Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  A flood of new immigrants in search of land, farms, and homes soon began arriving. “Not a day passes but long trains of emigrant wagons pass through town,” the Star reported in 1868. Most who came overland hailed from the South, and rural southern California retained its southern character. But increasingly people also arrived from elsewhere in the far West or by vessel from Ireland, Germany, and China. During the ten years following the war, nearly twenty thousand newcomers settled in Los Angeles County, two-thirds of them on farms or in small towns. “Real estate, both improved and unimproved, has advanced within the past ten months at least one hundred per cent,” J. J. Warner reported. “An activity in all the productive branches of labor beyond that of any former time is observable in this section.” The subdivision of ranchos into farms drove an economic recovery. The appearance in 1870 of the monthly Real Estate Advertiser, a listing service published by Robert M. Widney, the first real estate agent in Los Angeles, marked the moment that the sale and development of land became the foundation of the southern Californian economy.

  In 1868 county voters passed a bond issue subsidizing the construction of a short-haul railroad connecting downtown Los Angeles with the wharves at Wilmington and San Pedro, and in November 1869 the first steam locomotive pulled into the new Alameda Street rail station. Expanded access to the San Francisco market encouraged farmers to experiment with a variety of new cash crops—cotton, tobacco, sugar beets, even silkworms—but most found it more profitable to stick with corn and barley, or grapes and orchard fruit, especially oranges. The extraordinary profits enjoyed by established growers like William Wolfskill and Benjamin Davis Wilson began a citrus frenzy that would long shape the economy and landscape of southern California. The railroad also made Los Angeles into a distribution point for mining operations throughout the Southwest. By 1874 freight traffic in and out of Los Angeles was running at more than fifty boxcars per day.

  In the business district, south of the Plaza, adobes gave way to substantial buildings with metropolitan pretensions. Abel Stearns and Jonathan Temple built the first two-story business blocks in 1859, the Arcadia Block on Los Angeles Street and the Market House between Main and Spring, which became the de facto city hall. Urban building ground to a halt during the years of drought and plague but resumed as the economy recovered. In 1869 the Pico brothers built the first hotel in Los Angeles with indoor plumbing and gas lighting on the southwest corner of the Plaza, where the Pico and Carrillo townhouses had once stood. Pico House was located at what was then the city center, poised between Sonoratown on the north and “downtown” on the south. It was intended to revitalize the Plaza area, but instead became a marker of the northern perimeter of urban development.

  Pico House was followed by a score of notable new buildings and business blocks stretching several blocks south, including the new Catholic Cathedral of St. Vibiana, which opened on South Main Street in 1876. The movement south of diocesan headquarters, even as the majority of the city’s Catholics continued to reside in the north, was a sign of the uneven nature of postwar development, which aggravated existing disparities of wealth and power. As new residential neighborhoods with domestic water and sewer systems expanded south and west, Sonoratown remained in the adobe age. It was a working-class district, largely Californio and Mexican, but with other groups living on the fringes, including several hundred Chinese, who crowded into the old buildings east of the Plaza, along Negro Alley.

  THE FIRST ECONOMIC BOOM in Los Angeles history was accompanied by a significant increase in public violence. That was not exceptional, since disorder often accompanies rapid development, but it was a major disappointment, since there had been a dramatic drop in the incidence of homicide following the war. Many observers credited the extended episode of lynchings in 1862 and 1863 for the decline in violence. “Notwithstanding the usual legal opposition,” Benjamin Truman wrote in the New York Times, the extralegal executions in Los Angeles “are admitted to have been productive of great good. Since then the pulse of society has beat with less symptoms of irregularity.” By the time Truman made that upbeat assessment, however, the pace of homicide in Los Angeles had already picked up considerably. Only two murders were recorded for 1866, the lowest number since the war of conquest, but there were eight in 1867, ten in 1868, fourteen in 1869, and twenty-two in 1870. In 1867, amid rising concern over public violence, Tomás Sánchez was defeated in a bid for a fifth term as county sheriff by James Frank Burns, a former U.S. marshal, who pledged a crackdown on crime. Two years later the common council created two more deputy marshal positions, but still, that meant there were only five men to police a city of nearly six thousand residents. “Scenes occur almost daily in the streets that would disgrace any frontier village,” editor Jack King opined in the News.

  The level of violence increased, but its character remained the same. Tomás Oliveras beat his wife, Juana Inez, to death with a reata. Henry Rice planted an axe in the head of his stepfather, Samuel Wright. Charles Howard and Daniel Nichols, scions of a former district attorney and a former mayor, exchanged gunfire in the lobby of the Lafayette Hotel, leaving Howard dead and Nichols seriously wounded. Black barber Peter Biggs ended a quarter century of public brawling in a fatal contretemps with a knife-wielding waiter in a Main Street restaurant.

  Three murders in the fall of 1870 brought the pot to a boil. After a night of heavy drinking, Thomas Hardy and Daniel Newman, neighbors who lived with their wives and children on hardscrabble farms south of town, fell into a meaningless dispute over who was better at holding his liquor. Hardy grabbed a shotgun, Newman grabbed Hardy, the gun went off, and Hardy fell dead. Felipe García, convinced that his friend José Ramón Sepúlveda was secretly romancing his estranged wife, taunted him into a gunfight. “I’ll make a man of you,” García exclaimed. He fired, missed, and was shot dead by Sepúlveda. Cyrus Sanford and Enoch Barnes ended a tavern crawl one Saturday afternoon with a political argument over who was the more committed Democrat. “I’ll cut your God-damned throat,” said Barnes, brandishing a small pocketknife and advancing on Sanford, who pulled a pistol and fired, putting a bullet through his friend’s belly. Barnes looked down to see blood soaking his shirt. “Cy, you’ve shot me,” he exclaimed in surprise. “Enoch,” said Sanford, “if you were my own brother I could not have helped it, and I’m very sorry for it.” Barnes died the following morning.

  Newman, Sepúlveda, and Sanford were indicted by the county grand jury. Newman, a nobody, was promptly tried, found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to four years in San Quentin. But Sepúlveda was the son of José Loredo Sepúlveda, proprietor of Rancho de los Palos Verdes, and Sanford was the brother-in-law of transportation magnate Phineas Banning. Both were represented by E. J. C. Kewen, who delayed their trials through a series of procedural maneuvers. “A vigilance committee is promised unless some decisive action is speedily taken,” a local correspondent reported. In fact, the committee already existed and was simply waiting for a call to action. When Sanford’s case finally came to trial in December 1870, District Attorney Cameron Thom warned the jurors not to be swayed by Kewen’s eloquence. “A conviction of the defendant,” he declared, “may prevent vigilante committees in our midst.” When the jury found Sanford guilty of second-degree murder, the authorities breathed a sigh of relief.

  The justice system was operating with newfound efficiency. The boom in property sales and construction drove up the number of civil suits, overwhelming the district court. In 1868 the state legislature carved out a new judicial district for Los Angeles, and the governor appointed Democrat Murray Morrison to the bench. Morrison streamlined operations. In 1869 he tried seven men for murder, and that autumn he was elected to a full term as district judge. In 1870 he tried, convicted, and sentenced five more murderers to terms in San Quentin, while seven more awaited their day in district court. Not a bad record, especially when compared with earlier times.

  These statistics should have been known to the men of the press, but an accurate
summary of the court’s record was never provided to the public. Instead, the Star and the News continued to harp on “immunity from punishment,” in the phrase of Henry Hamilton. “Murders are of frequent occurrence here,” he wrote, “yet no one is ever punished for the offense.” Hamilton railed against pettifogging lawyers, corrupt juries, and lazy judges. Criticism had turned to cant. With misinformation parading as fact, could the people be blamed for not knowing the truth?

  ABOUT SUNDOWN on a mid-December day in 1870, Michel Lachenais shot and killed Jacob Bell during a dispute over property lines. A hired man witnessed the shooting and informed the authorities, and later that evening Lachenais was arrested in a downtown barroom and taken to jail. News of the homicide and arrest spread quickly through town, eliciting a great deal of public excitement. Lachenais was a large, intimidating man, notorious for his aggressive disposition and his hot temper. “He is known to have committed three murders beside this one,” reported the Daily Alta California.

  Armand Michel Josef Lachenais had come to California from France during the Gold Rush. By 1857, at the age of thirty, he was living in Los Angeles, attracted perhaps by the pueblo’s large French-speaking community. In 1859 he married María de la Encarnacion Reyes, whose family owned Rancho Las Virgenes in the San Fernando Valley as well as a number of smaller properties closer to town. It was on one of those plots that the couple made their home, a farm and vineyard located in the southwestern corner of the pueblo’s corporate limits, near today’s Exposition Park. Lachenais played an active role in the French community, and it was a lethal conflict with one of his countrymen that first brought him to public notice.

  That first homicide took place at a drunken wake one night in 1861. The mourners, all of them French, had been drinking for several hours when Lachenais and a man named Henry Delaval got into a heated argument over a trifling matter. Lachenais called Delaval “a shit” and told him to “go to the devil.” Delaval responded by slugging Lachenais in the face, which sent him reeling backward. Lachenais drew his revolver and pulled the trigger, but it misfired. He tried a second time, but again the pistol snapped. “What? Do you want to kill us?” one of the men cried. “I have enough for you and him both,” said Lachenais, as he reset the percussion caps on his revolver. Delaval raised his cane in a threatening manner. “Come on!” shouted Lachenais, daring him to attack. “Come on, if you’re a man!” Delaval charged forward, Lachenais dropped back a step or two, then fired twice, putting two balls into his opponent’s belly. Delaval was mortally wounded. “Better to kill the devil than the devil to kill me,” said Lachenais. Later that night, after Delaval had died, a mob of Frenchmen descended on Lachenais’s ranch, but he had already fled, leaving his wife and an adopted daughter behind.

  Lachenais took refuge in Mexico where he remained for five years. In 1866 he finally returned to Los Angeles and surrendered. He would have turned himself in earlier, his attorney told the court, but “he found the proper legal authorities set at defiance and overawed by a violent, illegal, and irresponsible mob styling themselves a Vigilance Committee.” Everyone knew that was true. Concluding that a fair trial would be impossible under the circumstances, Lachenais waited and watched, and “so soon as he was informed that the law in the county had regained its supremacy, he hastened here to deliver himself up.” Others believed Lacherais had waited until several key witnesses died or moved away. But his defense—that he had been threatened with a deadly weapon, the cane, and had retreated until his back was against the wall—persuaded the jury, and it acquitted him. The French community was outraged. Felix Signoret took note.

  The second murder was committed several months after the trial. An Indian alerted a local justice to the suspicious death of emancipado Pablo Moreno, whom Lachenais had employed as a vineyard worker. The Indian reported that in a dying declaration Moreno had accused Lachenais of beating him about the head with the butt of his revolver. Moreno’s body, which Lachenais had secretly buried, was exhumed and found to have a seriously fractured skull. Lachenais was indicted for murder and again brought to trial.

  No one had witnessed the alleged attack, but several witnesses testified that the workers at Lachenais’s vineyard all said he was guilty. None of them testified in court, however, because Indians were prohibited by statute from giving evidence against white men. Doña María, Lachenais’s wife, testified that Moreno had broken into a cask of wine and gotten so drunk that he stumbled and struck his head on a rock. “We did everything we could for him,” she said. But the jury didn’t buy it, convicting Lachenais of manslaughter. He was sentenced to three years at San Quentin, but defense attorney E. J. C. Kewen immediately moved for an “arrest of judgment,” arguing that although Indian testimony had been excluded from the trial, it had been the basis for the indictment, making it illegal. Judge de la Guerra overruled the motion, Kewen appealed, and Lachenais was released on bond. Some months later the California Supreme Court tossed out the conviction and ordered a new trial. Burdened with other court business considered more important than the death of an Indian vineyard worker, the authorities never got around to retrying the case.

  Lachenais had by then developed a reputation as one of the most fearsome men in Los Angeles. When his wife, Doña María, died under suspicious circumstances in 1869, the rumor around town was that Lachenais had killed her. There is no evidence supporting this claim of a third murder, only the gossip, but it shows what Angelenos thought of the man. The following year he was arrested for shooting at a neighbor, but the case apparently never came to trial. A few months later he was convicted of illegally diverting water from the zanja to irrigate his vineyard. Lachenais was an all-around menace.

  During the war the common council extended the zanja system to city lands on the southwest of town, opening them for sale in order to generate badly needed revenue. That area became notorious for disputes over property lines, much as the Monte had been in earlier years. When Spanish authorities laid out Los Angeles in 1781, they did not orient it with the points of the compass but at an angle to the sun’s arc in an attempt to provide better light and shade for streets and residences. Outside the pueblo’s corporate limits, however, the cardinal grid of the national survey system prevailed. Where those two surveys intersected, as they did along the city limits on the southwest—a pattern that remains clearly visible on a street map of today’s downtown Los Angeles—there was persistent conflict among owners, often leading to violence. Horace Bell, whose farm was in that area, frequently fought with his neighbors over access to water for crops and grass for livestock. The southern district, observed the Daily News, “has been the theater of many deeds of blood.”

  Lachenais and his neighbor Jacob Bell both claimed a strip of land that ran between their respective properties. On the Wednesday afternoon of December 14, 1870, Bell and his hired man were plowing that strip when Lachenais came up on horseback and began verbally abusing them. The two men retreated to a nearby shed and waited until Lachenais left, then went back to work. But he soon returned, this time with a Colt’s revolver in one hand. Lachenais ordered the hired man to “vamoose,” which he did, and as he made his way over the rough furrows of plowed ground he heard a gunshot, and turning, saw Lachenais firing at Bell, who was struggling with his own revolver, which had jammed. Bell was hit and he fell dead. At the inquest Lachenais contended that Bell fired first, but his revolver, found on the ground beside his body, was still fully loaded.

  JACOB BELL’S FUNERAL, held the following day, was said to be the largest in public memory, although most Angelenos were recent arrivals in the city and the public’s memory went back only a few years. Large attendance at the funerals of murder victims was a good indicator of public anger. Afterward groups of men lingered on street corners, and an angry crowd gathered at the jail. Lachenais’s arraignment was scheduled for that afternoon, but Sheriff James Burns decided to postpone it until Saturday, hoping that popular excitement would dissipate. That evening the leaders of the vigilance co
mmittee assembled for a secret meeting. Horace Bell was invited to attend, but refused, “because as bad as was the administration of law in Los Angeles, I was willing to endure it and bide a better day.” Bell, who was unrelated to the murder victim, was outraged by the crime but had only contempt for the vigilantes. “I never did attend one of those meetings, or participate in any of those unlawful transactions,” he said. “I was not born that way.” In truth, Bell had once been an enthusiastic Ranger, which in Los Angeles was another word for vigilante.

  On Thursday evening the vigilante leaders held a mass meeting. There is no contemporary account of it. The local press, which had formerly reported in detail on vigilante proceedings, including accounts of the arguments over the justice of lynch law, declined to provide any particulars. What is known comes from the recollections of participants. “We decided that Lachenais had committed murder too often in Los Angeles,” recalled Joseph Mesmer, who was there, although he was only fifteen. “We didn’t waste much time in arguing his case.” Harris Newmark offered an equally succinct summary. “Lachenais’s record was reviewed and his death at the hands of an outraged community was decided upon,” he wrote in his memoirs. The vigilantes agreed they would attempt to seize and hang Lachenais when he was taken from his cell for arraignment on Saturday morning. That would give them all day Friday to build support. “We are no advocate of vigilance committees,” wrote Charles E. Beane, a former Confederate officer who was editing the Daily News for publisher Jack King. “But we recognize the fact that the good citizen here holds his life at the mercy of any scoundrel who chooses to kill him and can pay for being defended, and we warn the authorities that if the flowing tide of crime which is now sweeping over us is not checked, a terrible vengeance will be meted out. Regret the fact we may, but we cannot shut our eyes to it.”