charge commandeered them from local rancheros. But when he attempted to expropriate animals from the Lugos, he ran into serious difficulty. According to a report in the Daily Alta California of San Francisco, the “sons and assistants” of José María Lugo “valiantly made a charge and retook the animals.” Coroner Hodges suspected that those very same “sons and assistants” were responsible for the murder of the teamsters.
In early March the coroner’s jury ruled that the teamsters had come to their deaths “by the hands of some person or persons of a party or parties that went after a band of Eutow [Ute] Indians.” Coroner Hodges issued a warrant for the arrest of several young men from Rancho San Bernardino, including two sons of Don José María—twenty-three-year-old José Francisco, known as Chico, and his brother, nineteen-year-old Francisco de Paula, known as Menito or Junior.
PATRIARCH ANTONIO MARÍA LUGO celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in 1851. The son of a soldado de cuera present at the founding of Los Angeles, Lugo followed his father into military service but retired after winning a land grant to Rancho San Antonio, a huge swath of territory on La Mesa, southeast of the pueblo. Lugo proved as tough as the arid environment, with growing herds and an expanding family. Exploiting his military, political, and kinship connections, he won other grants—to Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, which he gifted to daughter María de Jesús on the occasion of her marriage to American Isaac Williams, and Rancho San Bernardino, seventy miles east of the pueblo, which he placed under the management of three sons. With a total of nearly ninety thousand acres, the Lugos controlled a vast landed empire. In 1851 el viejo Lugo—or “Old Man Lugo,” as Americans knew him—was living in retirement at his Los Angeles townhouse and was frequently seen about town, mounted on one of his splendid gentle horses, tall and erect in his silver-plated saddle, his
sword strapped beneath his left leg. He was, in the words of Horace Bell, “the beau-ideal of a horseman and the envy of all the young dons, who were emulous of acquiring the style and carriage known and designated as el cuerpo de Lugo,” literally, the body of Lugo.
Lugo’s sons inherited their father’s style as well as his tenacity. In the early 1840s brothers José María, José del Cármen, and Vicente settled with their families at Rancho San Bernardino, and soon they had large herds of cattle and horses grazing on the extensive grasslands of the inland valleys. But the more they prospered, the more tempting a target they became for raiding desert Indians. For assistance in protecting their assets they first turned to the scouts and muleteers who accompanied the annual trade caravan from New Mexico, bringing woolen goods to southern California to exchange for horses and mules. Their route traversed the desert homelands of Utes, Mojaves, and Shoshones before crossing Cajon Pass, and these men became experienced Indian fighters. In 1842 the Lugo brothers offered a group of them bottomland along the upper Río Santa Ana if they would agree to settle there and act as a frontier guard. Several dozen families from New Mexico founded a thriving colony, but following a disagreement with the Lugos over access to water, they relocated several miles south to Rancho Jurupa, where they established a settlement called Agua Mansa.
To replace them the Lugos invited Juan Antonio, leader or “captain” of a large band of Cahuilla Indians, to establish a ranchería on the site. The Cahuillas, with a proud warrior tradition, had resisted missionization and retained their own spiritual worldview. Supplied with horses and equipment by the Lugos, Captain Antonio’s Cahuillas made a highly effective constabulary, and with their protection Rancho San Bernardino thrived. In turn, the horses and arms supplied by the Lugos greatly strengthened Captain Antonio’s power and authority. A diminutive but commanding man in his late sixties, he began styling himself “Chief of the Cahuilla Nation,” a role that was grudgingly acknowledged by the leaders of other Cahuilla bands. At the height of his power, Juan Antonio was able to call upon nearly a thousand fighting men. When the Lugos organized the posse to go after the rustlers in January 1851, at least half the riders were Cahuillas.
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