Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  HAYES CONVENED Jenkins’s preliminary hearing the next morning. The owners of the city’s shops and businesses shuttered their establishments in anticipation of trouble, but the saloons remained open and the streets were crowded with armed men. Unruly spectators thronged the courtroom, forcing Hayes to order it cleared, allowing only those whose presence was vital to remain, including the Californios of the comité, whom he seated in the jury box, thinking that was the appropriate spot for them since they were there to determine whether or not “the Judge did justice.” Jenkins was ushered in, surrounded by an armed guard of no fewer than a dozen men. After hearing the testimony of several witnesses, Hayes adjourned, saying that he would announce whether there was sufficient evidence to charge Jenkins with a crime the following morning.

  Great excitement prevailed for the remainder of the day. “The population of the city,” reported Francisco Ramírez, “was divided into two different factions,” a split that fell along ethnic lines. Late in the afternoon Hayes heard an unconfirmed rumor that a number of Sonoreños were planning a general attack on the city that night, planning to “destroy all the Americans.” He hurried to the homes of the men on the comité to see what they knew. All of them claimed ignorance, although they took the rumor seriously, one of them cautioning Hayes that it was dangerous for him to be out and about and that he “might be fired on from the corner of any of these streets.” Hayes hurried home, and late that evening, as darkness fell on the still quiet town, he reassured himself that, after all, rumors were just rumors. But about ten thirty, just after the rising of the moon, a man arrived at his door with an urgent message from Sheriff Alexander. Numerous men had been seen gathering at the summit of Gallows Hill. Hayes roused his wife and child and headed for the jail, where most of the town’s Anglos had preceded him and were preparing a stout defense.

  The sheriff enlisted two trusted Californios to investigate what was happening on the hill, fearing that sending his own Anglo deputies would provoke the crowd. By the light of a bright moon, Juan Padilla and Pedro Romo ascended the footpath leading up a ravine behind the church to the ruins of the earthenwork fort at the summit. To the rear was the “American graveyard,” a plot of city land used as the burying ground for non-Catholics, and there Padilla and Romo saw some two hundred men, many of them armed. They were Sonoreños mostly, but included a surprising number of Frenchmen. Romo reported seeing only one Californio, the old agitator Ylario Varela, who insisted he had only come to observe and quickly departed. Padilla and Romo circulated among the men, urging them to return to their homes. They were determined to hang Jenkins, the insurgents said, but they intended no harm to others. Jenkins was closely guarded, Romo told them, and “they should consider that the sheriff was obliged to do his duty.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the Frenchman Fernando Carriaga, who by virtue of his stand at the graveyard had become de facto leader of the insurgents. “In this country,” he declared, “the law is not administered equally to the poor and Mexicanos.” Ruiz’s death demonstrated that violence threatened them every day, and “they were persuaded it was better to die together than be killed one by one.” The Sonoreños nearby shook their heads in agreement. “I am French,” Carriaga declared. “But at this moment I am Mexican like the others.” “¡Viva México!” the men cheered. “¡Viva México!” Then Carriaga gave the order. “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Now is the time!” Padilla and Romo took that as their cue to depart.

  The intelligence from Gallows Hill stiffened the resolve of the men at the jail, many of whom had brought their families. Marshal Getman and his deputy, William H. Peterson, armed themselves with shotguns, and mounting their horses they rode up Main Street to reconnoiter. Coming to a little wooden bridge over a branch of the zanja at the entrance to the Plaza, they dismounted, and keeping to the shadow of an adobe wall they slowly walked their horses to the backside of the church. In the moonlight they could see a column of men streaming down the hill and assembling at the northwest corner of the Plaza, some twenty-five or thirty yards ahead. Suddenly one of the insurgents spied them and Peterson heard a cry, “¡Vámonos!”—let’s go!—immediately followed by gunfire. “We heard the balls whistling by us,” Peterson later testified, and he and the marshal hastily retreated back to the wooden bridge.

  “Go raise the alarm,” said Getman. Deputy Peterson took off, but hearing a clamor looked back and saw ten or fifteen horsemen dart out from behind the church. Getman leveled his shotgun and slowly walked his horse toward them. “¿Quien vive?” he called. Who’s there? “¡Carajo!” a voice shouted back, Fuck you! Peterson heard the discharge of revolvers, then the blast from Getman’s shotgun. He dismounted and ran back to the bridge. Getman was on the ground, knocked from his horse by a ball that had grazed his scalp, burning a bloody crease across the right side of his head, a painful but thankfully superficial wound. Peterson helped him back to the jail. Sheriff Alexander dispatched a company of forty men, who cautiously made their way to the Plaza, but found it completely deserted.

  The insurgents had scattered in all directions. “The truth is,” Hayes wrote later, “they came, they saw, and left.” Wine and aguardiente flowed freely on the hill, and Hayes believed that many of the men “got so drunk that the original seriousness of their project lost its influence on them.” Their plan had been to hang Jenkins, Hayes said, “just as they had done before with Brown.” The current instance, however, “fell under the stigma that attaches to a mere mob.” Why the difference? Hayes thought he knew the answer. “In this business, as in other things, success seems to be the test of merit.”

  EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING handbills appeared throughout the pueblo calling for a public meeting of all citizens at 10 AM in front of Montgomery House. A mostly Anglo crowd assembled at the clang of the triangle that hung from the veranda of the hotel, used to summon guests at mealtime. As the meeting was getting underway, some three dozen riders came charging down Main Street and pulled up directly in front of the Montgomery. The previous evening Sheriff Alexander had sent out a call for emergency assistance, and the Monte Boys had ridden to the rescue. The Anglo crowd greeted them with sustained cheering. The significance was lost on no one. These were the vigilantes Judge Hayes had tried to corral.

  The meeting began with County Judge Myron Norton presiding. The town’s elite had caucused and agreed on the necessity of a show of unity, and Norton’s first item of business was to call Andrés Pico forward to act as cochair. Pico was received by cheers from the crowd. Don Andrés, along with his brother, the former governor, had grown wealthy in the cattle business. Both had townhouses fronting the Plaza. Don Andrés was a political insider, a former state senator and a member of the Democratic junta in control of local politics. He and Norton spoke to the crowd in Spanish and English, delivering a common message. The events of the previous night, they said, had demonstrated once again the inability of local law enforcement to maintain order, and in the current emergency they proposed the formation of a vigilance committee representing all the people, empowered to arrest and disarm all “disorderly or suspicious persons.” Ramírez reported that many Californios worried that the phrase was a euphemism for Spanish-speakers, but not wanting to be tarred with defending the insurgents, they decided to go along, in effect “agreeing to their own persecution.” There was only one public dissenter, a young attorney named William Handlin who argued in favor of proceeding according to law, but he was shouted down and threatened with violence. Some time after the meeting Handlin was assaulted and beaten senseless. There was no room for dissent.

  The meeting approved the Pico-Norton proposal by acclamation and appointed a “Committee of Twenty,” made up of both Anglos and Californios, including Agustín Olvera and Antonio Coronel, Abel Stearns and Benjamin Davis Wilson, Stephen Clark Foster and John S. Griffin. The committee in turn authorized several volunteer companies, including the Los Angeles Rangers, to search out, arrest, and interrogate any and all men suspected of participating in
the disorders of the previous two days. “We will not take away the life of any man unless he is found resisting the proper authority,” the committee pledged, although that does not seem to have been the general understanding. “Companies are now organized to go out,” reported the Los Angeles correspondent for the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, “and to hang upon the spot every Spaniard they can find who has been connected with this movement.”

  Hayes refused to attend the public meeting. “Being myself a rival of Judge Lynch,” he wrote, “I was never, of course, admitted within their holy of holies.” Instead, he reconvened the preliminary hearing at the courthouse and announced his decision regarding the charges against William Jenkins. The testimony made it clear, Hayes said, that Constable Jenkins had killed Antonio Ruiz in the heat of passion, “without deliberation and without malice, either express or implied.” It was a clear case of manslaughter, and he forwarded the case to the grand jury, setting bond at three thousand dollars, which several friends of Jenkins quickly posted before spiriting him away to a secret location.

  By that afternoon the Rangers had rounded up several dozen Mexicans and a handful of Californios. The vigilance committee reserved the power of interrogation to itself, but Hayes interposed. “I passed the next day,” he wrote, “examining and discharging (to the infinite disgust of the marshal’s friends) the numbers of innocent and harmless persons with whom, by their random and half-frantic exertions, they filled the jail.” Andrés Pico, at the head of a company of twenty mounted Californios, brought in Fernando Carriaga, whom they discovered hiding near the old mission in San Gabriel. Hayes intervened again, filing charges against the Frenchman for assault with intent to commit murder and consigning him to the protection of the sheriff.

  The following morning Hayes convened a preliminary hearing for Carriaga, and after examining several witnesses to the events of Tuesday night, he announced his decision. Great caution was required, he began, when a single individual was charged with the criminal conduct of a multitude. That was particularly true in this case, which Hayes characterized as “the first prosecution in this state, I believe, for acts done in those popular movements too common amongst us, bearing the designation of ‘Lynch Law’ or ‘Committee of Vigilance.’ ” On three memorable occasions over the previous five years, he reminded the men in the courtroom, organized bodies of Angelenos had inflicted extralegal execution on a total of seven men. In the eyes of the law, every person who actively participated in those executions was guilty of the crime of murder, yet not a single one had been arrested or tried. When David Brown was lynched six months earlier, the perpetrators, a majority of them Californios and Mexicans, had been “sustained by universal public sympathy.” That precedent, said Hayes, impressed those who sought to lynch Constable Jenkins with “an undue confidence in their power.” The entire community, including the frustrated lynchers themselves, ought to feel great relief that they had failed. If Mexicans or Californios believed they suffered as a distinct class of people, there were remedies for their redress within the legal justice system. Popular justice offered them no protection and could only lead to disaster. “Violence, in kindness say it, will only terminate in their utter ruin.”

  The plan for a lynching had miscarried, but the insurgents had committed a serious crime when they fired on the marshal, who was present in the discharge of his duty. Each individual engaged in riot is responsible for every act done by the rest, said Hayes, and “it appearing to me that the offense of an assault with intent to commit murder has been committed, and that there is sufficient cause to believe the within named Fernando Carriaga guilty thereof, I order that he be held to answer.” Hayes set bond at two thousand dollars, which was posted by several French vineyardists later that afternoon.

  That concluded the formal hearing, Hayes said. But before adjourning the court he hoped he might be indulged “in a further remark or two.”

  Good men should occupy themselves at once in the endeavor to subdue the spirit of anarchy which, I fear, of late has diffused itself widely in our county, owing to various palpable causes—among which [is] a deep sense of the enormity of our own local evils which thus far the law has not been able to eradicate. A certain impatience of legal routine has affected, more or less, all the different classes or nationalities (so to speak) of which our community is composed. . . . How long shall we labor through this anti-social distrust, and this painful sense of insecurity of property and life? Shall the law be left nearly powerless for want of adequate cooperation on the part of the people with the efforts made by the officers for its enforcement? Must each man provide for his own safety? This cannot be. To me it seems that the events of the past week afford a sufficient admonition of the perils we have run and must run again, by listening to the voice of sudden passion and giving way to the impulses of every momentary excitement. The best course is to be found in a firm and constant reliance upon the laws of the land, and in upholding them.

  TWO WEEKS LATER the grand jury indicted William Jenkins for second-degree murder. His trial took place in mid-August. Defense attorney Jonathan R. Scott aggressively challenged every Californio among the forty-eight prospective jurors, and succeeded in seating an all-Anglo panel of twelve men. The prosecution’s case, presented by District Attorney Cameron E. Thom, rested on the eyewitness testimony of María Candelaria Pollorena, and Scott’s strategy was to discredit her. His first question to the first defense witness revealed his line of attack: “What was her general character, good or bad?” Thom objected that the question was irrelevant, but Hayes ruled to allow testimony bearing directly on her credibility. Scott then called a parade of prominent Anglos, including Benjamin Davis Wilson, John Ozias Wheeler, and Undersheriff William Osburn, all of whom testified to Doña Candelaria’s bad reputation.

  Their testimony was entirely unsubstantiated. But virtually everyone in the courtroom, especially including Hayes, knew that the preceding year Doña Candelaria had sued her husband for divorce in district court, claiming that he had taken up with “an Indian woman or squaw.” Her husband had answered with the countercharge that it was Doña Candelaria who was the adulterer. He had hired a tutor for his children named Antonio Ruiz, he said, who boarded with the family, and while living there Ruiz had seduced his wife. She wanted a divorce, he told the court, “to gratify her lusts and desires with Antonio Ruiz.” Before the divorce case could be concluded, Doña Candelaria’s husband died of natural causes, and soon thereafter she and Ruiz began living together. If there was substance to the charge of bad character, that was it. María Candelaria Pollorena was a willful woman.

  In his closing argument District Attorney Thom ignored that distraction and focused on the stark facts of the case, which clearly established, he argued, that Jenkins had demonstrated a reckless disregard for human life and was guilty of murder in the second degree. Scott countered that Doña Candelaria’s testimony could not be trusted and ought to be rejected as “false in every detail.” The purpose she and Ruiz had, Scott said, was not to retrieve a letter but to seize the guitar, an attempt at robbery, pure and simple, justifying Jenkins’s use of deadly force. A tendentious argument, perhaps, but one that provided members of the jury with the cover they needed. They retired after receiving the instructions of Judge Hayes—which plainly indicated that no officer of the law could be justified in using deadly force to enforce a civil seizure—and returned fifteen minutes later with a verdict of not guilty. Angelenos braced for an angry response, but it did not materialize. Less than two days later the grand jury terminated the case against Fernando Carriaga by declining to indict him. An equality of injustice.

  The entire episode forced Francisco Ramírez to rethink his support of vigilantism. “Everyone knows it was a murder—nothing more, nothing less,” he wrote of the Ruiz killing. But “the assault on the jail was out of bounds,” and served to further the division between Anglos and Californios. Ramírez now took the position that “there is nothing more unfortunate than the people ta
king the law into their own hands.” He now recognized that vigilantism offered no guarantee of universal justice. It arose from people’s deepest fears and exaggerated their prejudices. The rule of law, not the rule of individual men, offered the only sure way forward. “Let us work together in a common spirit to enforce the laws,” he wrote. “Let the hatred that pits race against race be transformed into the most sincere friendship. That’s what is required by the times in which we live.”

  The outcome gave Benjamin Hayes reason to hope for better days. “Ruiz is in his sepulcher,” he wrote in an unsigned essay published in Spanish in El Clamor Público. “Nothing will change the eternal destiny of the man by whose hand he fell.” No one would deny the ill effects the episode had on the community. “But time will erase them, and we will return to living in harmony, working to firmly establish and perpetuate the fraternal feelings that must reign in every orderly society.” Hayes could not have been more wrong.

  PART THREE

  •

  CHAPTER 21 •

  WE HAVE GOT YOU NOW,

  DON SANTIAGO

  AT THE CONCLUSION of his fourth term as sheriff, in October 1855, James R. Barton retired to his ranch, 170 acres of prime land near Los Nietos, some ten miles east of the pueblo on the west bank of the San Gabriel River. He bred horses, tended what one observer described as a “large and flourishing orchard,” and set out the first planting of English walnuts in a district that would later be celebrated for them. The property was valued at more than ten thousand dollars—the equivalent of several million in today’s money—placing Barton in the elite class of the county’s ranchers and farmers. While serving as sheriff he kept a room in Los Angeles, but Barton Ranch, which he purchased in 1853, was his permanent home. Living with him there was María del Espiritu Santo, a young Cupeño woman born and raised at Mission San Juan Capistrano. She and Barton were not legally married, but in the spring of 1854 she delivered a son, José Santiago, whom Barton acknowledged as his offspring in a legal document executed several months later. A gentleman farmer living in common-law marriage with “an Indian girl” and their child was not uncommon in southern California during those years.