Secessionist Knights and Union Clubs were instruments of the opposing sides of the politically committed. But in late 1861 another semi-secret organization, one enjoying broad support across the entire political spectrum, made a return appearance in Los Angeles. There had not been a lynching since the summary execution of Pancho Daniel in November 1858. But with the ongoing political turmoil, with residents concerned over the possibility of civil violence, and especially with a dramatic increase in homicides—which rose from nine in 1860, to twelve in 1861, to seventeen in 1862, the highest number since 1856—the stage was set once again for an extended episode of vigilantism.
The first indication was a lynching conducted by a mob of Californios at misión vieja. José Claudio Alvitre, uncle of the late Felipe Alvitre, was released from county jail after serving a term of four months for beating his wife. He returned home and after taking a few drinks grabbed a butcher knife and slit his wife’s throat. Neighbors found her lying in a pool of blood and the perpetrator hiding nearby. “The people decided that as the act needed no investigation he should be punished at once,” reported the Star. Unlike previous vigilante episodes that often featured some version of a kangaroo court, this one included no pretense of quasi-legal proceedings. Alvitre was bound, a noose placed around his neck, and soon he was “swinging in mid-air” from the branch of a nearby tree. Noting the frequency with which wives were “assaulted and treated in an inhuman manner” by their husbands, editor Hamilton hoped that “the promptness of justice in these parts will soon cure their propensity to abuse or kill women.”
Another mob lynching took place several months later. The precipitating event was the brutal murder of Caroline van der Leck, wife of a German shopkeeper, during a botched robbery of the couple’s dry goods store by a young Californio named Francisco Cota. The woman’s two young children witnessed the brutal knifing. “I touched her and called to her,” the daughter later recalled, “and when she did not answer, I knew that something dreadful had happened. I took my little brother by the hand and with my dress covered with blood, I ran crying up the street to the house of some friends.” Cota, seen running from the scene, was quickly apprehended. A crowd gathered, and it was with considerable difficulty that the deputy marshal delivered him to the county lockup. “I have never forgotten being carried to the jail on the shoulders of some of the men for the purpose of having me identify the criminal,” the daughter recalled. The sight of this innocent six-year-old being carried inside the jail greatly inflamed the crowd, which grew large and threatening. “Bring him out!” people cried. “Hang him!”
A public meeting was held on the street and a committee chosen to meet with Sheriff Tomás Sánchez. He promised Cota’s case would proceed immediately with an arraignment by a justice of the peace. About three in the afternoon, surrounded by a hastily formed posse, Sánchez escorted Cota to the courtroom of Justice William H. Peterson, a couple of blocks away. The streets were filled with people. Justice Peterson’s small court was packed to overflowing. Sheriff Sánchez read the complaint, Peterson asked Cota how he pled, and he responded “not guilty.” Did he have counsel? Cota replied in the negative. He would have until the following morning to obtain representation, said Peterson, who then gaveled an adjournment and ordered the room cleared. There was a moment of stunned silence, then a roar as the crowd rushed forward, fought off Sánchez and his posse, and dragged Cota out to the street.
The mob surged toward the commercial district with their captive. The brutal slashing by a Californio of an Anglo woman in the presence of her children was a crime of such horror it seemed to justify the exaction of communal vengeance. Sheriff Sánchez and his men made a valiant attempt to rescue the young man, but to no avail. Someone threw a noose about Cota’s neck, and he was violently pulled ahead. Joseph Mesmer, a mere boy of six or seven at the time, vividly recalled the scene many years later. As Cota was dragged along, Mesmer wrote, people “showered him with blows, pulled his hair, and tore his clothes half off.” At the corner of Aliso and Alameda the rope was tossed over the crossbeam of a tall gate, and Cota was hauled up by the neck. His limbs were untied, and they jerked wildly as his body swung in a wide arc. “The air was filled with cries, oaths, and imprecations,” Mesmer continued, “but the leaders went about their task with grim visage and determined mien, which brooked no interference. The crowd milled about with that indescribable sound of bodies pummeling each other and striving desperately for advantage. The impression of those sounds that day on my young mind was something which has not been erased through a long life of many other tragic incidents.”
The Southern News reported the lynching without comment. “Verily the soul of the murderer shall descend with curses to perdition,” wrote editor Charles Conway. In the Star, Hamilton was somewhat more equivocal. “We have ever been, and still are, opposed to mob law,” he wrote. “But if an occasion can arise, when the righteous indignation of a people will prompt them to the instant punishment of an enormity, whose hellish atrocity appalls the stoutest heart, and shocks the moral sensibilities of the most obdurate, or the most obtuse, the present is that occasion.” Both newspapers reported on the public meeting, the formation of the leadership committee, and the active participation of those same leaders in the lynching. But neither editor identified a single participant by name. That would remain the editorial policy in regard to lynching for the subsequent decade. The editors and their papers might be on opposite sides of the political divide, but both endorsed vigilantism.
Several weeks later the bodies of four or five Californios or Mexicans were found hanging along a road in the northern portion of the county. “It is supposed they were horse and cattle thieves, were on their way to the upper country with stock,” reported the Star, “that they had been overtaken on the road by the owners of the cattle, and immediately executed.” This time Hamilton refrained from expressing any criticism at all. An extended period of lynching had begun.
FOLLOWING A TWO-YEAR TERM as district attorney, E. J. C. Kewen opened a legal practice specializing in criminal defense. It was a much better fit for him. He defended at least five men charged with murder or attempted murder in 1863 and succeeded in getting four acquitted. In the most controversial case, he represented blacksmith John Buckley, charged with the murder of musician Francisco “Pancho” Cruz, a harp player in a band that performed at Sam McKlasky’s saloon on Negro Alley. The two men had been competitors for the affection of a young prostitute named Augusta Cañada. One evening Cruz found her in bed with Buckley, and the men exchanged hard words. Buckley left and Cruz reproached Cañada. “You do not command me,” she shot back. The next night, as Cruz tried to make up with Cañada, Buckley approached them. “What do you want,” Cruz demanded. Buckley drew a revolver and without a word shot his rival in the belly. Cruz died within minutes. According to the district attorney it was an open-and-shut case of murder. But Kewen elicited testimony that Cruz had a small pocketknife in his pocket, which he used to cut the strings of his harp, and planted the suggestion that he might have been attempting to draw the knife before Buckley fired. That was enough for the men of the jury, who concluded that Buckley had acted in self-defense and acquitted him. It was a classic Kewen move, playing on the prejudices of the jurors, exploiting their deep adherence to the honor code.
In partnership with Colonel James G. Howard, another shrewd litigator, Kewen became the most celebrated criminal defense attorney in southern California. So successful were the partners that they roused the ire of the vigilance committee, which continued to meet following the lynching of Francisco Cota. The vigilantes passed a resolution, so the story was told, that both attorneys deserved hanging. Word of the resolution leaked out, and on the street a day or two later Colonel Howard confronted one of the committee’s leaders, a Frenchman named Felix Signoret, described as a man huge in frame, with hands the size of hams. Signoret operated a “deluxe” barbershop on Main Street, which he parlayed into the ownership of a saloon, a billiard parlor,
and eventually an entire business block. Howard, a very large man, planted himself directly in front of Signoret, his feet spread wide, head and shoulders bent forward. “Signoret,” he said in his booming baritone, “I understand you are going to hang Kewen and Howard.” The Frenchman responded nervously. “That was our intention,” he stuttered. “Come now, Signoret,” said Howard, “we are old friends. Be generous, let’s compromise. Hang Kewen, he’s the head of the firm.” The story is apocryphal. But Signoret was indeed a leader of the vigilance committee, which in fact expressed frustration at the repeated acquittal of murderers in Los Angeles. “Lawyers do abound in this city,” declared J. J. Warner. “It is well that Justice is blind, for if she could see all that is done in her name she would become a raving maniac.”
Late in 1863 Kewen acted as defense attorney for one B. J. Daimwood, arrested for a violent assault on a Los Angeles deputy marshal. Daimwood was a notorious desperado, rumored to have murdered two miners for their gold. Kewen got him admitted to bail, but before Daimwood’s bond could be raised, he was targeted by the vigilance committee. On November 20 Sheriff Sánchez informed Judge Hayes that he believed the vigilantes were preparing to strike. Hayes telegraphed the commander at Drum Barracks requesting “aid and protection.” But the vigilantes acted before the officer could respond. Early the following day, the jail was swarmed by some two or three hundred men led by Felix Signoret and what Joseph Mesmer described as a group of “old timers who had taken part in other lynchings.” Sheriff Sánchez and Undersheriff King barred the iron door of the jail, but using sledgehammers and battering rams the vigilantes broke in and emerged with five men, including Daimwood, accused of an assortment of crimes ranging from attempted murder to horse theft. They were dragged up Spring Street to its junction with Main and unceremoniously hanged from the portico of an old adobe.
Henry Hamilton reminded his readers once again that he was “emphatically opposed to all such proceedings.” He also published a proclamation from Sheriff Sánchez, threatening the unnamed leaders with arrest. In response the vigilante “executive committee” issued a public statement, refusing to disband and insisting that their aim was “to help the Sheriff and all officers to execute the law.” After that there was no further mention of arrests. J. J. Warner defended the lynchings. “For the last year highway robberies and murder have become a common occurrence,” he wrote, and “the slow process of the law is inadequate to the task, hence the interference of the citizens.” Although “this wholesale slaughter may not be sanctioned by the community at large, the citizens of this section have borne the outrages until forbearance ceased to be a virtue.” The vigilance committee, he reported, had warned other “suspicious characters” that they had twenty-four hours to get out of town “or take the consequences.” It seemed that the vigilance committee had become a permanent institution in Los Angeles.
TWO WEEKS LATER the body of rancher John Sanford was discovered along a lonely stretch of road in the northern portion of the county. Sanford was well-known and well-connected. One of his brothers owned a ranch in San Gabriel; another was a business associate of Phineas Banning, the transportation baron, who was married to Sanford’s sister. A week after the discovery of the body, a young drifter named Charles Wilkins, arrested in Santa Barbara on a charge of vagrancy, confessed to the crime. He had been walking along the road, Wilkins said, when Sanford came by in a buggy and hired him on the spot to herd sheep. Wilkins climbed aboard and the two men continued on for a pace until Sanford stopped to relieve himself. “It occurred to me that he might have money,” Wilkins said, “and seeing his pistol lying in the bottom of the buggy, I picked it up and shot him while his back was towards me.” It was a cold-blooded murder of the worst sort. He was disappointed, Wilkins said, to find only twenty dollars and a gold watch in Sanford’s pockets. Asked whether his conscience troubled him, he answered no. “I have killed eight other men and think no more of killing a man than a dog.”
Wilkins arrived in Los Angeles in the custody of a deputy sheriff on a morning in mid-December. Benjamin Hayes, concluding the autumn term of district court, was determined to achieve swift justice in the case. A special grand jury was convened, Wilkins was brought before its members, and that very afternoon they handed down an indictment for murder. As Undersheriff King was escorting the prisoner back to the jail, he was surrounded by an angry crowd. King shoved his way through and got Wilkins back in his cell, but that afternoon he dispatched a telegram to the military authorities, requesting the presence of troops. King’s plea for federal intervention was ironic, of course, coming as it did from one of the most partisan secessionists in Los Angeles. Later that day he received an official response. “In reply to your telegram of this date stating that the jail of Los Angeles County is threatened by a mob and requesting the assistance of the U.S. troops, I am instructed to say that application should be made to the Governor of this State. . . . It is only upon the requisition of the highest executive authority in the State that the commanding general can act.”
The trial before Judge Hayes took place the following day. His term as district judge would end on December 31, and he knew that this would probably be the last capital case he would hear after twelve years on the bench. At midmorning a throng of several hundred watched as Undersheriff King and a large group of armed men escorted Wilkins from the jail to the courthouse. Suddenly a man with a shotgun pushed to the front of the crowd. It was the murdered man’s brother, Cyrus Sanford. King and his men rushed forward and prevented Sanford from firing, but in the confusion Wilkins broke from the guard and fled into a nearby house. Found cowering under a bed, he was hustled into the courthouse without further disruption. The proceeding went quickly and smoothly. Wilkins waived his right to a jury trial and pled guilty to murder in the first degree. Hayes pronounced him guilty and announced that sentencing would take place the following morning. Then, ordering King to return Wilkins to jail, he adjourned the court. Suddenly Phineas Banning, the murdered man’s brother-in-law, leading a group of his own teamsters, rushed forward, pushed King aside, and seized Wilkins. They dragged the terrified man outside and down the street to Banning’s corral, where they hanged him from a crossbeam over the gate.
Henry Barrows made no comment at the time—that would have been unseemly for a U.S. marshal—but he later wrote about this lynching. “The people were compelled to rise up in self-defense and summarily exterminate the thieves, thugs, and assassins who were preying upon the community,” he argued. It demonstrated once again that when the people awakened to the necessity of action, there was no stopping them. “In looking back to those days from this distance,” he wrote a quarter century later, “one would say that it would have been better if Wilkins and his fellow murderers could have been hung by law; but that it was better even that they should have been hung as they were, than that they should not have been hung at all.”
The lynching of Charles Wilkins concluded the extended episode of vigilantism that began in 1861 and included the extralegal execution of at least fourteen men. “It cleared the atmosphere wonderfully,” Barrows wrote. “Justice had been done without any quibbles or elisions or escapes, but swift and sure; the people, who had been stirred up by intense excitement, quieted down as if by magic; and human rights and property rights from that time on, were never safer, and peace and quietness prevailed for a long time.” Barrows got what he asked for—and for the next four or five years the number of homicides fell to the lowest level since before the war of conquest.
•
CHAPTER 25 •
MASTER IN THE HOUSE
“MARRIED—AT SAN GABRIEL, April 21st, by Rev. T. O. Ellis at the residence of Mr. D. F. Hall, Mr. Robert B. Carsley to Miss Josephine Smith.” The notice, printed in the Star on April 24, 1858, was accompanied by a note of congratulation from editor Henry Hamilton. “Cupid, the sly archer, has been winging his shafts pretty freely of late in this locality. Among his conquests, we find enrolled our young friend and highly este
emed correspondent, Miss Josephine Smith, whose compositions, over the signature of ‘Ina’ have frequently delighted our readers. Entering now on the serious duties of life, we may be permitted to wish her all felicity, and that her future may be as happy as her past has been bright and full of promise.” Bob Carsley was twenty-five, Josephine Smith seventeen.
Ina, as she was known to family and friends, was the daughter of Agnes Coolbrith and Don Carlos Smith, born in the Mormon community of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841. Her father died of malaria when she was an infant, and the next year her mother married her late husband’s older brother, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, becoming the seventh of his plural wives. Three years later Smith was murdered by an angry mob, and soon the Mormons were being hounded out of Illinois, just as they had been forced from Missouri several years before. When the faithful departed for the far West in 1846, Agnes Coolbrith Smith chose not to join them. Instead, she married a third time, to attorney William Pickett, not a Latter-day Saint himself, but a man who publicly supported the Mormons’ right to practice their religion as they chose. With Ina and her sister Charlotte, the couple relocated to St. Louis, where twin sons were born. In 1851, infected with gold fever, Pickett took the family overland to California, and in 1855 they relocated to Los Angeles, where Pickett hung out his shingle. Ina and her sister enrolled in the girls’ class taught by Louisa Hayes Griffin. It was a small world.
She wrote her first poems for Miss Hayes, who sent them to editor Hamilton. He published the first of them in 1856, when Ina was fifteen. The verses proved immensely popular, were reprinted in other papers around the state, and Ina became known as the “Los Angeles poetess.” Her revenge poem, published in the Star in aftermath of Barton’s death, was uncharacteristic. She wrote elegies of separation and loss, sentimental and conventional, but notably sincere. Her perspective reflected her family’s history, but also the experiences of her readers, most of them immigrants and transients, far from their homes of origin. Typical was a poem Hamilton published in 1857.
Eternity Street Page 42