As the new year of 1855 began, however, many Angelenos believed their city had taken a turn for the better. Formal trials in November concluded with the conviction for murder of two desperadoes. There was hope that the public execution of those felons—one a native Californio, the other an Anglo Texan—would affirm the supremacy of the law and the legitimacy of the justice system. But only days before the scheduled executions those hopes had been dashed by the arrival of an official document from the state capital that revived the persistent public controversy over violence and justice, means and ends. Sheriff Barton faced the prospect of an uprising of angry residents. It was enough to make even a reckless man seriously consider his mortality.
CONVICTED MURDERER Felipe Alvitre, a nineteen-year-old hijo del país, or native son, freely confessed his crimes. They fit a pattern of Alvitre family violence extending over three generations. The clan went back to the beginnings of Spanish settlement in California. Grandfather Felipe Sebastián Alvitre—a soldado de cuero (leather-jacket soldier) of the Spanish crown—served in the 1769 expedition that planted the first colonial foothold. While garrisoned at San Diego, Alvitre and two other soldiers were accused of beating and gang-raping two Indian women, one of whom died. Arrested and confined in irons, Alvitre and his companions were dishonorably discharged and sentenced to permanent exile in the frontier province, which was considered harsh punishment. Alvitre continued his troublesome ways. He relocated to the pueblo of San José in the north, but was banished after engaging in a tempestuous affair with another man’s wife. He removed to Los Angeles, where he was arrested and jailed for riotous conduct. Governor Pedro Fages described him as “an incorrigible rogue.” Eventually Alvitre married an Indian woman and settled east of the pueblo on the banks of the Río San Gabriel, near where the river squeezes through a gap in the foothills, a place known today as the Whittier Narrows. He and his wife cultivated a small plot of bottomland, herded cattle for the padres at nearby Mission San Gabriel, and raised a large family. Their children married and raised big families of their own on land nearby.
Young Felipe, old Felipe’s grandson and namesake, was born in 1835 and raised amid this cluster of extended family. He came of age during the Mexican-American War, when the men of his family, along with virtually all Californios, took up arms in defense of their homeland. The war, officially concluded in 1848, left a bitter legacy. Violent conflict continued between the Spanish-speaking majority and the small English-speaking minority in control of the political system. The institutions of the new American state were weak, and in the absence of credible authority social order depended on codes of honor and vengeance.
As he approached manhood, young Alvitre was witness to a storm of violence within his family circle. During the wedding of a cousin in 1852 an American guest shot and killed one of his uncles. Several months later one of his cousins threatened a bothersome Mexican drifter, who revenged himself by kidnapping the man’s three-year-old daughter, cutting her throat, and tossing her body into a swamp. In 1853 a group of vigilantes arrested another cousin, Ysidro Alvitre, Felipe’s age-mate, and charged him with the assault and attempted rape of Antonia Margarita Workman de Temple, daughter of Englishman William Workman and the wife of Francis P. F. Temple, two of the most prominent Anglo rancheros in the county. A kangaroo court composed of Anglos and Californios—including Andrés Pico, brother of Pío de Jesús Pico, the last governor of Mexican California—sentenced the offender to 250 lashes “on the bare back” and warned him, on pain of death, to “leave the county as soon as his physicians pronounce him able to do so.” The notice was unnecessary. The young man died of his wounds.
Brute force was common in Felipe Alvitre’s world, and he felt no hesitation about employing lethal violence himself. His brief but bloody criminal career began on Sunday morning, September 3, 1854. Alvitre and his seventeen-year-old brother, Ylario, accompanied by a Mexican boy named Martín and an Indian girl named Innocencia, were traveling together down the lower valley road, taking turns riding a single horse. About a mile or two east of the Monte, an American settler community on the west bank of the Río San Gabriel, they encountered James Ellington, a recent migrant from Texas, rounding up livestock. The Alvitre brothers somehow persuaded Ellington to dismount, then attacked him with their knives. He ran, but stumbled into a cactus patch, where they dispatched him. The brothers took his buckskin purse containing several hundred dollars, his Colt’s Navy revolver, and his black felt hat. Ellington’s horse ran off and later showed up at the home place, alerting the family that something was amiss.
They discovered his body several hours later. A local physician, standing in for the county coroner, summoned a jury of six men from the neighborhood and conducted an inquest. His report was explicit. There were “fourteen severe wounds on the body and arms, all thrust wounds, as if made with a spear lance or two edge instrument of some kind. There were two deep wounds just below the left nipple, four on the breast bone, three deep thrusts in the back, and several on each arm.” The assault, reported the bilingual Los Angeles Star, had been committed by “fiends in human shape.” Ellington left a young widow and five children under the age of ten.
The Alvitres struck again the following morning near the settlement of Los Nietos, about ten miles downriver. Charles Moore was on horseback rounding up a drove of hogs, when he saw them in the distance, riding double on an unsaddled horse. The brothers shouted a greeting. Did he have any whiskey? No, Moore replied. They rode in closer. Perhaps he could spare a match? Moore nodded, dug into his pocket, and as he did so, one of the brothers pulled a knife and took a wild swing, ripping Moore’s shirt and cutting him superficially. Moore pitched backward off his horse, scrambled up, and took off running as the other brother aimed and fired the Colt. Moore heard four shots whistle past in rapid succession, then the click of the hammer on an empty chamber. He turned, drew his own revolver, and fired one or two ineffective rounds as the Alvitres rode off with his horse in tow.
The residents of the Monte—including local patriarch Samuel King and his three sons, Francis Marion, Andrew Jackson, and Samuel Houston—organized a posse and scoured the countryside. At nearby Rancho La Puente they seized two vaqueros employed by ranchero William Workman and subjected them to harsh interrogation. The “Monte Boys” distrusted Workman, who had supported the Californios during the late war of conquest, and when he vouched for his men, he too was threatened. But cooler heads prevailed and violence was averted.
The gang had fled into the remote canyons of the Puente Hills on the east side of the river, where they hid out for several weeks, supporting themselves by rustling and slaughtering stray cattle. One Sunday in early October, as they scouted for plunder along Los Coyotes Creek, near today’s town of Artesia, they encounted a lone rider, a Chilean by the name of Gorgonio Carrera, making his way to Los Angeles after a visit with friends in San Juan Capistrano. Seeing this dirty, ragged band of youngsters approaching, Carrera must have immediately sensed trouble. “Where are your father and mother?” he pointedly asked Felipe, a question he almost certainly intended as an insult. As Alvitre later told the authorities, that was precisely how he took it. The gang surrounded Carrera, and as he swiveled in his saddle to get a good look at them, Alvitre drew the Colt, pressed it against Carrera’s back, and fired twice. After stripping the body of clothing and valuables, the Alvitres dragged it into a ditch at the side of the trail. Coyotes and buzzards would ravage the corpse, leaving little more than fragments of hair and bone.
Soon afterward the Alvitre brothers quarreled and parted company. Ylario and the Mexican boy went south to San Diego, leaving Felipe encamped with Innocencia in a ravine near Soquel Canyon in the Chino Hills. A few days later, they were discovered there by a party of mounted Californios, searching for missing stock. Seeing that he was outnumbered, Alvitre tossed the Colt aside and surrendered without resistance. The leader of the party, Ygnacio Palomares, was a prominent ranchero, and Alvitre assumed a deferential demeanor with h
im. He was disgusted by what he had done, he told Don Ygnacio, and was ready to be punished for his crimes. Palomares delivered Alvitre and the girl to Sheriff Barton, who brought them to Judge Benjamin Hayes for examination. After hearing Alvitre’s confession, Hayes asked him why he had murdered Ellington. He thought he might as well kill as not, the young man answered flippantly. That didn’t satisfy Hayes, and when he pressed for an explanation Alvitre turned serious. “Porque era Americano,” he declared. Because he was American.
ON OCTOBER 13, a week before Alvitre’s capture, David Brown was arrested as he ran from a livery stable on Calle Principal, or Main Street, where Pinckney Clifford lay bleeding to death. Like Felipe Alvitre, Brown was no stranger to violence. Born about 1825 in east Texas, he took his lessons in human relations during the settler rebellion of the 1830s. When the war with Mexico commenced in 1846, Brown enlisted in the First Texas Mounted Volunteers, an early iteration of the Texas Rangers. The Texas Mounted scouted for General Zachary Taylor, employing savage tactics that cost the lives of hundreds of Mexican civilians. Taylor was scandalized by their behavior. The Texans “committed extensive depredations and outrages upon the peaceful inhabitants,” he reported. “Were it possible to rouse the Mexican people to resistance, no more effectual plan could be devised than the very one pursued by some of our volunteer regiments.” Mexicans named the volunteers “los diablos Tejanos.”
After the war, under the direction of a former officer named John Joel Glanton, Brown and several other hardened veterans took up bounty hunting for the provincial government of Chihuahua. Their assignment was to stalk and kill Apaches, but finding their prey elusive, the gang turned to murdering Mexicans and counterfeiting Apache scalps. By the time the authorities caught on to the trick, Glanton and his men had departed for Gold Rush California, with its abundant criminal opportunities. Arriving in early 1850 at the Yuma crossing of the Colorado River, where hundreds of Americans and Mexicans entered California each month, they forcibly took over the ferrying service, using threat, assault, and murder to eliminate all competitors, including the Quechans (better known in the day as the Yumas), the native inhabitants of the area. Glanton assaulted a Quechan chief, warning him that for every man the Indians ferried over, the gang would kill two of his people. It was no way to make friends and influence people.
In the spring, in need of supplies, Glanton, Brown, and several others traveled to San Diego, 150 miles west on the California coast. Carousing in one of the town’s many saloons, Brown shot and killed an American soldier. Arrested and jailed, he bribed his jailer and fled north to Los Angeles. In the meantime his colleagues had returned to the Colorado crossing. The night of their homecoming they drank themselves into a collective stupor, providing the Quechans an opportunity for a sneak attack. Most of the gang were killed, including Glanton, whose head was cleaved open by the vengeful Quechan chief he had roughed up. Two of the gangsters managed to escape and make it to Los Angeles, where their account of the attack stirred up a veritable panic. Later that year, when a volunteer militia force journeyed across the desert, intent on punishing the Quechans, Dave Brown hired on as one of their guides.
Following that campaign, in the fall of 1850, Brown found work as a deputy city marshal in Los Angeles. A criminal complaint by saloonkeeper Charley Burrows in early 1851 suggests something of Brown’s approach to policing. Late one afternoon he burst into Burrows’s place, claiming to be in hot pursuit of a fleeing criminal. Not seeing the fugitive among the men at the bar, he demanded admission to Burrows’s locked stockroom. There’s no one in there, Burrows objected, and asked to see some evidence of Brown’s authority. Brown drew a large revolver and pushed it into Burrows’s face. “Here it is,” he said. “I will kill you.” Burrows, who was not easily intimidated, began to bellow, and his place quickly filled with curious men from the street outside. Looking around, Brown holstered his weapon and exited, muttering a string of obscenities. Burrows filed a charge of assault, but the county grand jury declined to hand down an indictment, and Brown continued to wear a badge. But in the municipal elections later that year, when he stood as a candidate for city marshal, he was defeated by an overwhelming vote.
A short time later Brown was arrested on a charge of violent assault. He had been among a group of half a dozen drunk Americans who assaulted Juan de Dios Ballesteros, a Californio, returning one evening from the tar pits at Rancho La Brea with a carreta loaded with bitumen or tar, used for waterproofing the flat roofs of the town’s adobes. The Americans demanded that Ballesteros drive them out to an Indian encampment on the north side, where they hoped to find willing women. Ballesteros objected that his oxen were too tired, but the Americans piled aboard anyway. Their route took them across the Plaza at the heart of the pueblo, and as they passed the church one of the large wheels caught on a mile post, jolting the carreta and dumping one of the riders into the street. Brown shouted at Ballesteros to control his animals. The American picked himself up and angrily struck at one of the oxen, which jerked away impulsively, jolting the cart again. Erupting in rage, Brown pulled his revolver and fired point-blank at Ballesteros. “He shot four times at my uncle,” Ballesteros’s nephew testified at the trial, “and catching him by the hair, dragged him out of the cart onto the ground, and while down kept striking him on the head with the pistol.” Ballesteros suffered a gunshot wound to his left arm as well as a fractured skull. It was a clear case of assault with intent to commit murder. But intimidated by the presence of several dozen Americans in the courtroom, Ballesteros proved reluctant to make a positive identification, and Brown was acquitted.
After that Brown worked for a time as a vaquero at Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, the largest cattle operation in southern California. On one occasion foreman John Rains, a fellow veteran of the Texas Mounted, dispatched him and a couple of other cowboys to Sonora to purchase cattle. For the return trip they hired several Sonoreños to assist with the drive. According to an Anglo who was present, Brown and one of the Mexicans got into a dispute and Brown shot him dead. “We buried the poor man, and blamed Brown very much,” the man wrote, “for he had no justifiable provocation for the deed.” No one bothered to press charges.
Angry, volatile, and homicidal, Brown would not be called to account until he murdered fellow American Pinckney Clifford in the fall of 1854. Young Clifford was a hanger-on among the disorderly crowd of gamblers and shootists who haunted Los Angeles. Unlike most of the others, however, he held a steady job at Acron and Aikin’s Livery on Calle Principal. He and Brown shared a room, and the rent was often paid by the admiring Clifford. Late one autumn evening Brown stopped by the livery stable on his way home. It was unseasonably cold, and Clifford suggested that Brown buy a couple of dollars’ worth of kindling for the stove in their room. Brown, drunk as usual, took offense at Clifford telling him how to spend his money. He launched into a verbal tirade and quickly worked himself into a frothing rage. The more Clifford attempted to calm him, the angrier Brown became, until suddenly he pulled a knife and plunged it into his roommate’s chest. Outraged bystanders seized him and delivered him to Sheriff Barton.
The next day a large procession of Clifford’s friends and acquaintances followed the coffin to the American graveyard, a barren, windswept patch of ground atop Fort Moore Hill, adjacent to the crumbling ruin of the fort built by the Americans following the conquest in 1847. There was angry talk at the graveside. The men denounced Brown as a scourge on the community. Since the law proved unable to curb him, the time had come for vigilante action. In an attempt to tamp down the excitement, the authorities called a public meeting at the courthouse for that evening, but their plan nearly backfired. As soon as the meeting began a resolution was proposed and adopted declaring Brown guilty of murder and deserving of death. Speakers began to incite the crowd, and it seemed likely that a lynch mob was about to form.
At that point Mayor Stephen Clark Foster entered the room, mounted a table in front, and called for order. He fully expected, he said
, that the county grand jury would indict Brown for murder and that he would be tried at the fall term of district court. Let the legally constituted justice system do its job. Give the authorities “one more chance” to secure justice by legal process. Foster then added a caveat that won the day. If, for whatever reason, Brown escaped conviction or punishment, the people would be fully justified in resorting to popular justice. If Dave Brown was not executed by the state of California, Mayor Foster pledged, “I will resign my office and assist you in hanging him myself.”
THE GRAND JURY indicted Brown a few days later, Felipe Alvitre soon thereafter. They were confined to separate cells in the county jail, their arms and legs shackled in irons. When Alvitre’s trial began in late November, the courtroom was outfitted with a new judge’s bench, jury box, and attorney’s desks, as well as benches for the public, which were packed by curious Angelenos. Lacking any physical evidence in the death of the Chilean, District Attorney Cameron E. Thom decided to try Alvitre only for the murder of James Ellington. On the advice of his court-appointed counsel, William G. Dryden, one of the few local attorneys who spoke fluent Spanish, Alvitre pled not guilty, despite his confession. Jury selection took up the first day, and by late afternoon Judge Hayes had seated a panel of six Californios and six Americans. There was no legal requirement for such ethnic balance, but everyone recognized that the credibility of the court was at stake.
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