Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  The prisoners were placed in a carreta, hands bound behind their backs and nooses around their necks, and driven to the base of a large tree in Willow Grove, a central gathering spot for the community. A crowd assembled, but a number of residents objected to the proceeding, arguing that the rustlers should be turned over to the proper authorities. The prisoners were locked in a shed for safe keeping until the issue was resolved. But later that evening a group of masked men overwhelmed the guard and announced to the captives that the time had come for them “to say their prayers.” Two were selected to go first. It was a moonless night, and in the darkness both men slipped their bonds and escaped. While a number of vigilantes scoured the countryside in search of the fugitives, the rest went back for the other two. The wounded man, lying semiconscious on a pallet, was dispatched with a single shot to the temple. His companion was wrestled outside, ineptly strung up from the branch of a tree, and finished off with a fusillade of gunfire as he struggling against the rope. Meanwhile, one of the fugitives succeeded in stealing a horse and fleeing back to the mountains, while the other found his way to Los Angeles, where he filed a formal complaint of murder against four of the vigilantes he was able to identify by name.

  Judge Benjamin Hayes was determined that this episode of lynch law—the first in the county since the hanging of David Brown four months earlier—not go unchallenged. He issued warrants for the arrest of the men identified by the fugitive—E. P. Robinson, William Burt, John Ward, and Ezekiel Rubottom—all upstanding citizens of the Monte. A few days later, as Hayes was walking to his courtroom for the preliminary hearing, he was overtaken and surrounded by several dozen mounted men from the Monte, one of whom bent down and handed him a sealed note. “We the undersigned,” it read, “have been informed that some of our best citizens have been arrested,” charged with the murder of the two prisoners. “It having been satisfactorily proved that the above mentioned men were connected with a band of robbers & thieves numbering about three hundred, we therefore approve of those of . . . .” The bottom half of the surviving note is torn away, truncating the message and removing what Hayes said were several dozen signatures. Someone, perhaps Hayes himself, decided it was better that they not be identified in the record. The final lines of the note warned Hayes “to lookout for your personal safety.”

  Hayes forwarded the complaint against the Monte Boys to the district attorney, who declined to prosecute, exasperating Hayes. He was even more distressed when he learned that another posse from the Monte had pursued the fugitive rustler into the mountains, capturing him along with Brown, the reputed leader, and hanging them both on the spot. These lynchings, Hayes believed, further weakened public support for the law.

  JOHN O. WHEELER saw things differently. “We have, during a residence in this county for the last half dozen years,” he wrote in the Southern Californian, “become somewhat intimately acquainted with lynch law or, as it is sometimes called, ‘mob law,’ and we have scarcely ever seen it wrong.” Popular justice, he argued, had served Los Angeles well. “Whatever security to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which have in times past been vouchsafed to us has been owing wholly and entirely to the retributive justice meted out by the people.” Wheeler applauded “the late efforts of Judge Lynch in the Monte” as an inspiring example for all county residents. Good riddance to the rustlers who plagued the county. Good riddance to the Brown brothers and their criminal ilk. “So the work goes bravely on,” Wheeler concluded. “A few more examples of this sort will clean the land of all such gente.”

  Wheeler had long supported popular justice, but previously his views had been contested by editor Waite of the Star. Following the lynching of David Brown, however, Waite shifted position. The residents of the Monte, he wrote, had done a commendable job and “we wish them every success.” It was a quiet admission of defeat but a capitulation nonetheless, and it left the impression that his opposition to mob law might depend on the character of the people who made up the mob. Waite’s had been a lone public voice opposing lynch law in Los Angeles. And then there were none.

  Yet Waite conveyed none of Wheeler’s bluster. He was a reluctant supporter of popular justice. He held a view similar to that of his young colleague Francisco Ramírez, editor of La Estrella, who soon after Brown was hanged opened an editorial column with the declaration that “lynch law reigns supreme in California.” But like Waite, Ramírez considered this an unfortunate fact. He regretted the absence of an effective urban police or a rural constabulary. “Law without arms is like a body without a soul,” he wrote. “One is not possible without the other.” If and when the authorities demonstrated a capacity to effectively enforce the laws, he felt certain that the people would abandon their support of vigilantism. But in the meantime, as Ramírez put it, “we must satisfy public vengeance.”

  With his literary savvy and his sharp reporting, Ramírez proved an effective replacement for Manuel Clemente Rojo. “The editor of the Spanish pages of the Los Angeles Star is a native Californian named Francisco Ramírez, only fifteen years of age,” noted the editor of San Francisco’s Daily Alta California. “Those versed in the Castilian language say that La Estrella is a model for purity of style.” Ramírez was actually eighteen at the time, but that made him no less precocious. He learned on the job, and the pressures of responding to the complicated events of his time and place sometimes led him to take contradictory positions. But his idealism showed through consistently, as it did in a column he wrote lambasting the nativist American Party (scornfully known by their critics as the “Know-Nothings,” a label inherited from a secret society from which the party emerged), whose opposition to immigrants and Catholics Ramírez considered not merely distasteful but ill informed. “Our country,” he wrote of the United States, “is not only the home of men from all nations, but of their ideas. . . . Our religion is from Palestine; the hymns we sing in our churches were heard for the first time in Italy, some in Arabia, and others on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts came from Greece, our case law from Rome, our maritime code from Russia; England taught us the system of representative government, and the noble republic of the United Provinces bequeathed to us the idea of tolerance.” The Know-Nothings lived up to their name—los ignorantes.

  Ramírez’s success at the Star inspired him to begin an independent Spanish-language newspaper of his own. James Waite encouraged the young man’s aspirations, offering Ramírez his list of Spanish-language subscribers and advertisers. The Star was operating in the red, and Waite hoped that freeing up the back pages for more advertising might generate more revenue. He even allowed Ramírez to promote his new venture in the Star. In June Ramírez published the first issue of El Clamor Público—the public outcry—“devoted exclusively to the service and interests of native Californians.” Over the next four and a half years, he would use the paper to argue for his liberal principles, including racial equality and political rights for all citizens.

  The three weeklies—the Star, the Southern Californian, and El Clamor Público—competed for readers through the second half of 1855, but Los Angeles was not large enough to support them all. In December the Southern Californian went out of business, and a few months later Waite sold the Star to Henry Hamilton, a partisan Democrat who made the paper over into the mouthpiece of the local party machine, which was led by Joseph Lancaster Brent. About the same time Ramírez declared his support for the new Republican Party, inaugurating an intense political competition between the two weeklies.

  SATISFYING PUBLIC VENGEANCE—vindicta pública—was something local authorities had difficulty doing. In 1855 Los Angeles County recorded a total of thirty-three murders, more than any other county in the state, including San Francisco, which was nearly ten times larger. With less than 3 percent of the population, Angelenos accounted for more than 6 percent of California’s homicides, making for a murder rate that was double the state average. Yet most violent perpetrators in Los Angeles went unpunished.

  David Brown’
s hanging further undercut the authority and morale of the county’s legal justice system. After his humiliating capitulation to the mob, Sheriff James R. Barton announced he would not stand for another term. David W. Alexander, his elected successor, focused most of his attention on his freighting business, operating as something of a part-time sheriff, leaving most matters in the hands of Undersheriff William Osburn. That was unfortunate, because the state of affairs in the county required strong leadership. Lawbreakers were emboldened and officers of the law responded aggressively, resulting in a number of confrontations, including a wild shootout on the Plaza in the spring of 1855 between a group of Sonoreños and Undersheriff Osburn.

  The California legislature had passed a law authorizing the arrest and incarceration of vagrants, singling out for special attention, in the words of the statute, “all persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers,’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood.” The statute authorized officers, in effect, to stop, question, disarm, and detain any suspicious-looking Mexican or Californio, without distinction of citizenship. Juan Sepúlveda, a man who had held many civic offices in Los Angeles over the years and was then serving as county treasurer, published an outraged open letter in response. “A portion of the people, which ought to enjoy equal rights with the rest,” he wrote, “has been contemptuously treated by a body of would-be enlightened gentlemen, meeting in the name of the entire people.” The treaty ending the war had guaranteed full rights as citizens to all Mexicans who chose to remain in ceded territory. “Why is it now,” Sepúlveda wanted to know, “that we should be marked out as fit objects for defamatory taunts and branded with special legislation to our injury? . . . We can look upon it only as a step towards excluding us from all the rights enjoyed by other citizens.” Francisco Ramírez agreed. The Greaser Law, he wrote “widens the barriers that have long existed between extranjeros and nativos.”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1856 Angelenos were closely following developments in San Francisco, where a committee of vigilance had hanged two men for murder and seized political control of the city, events extensively reported in newspapers throughout the state and nation. “Though rather distant from the exciting scenes of San Francisco,” a correspondent from Los Angeles reported in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, “the almost universal opinion is that the San Francisco Vigilance Committee have commenced a glorious work, and they are earnestly requested to continue their labors.” The events in the north served to further legitimize popular justice in Los Angeles. Ramírez made the connection explicit in El Clamor Público. What was taking place in San Francisco, he wrote, had occurred the year before in Los Angeles, when outraged citizens hanged David Brown. “Bien hecho,” Ramírez declared. Well done. “Murderers still march through the streets with impunity and arrogant pride,” he admitted, but the remedy was at hand. “We hope the people know what to do when it comes to punishing criminals.”

  But popular justice was parochial. It reflected the interests and values of particular groups, not the community as a whole. In the spring of 1856 the residents of the Monte organized another vigilance committee to address the continuing problem of livestock theft, this time focusing attention on a gang of Mexican and Californio rustlers. A few weeks later the mangled body of Cruz Montoya, a longtime resident of San Gabriel, was found in a ravine near the mission. “Cruz was looked upon by Americans as the chief of a band of robbers,” reported the Star, “the community can well bear the loss of his company.” That was coded language strongly suggesting a vigilante killing. Montoya had been ambushed by a group of mounted men, tortured with a knife, and dragged through the chaparral, before being riddled with bullets. His mangled body was intended to terrorize others.

  Ramírez took the occasion to stand up for a universal standard of justice. “We are all linked together in society,” he wrote. “Californios! Americans! Citizens of all origins and classes! Unite to obey the laws and see that our officers have the help they need.” But that was aspirational, and as a practical matter Ramírez found himself returning to the nostrum of vigilantism. There must be no delay in finding those responsible for Montoya’s death and administering retributive justice, he wrote. “¿No necesitamos aqui un comité de vigilancia?” Do we not need a vigilance committee here? What Ramírez had in mind was a vigilance committee composed of Californios, a committee that would protect hijos del país from Anglo vigilantes.

  RAMÍREZ RAISED THAT QUESTION in the issue of El Clamor Público for Saturday, July 19, 1856. The morning of that same day, Constable William Jenkins appeared at the Eternity Street home of María Candelaria Pollorena with an order of attachment for an unpaid fifty-dollar debt on the property of Antonio Ruiz, a Mexican citizen who was living there. Although it was still early in the day, it was already intensely hot, and Jenkins found Ruiz sitting with Doña Candelaria in the shade of the adobe’s front veranda. Jenkins, who spoke fluent Spanish, produced a court order and spoke with Ruiz for a few minutes. Then they went into the house together and emerged with Jenkins holding a guitar that belonged to Ruiz. The constable turned to leave, but Doña Candelaria stopped him. She had placed a letter from her mother inside the instrument, she said, and she wished to retrieve it. “Por favor, let her have the letter,” said Ruiz. No, Jenkins replied, he couldn’t do that, for the guitar was now the property of the court. “Give it to me, it’s mine,” said Doña Candelaria. She grabbed the guitar with one hand and thrust the other through the boca, or sound hole, in an attempt to retrieve it. “Give her that letter,” Ruiz demanded, and he grabbed Jenkins from behind. Jenkins instantly pulled a revolver from his belt, pointed it blindly over his shoulder, and fired.

  City marshal William Getman was nearby when he heard the gunshot. Hurrying to the scene, he found Ruiz lying on the ground, surrounded by neighbors attempting to stanch the blood flowing from a wound to his chest. Jenkins was pacing up and down nervously, the revolver still in his hand. Getman took it from him. He had been forced to fire in the execution of his duty, Jenkins said, and was “sorry for having done so.” Ruiz was carried inside, where he was examined by a physician, who called for a priest. Getman escorted Jenkins to the office of a justice of the peace and swore out a complaint against him for assault. He was then released on his own recognizance.

  William Willoughby Jenkins, a lanky young man of twenty-one, had immigrated from Ohio with his mother and stepfather six years before. He grew to manhood on the streets of Los Angeles during its most turbulent period and was considered among the toughest of the young Anglo toughs. He joined the Rangers and later became a constable. The man Jenkins shot, Antonio Ruiz, was a Sonoreño in his early thirties who had resided in Los Angeles for less than two years. Well educated, with the deportment of a scholar, Ruiz earned his living as a tutor and a music instructor. He took an interest in civic affairs and the previous September had been the featured speaker at Mexican independence day festivities. He was admired by Californios and Mexicans alike, and as word of his shooting circulated through the community a steady stream of friends and associates made their way to the house on Eternity Street to pay their respects.

  Ruiz died Sunday afternoon. Judge Hayes issued a warrant for Jenkins’s arrest on a charge of homicide. Jenkins surrendered voluntarily and was released again a few minutes later. Los Angeles schoolteacher William Wallace worried in his diary that this pattern was all too familiar. “He who commits an assassination or murder is uniformly greeted with a verdict of justifiable homicide, which amounts to an acquittal,” Wallace wrote. “And the slayer goes forth again having gained some renown for his exploits. He holds his head more erect than ever and almost demands the deference of the people. . . . Jenkins has accomplished his fame, he has shed blood, and now he may aspire to office.” Recognizing the negative impact Jenkins’s release would have among Mexicans and Californios, Hayes remonstrated with Sheriff Alexander, who ordered Jenkins arrested and jailed again.

  The requiem mass for Ruiz on Monday afternoon concluded with what Francisco
Ramírez characterized as the largest funeral procession in the history of the pueblo. A double column of mourners stretched along Eternity Street from the church to the graveyard. As had been the case so many times before, a crowd of men, including Sonoreños, Californios, and a large contingent of Frenchmen, remained at the graveside following the burial, arguing over what was to be done. One of the speakers, a young French vineyard worker named Fernando Carriaga, with a striking red beard, urged the crowd to march to the jail and hang Jenkins just as they had hanged David Brown. But several prominent Californios spoke in favor of allowing the justice system take its course. The men settled on a compromise, naming several Californios to a comité de vigilancia and charging them with ensuring that the case was handled impartially and effectively. Then the crowd resolved to march on the jail to demonstrate their determination. Two members of the comité stopped at the home of Judge Hayes, and he agreed to accompany them to the jail.

  They arrived to find the situation rapidly spiraling out of control. Hearing reports of the agitation at the campo santo, a posse of several dozen armed Anglos had surrounded the jail, determined to protect Jenkins. Francisco Ramírez was among the marching protesters as they turned down Spring Street, and he could see the Anglo guard ahead, cocking their weapons and “making other bellicose demonstrations.” Hotheads on both sides began hurling insults and challenges across the divide, and the demonstration degenerated into a near riot, with the protesters, according to Hayes, “evincing a deep emotion that might have been mistaken for the excitement incident to violence.” Sheriff Alexander finally appeared and announced that Judge Hayes would open the judicial process the following day, which calmed things down considerably. By then it was nearly sundown, and the crowd gradually dispersed.