Nor could Angelenos shut their eyes to what was happening on the morning of Saturday, December 17. People began arriving in the pueblo at an early hour, on horseback, by buggy and wagon, afoot. “It was evident that trouble was brewing,” the Daily News reported. “Men with knit brows and a mysterious air went hurrying to and fro and gradually the sidewalks of the street leading to the jail were crowded with citizens, drawn thither by the rumor of contemplated tragedy.” Families found places on the eastern slope of Poundcake Hill, which provided an unobstructed view of the jail below. Sheriff Burns postponed the arraignment and issued a summons for a posse to protect the prisoner, but only two citizens responded. Facing the inevitable, Burns consulted with jailer Frank Carpenter and arranged for a priest from the Plaza church to meet with Lachenais. Serafina Reyes Lachenais, his seventeen-year-old adopted daughter, was allowed to spend several minutes with him. Henrietta Carpenter, the ten-year-old daughter of the jailer, realizing what was about to take place, slipped out of the house and ran to find herself a good spot on the hill.
At ten thirty some two or three hundred vigilantes assembled in the Arcadia Block at the head of Los Angeles Street, organized themselves into companies, then began their march to the jail. The Daily News, in its account, provided the names of two leaders. The crowd was “under the superintendence of F. Signoret, P. McFadden and others.” Felix Signoret was the prosperous barber who had led the vigilance committee for several years, and Irishman Patrick McFadden was a master mason with a booming business. What about the “others”? One was the Reverend Asahel M. Hough, in the words of one observer “a Methodist preacher with a shotgun,” who had come to Los Angeles after a stint in Montana during a period of intense vigilantism and lynch law. Another, according to Horace Bell, was real estate agent Robert M. Widney, one of Hough’s most prominent parishioners. “But at the last moment,” Bell claimed, Widney “dropped out and left his pastor to do the substantial work.” Although he did not take part in the march of the vigilantes that Saturday morning, Widney’s participation behind the scenes was widely rumored.
As the vigilantes marched they were joined by scores of unruly bystanders shouting, “Hang him!” And thus the march took on the character of a lynch mob. Arriving at the jail, the leaders pushed past the undersheriff and forced their way into the jail yard. Once again the iron door was attacked with sledges, crowbars, and a large wooden beam, used as a battering ram. Eleven-year-old Henry O’Melveny was outside, watching and listening from the hillside. “We could look right down upon the jail yard,” he remembered years later, and “it was quite piteous to hear the cries of the other inmates of the jail, who all feared they were going to be lynched too.” Finally the hinges gave way and the mob streamed inside and up the stairs, where they found Lachenais cowering in his cell.
His arms pinioned behind his back and a stiff rope around his neck, he was escorted down and out into the jail yard, surrounded by a detachment of vigilantes. The crowd on the hillside greeted him with shouted epithets and vulgar gestures. “When he first appeared the nether lip of the prisoner quivered for a moment or two,” the Daily News reported, “but then all traces of emotion passed away, and he walked to his doom with a tread as firm as if he were upon an ordinary walk.” Attention to such details exposed the event as the spectacle lynching it was. Hundreds of people were attentive to the manner in which Lachenais would die, and the vigilantes aimed to please by picking a location for the hanging clearly visible to spectators on the hillside. They marched their prisoner two blocks to a large fenced property at the corner of Temple and New High Streets that everyone knew as Tomlinson’s old corral, although it was being used as a lumberyard. Over the gate was a heavy crosspiece, some ten or twelve feet high, and this they used as a gallows. The only protest came from a man who mounted a large wooden box and implored the mob to let the law take its course. But the die was cast. He was shouted down, the box repositioned under the crossbeam, and Lachenais lifted onto it.
As the priest prayed beside him, Lachenais asked permission to dictate his will. “He desired to make provision for the education of an adopted child,” the Daily News reported. “This privilege was not accorded him.” He spoke briefly to the crowd. “I am guiltless of murder,” he said. “If I had not killed Mr. Bell, whom I liked and esteemed, he would have killed me. It was done in the excitement . . . .” Someone pulled the box from beneath Lachenais before he finished speaking. The drop was not more than two or three feet, and it took an inordinate amount of time before he strangled to death. He was left hanging for an hour, and before he was cut down, William Godfrey, proprietor of the Sun Beam Photographic Gallery on Main Street, set up his camera and photographed the scene. He later did a brisk business selling the prints.
“THERE IS NO DOUBT but what Lachenais deserved hanging,” wrote Horace Bell. But “the Courts ought to have been permitted to decide that question. He had no hearing. He was not permitted to speak in his own defense and to hang him was murder.” Few Angelenos expressed so forthright an opinion at the time, yet the lynching had plenty of critics. Charles Beane, despite his sympathy for the fears and frustrations of Angelenos, condemned the action in the Daily News. “Every good citizen must deprecate this occurrence,” he wrote. To be sure, the legal justice system was weak, “but we submit that the remedy lies not in an organization which flouts all law.” He hoped that this would be the last of those acts “which, in the minds of those abroad, stamp us as a semi-civilized community.”
In the Star, Henry Hamilton continued his long practice of equivocating in the face of vigilantism. He was consistently against lynch law—except when he was for it. “We are opposed to mob law—we are opposed to the formation of vigilance committees,” he declared, then hedged his bet. “But of late murder has gone so unwhipt of justice that it appeared there was no law against it. . . . Of the numberless murders committed in this city and county, we have recollection of but one case being punished by law.” That was a bald-faced lie, but no one stepped forward to challenge Hamilton’s facts, and he persisted in criticizing “the weak arm of the law.” The authorities, he held, should “take the hint” and begin dealing swiftly and harshly with violent criminals, making it “unnecessary for the people, from whom all the power of the law proceeds, to ever again retake the law into their own hands.”
Apparently getting the message, the common council approved a reorganization of law enforcement, voting to hire another two deputy marshals—now termed patrolmen or policemen—for a total force of seven. And it passed an ordinance establishing a “Board of Police Commissioners,” composed of several councilmen as well as the city marshal, arming it with the power “to make all appointments, to suspend, discharge, and to have the entire control and regulation of the police force of this city.” Adding the new officers was helpful, but the new board actually weakened the authority of the marshal over his men. Not until 1873 would he be provided with the power to appoint and suspend his own officers.
None of this had the slightest effect on the vigilance committee. The leaders had no intention of disbanding. “It was understood,” the Daily News reported the day following the lynching, “that another meeting was to be held last night, to decide upon the propriety or expediency of lynching other parties.” This and subsequent meetings took place at night and in secret, and within days the committee began issuing notices to selected “evil-doers,” warning them to leave town or suffer the consequences. In one case a man named John Kelly, awaiting trial on charges of grand larceny, was given until noon the following day to “make himself scarce.” He departed on the morning train for Wilmington and caught the steamer for San Francisco.
The leaders of what was termed the Home Guard Vigilance Committee, or the HGVC, as it was known around the pueblo, issued a formal statement of their aims and objectives in the Star. They saw a continuing role for themselves in the justice system of Los Angeles. “The red hand of the assassin has been rife among us,” read the statement, “and from cor
ruption or mismanagement, criminals have been allowed to go unwhipt of justice.” In his editorial of a few days before, Hamilton had used that same Shakespearean phrase, “unwhipt of justice”—from King Lear—and its reappearance suggested a cozy relationship between the vigilantes and the Star. “Our object, in thus associating together, is not to inaugurate mob law, but to protect the life and property of innocent persons to the best of our ability,” the vigilantes declared. “And wherever, in our judgment—after mature deliberation and without haste—any assassin has been set free, where the evidence should have convicted him—then, and not until then, shall we meddle with the course of the law.” They would act in a restrained manner, they promised, but have no doubt, they would act. Vigilantism had triumphed in Los Angeles fifteen years before. Vigilance committees were now part of the county’s virtual institutional structure, and vigilantes were not about to give up that power. Hamilton printed the statement without identifying the authors and added his endorsement. “We are of the opinion that a little hanging by the neck for the perpetration of murder would be about as good a remedy as could be suggested.”
The following day the Daily News published a letter from a reader, responding to the vigilante declaration. “If an honest jury and learned judge mistake the law, is society any safer in the hands of an ignorant association of green grocers? If a learned judge errs, it is not very probable that he will be improved upon by a dealer in old clothes, or that the old-clothes man will be any more honest than a sworn juror.” If the vigilantes wished to bring offenders to justice, “they should have organized under the law, and in aid of its administration.”
Popular opinion was divided. Early in 1871, when Jose Ramón Sepúlveda was tried and convicted for the murder of Felipe García, defense attorney E. J. C. Kewen challenged several prospective jurors on their support of lynch law. Houston King of the Monte, brother of Jack King and lifelong Democrat, acquitted five years earlier of the murder of Robert Carlisle, said that when horse or cattle thieves were caught red-handed, they ought to be hanged on the spot, but that he “didn’t believe in mobs going and breaking open the jail and taking men out and hanging them.” Jonathan Tibbetts, also from the Monte, but a combative Republican, agreed with much of what the HGVC had to say in its public statement, but declared that he “never did approve of the hanging of Lachenais, nor in ever going and breaking into a jail and taking a man thence and hanging him.” Henry Hammerton, a young farmer from England who lived with his wife and children on a place in Los Nietos, was generally opposed to capital punishment and said he would never take part in a lynching. But, he continued, if a jury found a man not guilty, “and I positively knew he deserved hanging, I believe he should then be hung.”
The testimony suggested the contradictory views held by ordinary Angelenos. Yet the HGVC, with its black-and-white perspective, would officially carry the day. County Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda charged the grand jury with responsibility for the investigation of Lachenais’s killers. “Be they few or be they many, if you believe them to be guilty you must indict them,” he instructed the jurors. “Be they men of the higher walks of life, or from the lowest levels of our population, they all stand as violators of the law and should be dealt with accordingly.” It was critical that all citizens understand “that their safety and happiness greatly depend in yielding obedience to the laws of the land, and in having due respect for constituted authority, [and] that the violation of law only entails to us injustice, cruelty, dissension, anarchy, and immorality.”
But the grand jury failed to indict anyone and issued a report exonerating the vigilantes. It held the justice system ultimately responsible for the lynching. “Had the laws been faithfully executed, and had the criminals been punished by the Courts in a thorough and vigorous manner, the disgraceful scene recently enacted in the broad light of day in Los Angeles city would never have taken place.” Thus the grand jury, the body that had indicted twelve men for murder during that very year of 1870, helped perpetuate the same dangerous misinformation that had fueled the support of vigilantism. The year 1871—which would prove the single most violent year in the frontier history of Los Angeles—began with vigilantism and lynch law more firmly entrenched than at any other time since the American conquest.
•
CHAPTER 28 •
CHINATOWN
IF VIGILANTISM WAS TO SUCCEED in deterring violence, the history of Los Angeles suggested that it would require more than a single lynching. So the leaders of the vigilance committee kept at the ready. At some point during the year they began referring to themselves as the Law and Order Party and chose real estate agent Robert M. Widney as their leader and spokesman. Their aim, Widney said, was “to cooperate with officers of the law in suppressing violations of the law.” A similar declaration had been made by virtually every vigilance organization in the history of frontier Los Angeles.
The year 1871 opened inauspiciously with the double homicide of brothers Hershel and Henry Bilderback, young men from Ohio who worked as woodchoppers, supplying fuel to the rapidly growing domestic market. The firewood business was intensely competitive, and the Bilderbacks’ claim to a forested canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains was contested by Allanson Gardner, another firewood supplier, who employed a crew of half a dozen men. After several attempts to warn them off failed, Gardner decided to evict the brothers by whatever means necessary. Accompanied by two men armed with Henry rifles, he came up on them one morning as they were chopping. “If I was you, I would leave this canyon,” Gardner shouted. But before the Bilderbacks could respond, before they even had time to spin around, David “Buckskin” Stevenson fired and put a bullet through the back of one of them, killing him instantly. The other brother took off down the canyon, “running like a deer,” Gardner later testified. Stevenson jumped on his mare and went in pursuit. Gardner heard the sound of rifle fire, then saw Stevenson come riding back. “I killed the son of a bitch,” he said. “Come on, let’s cover them up.”
Two weeks later a sheriff’s posse recovered the bodies from a shallow grave, “far advanced in the first stages of that decay which is the inevitable end of all things mortal,” in the words of the Star. Stuffed in the breast pocket of the younger brother’s coat was a crumpled letter from his mother. “My Very Dear Son,” it began, “I have not heard a word from you since you wrote me you were sick. Oh, I feel so uneasy about you—I fear the worst.” It concluded, “Oh, Henry, write to me, if but a line.” Gardner’s employees implicated their boss, and he in turn fingered Buckskin Stevenson, who was tracked down and killed by a bounty hunter. Gardner was indicted for murder, but defense counsel E. J. C. Kewen successfully delayed the trial until negative coverage in the local press had reached fever pitch. “It is rumored,” reported the Star, “that a vigilance committee is being organized for the purpose of hanging Allanson Gardner.” That news item provided Kewen with probable cause for a change of venue, which was granted by District Judge Murray Morrison, Kewen’s brother-in-law. After a trial in San Bernardino, which the defense orchestrated as a virtual prosecution of the late Buckskin Stevenson, Gardner was acquitted.
JUDGE MURRAY MORRISON, who was frequently incapacitated by a chronic illness, struggled to keep up with the felony cases prosecuted by District Attorney Cameron E. Thom. If the volume of homicides fell short of the record carnage of the 1850s, it was in part because of a steep decline in the number of murdered Indians. Before the smallpox epidemics of the 1860s there were an average of four or five Indian victims every year, but by the late 1860s the toll had fallen to one or two. The Indian population of the city collapsed as many emancipados fled the smallpox-infested city for the relative safety of backcountry rancherías. Indian migrants continued to travel to the pueblo to work in the vineyards, the stockyards, or the busy commercial district on the eastside; they still gathered on Negro Alley and continued to be arrested and auctioned off to employers. But there were far fewer of them.
As the countryside filled with thousand
s of Anglo families, the rural homelands of Indians were placed under increasing pressure. Gabrieleños in the San Gabriel Valley protested that they were being forced from their lands by local growers. Luiseños at Temecula, returning from the grape harvest in Los Angeles, found their houses burned and Anglos in possession of their gardens and zanjas. Desert Cahuillas complained that rancheros had taken over their springs and oases for watering livestock. Native lands were “being invaded and their pastures consumed by the stock of white settlers,” wrote a government official, “the water turned away from their ditches to irrigate the gardens of those trespassing upon their lands. And they have no redress.”
In this context a new leader emerged, a Luiseño named Manuel Olegario, described in the Star as “a large, fine looking fellow, almost as black as a Negro, and quite intelligent and much disposed to stand on his rights as a white man.” Olegario had lived and worked in Los Angeles, where he earned a reputation as a man of talent and became a leader of the pueblo’s Indian community. But during one of the recurrent outbreaks of smallpox he returned to his home in Temecula. There he played a leading role in the struggle to maintain the Luiseño homeland. In 1870 local leaders chose him to be their paramount chief. The Indian agent had handpicked another man for the position, a conflict broke out between the rivals and their followers, and bloodshed occurred. Olegario forged an alliance with Manuel Largo, captain of the Cahuillas, traditional enemies of the Luiseños, raising fears of communal violence. Olegario and Largo—advised by a number of Angelenos, including vineyardist Matthew Keller, attorney Christopher N. Wilson, and former ranchero J. J. Warner—met with federal officials and assured them of their peaceful intentions. What they required, the Indian leaders insisted, was federal protection of their homelands. “The danger to which they are now exposed,” wrote a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, “is that Congress, not finding any convenient lands in the south of California whereupon to place them, will propose to remove them to some distant reservation, . . . a separation as hopeless as the barbarous removal of the Acadian farmers immortalized by Longfellow in ‘Evangeline.’”
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