Rojo then offered an argument that masterfully summarized the choice faced by Angelenos. If the police are ineffective in enforcing the laws, find new men to take their place. If the courts are ineffective in convicting criminals, place new judges on the bench. If the laws are ineffective, pass new ones that work. “Are we a people who must submit to the immorality, barbarism, and disorder of lynch law? Are we capable of being shamed into making good use of our freedom? Must we commit injustice when we have the recourse to remedy all our needs?” Rojo’s questions would haunt Los Angeles for years to come.
The four Californios the Angelenos shipped off were met at the San Luis Obispo landing by a dozen Anglo vigilantes, who hustled them to the first available tree and hanged them all without ceremony. Rojo printed that news in La Estrella and accompanied it with yet another plea for the sanctity of the law. “Should we not let justice take its course, let criminals be tried by our courts and punished under the law?” he asked. These would be his last printed words in Los Angeles. Soon thereafter Rojo, who had lived and worked in the pueblo for nearly five years, relocated to the coastal town of Ensenada, south of the border in Baja California. There he practiced law, ran for political office, and was responsible for founding the territory’s public education system. Years later, asked why he chose to leave Los Angeles, he responded sharply, “No me pude aclimatar”—I could not acclimatize.
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CHAPTER 18 •
THE CULT OF VIOLENCE
BENJAMIN HAYES WAS PROUD of his electoral victory in November 1852. He was a lifelong Democrat, but believing the court should be above politics he stood for the open position of judge of California’s First Judicial District without his party’s endorsement. Yet he outpolled the Democratic candidates for all other local offices. “So as you see,” he reported to a friend in Missouri, “I am considerably ahead of the party.” He was happy to give up his private practice of bickering clients and petty suits. As district judge, he would be required to ride circuit between Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino, the seat of a new county being carved from the other two. “The counties are large,” Hayes conceded, and “I shall have my hands full.” Yet the work was critical. As presiding judge of the highest court in southern California, he envisioned leading Los Angeles “to better order and more perfect security.”
His wife, Emily Chauncey Hayes, supported her husband’s decision but worried about his stamina. “His health in truth is far from being good,” she wrote a relative, “he cannot stand as much as I can.” Hayes disagreed. “I consider myself to be in excellent health,” he countered. “A ride for a day or two on horseback renews my strength.” Indeed, “one reason why I felt desirous to quit the practice of law for the judgeship was to get time for exercise, of which I have sometimes had too little, as well as to take Emily out riding, so advantageous to her.” Emily was in fact the frail one, suffering from a pulmonary disorder (probably tuberculosis) that often left her coughing uncontrollably and struggling for breath. After a journey across the Isthmus of Panama that taxed every ounce of her strength, she had joined her husband in Los Angeles in early 1852.
It was a welcome reunion for the young couple. They settled into a small adobe on the slope of Fort Moore Hill, a few steps from the Plaza church. “I do not think there could be a more lovely spot,” Emily declared. From her front door she enjoyed a view looking east across the broad valley to the rugged San Gabriel Mountains. Together the couple strolled the grassy foothills and meandered along the banks of the zanja, a word which Anglo tongues pronounced sankey. “Today we walked out to a vineyard, about a mile and a half,” Emily wrote after one of their excursions. “I was weak, but it did me a great deal of good. Whilst there I had two oranges and some dried grapes, which helped me, I think. . . . I intend to walk out there often in the fruit season, should I live.” Both she and Hayes were devout Catholics, and despite the language barrier—unlike her husband, Emily spoke no Spanish—she grew fond of the local women who crowded the church on Sunday mornings. They fussed over her, bringing her little gifts of fruit, embroidery, and advice. Learning she was childless, they offered reassurance. “Ah, no matter, California es muy fertil, you will have many yet.” In the spring of 1853 she delivered a son, John Chauncey Hayes, whom she pronounced “the sweetest thing in the world.” Two years later she suffered the loss of an infant daughter, who died after only a few hours of life. But in the meantime two of her husband’s sisters relocated from Missouri to Los Angeles, providing the couple with a circle of family in addition to their growing network of friends.
Los Angeles became home. But there were aspects of pueblo life Emily Hayes did not appreciate. “The site of Los Angeles is lovely,” she thought, “but the city is very ugly. Most of the houses are built of mud.” That included her own casa, with its dirt floor and leaky roof. She pleaded with her husband for floorboards, but it was several months before he procured them from a mill in San Bernardino. Emily kept her distance from the raucous doings down on Calle de los Negros, although she got a taste when with Hayes she attended the Fourth of July festivities on the Plaza. “They were to have had a procession through the town,” she wrote, “but this turned out to be a few men on horseback, racing through the streets, nearly all drunk.” The couple retreated to their home on the hillside, but the sound of gunfire kept Emily awake late into the night. A few weeks later, the first of the vigilante executions took place at the summit of “Gallows Hill,” as Fort Moore Hill had become known, a hailing distance from her back door. Emily was horrified when the first hanging was followed by another several months later, and yet another a few weeks after that.
Hayes himself was more forbearing. He estimated that there were three or four hundred Americans in the pueblo, perhaps half of them transients—miners on their way to or from the diggings or gamblers out to fleece them. But they were gradually giving way to more respectable settlers, “a clever, manly population, such as you find on the frontiers of Missouri, . . . well-disposed citizens, peaceful and seeking the prosperity of the country,” not the “bloodthirsty horde” critics made them out to be. True, they had resorted to lynch law, which Hayes staunchly opposed, although he had to admit that since the vigilante episodes of the previous year “there has been felt generally a great sense of safety.” Among Anglos anyway, if not among Californios. The trick, Hayes thought, was to use this moment of calm to build up support for the legally constituted justice system. When Hayes took the oath of office in January 1853, he was generally upbeat. He would soon have reason to feel otherwise.
TO CELEBRATE THE ANNIVERSARY of George Washington’s birth on February 22, a group of prominent Americans and elite Californios invited what attorney Joseph Lancaster Brent described as “the better class” of Angelenos to a ball at el palacio, the Abel Stearns mansion. Some Americans of the vagabond class professed to be deeply offended. Such national occasions, they insisted, should be celebrated democratically, and they denounced the pretentions of “the aristocrats.” Something quite similar had happened several years before the American conquest, when ordinary Angelenos protested a gathering of the Californio elite at el palacio on Mexican Independence Day.
On the night of the ball a crowd of drunken protesters gathered on the Plaza. There were incendiary speeches. A group of a dozen men or more commandeered an old artillery piece that sat on the Plaza, pushed it down Main Street, and positioned it in front of the entrance to el palacio. Then, loading it with stones and a small charge of powder, they fired it off, producing a loud report though doing relatively little damage to the house. Then the men staged a “shivaree,” banging tin pans, shooting off firecrackers, and singing patriotic songs. Eventually the guests inside decided the foolishness had gone on long enough, and once the women were secured in a back room the men marched to the foyer and threw open the heavy double doors. Myron Norton and James A. “Jack” Watson stepped into the doorway and faced the crowd. Both were armed. Norton, an attorney who had come to California as a
n officer with the New York volunteers, was a large man with a commanding presence. Watson, who had fought with the Texas Mounted during the war, was short and slight. He was a “game little fellow,” wrote Horace Bell, with “a battery of Colts buckled to him, either of which was nearly as large as himself.” It is not clear which side fired first, but Norton was hit in the first round and went down with what turned out to be a minor wound. Watson “sallied out alone,” both revolvers blazing, and brought down two protesters. The rest of the mob fled, leaving the wounded men writhing on the ground. Both were dead within the hour.
Writing in the Star, editor John A. Lewis strongly criticized all the participants in the affray. How could the protesters have thought it acceptable to attack the private residence of a respectable citizen? Why hadn’t the men inside summoned the marshal or the sheriff? Lewis believed he knew the answer. Men on both sides, including shooters and victims, had been active participants in the recent vigilante activities. “Men have become so accustomed to acting as judges, jurors, and executioners,” he wrote, “they have come to think justice will lose a victim unless they swing him off or flog him themselves.” In frontier Los Angeles, where state-sponsored institutions of justice were extraordinarily weak, men of all classes and backgrounds considered the offenses of other men as insults to themselves rather than as offenses against the community. Justice was personal. Men followed the precept of former president Andrew Jackson, who famously quoted his mother’s advice on how he should handle challenges to his reputation or honor. “Always settle them cases yourself!”
Norton and Watson surrendered to the authorities and were examined by Judge Hayes. Watson claimed the first fire came from the mob, but he took full responsibility for the deadly shots fired in response. Norton had gotten off a round, but Watson was confident that he had fired the shots that killed the two men because both died of wounds to the belly. “It is my habit when I shoot a man at night, to aim just below the belt,” he told Hayes. “In the day time you can pick your place to shoot, but at night I make it a rule to aim at the stomach.” Hayes ruled the killings to be justifiable homicides.
The public reputations of both men were greatly enhanced by the episode. Soon thereafter Norton was elected county judge, succeeding Agustín Olvera. Watson established a lucrative legal practice, served three terms in the state assembly, and married María Dolores Domínguez, an heir to Rancho San Pedro. “He was the gamest man and the best fighter that I ever knew,” an associate wrote after Watson’s death some years later. “The little chap didn’t provoke difficulties, but I verily believe he enjoyed fighting for its own sake, and odds didn’t figure with him once he concluded to go into a melee. His long suit was shooting, and a deadlier shot never fingered a revolver.”
Jack Watson was a devotee of the cult of violence, a sect with its own set of symbols and rituals. The Colt was his cross, stand your ground his creed, the glory of defying risk his reward. The shootist, observed Peter Burnett, a Missourian who served as California’s first American governor, was “essentially selfish, and therefore he heeds not the ruin he produces. The cry and distress of the widow and the orphan never reach his dull, cold ear, or affect his stony heart.” Burnett’s opinion of gunfighters was “that most of them are atheists, whose moral conduct depends upon the sliding scale of the times, and who have no strict moral principles independent of public opinion.” Watson was a lifelong Catholic who married in the Plaza church and had his children baptized there. But he was also a practicioner of the cult of violence.
LOS ANGELES WAS AWASH IN GUNS, many carried west by soldiers and immigrants, others imported for sale by merchants. The private armory of residents included military muskets and hunting rifles, single- and double-barreled shotguns, carbines, and pistols of all shapes and sizes, an increasing proportion of them outfitted with percussion ignition. Firearms manufacturer Samuel Colt utilized the percussion cap in his patented “revolving gun,” featuring a cylinder with multiple chambers that rotated into place with the cock of the hammer, enabling the discharge of several rounds without reloading. Introduced in 1848, Colt’s Dragoon six-shooter, also known as an Army revolver, was a large .44-caliber horse pistol weighing four and a half pounds, designed to be carried in a saddle holster. Two years later Colt began manufacturing more compact models, the Navy and Pocket revolvers, which could be tucked into a belt or concealed in a coat pocket. Wildly popular with the public, those were the guns that made the Colt brand famous. Hundreds of thousands were manufactured over the subsequent quarter century. Within months of their initial introduction, Los Angeles merchants were advertising the availability of “Colt’s Army and Navy Pistols.”
Revolvers were ubiquitous in Los Angeles by 1852 when Horace Bell arrived. “The patrons who came and went from the Bella Union bar during that time,” he wrote, “were the most bandit, cut-throat looking set that the writer had ever sat his youthful eyes upon. Some were dressed in the gorgeous attire of the country, some half ranchero, half miner; others were dressed in the most modern style of tailorship; all, however, had slung to their rear the never-failing pair of Colts, generally with the accompaniment of the Bowie knife.”
Some Angelenos had tried to prevent that. In the summer of 1850, at one of the first meetings of the Los Angeles common council, two members proposed a regulation prohibiting the carriage or discharge of firearms within city limits. This would have extended the life of the ordinance passed by the ayuntamiento before the conquest, which Marshal Purdy had tried to enforce but was ignored by virtually everyone else. Passing and enforcing a ban on firearms would have been a bold move, but not an unprecedented one. Several states adopted restrictions on firearms, and in later years a number of notable frontier towns—Dodge City, Tombstone, and Fort Worth among them—passed local ordinances banning handguns. But after considerable discussion, the council rejected the restriction. Enforcing the ordinance would have required hiring more deputy marshals or creating a real city police, which in turn would have necessitated an increase in fees and taxes on businessmen and property owners, something a majority of councilmen were loath to do. On several subsequent occasions the common council would again reject proposals for a city police force operating at taxpayer expense. As a result, as Benjamin Hayes put it, “the revolver seems to have been the law about this time.”
THE ANNALS OF FRONTIER LOS ANGELES are crowded with instances in which Anglos of “the better class” resorted to guns to settle disputes. In September of 1852 William A. Cornwall, private secretary to Governor John Bigler, in Los Angeles on political business, assaulted newspaperman Andrew C. Russell after he published a column in the Star accusing Cornwall of corruption. Cornwall found Russell standing at the crowded bar in the Bella Union. He came up from behind, a cocked Colt’s Navy in one hand and a Bowie knife in the other. “Clear the way,” he shouted. Russell spun around and Cornwall struck him in the face with the handle of his knife. “Defend yourself,” he exclaimed. He raised the Colt but in his excitement discharged it prematurely, literally shooting himself in the foot. Russell ran for the door, simultaneously drawing a Colt Pocket revolver and firing wildly over his shoulder, miraculously hitting no one. Cornwall came after him, hopping and cursing. He caught Russell as he paused to reload in the middle of Main Street. The men clinched and fell, biting and kicking like two fighting dogs before being pulled apart. The county grand jury later indicted Cornwall for assault with intent to commit murder, but he had returned to Sacramento and was never brought to trial.
Brawls like these among prominent Anglos were common. Isaac S. K. Ogier, U.S. attorney and later U.S. district court judge for southern California, and Hilliard P. Dorsey, register of the Federal Land Office, both cultivated reputations as street fighters. One late evening the two got into a dispute during a boozy supper at the Montgomery House Hotel. Ogier tossed a bowl of hot soup in Dorsey’s face, and with barely a hesitation Dorsey vaulted across the table and onto Ogier. “It was a genuine Georgia affair,” reported the Da
ily Alta California, “bite, cut, and gouge.” Dorsey suffered second-degree burns to his face, but left Ogier with an eye hanging from its socket and the tip of a nose that had to be reattached. Dorsey, wrote Horace Bell, was “an out-and-out man-of-war. He could wield a Bowie, was quick on the draw, struck square out from the shoulder, and could gouge out an eye or bite off a nose in such a style and manner as would excite the envy of the most fastidious backwoods fighter.”
If Bell’s description hints at admiration, that is because he was a true believer in the efficacy of violence. Born in 1830 in frontier southern Indiana, Bell had imbibed the aggressive values of his Scots-Irish father. Raised to be a fighter, he was ever eager to set things aright with fists or guns. During more than a half century in Los Angeles, Bell took part in dozens of street fights and bloody encounters. The first on record occurred on New Year’s Day, 1854, when he confronted Horace Zebulon Wheeler, proprietor of a hardware store and brother of editor John Ozias Wheeler of the Southern Californian. In its account, the Star did not detail the nature of the dispute, but reported that Bell challenged Wheeler’s manhood and shouted that “one of us must die.” Wheeler got the upper hand, however, subjecting Bell to what the Star characterized as “a horse whipping.” Bell refused to cry uncle, and when he came back for more, Wheeler drew a pistol and shot him in the shoulder. Fortunately it proved a minor wound, though a major injury to Bell’s pride. Because Bell had started the fight, Wheeler was not charged. “One justice of the peace has told us that had the shot proved fatal,” the Star reported, “he would have discharged Mr. Wheeler upon the ground of justified homicide.” Self-defense was a very broad category, a cover for violence of all kinds.
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