Eternity Street
Page 39
Dissenters like Barrows refused to let the question die. Several men harangued the crowd with the evidence against two Mexicans who the previous day had been arrested on suspicion of stealing horses. Someone moved that they be hanged alongside Flores, and Scott called for a show of hands: there were 257 for summary execution and 395 for leaving the matter for the courts to decide. According to Wallace, “the Americans were for hanging, believing that a severe example was needed to check crime.” The opposition came from the French and the Californios. Ramírez was “shocked and horrified to see so many people in favor of sacrificing some unhappy Mexicans alongside the bandit Flores for simply stealing a horse. But,” he added, “we must rejoice that the great majority of thinking people rejected violence. Sad to say, we had feared the worst.”
By then it was nearly noon and the crowd was growing restless. A man rose in his stirrups and called for attention. “All who are in favor of hanging Flores, follow me!” he shouted. The crowd responded immediately. Everyone turned south and followed the mounted companies to the jail. Neither the undersheriff nor the county jailer put up the slightest resistance, so the crowd remained orderly. A delegation went inside and found Flores in his cell, praying with two priests from the Plaza church. His irons were removed and he was escorted out, surrounded by a heavy guard. He had dressed for the occasion in white linen trousers, white collarless shirt, and embroidered vest, over which he wore a fashionable black merino sack coat. “There was nothing in his appearance,” noted the Star, “to indicate the formidable bandit which he had proved himself to be.”
Sunshine broke through the clouds as Flores, accompanied by the priests and surrounded by guards, ascended Gallows Hill, followed by the large crowd. The surrounding hills were covered with spectators, including women and children. Reaching the summit, Flores, the priests, and the executioner mounted the ungainly gallows hastily erected that morning. Flores was offered a cigarillo, which he smoked as the priests prayed. Then he addressed the crowd. He spoke in a calm, firm voice, his words translated into French and English by an interpreter. He was ready to die, he said. He had committed many crimes but harbored no ill will against anyone, and hoped none would bear ill will toward him. The executioner bound his arms and legs, adjusted the noose around his neck, and tied a white handkerchief over his eyes. The priests descended the platform and the executioner made ready as Flores stood silently before the crowd for several moments, his body trembling slightly.
The latch was pulled and Flores dropped, but the fall did not kill him. His body bucked and convulsed, the cord binding his arms slipped, and they flailed wildly in a vain attempt to grasp the rope and stop the agony. “He was hung very much like a dog,” reported William Wallace, “and the way he dangled in the air afforded a disgusting spectacle to the people.” It was thirty minutes before the attending physician declared Flores dead. He had been hanged with the reata of one of the men slain with Barton, and it had proved far too short. “Those who seek vengeance,” observed Ramírez, “dote on the most insignificant of details.”
A FEW DAYS LATER California governor J. Neely Johnson issued a proclamation offering a large cash reward for the apprehension of the Manillas still at large, provoking an intensive manhunt that lasted many months. The murderers of a county sheriff could not be allowed to remain free. Angelenos soon learned that Andrés Fuentes, the man who killed Barton, had fled to Mexico, beyond their reach. Pancho Daniel and Leonardo López, however, had remained closer. In early December the sheriff of Santa Clara County in the north arrested López after a desperate gunfight that left him seriously wounded. William Getman, elected to succeed Barton as county sheriff, brought López back on the steamer. He was tried in district court with Judge Hayes presiding and found guilty of the murder of George Pflugardt. Asked whether he wished to make a statement before sentencing, López gave what William Wallace characterized as a brave speech. He was innocent of Plugardt’s murder and everyone knew it, he said. Indeed, the testimony clearly indicated that Chino Varela had fired the fatal shot. But, López continued, “inasmuch as they had resolved to hang him, he did not comprehend why they should torment him by keeping him two or three months in jail, exposed to the curiosity of any impertinent person who might come to look at him. Why not hang him at once, as they had the other Californians? He was ready to die, and didn’t ask any favors.” When López finished, Hayes pronounced sentence, setting the execution for two months hence, the soonest the law would allow.
A few weeks later the same sheriff who captured López arrested Pancho Daniel, who was also brought south and placed in a cell next to his compatriot. In the meantime, Los Angeles had suffered another shocking act of violence, the cold-blooded murder of Sheriff Getman by a deranged Anglo. In the excitement that followed, there were calls for hanging all the inmates of the jail, but cooler heads prevailed, and on February 16, as Daniel remained in his cell, López was executed in the jail yard alongside another murderer, an Anglo convicted of cold-blooded murder. In his gallows declaration, López advised young men to take caution from his example. If any of his creditors were present, he joked, he would happily write them a bank draft. James Thompson, acting sheriff, appointed to fill out Getman’s term, had made careful preparations, and the double hanging came off without a hitch. “It was a happy day for society,” wrote Ramírez. “Let us hope that the terrible spectacle of death, presented so often before the eyes of the people, will serve as an example.”
When Pancho Daniel came to trial in March 1858, court-assigned defense attorney Columbus Sims requested a postponement until he could arrange for witnesses from San José he claimed would prove that Daniel had been in the north at the time of Barton’s murder. Hayes granted the request and set a new trial date for the court’s next term. “Considerable uneasiness was manifested at this continuance,” wrote Wallace. Henry Barrows was more explicit. “There is here a quiet but deep feeling,” he wrote, “that if the law should fail to mete out justice, the PEOPLE will not. It is this very certainty that gives us security. The source of all power in human society is in the PEOPLE; law is merely their organized representative. When that becomes inactive or inadequate, it is their duty to come to its rescue, and in desperate cases to act directly and instantly.”
The trial began in July. Hayes issued venire for ninety-six prospective jurors, and Sheriff Thompson supervised their selection from the county’s register of voters. Most of them were present when attorney Sims challenged the entire panel on the grounds of bias, arguing that Sheriff Thompson—a good friend of Barton’s and renowned as Flores’s captor—had tainted the process by publicly declaring that Daniel was guilty. The prosecution objected, and rather than rule on the question himself, Hayes selected three lawyers as triers to investigate the charge. After interviewing Thompson they decided in favor of Sims. Hayes ordered that another panel of prospective jurors be summoned by County Coroner J. C. Welsh. But once that panel had assembled, Sims challenged Welsh’s objectivity as well. Hayes appointed another three triers, who again found for Sims. “It will be next to impossible to find a jury in the county who have not expressed opinions,” Barrows reported. Virtually every public official in Los Angeles was on record excoriating Pancho Daniel. The legal maneuvering took up an entire month. Judge Hayes was due to open the summer term of district court in San Diego, so for a second time he postponed the trial, and placed it on the calendar for the autumn. Bewildering procedural delay was the cost for following the rule of law. But it confused many people and encouraged them to support alternatives that promised more immediate satisfaction.
BENJAMIN HAYES was nearing the end of his six-year term as district judge. The preceding year he and his wife, Emily, had debated whether or not he should stand for another. Her consumption had grown much worse, often confining her to bed for days at a time. She required considerably more care, and although Hayes made arrangements with friends and relatives, both of them dreaded the weeks he rode the circuit, away from the family. They talked i
t over one afternoon as they strolled the vineyard district, returning home with a basket of peaches and ripe figs, on which they made their supper. It was then that Emily Hayes made her declaration. “I hope you will not again be a candidate for judge,” she said. “I never wish you to be electioneering and treating, as when you were a candidate before.” Hayes recorded the conversation in his diary before bed that evening. “My father once told me that he had often lost greatly in life by not taking my mother’s advice. What if Emily be right on this occasion? The matter will have to be thought of carefully.” In the succeeding months Hayes indeed thought about it a great deal. But he and Emily never spoke of it again, for the following day she suffered a hemorrhage of the lungs and died within minutes.
Hayes was disconsolate. His sisters were there to help with his son, Chauncey, and he had many supportive friends, but in his despair he turned back to the bottle. Alcoholism would remain a problem for the rest of his life and may be what led to his premature death in 1877, an old man at the age of just sixty-two. About the judgeship, Hayes remained undecided for some months. What persuaded him to run again was the opposition to his candidacy from within the Democratic Party. Hayes had studiously kept out of the increasingly partisan political contests in the county, which infuriated local party boss and former friend Joseph Lancaster Brent, who openly solicited other candidates for district court judge, men Hayes considered far less scrupulous than himself. With vigilantism in ascendance, Hayes became convinced that southern California required his continued presence on the bench. He issued a formal announcement of his candidacy several months after Emily’s death, in July 1858. “All my life I have been a Democrat,” he wrote. “But I beg leave to add that, in my opinion, the office of Judge should be maintained free forever from any influence of mere party politics.” He sought reelection as an independent, “without reference to the proceedings of any cabal, committee, or convention.” He would stand for another term, despite Emily’s dying wish, but would honor her memory by declining to campaign. The Democrats, sensing a losing fight, did not run a candidate of their own. The Republicans put up Columbus Sims. In the September election Hayes was reelected by a large majority, which he interpreted as a vindication for the authority of the law, although it seems likely that many voters cast their ballots against Sims, the defender of Pancho Daniel, rather than in favor of Hayes.
When the Daniel trial reconvened in November, Hayes appointed Antonio Coronel to summon a panel of prospective jurors. Sims objected once again, but Hayes overruled him. Coronel, a consummate politician, had been careful to keep mum during the crisis following Barton’s death. But when Hayes directed that the trial proceed with the selection of a jury, Sims filed for a change of venue, forcing a hearing on the matter. It revealed, to the surprise of no one, that many Angelenos believed that if the court failed to convict, the people should act. Four years before, Hayes had denied similar motions from Jonathan Scott and Joseph Lancaster Brent, representing David Brown and William Lee, and had been rebuked by the California Supreme Court. On November 24 he granted Sims’s motion and reassigned the case to the district court in Santa Barbara.
Six days later, shortly before sunrise on the morning of November 30, the county jailer was on his way to market when he was waylaid by a group of eight or ten armed men, who forced him back to the jail and demanded the keys. Seeing that resistance was useless, he handed them over. The men opened the gate to the yard and were immediately joined by several dozen more who had concealed themselves in a neighboring corral. Henry Barrows may have been among them, for his report of the event reads like an eyewitness account. The leaders unlocked the door and entered the jail, emerging some time later with an ashen-faced Pancho Daniel. “He rather broke down at first,” wrote Barrows, but “then recovered and told them to bid his wife good-bye; said he was ready, and stood up to his fate like a hero—or bravado, as he was.” Daniel was hanged without ceremony from the crosspiece over the gate posts. It took a long time for him to die.
The news quickly spread through town and a large crowd gathered. “Some turned away and said nothing,” wrote Barrows, “but most said, in words, in looks, or in acts, ‘Amen—it is well!’ Some few of the lower class of Californians or Sonoranians vowed vengeance on his murderers, as they call his executioners. But they will hardly undertake any overt act. If they do, they may find it a terrible business for themselves.” After an hour or so the body was taken down and delivered to Daniel’s wife, who had come down from San José for the trial. An inquest over the body was held later that day at the house where she was staying. The coroner’s jury concluded that Daniel had been “accidentally hung through the carelessness of some American citizens.”
Pancho Daniel was the fourteenth and final lynching in the aftermath of the fatal attack on Sheriff Barton’s posse, and as in the other summary executions there was nothing at all careless about it. The lynching had been carefully planned and executed by what the Star called “a committee acting on behalf of a larger body of citizens.” Barrows celebrated their accomplishment. The day previous to the lynching the vigilance committee had planted a false report that Andrés Fuentes had been seen near San Gabriel. Sheriff Thompson and his deputy went to investigate, getting them “out of the way.” The vigilantes met in secret and were careful to cover their tracks. “The execution,” Barrows wrote, “was so well planned and executed that scarcely a person in town knew of word of it till it was all over.” This was vigilantism of a new, secretive type, and for the next dozen years it would dominate Los Angeles. “Justice, though tardy, had been done at last,” wrote Barrows. “The criminal has met that terrible and summary retribution which the murderer will ever meet in every community where, as here, there is a power behind the law that is swift to execute the spirit of the law, and which will not see justice foiled by the accidents or frailties of the letter of the law.”
•
CHAPTER 23 •
DUELING, SHOOTING,
AND KILLING
THE LYNCHING OF PANCHO DANIEL left Francisco Ramírez heartsick. “We can not find expressions strong enough to condemn the conduct of those who consummated their atrocity under cover of darkness.” Ramírez expected an outpouring of protest from Californios, but it was not forthcoming. “News of the barbaric and diabolical lynching that was perpetrated in this city has fallen on deaf ears,” he wrote, “and it will soon be forgotten, like so many other appalling and horrifying events.” The Spanish-speaking community had been silenced by the terrorism in response to Barton’s death, but Ramírez wasn’t cutting his people any slack. “You, imbecile Californios!” he raged in El Clamor Público. “You must take the blame for the tragic events we are seeing. We are tired of saying, ‘Open your eyes, it’s time to uphold your rights and interests.’”
Henry Barrows responded in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. Ramírez was “a young man of promise, a Spanish, French, and English scholar, and a gentleman,” Barrows declared. But his opposition to vigilantism was “a great wrong—not alone to Americans, nor to the society at large in which he lives, but to his own people and race throughout California, for whom he volunteers to act as champion and defender.” Had Ramírez forgotten the role Californios played in the lynching of David Brown? They had been justified then, argued Barrows, just as the Anglos who hanged Pancho Daniel were justified now. Ramírez stubbornly opposed vigilantism “when he knows—as all know—that justice, otherwise, will not be done, . . . that no one can be safe in life and property unless the people do rise, as they did in this county of Los Angeles.”
Barrows acknowledged that when the sleeping lion awoke and the people acted, excesses sometimes occurred. “It is indeed awful that any innocent person should suffer with the guilty,” he wrote. But he thought that an acceptable cost for social peace. “What would have been the condition of society if the people had not acted? Intolerable.” Let the law take its course, let the courts do their job. But when the justice system failed, as it sometimes
did, allow the people to do what was required. The citizens who hanged Pancho Daniel “did not desire to subvert the law,” he averred. “They would gladly have been spared the duty of an exceptional breach of its letter to fulfill its spirit—for Justice must be satisfied.” Murder, rape, and rapine “would have continued till nobody knows when, if our people had not banded together.” But by their decisive action, “the bloody flood was stayed, and now we may live in peace.” Vigilantism, Barrows argued, produced a deterrent effect, reducing the incidence of lethal violence. It had proved its worth. “We have had quiet, peaceable times since.”
He overstated his case, for Los Angeles did not suddenly turn quiet and peaceable following the terror. But judging solely by the numbers, Barrows had a point. Significant episodes of vigilantism occurred in 1852 (when there were seven lynching executions), 1855 (six), and 1857 (thirteen). In each instance the number of homicides dropped significantly in the subsequent year, by a quarter in 1853 and 1856, by 40 percent in 1858. At the end of the decade the homicide rate was less than half of what it had been several years before.