Hayes certainly took the threats seriously. He wrote to the commander of Union forces in southern California, requesting protection for Doña Merced. “If I was justified once before, while I held the office of district judge, in asking military intervention to preserve the peace of the county,” he wrote, “permit me to represent now that a much stronger case for it exists, arising out of the recent murder of Don Ramón,” which he characterized as “the most atrocious crime that has been committed within my memory going back more than fourteen years,” the whole of his two terms as district judge. The widow had now been threatened with violence, and for her protection Hayes requested that “a small force of dragoons be stationed at the rancho for a short time.” An officer and fifteen men were dispatched and spent several days camped in the vicinity of the ranch house.
While there, one of the dragoons recorded the gossip he heard from locals, very possibly at Rubottom’s inn, less than a mile from the ranch house.
It appears that from what I can hear that John Rains married a woman that was half English and half Spanish and an heiress also, and became a noted man. Report says that he kept one or more spirituals and that his wife became jealous and took a paramour by the name of Ramón Carrillo, which of course caused family trouble, and the husband ordered the paramour to keep away from his house and out of his Eden. The paramour, being possessed of little moral but of great animal courage, resolved to put the husband out of his way and have the woman all to himself, so he either directly or indirectly assassinated the aforesaid Rains. Then the friends of Rains (acting according to the old proverb that is when you are in Rome you must do as the Romans do) caused the paramour Ramón Carrillo to be assassinated.
This version of the story was in striking contrast to the one related by Don Ramón’s brother. It made perfect sense, even if it was completely false.
“Rarely has a woman—defenseless herself—been exposed to such injury as has been visited upon you,” Hayes wrote to Doña Merced.
But es fuerza [take strength], as the Californians say. It is not necessary for anyone to advise me of the designs which several had against your property—to accomplish which design the better, they have not spared your reputation—that which is the most valuable thing that can belong to one of your sex. It has indeed been the most refined piece of villainy I have every watched, and I have observed it pretty closely for more than a year.
Her suit against Carlisle would soon come before district court, he assured her, and he was optimistic. But in the meantime he could only counsel patience. “Under a kind Providence you will, I doubt not, come safely out of this severe affliction and trial. Always look for protection from heaven. This never fails. I am sure of it.” Hayes tried to be upbeat. “Never forget your usual smile at the cares that sometimes threaten you. . . . There, lively Merced, you have quite a sermon. I suppose you think . . . I would make a better padre than an abogado.”
But Doña Merced was not smiling. Her Anglo husband and then her Californio protector had both been murdered. She was responsible for a large household that included five children and three half sisters. She was in jeopardy of losing her property, her only source of income. She was threatened with violence. Less than two weeks after writing that letter, she married José Clemente Carrillo, a cousin of Don Ramón’s, who worked as a constable in Los Angeles. Doña Merced’s biographer puts it succinctly. “Merced’s only alternative was to remarry. It was a man’s world.”
DISTRICT JUDGE PABLO DE LA GUERRA was a distant cousin of Doña Merced’s, so he recused himself, and her suit was transferred to the district court in San José. The case was not heard until the spring of 1865. Carlisle moved for a continuation of the power of attorney, arguing that Doña Merced was “a woman of impulsive and passionate temperament and character,” and that the children of John Rains required protection against the risk that their mother might “come under the influence of a husband who would abuse that influence.” A man like John Rains, perhaps? But the judge ruled that the power of attorney had been obtained through fraud. Arguing that a neutral party ought to be appointed to oversee the estate in the best interests of the children, he appointed Undersheriff Andrew Jackson King of Los Angeles County. Hayes applauded the decision. “If a receiver had not been appointed,” he wrote, the creditors “would have left little for either mother or children.” Carlisle was outraged, of course, and Hayes worried that “further violence on the part of R. S. Carlisle” would be directed at Doña Merced or her husband.
Hayes was right about the potential for retribution. But when it erupted it was aimed not at Doña Merced but at Jack King, who stood in Carlisle’s way just as Don Ramón had. The confrontation came some weeks after the ruling, at a wedding reception held at the Bella Union on July 5, 1865, attended by all the Los Angeles elite. Carlisle, who was roaring drunk, was standing at the bar when Undersheriff King and Sheriff Sánchez came in from the ballroom and ordered drinks. Carlisle looked over at them. “Jack King is a damned shit ass,” he said belligerently. It was a spontaneous outburst, his anger and frustration bursting out under the effect of the booze. King calmly put down his drink, walked directly up to Carlisle, and slapped him hard across the face with his open hand. Carlisle took a swing and the two men clinched, but were separated by Sánchez. Without a word, King turned heel and returned to the ballroom. Carlisle stood there stewing for several minutes, then followed. King was standing with a small group when Carlisle came up from behind, large Bowie knife in hand, which he thrust into King’s side. King staggered away, bleeding profusely, and attempted to draw his revolver. But his gun hand had also been badly cut, so he took the weapon in the other hand and fired twice at Carlisle, both shots going wide and fortunately injuring no one. Dr. Griffin, who was nearby, ordered King carried to his office, where he repaired a severed artery and pronounced him out of danger. But loss of blood kept King confined to bed for more than a week.
His brothers, Frank and Houston King, did not learn of the incident until the following morning. Everyone expected a confrontation with Carlisle, who had remained all night in the barroom of the Bella Union. Sheriff Sánchez stationed himself in a chair on the veranda outside, hoping to cut off the King brothers. Apparently he gave no thought to arresting Carlisle for his assault on King, an attack he witnessed, instead regarding it as a private dispute. Main Street was all hustle and bustle. Dozens of people had come into town for the wedding, and those who had spent the night at the Bella Union or the other hotels on Main Street were checking out, carrying bags, and loading themselves into the coaches and carriages lined up along the dusty street. At noon, with no sign of trouble, Sánchez left his post to purchase a cigar. The King brothers may have been watching, for that was the moment they entered the barroom, revolvers in hand. Carlisle was confering with his attorney. “Your time has come,” Frank King shouted. Carlisle drew his revolver, and the three men began firing simultaneously.
The report of their guns came so rapidly people thought it was firecrackers going off. Houston King fell in the first fire with a ball to his chest. Carlisle was hit several times, but continued firing wildly. His attorney was wounded, as was another bystander. A horse standing in front of the hotel was shot and dropped dead in its tracks. Frank King’s revolver jammed. He charged Carlisle and began clubbing him on the head with the butt end of the weapon. The two men grappled, dancing violently about the room before bursting through the doors and into the crowded street. People screamed and ran in all directions. Teamsters attempted to steady their rearing horses. Amid the chaos, Sheriff Sánchez charged up and pushed the two combatants apart. Carlisle fell back and crashed against the wall of the hotel. His coat and shirt were soaked in blood. Frank King, who had not been hit, fumbled with his revolver, intent on getting off a shot. Carlisle weakly raised his pistol with both hands, took aim and fired. Struck in the heart, King dropped to his knees and remained upright for a few seconds, before falling on his face, dead. Carlisle was carried inside the Bella Union a
nd laid on the billiard table. In addition to a fractured skull he had suffered three or four wounds to his chest, any one of which would have been fatal. It took two or three hours for him to die. Houston King survived his wounds. Tried for murder, he was acquitted.
Despite prevailing in court, Doña Merced was ultimately unable to satisfy her creditors. Jack King advertised the sale of her properties, but could not to raise the capital required to retire the debt run up by her late husband. She was able to hang on to Rancho Cucamonga for several years more, but in the end the mortgage was foreclosed and the property was auctioned off at bottom dollar. Doña Merced relocated to a working-class neighborhood in the pueblo. In the 1880 federal census she was listed as a “laborer,” reduced to taking in laundry. Her sister, Doña Francisca, was more fortunate. After Carlisle’s death she found an able ranch manager, the husband of one of her half sisters, and some years later she married a wealthy Angeleno. She resided in one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods, in a household with several servants. “I hardly think the two sisters can long war with each other,” Hayes had predicted shortly after Carlisle’s death. But the bitterness of their feud persisted. Doña Merced and Doña Francisca remained estranged for the remainder of their lives.
The shootout at the Bella Union, wrote Henry Barrows, was “one of the most desperate encounters that ever occurred in Los Angeles or anywhere else.” In fact it bore a striking resemblance to numerous violent affrays in and around the pueblo, including the gunfight ten years earlier between the King brothers and Micajah Johnson. “This was a quick, sharp, diabolical conflict,” wrote Hayes, “and yet, come to look around me, it seems to have been almost inevitable.” Inevitable perhaps, but as Los Angeles moved into the postwar world, its likes would not be seen again.
•
CHAPTER 27 •
THE HOME GUARD
VIGILANCE COMMITTEE
THE FINAL YEAR of the Civil War was an unhappy time for the Democrats of Los Angeles. Their confidence was badly shaken by Union battlefield victories and the resurgent popularity of President Lincoln. Most were upset over with the national party’s presidential nomination of General George McClellan, who supported a continuation of the war. Henry Hamilton, editor and publisher of the Star, was so disgusted he turned management over to others and left Los Angeles. The paper struggled on without him for a few weeks, then ceased publication altogether. Lincoln actually outpolled McClellan in the November election, largely because of the votes cast by the troops garrisoned at Camp Drum. Citing irregularities, county officials tossed out several hundred ballots, tipping the vote in favor of the Democrats, although the state electorate as a whole voted strongly Republican and California went for Lincoln.
But the Democrats remained firmly in control of local government, carrying the county for the party in every state and national election before 1880. Democrats continued to control Los Angeles, and former secessionists continued to control the Democrats. After the deadly affray with Bob Carlisle, Jack King left the sheriff’s office, read law with Benjamin Hayes, and was admitted to the bar. In 1865 he purchased the Los Angeles News and turned it into a mouthpiece for unreconstructed Chivs. Editor King made no apologies for his views. “Call us traitors!” he wrote in one of his first editorials. “We have been and are yet secessionist.” His newspaper, he announced, would speak in the name of “six million brave, gallant, and chivalrous people who sacrificed fortune, ease, home and the lives of the flower of their young men in support of a principle that should be dear to the heart of every American.” In 1868, after several unhappy editorial posts elsewhere, Henry Hamilton returned to Los Angeles and revived the Star. The postwar press of Los Angeles spoke with the southern drawl of the Democrats.
Few of the young men who fought for the Confederacy returned to Los Angeles after the war. Most were originally from the South and were only wayfarers in California. Among those who came back was Cameron E. Thom, former state senator and district attorney, who served in the Confederate army with the rank of captain and fought in numerous engagements, including Gettysburg, where he was wounded. With a pardon from President Andrew Johnson he was allowed to continue the practice of law, and he resumed his place in the Democratic hierarchy, serving once again as district attorney and later as mayor.
Another returned veteran was Horace Bell. The previous ten years had been full ones for Bell. Following his disillusioning experience in Nicaragua, he performed penance of a sort by fighting for Benito Juarez and his liberal forces in Mexico before being called home to Indiana. His father and a brother, who jointly operated a ferry downstream from Louisville on the Ohio River, had been jailed in Kentucky on a trumped-up charge of assisting a fugitive slave to escape across the river. In an adventure worthy of Bell’s pen—but one about which he declined to write—he and another brother traveled across the river in the dead of night, rescued the prisoners at the point of their revolvers, and brought them back as a crowd of angry men took potshots at them from the Kentucky shore. The Bell brothers were celebrated as local heroes. But several weeks later Bell was kidnapped by bounty hunters, taken back to Kentucky, and placed in the same jail on felony charges. A group of more than a hundred outraged Indiana residents mustered for an attack, and the incident became national news, with Bell’s story reprinted in newspapers all over the country. Kentucky authorities, sensitive to the negative publicity, agreed to release him on bond and quietly dropped the charges.
His Nicaragua and Kentucky experiences converted Bell to the cause of antislavery. He served as a Union scout operating behind enemy lines during the first years of the Civil War, and as a reward for bravery under fire was posted to New York City as a recruitment officer. There he met, wooed, and wed young Georgia Herrick, then was sent to the front in western Louisiana, where he served as chief of scouts, spying on the Confederate cavalry force led by Brigadier General Joseph Lancaster Brent, who had left Los Angeles to serve in the Confederate army.
In July 1866 Bell returned to the pueblo with his wife and the first of their brood of eleven children. They traveled overland across the Southwest, ferried the Colorado River at Yuma, and crested the coast range at Warner’s Pass. Bell had promised his wife that they were relocating to paradise, but coming up the stage road past Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, they saw the parched grassland covered with the bones of thousands of cattle, the toll of the drought. Bell purchased a small property southwest of town, built a cottage for his family (on the southwest corner of what would later be the intersection of Figueroa and Pico), dug a ditch from the zanja, and laid out a vineyard and a small orange grove.
“My reception in the pueblo was cold,” Bell recalled. With the exception of a few gregarious men like Ned Kewen and Jack King, his old friends turned their backs on him. “I was the first man to reappear in Los Angeles who had fought on the Union side in the war,” Bell said, “and as I had gone from this town to do this nefarious thing, I was simply a red rag to the secessionist bulls of the vicinity.”
His first violent clash with them came not long after his return. Bell was shopping at a dry goods store when the clerk told him that a big man was waiting outside with a whip to flog him. “I was quite proud of my war record,” Bell wrote, “and was not in the frame of mind to accept discipline from any individual, especially from a stay-at-home scoundrel.” He confronted the man, who was accompanied by about a dozen Monte Boys. “Is it me that you’re looking for?” Bell inquired. The man glared at him and raised his whip. But before he could use it, Bell put everything he had into a roundhouse punch that laid the man flat. Climbing onto a large wood crate, he came down feet first on his opponent’s chest “with sufficient force to break three ribs from his backbone.” Then he seized the whip and administered a savage lashing. It was the first of many street fights. “I never did get the worst of it in any of them,” Bell bragged. “I always got there first with the most force. That is more than half the fight. When a man knows he has to fight he must get there first—neve
r wait to be assaulted.”
Bell remained a true believer in righteous violence. But as a product of his time and place he found his rage difficult to manage. The fighting continued long after he had won the grudging respect of the Monte Boys. In the most serious incident, a confrontation on a lonely road with a drunken Californio, Bell beat the man to death with the butt end of his pistol. He was acquitted of murder in a jury trial, but the affair highlighted his violent proclivities. The local press frequently depicted him as a dangerous brute and that angered Bell. “I want this community to know that I am a peaceable man,” he wrote in an open letter to Angelenos, and he defied his critics “to point to one single instance of my having ever been known to speak unkindly to any one or to comport myself in any manner unbecoming a gentleman and a good citizen.” When challenged, however, Bell’s instinctive response was to strike first.
THE GREAT DROUGHT of 1862–65 destroyed the open-range cattle business in southern California and led to the breakup of the great ranchos. Most rancheros successfully defended their claims before the Public Land Commission or in the courts, but few survived the drought. To pay taxes, service debts, and maintain their way of life, many took mortgages at usurious rates and later suffered foreclosure. In 1865 former governor John G. Downey, who had gained possession of considerable property through foreclosure, announced the subdivision and sale of fifty-acre plots with access to irrigation at ten dollars per acre, credit available. The Pico brothers and members of the Lugo family, with large properties east of the pueblo adjoining Downey’s, followed suit, making available hundreds of farm sites along the San Gabriel River. Abel Stearns, with huge holdings in the south county, avoided bankruptcy by selling out to a consortium of San Francisco investors, who paid him several million dollars and placed the land in trust for subdivision and sale. “A great many ranches are being reduced into farms and placed on the market for sale at attractive prices,” reported Benjamin C. Truman, Los Angeles correspondent for the New York Times. “Look this way, ye seekers after homes and happiness.”
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