THE CULT OF VIOLENCE drew disciples from all classes and ethnicities, although the ritual observances of the hoi polloi rarely garnered the rapt attention paid to the elite. The Star might devote a few lines to the everyday conflicts of ordinary people, but generally failed to give them extensive coverage. An exception to that rule was the attention lavished on a spectacular gunfight that took place on Calle de los Negros one Sunday morning during the spring of 1854. For the principals in this pathetic melodrama, the day began at the Montgomery House Hotel, on Main Street. Merchant clerk George Dyke arrived about eight, planning to have something to eat. But at the bar he found his friend Tom Smith, a tough character who had drifted into town several weeks before. “We got to drinking together,” Dyke said, “taking two or three drinks apiece, and knocking around.” At Smith’s suggestion the two men left the Montgomery and walked uptown “to a whorehouse kept by three white women,” a new addition to the pueblo’s demimonde.
Shortly after they departed, gambler Frank Dana came in for breakfast. He ate quickly. What’s the rush, asked the manager. “I’m obliged to go over to Nigger Alley,” said Dana. “I have a game going on and I must hurry.” With his partner Levi Jackson, Dana operated a monte table at Moore & Alvarta’s saloon. He was gone by the time Dyke and Smith returned from their visit to the brothel and resumed their stations at the bar, soon joined by Sterling Lester and Bill Foster, two more Americans of the vagabond class. “Let’s go over to Nigger Alley,” one of them suggested. Smith liked that idea. “Come on, Dyke,” he said to his friend. The four men left the Montgomery and proceeded east down a muddy lane to Moore & Alvarta’s, located in an old adobe owned by Antonio F. Coronel, at the southwest corner of Calle de los Negros.
Monte (or montebank), a card game brought back from Mexico by American troops, was the most popular form of losing money in a town as famous for its gambling as its gun fighting. In monte the players (called “punters”) bet against the “banker” who operated the table and who by custom keep his entire stake or “bank” in plain view. After an initial shuffle of the deck, the banker drew one card from the top and another from the bottom, placing both face up on the table. This was the “layout.” Punters then placed bets on whether the next card drawn would match the suit of either layout card. Once the bets were on the table, the banker turned the deck over to expose the bottom card. He paid one-to-one for pairs and swept up all losing bets. The three face cards were then discarded and the banker dealt another layout, continuing until the deck grew short, when he would reshuffle the cards and begin again. The game was simple, fast, and addictive, and Horace Bell was astounded at the quantity of money that changed hands. “Each table with its baize cover,” he wrote, was “literally heaped with piles of $50 ingots, commonly called ‘slugs.’ Betting was high. You would frequently see a ranchero with an immense pile of gold in front of him, quietly and unconcernedly smoking his cigarrito and betting twenty slugs on the turn, the losing of which produced no perceptible discomposure of his grave countenance.” Not everyone, however, took the losses with such equanimity.
It was a Sunday morning, but Moore & Alvarta’s was crowded when the four men arrived from the Montgomery. Lester found his way to the bar while the other three sat down at the table where Levi Jackson was dealing. His partner Frank Dana stood behind him, monitoring the action. Tom Smith bet on several layouts, losing each time until he ran out of money. “Foster, lend me $50,” he said to his friend, who ignored him. Over the previous several days Smith had lost a pile to Dana and Jackson, and he believed it was time for his luck to change. “Hand me $50!” he barked again, and Foster reluctantly dug into his pocket and tossed two $20 double eagles onto the table. Smith played them both on the next layout and lost again. Jackson began another deal, but Smith grabbed the first card and tore it in two. No one said a word. Smith was a notorious troublemaker, and no one wanted to be on his bad side. Jackson discarded the old deck, broke the seal of a new one, sorted the cards, shuffled, and began again. Suddenly Smith rose, leapt onto his chair, then mounted the table, simultaneously drawing his revolver. He kicked at Jackson’s bank with his boots, scattering the coins and ingots. “Tom, don’t do that,” Jackson said calmly. Smith stopped, stared daggers at Jackson for a moment, then stepped down. Putting his pistol back in its scabbard, he left the table and walked toward the large double doors opening onto Calle de los Negros.
Frank Dana had not said a word. He too left the table and walked over to the bar, and noticing him out of the corner of his eye, Smith turned and approached, at the same time reaching beneath his coat and drawing a large Bowie knife. He waved it in Dana’s face. “What do you look so white about?” he declared. Dana remained silent for a few moments, then responded. “Tom,” he said, “what have you got against me?” According to shopkeeper Joe Cummings, who was standing next to them at the bar, Dana “spoke pretty spunky—pretty sharp—did not appear to be afraid.” Tom Cavanaugh, a tailor who was also standing at the bar, did not catch the words but immediately understood the tone of the exchange. “There was going to be something more than words,” he thought to himself, then turned and quickly left the establishment. “You are a damned little shit ass,” Smith said to Dana, “and I can whip you any way that men fight.” Dana looked him straight in the face. “I suppose you can,” he said, “you’re big enough.” That ended the verbal contretemps, with Smith the apparent victor. He put his knife away and turned heel on Dana.
Pedro Alvarta, one of the owners of the place, was tending bar. At the coroner’s inquest he testified that he understood very little English, but enough to know that “shit ass” meant trouble, which was why he ducked behind the bar. As soon as Smith turned, Dana went for his revolver. Smith’s friend Lester was standing off to the side, watching. “Tom,” he shouted, “Dana’s drawing,” and simultaneously he pulled his own revolver. Smith wheeled as he too went for his gun. The three men fired at almost the same moment. “I could see the fire roll out of Dana’s pistol,” said Joe Cummings. His ball missed its mark, but Lester’s did not. “I could see the coat and dust fly up on the right side of Dana’s coat,” said bricklayer William Winters. The ball plowed into Dana’s chest and through one of his lungs. Smith’s shot went wide and he continued firing wildly, a total of four rounds, wounding two bystanders seriously. The crowd rushed for the doors. Dana staggered into a back room, turned, and fired again, but he was reeling, and his shot wounded another bystander. Bleeding profusely, Dana stumbled out a side door.
Along with nearly everyone else in the saloon, Smith assumed that one of his shots had hit Dana. Lester knew different, but he wasn’t saying. Smith stood surveying the room, the smoking revolver still in his right hand. He turned and walked toward the doors leading out to the alley, crowded with frightened men, then out onto the veranda, in a sort of euphoric daze. “I’m the best man who ever stood in leather,” he crowed in a loud voice, then holstered his revolver. The ritual had concluded.
Meanwhile, Dana was staggering back toward Montgomery House, leaving behind a trail of blood. He collapsed at the muddy corner of Main Street and several pedestrians hurried over and lifted him up. “Tom Smith has killed me,” he said. By the time a doctor arrived a few minutes later, Dana was indeed dead. The doctor also attended the three other victims, one wounded in the thigh, the other two in the buttocks. They all recovered. Sheriff James Barton was summoned, and he arrested Smith and Lester, whom he found wandering aimlessly near the Plaza. Smith, who claimed to have fired the fatal shot, was jailed. Lester, who said nothing about his role, was released. Before the truth emerged at the inquest, he had departed for parts unknown. Smith also avoided a reckoning. Before he could be brought to trial before Judge Hayes, he and three other prisoners overpowered the jailer and escaped into the night.
BENJAMIN HAYES FIRMLY BELIEVED that “better order and more perfect security” would be most lastingly achieved through the firm and fair application of the law by the courts. Yet his first year as district j
udge in 1853 offered little evidence in support of that proposition. By late November county authorities had recorded a total of fourteen homicides for the year. That was a considerable decline from the year before, but few of those cases came before Judge Hayes. Several were ruled justifiable homicides. Others failed to go to trial because of an absence of reliable evidence or the reluctance of witnesses to testify. In at least two cases the suspects were killed during their attempted apprehension. In others the perpetrators remained unknown. Hayes heard one case in which the self-defense defense resulted in swift acquittal. A final case remained to be heard, which Hayes scheduled for Thursday, December 8.
The day before that trial began Los Angeles suffered the fifteenth homicide of the year. Deputy city marshal Jack Whalen was killed by a Sonoreño named Gabriel Sanate, whom Whalen was attempting to arrest on an outstanding warrant for assault. Whalen, a veteran of the New York volunteers, was well-known and well-respected. “He was brave and reckless,” read an account of the murder in the Star, “and has lost his life through a careless indifference to the desperate character of the man he arrested.” Whalen’s funeral took place the following day, and Hayes adjourned his court in respect. As was so often the case on such occasions, angry men gathered at the graveside. “There was much excitement,” the Star reported, “and many threats were uttered against the whole mixed race,” meaning the Mexicans. The murder had occurred in a tent camp on the north side, and there were plenty of bystanders, most of them Sonoreños, not one of whom had offered assistance to Whalen during the confrontation or information to Sheriff Barton after the fact. The Los Angeles Rangers mobilized and scoured the county in search of Sanate. The homes of many Californios were subjected to rough searches.
The trial of Ygnacio Herrera for the murder of Nestor Nartiago took place in this crisis atmosphere. Hayes was determined to proceed with deliberation and care, and he gave defense attorney Myron Norton wide latitude to call numerous witnesses who spoke to Herrera’s good character. The defendant took the stand in his own defense, testifying that he and Nartiago had been friends but found themselves competing for the attention of the same woman. Nartiago started the fight, Herrera claimed, and he had drawn his knife only after being attacked. Plenty of men in frontier Los Angeles had been acquitted under similar circumstances, but not this time. After Norton rested his case, Hayes instructed the jury with a reading of common-law doctrine that was much stricter than the one he had applied earlier that year in the case of Jack Watson. To acquit, Hayes ruled, the jurors must find that Herrera had done everything possible to avoid the fight, resorting to deadly force only when his own life was in imminent peril. So instructed, the jury found Herrera guilty of murder, and Hayes sentenced him to death. It would be the first judicial execution to take place in southern California.
THE NEW YEAR OF 1854 opened with the Rangers still hunting for Gabriel Sanate. They covered all of southern California, from the Tehachapi Mountains in the north to Warner’s Ranch in the south, “following the will-o’-the-wisp of some false alarm without any important result,” according to Horace Bell, a Ranger himself. Joseph Lancaster Brent wrote of taking part in the raid of an isolated adobe northeast of town. “We surrounded the house and rode down upon it at full speed,” Brent wrote, but inside found only an ordinary Californio and his family, “who received us with black looks and scant courtesy.”
The Rangers’ inability to find their man made it all the more humiliating when, late on the evening of January 19, the hoodlum Sanate and several armed accomplices commandeered the recently opened American brothel on Bath Street, robbing both the women and their clientele of cash and jewelry before fleeing into the night. The gang moved on to the house of Martin Lelong, a Frenchman who lived in the midst of his vineyard with his young wife and their infant son. Awakened by the barking of his dogs, Lelong was still in his nightclothes when the gang burst into his house, demanding his money or his life. They bound him to a chair and took their time ransacking the place, taking money, clothing, and jewelry. And then, as Lelong watched in helpless horror, “they each proceeded to inflict the last injury upon him, by committing diabolical outrage upon his defenseless wife,” María Josepha Alanis de Lelong.
Two days later Sheriff Barton published a notice in English and Spanish, offering a reward of $500 for the apprehension of Gabriel Sanate “vivo o muerto”—dead or alive. Hayes opposed posting the reward, arguing that it would provide more incentive for vigilantism. “I remonstrated with the Sheriff,” he noted, but Barton went ahead anyway. Several days later a man drove up to the sheriff’s office with a carreta piled with the bodies of Sanate and a member of his gang. Claiming the reward was Anastacio Moreno, a shopkeeper who had been unaccountably absent from the pueblo for several weeks. Sanate’s gang had kidnapped and held him prisoner, he claimed. But finally, finding himself alone with the bandit chief and another gangster, he grabbed a sword and killed them both. “The death of these two villains caused universal joy to our citizens,” reported the Star, and Moreno was celebrated as a hero. But two weeks later he was arrested after attempting to sell some of the loot stolen from Martin Lelong. Lelong then identified Moreno as one of the men who robbed him, but added that he had not participated in the rape of Doña Josepha, a fact that saved Moreno’s life. He made a full confession, admitting he had been a member of the gang and murdered his companions to collect the reward. Tried and convicted in district court, he was sentenced to fifteen years in state prison.
ON FEBRUARY 13, the day designated for Ygnacio Herrera’s execution, Sheriff Barton and Undersheriff Osburn conducted themselves with appropriate solemnity and propriety. A scaffold was erected in the yard behind the jail, rather than atop the hill, where the vigilante executions had taken place. Fearful of a demonstration, Barton deployed an armed detachment of Rangers. The crowd was large but orderly. At the appointed hour Barton and Osburn emerged from the jail with the condemned man, then mounted the scaffold, accompanied by Father Anacleto. Herrera was allowed to make a short statement. “To me it has fallen to be the first man executed by the district court of this county,” he said. “I have been convicted as a murderer, but God, in whose presence I will be very soon, knows that I have not murdered, but only killed to defend my own life.” As a Mexican citizen and a former soldier, he believed he deserved a better fate than this. Herrera’s last words amounted to a stinging rebuke to Judge Hayes. “There was no justice.”
Although the first legal execution in Los Angeles proceeded without complications, it failed to be the affirmation of the law for which Hayes had hoped. The opera buffa of the Moreno episode made the authorities look foolish, and the strict definition of self-defense Hayes applied in Herrera’s case struck many Californios as discriminatory. The day following the execution Hayes awoke in a sour mood. It was his thirty-ninth birthday. That evening Emily would make him a party, attended by his sisters and a small circle of friends. There would be singing and laughter and memories of home, back in the states. But Hayes would not be able to get Ygnacio Herrera off his mind. That morning, from the front door of their adobe on the slope of Gallows Hill, he and Emily watched as several hundred mourners exited the Plaza church and slowly ascended Eternity Street to the mournful strains of a martial band, following Herrera’s body on its journey to the campo santo, at the foot of the rolling hills on the north side of town.
•
CHAPTER 19 •
CITY OF DEMONS
IN THE SUMMER OF 1854 a new newspaper, the Southern Californian, began publication in Los Angeles. Determined to distinguish his weekly from the Star, editor William Butts took up the pueblo’s most pressing issue, the problem of violence. He reported speaking to prospective settlers who expressed delight with the climate and excitement at the economic prospects, but declined to relocate for fear of their personal safety. “This place will not do for me,” Butts quoted one of them. “There is no security here—I dare not venture out after the dark of night has set in.” Peaceable men
were repelled by the lawlessness and disorder, while desperadoes were attracted. “Americans profess to be a Christian people,” Butts wrote, but those who came to Los Angeles seemed to have “left their precepts at home.” He lamented that the principal contribution of the local culture was the introduction of “ever more formidable weapons of death and destruction.”
Lethal violence in Los Angeles took a turn for the worse in 1854. During the previous year fifteen homicides were recorded for Los Angeles County, a large number for such a sparsely settled region but a considerable decline from the twenty-four of 1852. In 1854, however, the pace picked up significantly, and on September 17, with the death of farmer James Ellington at the hands of the Alvitre brothers, the toll for the year reached sixteen, exceeding the total of the year before. By the end of November the list of victims had grown to a record high of twenty-seven, including twelve Anglos, twice the number killed the preceding year. The October 13 murder of Pinckney Clifford by David Brown focused public attention on violence within the Anglo community. Angelenos were “appalled at the frequent and enormous crimes constantly perpetrated in our midst,” wrote James S. Waite, who had taken over as editor of the Star. “All the slumbering energies of the people are being aroused to the intensest state of excitement.”
Eternity Street Page 31
