Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  “WITH ALL THE HORRORS of a year ago before us,” the Daily News observed on the first anniversary of the Chinese massacre, “it is gratifying to note that since then the knife and pistol have not been so frequently at work as previously.” Not only were county authorities doing a better job of investigating, arresting, and convicting perpetrators, but the frequency of lethal conflict in Los Angeles had fallen dramatically. From 1869 through 1871, the county recorded a total of seventy-one homicides (including the eighteen men slaughtered during the riot), a homicide rate comparable to the dark days of the 1850s. Over the subsequent three years, however, from 1872 through 1874, the number of murders dropped to twenty-three, a decline of nearly 70 percent. A homicide rate of this order of magnitude—a new normal—would continue for the next two decades.

  What accounted for the decline? Violence in frontier Los Angeles was overdetermined. A legacy of colonial conquest; antagonistic relations among Indians, Californios, Mexicans, Anglos, and Chinese; conflicts over land and labor; large numbers of transient men; a thriving counterculture of vice and crime; a city awash in wine and aguardiente; and deadly weapons readily at hand—all these factors contributed to the mayhem. By the early 1870s none of them had changed appreciably for the better. Los Angeles continued to be a restless, rowdy, rumble of a town, and would remain so until its transformation into something resembling a middle-class metropolis toward the end of the century. What was different in the early 1870s was the newfound power and authority of the legally constituted justice system. Increased confidence in the possibility of official justice offers the best explanation for the decline in the level of lethal violence.

  On New Year’s Day, 1875, the Herald crowed over the reduced rate of violence. “The criminal record shows that Los Angeles, with its population of mixed races, is just as orderly as cities of its size on other parts of the continent.” Not quite. Although violence had fallen to its lowest level since the American conquest, Angelenos continued to assault and murder one another with far greater frequency than the residents of most American communities. Over the remainder of the century the prevailing murder rate in Los Angeles would remain three times the rate in New York City and 50 percent higher than the country at large.

  OF THE SIX HOMICIDES committed in Los Angeles County during 1874, two in particular claimed a great deal of public attention. “During the last month,” James Bassett reported in the Herald at the end of June, “no less than three or four wife-murders have been committed in this city and vicinity. Of all the wickedness of which man is guilty, this is the most beastly and damning.” Wife murder directed the public’s attention to what was arguably the root of the violence problem, the endemic abuse and assault that went on in private homes, preparing men for the slings and arrows of the public world by training them to employ violence to resolve conflict. Two of those murders were committed within a few blocks of the Plaza, only weeks apart.

  On Commercial Street, near the railroad depot, John and Eliza McDonald operated the Shamrock Restaurant, a popular establishment that boasted “the best 25 cent meals to be had in the city.” Immigrants from Ireland in their midtwenties, the McDonalds were hard workers, and built up a thriving trade. Young Joseph Mesmer performed small jobs for them and claimed to know both husband and wife quite well. McDonald could be a reasonable man, Mesmer recalled, but he had a vicious temper and treated his wife brutally. She was “a most comely woman of fine appearance with a loveable disposition,” Mesmer said, and her husband was intensely jealous of the attentions paid to her, although it was her charm that accounted for a good deal of the Shamrock’s repeat business. McDonald often accused his wife of infidelity, something that would have been difficult for her to pull off, with a public dining room to manage and four children under the age of eight. On several occasions she filed complaints in local justice court, accusing her husband of assault. McDonald was admonished and fined, then went back to battering his wife.

  One afternoon, after a confrontation with her husband, Mrs. McDonald fled to the house of a neighbor. McDonald followed her there, but finding the door barred he returned to the Shamrock fuming mad. When his wife returned to the restaurant some time later, he struck her, knocking her to the floor. She retreated to their rooms upstairs, but soon came down with the baby in her arms. McDonald went after her again but was restrained by one of the waiters. While his wife sat nursing the baby, he went back to his counter, where he was slicing bread and cheese with a large knife, muttering curses under his breath. McDonald himself later recalled the next few moments. “She sat there and talked, and said something cross, I don’t know what, but it greatly exasperated me. In the heat of passion I threw the knife I held in my hand at her.” The knife barely missed the infant and penetrated the mother’s side. “I’m dead!” she cried, and dropping the baby she jumped up, ran out the door, and into the street, where she collapsed. McDonald rushed to her side with loud demonstrations of grief. “But she was past hearing him,” wrote Mesmer, “and the unsympathetic crowd was not impressed by his tears.”

  Patrolmen quickly arrested McDonald and hustled him off to jail before the situation got out of hand. The lynching of Jesús Romo was still fresh in the minds of the authorities, and fearing an attack by a mob, the sheriff surrounded the jail with a strong guard. County Judge H. K. S. O’Melveny issued a public statement. “Threats have been made to organize for the purpose of hanging some of the prisoners now in the jail,” he wrote.

  This every man who has the honor of this city at heart should at once abandon and oppose. Its effect would be to degrade us in the opinion of mankind elsewhere. The act itself would be a crime. No man can justify the act of taking unarmed men from the custody of the officers of the law and hanging them without a trial. We have laws and men ready to execute those laws and as honorable men we are bound to regulate our conduct in obedience to those laws and assist them to do so according to law, not by violence and disorder.

  Los Angeles remained calm.

  McDonald was indicted for murder and his trial scheduled for September. But when it began his attorneys, Kewen and Howard, pounced on an error in the indictment, mistakenly naming the victim as “Louisa” rather than Eliza McDonald. They had used a carelessly written indictment as the basis for the reversal of the conviction of the Chinese rioters, and Judge Sepúlveda wasn’t taking any chances. He ordered the grand jury to reconvene and prepare a new indictment, which required postponing the trial for several months. James Bassett worried over the consequences in the Herald. “People are justified in expressing doubts as to the probity of our laws and the possibility of our courts meting out justice while guided by a code so exact in its requirements,” he wrote. “Nothing offers a greater inducement to the people to take the law in their own hands than a consciousness that the law of the land is insufficient for the full protection of life and property.” But there were no protests or demonstrations, and in December McDonald was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison at San Quentin.

  THE DRAMATIC MURDER of Eliza McDonald occurred in public. The murder of Rafaela Ledesma de Marasovich took place in private, in an old adobe on Bath Street, a block or two north of the Plaza church, a stretch rivaling Negro Alley as a resort of vice and disorder. The victim, a native of Mexico, had been married for fourteen years to Lucas (or Lucca) Marasovich, a Croatian who had come to California during the Gold Rush and by the 1870s owned a stake in a mining and smelting operation in the desert, east of Los Angeles. The couple had no children. Marasovich was away at his mine for much of the time, and his visits home often meant trouble for Mrs. Marasovich, for he was a wife beater, even though she was weak and sickly, said to be suffering from a chronic heart condition.

  One Sunday evening, Navio and María Valenzuela, who lived nearby, heard the sound of conflict coming from the Marasovich place. They knew the couple only by sight. “I heard the man quarreling with and abusing the woman,” Mrs. Valenzuela testified at the coroner’s inquest. “I heard her crying.
” The Valenzuelas went to investigate, and finding the front door of the Marasovich adobe ajar, they peered inside. “I saw the man standing in front of the woman,” Mr. Valenzuela testified. “The woman was crying and asking the man why he was beating her. Then he struck her in the face, knocking her down.” Mrs. Valenzuela saw the woman “fall backwards between the wall and the bed. She never spoke afterward. She was dead.” Mr. Valenzuela wasn’t sure whether the woman was dead or alive. “The side of the door shut her from my view,” he said. His eyes were firmly fixed on Marasovich. “He was mad when he struck the woman. He was standing in front of her, abusing her, with both fists doubled up, in the attitude of striking. He struck the woman with his fists.”

  Marasovich denied that any of this had happened. Why would the Valenzuelas make it up? “Navio Valenzuela is my enemy,” Marasovich testified. The truth, he said, was that his wife had been chronically ill. “She has been subject to the heart disease for fourteen years,” he said. On the night in question she stumbled “and fell between the wall and bed about 6 o’clock, and died about 1 o’clock the next morning.” He had not thought to call a physician. When the authorities arrived, acting on a tip (from the Valenzuelas, perhaps), Marasovich had already placed his wife’s body in a coffin. A doctor acting for the coroner conducted a postmortem examination and found “a severe wound over the right eye extending toward the temple, which separated the flesh from the bone or skull,” along with “other marks of violence, particularly on the neck, under the chin on the right side.” Those wounds alone were probably not mortal, the doctor reported, but he concluded that the beating had “superinduced a natural death.”

  The coroner’s jury ruled that Rafaela Ledesma de Marasovich “came to her death by blows inflicted at the hands of the said Lucas Marasovich.” But the grand jury indicted him for manslaughter rather than murder, perhaps because his beating had only “superinduced” the death. The trial jury rejected even that charge, convicting Marasovich of simple assault and battery, and Judge Sepúlveda sentenced him to a year in the county jail. Soon numerous prominent Angelenos were petitioning the governor for his release, arguing that Marasovich “was not guilty of the offense for which he was imprisoned.” It had been a family matter, un asunto de su familia. The governor issued a pardon and Marasovich was released. He continued to reside in Los Angeles and rose to become a respected authority in the local mining industry. Some things had changed. Some things had not.

  •

  EPILOGUE •

  FORGIVE ME, I HAVE

  KILLED YOUR BROTHER

  THE FILE OF THE MARASOVICH CASE does not include the trial transcript, so the name of the attorney who represented the accused is not recorded. But it might well have been E. J. C. Kewen. It was his kind of meat. “Any murderer or horse thief that could get the impulsive southerner to take his case,” an Angeleno recalled years later, “was as good as acquitted.” Kewen continued to practice law through the late 1870s. But rather than growing milder as he aged, he became increasingly testy, involved in more than his fair share of blowups and contretemps.

  A disheartening comeupance of a sort came for Kewen in the spring of 1877. His wife’s brother had died prematurely, and since the man’s wife had previously died in childbirth it left their young son orphaned. In the absence of a will the Kewens petitioned the court to be appointed legal guardians of their nephew. But the child’s maternal grandmother made the same application, and when the contending parties failed to reach an accommodation, the matter went to trial. Kewen represented himself. During a hearing in county court, the opposing attorney, John S. Thompson, introduced evidence “of a very personal nature” suggesting that Mrs. Kewen “was not a proper guardian.” That evidence may have concerned the chronic illness—quite possibly tuberculosis—that had afflicted Frances Kewen for some years. Whatever it was, exposing the evidence in open court outraged Kewen, and he berated Thompson for his lack of chivalry, shaking his finger angrily at the man. When that failed to provide sufficient emotional release, Kewen reared back and struck Thompson in the face. Thompson staggered, then counterpunched, knocking Kewen to the floor. The sons of the two attorneys, young men in their early twenties, jumped into the fray, revolvers were drawn, and there was a near riot before friends succeeded in pulling them apart.

  The public exposure of the family conflict and Kewen’s own lack of restraint deeply humiliated him. The following day he uncharacteristically apologized to Thompson and to the court, paid a fine of one hundred dollars for contempt, and dropped the suit. Although he officially maintained his practice, Kewen retired to his San Gabriel estate. He may have been suffering from the same disease as his wife, for some months later he suffered a massive hemorrhage of the lungs. He died in 1879 at the age of fifty-one, his wife following him to the grave three years later at the age of fifty-two.

  LOS ANGELES LAWYERS remained a fighting lot. In 1872, after reading law and passing an oral examination, Horace Bell was admitted to the bar. He opened an office, beginning a legal career that would last more than a quarter century. Pugnacious and persistent, Bell was noted for defending Spanish-speaking clients, known throughout Sonoratown as el abogado de los pobres, the poor people’s lawyer. In the meantime he was composing his memoir, Reminiscences of a Ranger, which appeared in 1881, the first book published in Los Angeles. The next year he founded a weekly newspaper, the Porcupine, and during its run of several years Bell delighted in exposing the corruption of Los Angeles city and county government.

  He continued to allow his legal and political battles to descend into personal conflicts. His fighting disposition invited challenge, and he got it in spades. During his campaign against corruption Bell focused his criticism on the Los Angeles chief of police, charging him with corruption, bribery, drunkenness, and indecency. After enduring the scorn of the Porcupine for weeks, the frustrated chief finally burst into Bell’s office with a cocked revolver, and violence was narrowly averted by the intervention of Bell’s eldest son. Bell declined to press charges and the matter was dropped. Some time later Bell took to lambasting the county sheriff in the pages of his paper. After one particularly excoriating editorial, Bell was walking past the courthouse when he heard someone loudly curse him. Turning toward the voice, he saw two men struggling with the sheriff, gripping both his arms to keep him from shooting Bell. Concluding he would “make a two-sided affair of the business,” Bell procured a loaded Colt’s Dragoon, draped his linen duster over it, and returned to the sheriff’s office. For several long seconds the two men stood staring daggers at each other, and when his opponent made no move to draw, Bell turned to leave. If the sheriff remained “bent on human gore,” he announced as he departed, he would meet him on the edge of town, “where people would not be disturbed by their foolishness.”

  VIOLENCE CONTINUED to haunt the lives of many Angelenos. One night in February 1875, Andrés Pico failed to return to his home on south Main Street after an evening on the town. Growing alarmed, the members of his household went in search and found the sixty-five-year-old man lying in a nearby street, bloody, bruised, and unconscious. The authorities concluded that Don Andrés had slipped and hit his head, but the family suspected “foul play.” He remained unconscious for several days before dying.

  The death shattered Don Pío, and according to family legend he spent a small fortune in a failed attempt to identify his brother’s assailant. Don Andrés had never married, but he was a celebrated lover, fathering a host of illegitimate children, all of whom he acknowledged and supported in good spirit, although he legally adopted none of them. He died intestate, and his firstborn son, Rómulo Pico, petitioned to be named executor of the estate. Don Pío contested the application in court, denying that Rómulo was his brother’s blood offspring. This ugly case dragged on for several years, split the Pico family, and cost Don Pío plenty. Like many others, he was unable to keep up with the payments on his mortgages, with their ruinous rates of interest. Not only did he lose this suit, but soon thereaf
ter he lost control of most of his property, including Pico House. Don Pío’s wife had died childless some years before, but like his brother he had fathered numerous illegitimate children, and with several of them he retired to his last remaining piece of property, El Ranchito on the San Gabriel River, which he had taken from Francisca Pérez de Silvas thirty years before.

  There, on a summer evening in 1883, Don Pío’s eldest son, Ra­nulfo Pico, was shot and killed by his lover, María Ygnacia López. They had been living together for some time, and Pico, according to López, had promised her they would marry. But when she told him she was pregnant he admitted that he would never marry her, then callously turned and walked away. López pulled a small revolver from her apron pocket and shot Pico in the back of the head. Hearing the shot, his sibling Alfredo Pico rushed into the room. “Forgive me, I have killed your brother,” López exclaimed.

  She was arrested but soon released on bond posted by several sympathetic citizens. Public opinion was entirely on her side. “There is little sympathy expressed for the victim,” a correspondent reported, “as he was apparently unnaturally heartless in refusing to meet his promises and save the injured girl from exposure.” The Herald attributed the tragedy to “the denial of justice to the weaker sex.” Women in López’s position—fearing the expense of a lawsuit, the humiliation of cross-examination, and the scorn of an all-male jury—“have adopted the pistol as their remedy instead of the law. When will justice be done in such cases without violence?” There is no record that María Ygnacia López was ever brought to trial.