At about that same time Brent’s messenger located the Lugos, who were supervising a roundup of stock, some eight or ten miles from their residences. Don José María and his brother Don Vicente rushed back to warn their families and associates, while Don José del Cármen and Ricardo Uribe, his mayordomo, rode to an outpost of volunteer militia near the entrance to Cajon Pass, stationed there to guard against the incursions of Indian raiders. Most of the volunteers had departed for Chino, responding to the alarm over the depredations of Irving’s gang, leaving only a small force under the command of a young lieutenant. The gang was threatening his family, Lugo explained, and he required assistance. He was not authorized to leave the encampment, the lieutenant replied, but the Lugos could bring their families to him for protection. “His offer was of no value to me,” Don José del Cármen later recalled. Sending Uribe to rouse Captain Juan Antonio and his Cahuillas, Lugo set off on a mad dash for home, at least twenty miles and more than an hour’s ride away.
At about ten in the morning, as vaquero Jesús Castro was working outside the family compound of Don José María’s place, he saw the gang approaching. They were riding “in military order, armed with pistols,” he later testified, which meant trouble. Castro shouted a warning to the women, children, and servants inside, and they fled to a thicket at the rear of the house. Castro remained behind, determined to keep the gang from finding the family.
Riding up, Irving immediately came to the point. “Where are the boys?” he demanded. “En el pueblo,” in town, Castro lied. What about Don José María and his brothers? “En el rodeo,” rounding up stock. Irving ordered Castro to saddle fresh horses for his men, and while a couple of them pushed the Californio toward the corral at gunpoint, the others barged into the house. By the time Castro had transferred the saddles to new mounts, the gang was exiting with several sacks of booty. They packed up and immediately headed east in the direction of Don José del Cármen’s place, at the site of the old mission estancia, a place the Indians called Guachama, some five miles away. Castro went inside and found trunks broken open, furniture overturned, and household goods scattered about. A few minutes later Don José María charged up on a frothing horse and was greatly relieved to see his wife, daughter, and a number of grandchildren emerging from the thicket. Minutes later Ricardo Uribe arrived with Captain Antonio and two or three dozen Cahuillas, some mounted, others on foot, and with Don José María in the lead they set out in pursuit of the outlaws.
The gang showed up at Guachama around noon. Hired man Alexander Martino was working in a field nearby, and seeing their approach he climbed into the branches of a large cottonwood and hid there as the men broke into the house. They rifled trunks and stole valuables, including two silver-plated saddles and bridles. They had packed up and were about to depart when the Cahuillas appeared, Captain Antonio and Ricardo Uribe in the lead. Uribe hailed the outlaws in Spanish, but they answered with a volley from their revolvers, then took off in an easterly direction, the Cahuillas on their heels. After a few minutes the outlaws wheeled and fired a barrage at their pursuers. “The Indians did not retreat,” Martino testified, but “held up their horses and bent their bodies over, as if dodging, and then pushed on again.” This maneuver was repeated several times. Irving’s men had plenty of ammunition, including extra cylinders loaded with cap and ball, which they were able to snap into their revolvers. Martino watched as the chase advanced across an ascending plain, later the site of the town of Redlands, leading toward a range of low-lying hills.
REACHING THE RIDGE LINE, the gangsters looked out on the Yucaipa Valley. In the near distance, about a mile ahead, they saw the adobe of Diego Sepúlveda, a cousin of the Lugos, who grazed his stock on this eastern section of Rancho San Bernardino. Spurring their horses forward, in a few minutes they arrived at the building, which was unoccupied, and took the opportunity to water their parched horses while the Cahuillas closed in. Irving was completely unfamiliar with the country. Robidoux had advised him to take the trail through Yucaipa and watch for a turnoff leading south through the hills, which would bring them to Temecula and the Sonora Road to Warner’s Ranch. Looking about, Irving spied a trail cutting south along the bank of Yucaipa Creek, a few hundred yards away. George Evans, his lieutenant, didn’t believe it was the right road, and he advised going farther on. But Irving, “as if doomed,” as Evans put it, “turned into the mountains along the path which led into the fatal trap.” Evans was right. The southbound trail Robidoux had told them to watch for was another ten miles ahead.
Irving must have realized his error within minutes, for the creek and the trail turned westward. But with the Cahuillas in hot pursuit there was no turning back. After another four miles of rough riding across a desiccated landscape, the trail made a rapid descent into a narrow valley known as San Timoteo Canyon. On the canyon floor, by a flowing stream, they came to an adobe with a fenced cornfield and a corral. By then it was late in the afternoon and the men were exhausted. They had been engaged in the running fight with the Cahuillas for a couple of hours and more than a dozen miles. Using the house and fence for cover, they skirmished with the Indians. Their ammunition was running low, but only by continuing to fire were they able to keep their pursuers at bay. They succeeded in hitting two or three Indians, including the brother of Captain Antonio, who was mortally wounded. That sealed their fate. The sound of fire attracted the attention of another group of Cahuillas at a ranchería some distance upstream, and more warriors came running. Soon the Americans were facing more than a hundred men. There was only one option open to them. A cart trail behind the adobe led through an opening in the hills. Perhaps it would take them to safety.
Within a few hundred yards, however, the canyon walls began to narrow and the Americans realized they were trapped in a blind canyon. Ricardo Uribe shouted for them to lay down their arms and give themselves up. “They replied that they would not surrender,” Uribe later testified, “and uttered oaths and words in English which I could not understand.” As the Americans pushed farther into the canyon, George Evans, Irving’s lieutenant, deliberately fell back, and when the moment was right he slipped from his horse, dived into a crevasse, and hid. As the lone survivor, he would provide an eyewitness account of what happened next. The Cahuillas swarmed up the hillsides of the canyon. Evans heard several more gunshots, then an ominous silence. “The Indians first shot them down with arrows, and then beat in their skulls with stones,” he said. From his hiding place he watched as the Cahuillas stripped the bodies of his eleven colleagues, leaving them for the coyotes and buzzards. He saw them pile the booty atop the horses and lead them back out of the canyon. He remained in the crevasse until after dark, then crept out and followed the watercourse downstream for several miles until he found himself once again at Guachama, having made a twenty mile loop. There he stole a mule and escaped.
Sheriff Burrill’s posse, mostly Californios, arrived at Rancho San Bernardino the following morning, accompanied by the militia volunteers, nearly all of them Americans, who had come back from Chino under the command of General Joshua H. Bean of the state militia. Bean was a Kentuckian who came to California in 1849 with his brother Roy Bean, later notorious as the eccentric Texas saloonkeeper who advertised himself as “Law West of the Pecos.” In California in 1851, however, it was the older brother who enjoyed the fame. Bean opened a store in San Diego and in 1850 served as the city’s last alcalde and first mayor, before being named major general of the California state militia by Governor Peter Burnett. Following the trail of the outlaws, Bean and his men, along with the posse, reached the scene of the slaughter about midday. “I saw the bodies,” said Stephen Foster, who was riding with the posse. “They were naked, and the men appeared to have been killed with arrows, and their heads beaten with stones.” Buzzards circling overhead had already plucked the eyes from some of the bodies. The Californios expressed their satisfaction, saying justice had been served. But according to Brent, the Americans “resented the gloating over the de
ad of their race by the Spaniards.” Bitter words led to drawn pistols. The leaders—including Burrill, Foster, and Bean—“rode between the angry and separated lines, and quieted the outburst of what would have been a bloodier fray than that before them.” The two groups cooperated in burying the eleven bodies in a mass grave before leaving the canyon separately.
Over the next several days the anger and resentment among Bean’s militia volunteers continued to fester. Back at their encampment, near the entrance to Cajon Pass, many were eager to punish the Cahuillas. “The volunteers were almost in a state of open mutiny,” one correspondent wrote, “and had declared their intention of attacking the Indians, notwithstanding the most strict and positive orders had been given by the General that no man should leave the camp.” Bean met the trouble head-on. He ordered his men to assemble, then announced that “they would have to pass over his dead body before they left that ground.” The crisis passed. But learning of the incident, and fearing for the lives of his people, Juan Antonio led his Cahuillas into the mountains.
Bean understood the calamity that would have resulted had Captain Antonio, in control of the most powerful military force in southern California, turned from friend to foe. Los Angeles County officials did what they could to bring the Indian commander back into the fold, issuing a statement praising him for his efforts on behalf of law and order. “He can return with his people to their homes,” they announced, “with a guaranty that no harm shall be done him, either by individuals or by the county authorities, because all consider him as a good friend, and will not consent to let him be injured.” They presented him with “a beautiful sword, a silver-mounted scabbard, and a belt with a general’s epaulets,” as well as a wagonload of presents for his people. A few days later a coroner’s jury exonerated the Cahuillas, declaring that the killing of Irving and his men was justifiable homicide. Nevertheless, Captain Antonio soon relocated his ranchería to a place the Cahuillas called Sahatapa in the San Timoteo Canyon. With the loss of their constabulary, the Lugos decided it was time to get out, and in September 1851 they sold Rancho San Bernardino to a group of Mormon colonists.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE MASSACRE of Irving’s gang, the Daily Alta California of San Francisco offered some reflections on the episode. Although Americans had succeeded in conquering southern California, they had failed to establish a system of law and justice, leaving the Californios at the mercy of the “lawless and reckless scum of our own country.” In early 1850 “a band of desperados put all law at defiance and committed whatever crimes suited their depraved appetites, with impunity,” even running the marshal out of town at gunpoint. More recently Red Irving and his men had “roamed about the country, laying the different proprietors under such contributions as their needs, or caprice, or malignity dictated.” The state of affairs in Los Angeles was “execrable beyond anything we have experienced here.” That was saying a good deal. Only days before, San Franciscans had organized a committee of vigilance which had summarily hanged its first victim. If southern California was to avoid the same fate, the paper argued, civil authorities needed to act energetically “to put an end to the outrageous acts of the desperadoes who have ruled so long in that garden spot of California.”
But the suspicion and hostility between Americans and Californios, with all the attendant threats and acts of violence, continued unabated. In the fall of 1851 the grand jury handed down indictments charging Chico Lugo, Menito Lugo, and Mariano Elisalde with murder. Justice Scott revoked their bond and issued warrants for their arrest. But by that time Brent had lost confidence in the county’s justice system. “Behind these efforts,” he believed, “was a strong and resolute organization to hang the Lugos if they were ever brought to town.” He advised the family to keep the brothers hidden, which they did.
The violence cut both ways. One night in November, as Benjamin Hayes worked in his office, he heard the sound of horsemen outside. Expecting that it was some of his friends come to pay him a visit, he opened the door and was greeted by a pistol fired in his face. The ball grazed his cheek and smashed into the back wall, leaving Hayes terribly shaken but unhurt. Despite the efforts of Sheriff Barton to track the assailant, he was never identified, but the shooting was generally considered payback for Hayes’s role in the Lugo case.
By year’s end, however, Brent sensed that the local passions were moderating. “Other American settlers came into the county,” he wrote, people “who had no feelings at all in respect to the Lugos.” In December he arranged for the surrender of his clients to the sheriff, and they were immediately released again on bond by County Judge Agustín Olvera. At Brent’s request the district court undertook a review of the case, and in early 1852 Judge Witherby tossed out the indictments, ruling that county authorities had failed to follow “the most ordinary and necessary regulations of the law.” Some months later, Judge Olvera finally dismissed the case. It would long be remembered by both Californios and Americans as evidence of the failure of the justice system. By Californios for the unjust prosecution of the Lugos, by Americans for the failure to convict and punish according to law.
José Francisco “Chico” Lugo later married a ranchero’s daughter and settled at Rancho San Antonio on La Mesa with the rest of the extended Lugo family. His friend Mariano Elisalde lived nearby with his wife and children. But brother Francisco de Paula “Menito” Lugo refused to settle down. Over subsequent years he was arrested numerous times and served a term in the state penitentiary at San Quentin, where a photograph was taken of the handsome but stern-faced young man. Shortly after his release he was implicated in another murder. Menito Lugo’s ultimate fate is unknown.
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CHAPTER 16 •
WAR FOR A WHOLE LIFE
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE IRVING GANG by the Cahuillas in May 1851 was a harsh reminder of the demographic facts. In southern California some four thousand Californios and perhaps a thousand Americans and other immigrants (in popular parlance lumped together as “Anglos”) were outnumbered by some ten thousand native inhabitants, among whom the Cahuillas were the largest and most powerful organized group. Anglo vulnerability tamped down the outrage over the killing of eleven white men at the hands of “savages.”
The Cahuillas were “undomesticated” gentiles in the Spanish lexicon. But southern California was also home to approximately six thousand “domesticated” Indians, emancipados living in autonomous rancherías or on the outskirts of Los Angeles and San Diego. In 1849, when the pueblo’s total population was about fifteen hundred, Alcalde Stephen Clark Foster estimated that four or five hundred Indians were at work in Los Angeles.
The important role played by Indian workers in the local economy was made plain in a report written in 1852 by Benjamin Hayes for Benjamin Davis Wilson, who had been appointed federal agent for the Indians of southern California. “Let us remember,” Hayes wrote, “Indians built all the houses in the country, and planted all the fields and vineyards.” They possessed all kinds of practical knowledge, “how to make an adobe (sun-dried brick), mix the lodo (mud mortar), put on the brea (pitch) for roof[ing], all of these recondite arts to the new beginner, yet very important to be known when there are no other building materials.” Indians could read local weather signs and they understood “the mysteries of irrigation.” Without them the production of wine, the pueblo’s most important commodity, would have been impossible. “Most of our vineyard labor,” wrote winemaker Matthew Keller, “is done by Indians, some of whom are the best pruners we have, an art they learned from the Mission Fathers.” The vineyards—the Star counted 104 in the county in 1851, most within the city limits—hired large crews of Luiseños and Cahuillas for the spring pruning and the fall harvest and pressing.
On Saturday afternoons, at the conclusion of the workweek, several hundred Indian workers congregated in the vicinity of Calle de los Negros for their juegos, or pastimes—drinking, gambling, and fighting—a custom that had originated years before the American conquest but grew thereafter, w
ith the expanding number of vineyards and vineyard workers. Horace Bell, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1852, witnessed the bacchanal on his first weekend in town. The area southeast of the Plaza, Bell wrote, was “crowded from morn till night with Indians, males and females of all ages, from the girl of ten or twelve, to the old man and woman of 70 or 80.” By Sunday afternoon the streets were overflowing “with a mass of drunken Indians, yelling and fighting. Men and women, boys and girls, tooth and toe nail, sometimes, and frequently with knives, but always in a manner that would strike the beholder with awe and horror.” At sundown the city marshal appeared with his Indian deputies. Swinging their canes, they charged into the crowd, driving men and women alike into a large corral near the jail, where they spent the night in the open air. The next morning those unable to pay their fines were auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The practice of arresting drunk or vagrant Indians and sentencing them to forced labor began in the 1830s. On the occasions when the supply of prisoners grew too large for available public works projects, the alcalde hired them out to private employers. The Americans formalized that system. In August 1850 the common council of Los Angeles, successor to the ayuntamiento, enacted a set of “Police Regulations” authorizing the city marshal to arrest Indian vagrants, auctioning them for a week of labor. Vineyardists and rancheros in need of temporary workers gathered at the jail every Monday morning for the prisoner auction. “I wish you would deputize some one to attend the auction and buy me five or six Indians,” the manager of Rancho Los Alamitos wrote his boss, Abel Stearns, in 1852. The bidding rarely went higher than three or four dollars for a week’s work, at the conclusion of which the convict worker would be paid an additional dollar or two, often in the form of a bottle of aguardiente, ensuring another crop of prisoners for the subsequent week. “Los Angeles had its slave mart, as well as New Orleans and Constantinople,” wrote Bell. “Only the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived, which did not generally exceed one, two or three years, under the new dispensation.”
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