Judge Widney instructed the jury late on the evening of March 26, 1872. It was the court’s responsibility, he told the jurors, to interpret the law. And according to the law, when individuals engaged in combination with others in riotous conduct “all are responsible for the acts of each if done in pursuance and furtherance of the common design.” It was for the jurors, he continued, to determine matters of fact. Specifically, “whether any or all of these defendants did any act or participated by voice or manner with the rioters.” The jurors retired and after several hours of deliberation, at approximately two the following morning, they notified Widney that they had reached a consensus. Despite the hour, the courtroom was crowded as the foreman read the verdicts. Two defendants were acquitted. The remaining seven—Alexander Johnston, Refugio Botello, Louis Mendell, Esteban Alvarado, Patrick McDonald, Charles Austin, and Jesús Martínez—were found guilty of manslaughter. Two days later Widney sentenced them, along with Leonard “Curley” Crenshaw, to terms ranging from two to six years in San Quentin.
KEWEN AND HOWARD appealed to the California Supreme Court, and in the spring of 1873 the justices threw out the convictions, ruling that the indictment had been “fatally defective” in failing to state that Dr. Tong was murdered. It was an outrageous decision based on a trivial technicality, but Judge Widney had no choice but to order the release from San Quentin of the men convicted in his court. They returned to Los Angeles and were never retried. “To this most lame and impotent conclusion, has come the great Chinese riot,” reported the Star. “The convicted parties escape full punishment for their crimes by a quibble, justice is complacent, and the eagle roosts high. Thus it goes.”
Despite this lamentable outcome, the justice system of Los Angeles had performed admirably under the circumstances. In the most complicated case in the county’s history, eight rioters had been convicted of taking the lives of eighteen Chinese. It was imperfect justice, to be sure. The defendants ought to have been convicted of first-degree murder. Moreover, in accordance with Judge Widney’s reading of the law—that every individual engaged in the riot was legally responsible for the acts of all—many Angelenos went unpunished. Not only the lynchers who were never tried, but the bystanders who furnished the rope, the officials who instructed the crowd to “let them have it,” the patrolmen who ignored the crimes committed before their eyes, the respectable citizens who stood by and did nothing. “There is no doubt that all those indicted were guilty,” wrote Horace Bell. “But there were so many others.” Bell’s point is well taken. The massacre was a horrendous act of communal violence. But naming, indicting, and finally convicting a long list of perpetrators after years of allowing vigilantes to get away with murder was a breakthrough. The valence of vigilantism had turned negative. The principal vigilante argument had been that the courts were incapable of securing justice. By the late 1860s that was no longer true. If that truth could not be seen in 1870, when Michel Lachenais was lynched, it had become clear by 1872, when the Chinese rioters were convicted.
Bell was one of the few to take the long view. “Ever since that earlier day when the mayor of the town resigned his position in order to go out and lynch a prisoner who was under the protection of the law of the land,” he wrote, “Los Angeles was ruled by a lawless mob.” Certainly the triumph of lynch law in January 1855, seventeen years before, had marked a signal turning point in the history of frontier Los Angeles. Vigilantism became an institutional feature of Los Angeles life, encouraged by the press and condoned by the authorities. “All this is disagreeable to recall and to record,” wrote Bell, “but it is a part of the city’s history. The people of Los Angeles made that history. They sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. ‘As they sowed so did they reap.’ The harvest was gathered in on the twenty-fourth of October, 1871.”
•
CHAPTER 30 •
FISTS DOUBLED UP
“WHERE IS ALL THIS TO END?” asked John A. Lewis, the Star’s first editor, in a column condemning vigilantism published in 1851, twenty years before the Chinese massacre. If Angelenos allowed vigilantism to continue unchecked, Lewis had worried, it would result in the slaughter of innocents, and “the Days of Terror will then come upon us.” The same warning was repeated many times over the years by the likes of Benjamin Ignatius Hayes, Manuel Clemente Rojo, James S. Waite, and Francisco P. Ramírez. With the exception of Hayes, who consistently opposed lynch law from the time he arrived in Los Angeles in 1850 until his death in 1877, those critics sometimes wavered in their commitment to the legally constituted justice system. In a frontier community like Los Angeles, with underdeveloped governmental institutions and an extraordinarily high incidence of lethal violence, the immediate satisfactions of summary punishment were difficult to resist. But that made vigilantism nonetheless toxic. The mass violence of October 1871 was a horror foretold.
In the aftermath of the terror, Angelenos frequently expressed concern over the reappearance of vigilantism. An incident that took place only a few weeks after the massacre, in January 1872, stoked those fears. The twenty-one-year-old daughter of former county judge Agustín Olvera requested her father’s consent to marry a Mexican doctor, and when Don Agustín refused to grant his blessing the couple eloped, scandalizing elite Californios. One evening, a day or two after the civil ceremony conducted by a local justice, a messenger appeared at the Lafayette Hotel, where the honeymoon couple were staying, with an urgent appeal that the doctor accompany him to the bedside of a dying man. The doctor grabbed his bag and left in a wagon with the messenger. But on the outskirts of town a group of masked men stopped the horses and seized the doctor. They beat him severely, then covering him in hot tar and feathers. The victim filed charges of kidnapping and assault, and after an initial investigation the authorities arrested a half dozen young men from several prominent Californio families, including two sons of Stephen Clark Foster. For Foster, already suffering the shame of having participated in the defrauding of his niece and goddaughter, Doña Merced, it was all downhill thereafter. He retreated into a world of his own, declining to live with his family, and spent the remainder of his life as one of the city’s most notable eccentrics.
“The Sonorans are in a state of exasperation over the late outrage,” the Star reported, “and talk of lynching the lynchers.” E. J. C. Kewen, hired by the families to defend their sons, succeeded in getting the charges dropped for lack of admissible evidence, and soon the excitement faded. But the episode set off alarm bells. “Los Angeles will soon have a reputation for lawlessness if the authorities are unable to check the disposition of the people to take the punishment of alleged offenses into their own hands,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle. “The recent Chinese riot drew upon that city the animadversions of the press throughout the whole country, and now we have to record a fresh outrage. . . . No community calling itself civilized has a right to allow such things to be perpetrated with impunity.”
ROBERT M. WIDNEY proudly embraced the honorable reputation he secured for himself by spearheading the citizen efforts to rescue Chinese victims and by presiding over the trial of the rioters. But Widney remained highly sensitive about his previous record as a leading vigilante. Some time later, during a legal proceeding in which he was serving as an attorney, the opposing counsel elicited testimony that Michel Lachenais had been hanged “by Judge Widney and some other persons.” At those words, Widney jumped from his chair, pulled a pistol from his coat pocket, and charged the witness. “You say I murdered a man?” he exclaimed, his finger on the trigger. “You lie, you perjured villain! I was in the county courtroom trying a case at the time Lachenais was hung and knew nothing whatever about it.” The lynching of Lachenais had been witnessed by virtually every resident of Los Angeles, but Widney claimed to have been ignorant of it. The gentleman doth protest too much.
Popular attitudes toward vigilantism and lynch law had changed. But the extent and limit of those changes were suggested by two incidents that occurred two years later, in the spring
of 1874. In May, in a desperate shootout several miles west of town, a sheriff’s posse captured a notorious outlaw named Tiburcio Vásquez. Wanted for multiple armed robberies and murders in the northern part of the state, Vásquez had fled with his gang to southern California, where they continued their crime spree, earning the leader a reputation as the new Joaquín Murieta or Juan Flores. Vásquez was placed in a heavily guarded jail cell while arrangements were completed for his extradition. “There are some who curse Vásquez’s captors for not killing him on the spot,” wrote a reporter. “They would like to help drag him from his cell and hang him to the nearest lamp-post.”
Yet nothing of the sort took place. Crowds flocked to the jail, not to lynch Vásquez but to gawk at him. In interviews with reporters Vásquez portrayed himself as a persecuted Californio who had acted to defend the honor of his countrymen. He sat for a photographic portrait that sold like hotcakes. Once he recovered from the wounds inflicted during his capture, he was escorted north to San José, where he was properly tried, convicted, and finally executed. “No attempt was made to interfere with the law,” wrote Benjamin C. Truman, who had become editor of the Star. “A feeling more of relief than of revenge or exultation seemed to be uppermost in the minds of all. If we interpret it rightly, it arose from a firm belief that if convicted of the offenses with which he stands charged, he will receive just punishment.”
The capture of Vásquez was celebrated as a significant turning point for law enforcement. And under the tenure of Judge Widney and his successor, former county judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda, the district court’s efficiency continued to improve. During the three years following the Chinese massacre, Los Angeles County authorities investigated forty-seven murders. Thirty-seven of them were “cleared,” either by the death of the suspect, a determination of justifiable homicide, or an indictment. Twenty-nine men were brought to trial for murder or manslaughter, resulting in twenty convictions. Both the clearance rate (79 percent) and the conviction rate (70 percent) compare very favorably with modern patterns—quite impressive in light of what had come before. Growing public confidence in the legally constituted justice system made a crucial difference.
THE SPIRIT OF VIGILANTISM, however, was not yet dead, as events in the crossroads settlement of Workman’s Mill, at the narrows on the east bank of the San Gabriel River, soon demonstrated. The episode began on a June afternoon, not long after Vásquez had been sent north. Rebecca Humphreys Turner, a young wife and mother in the late stages of pregnancy, was sitting on her front porch, rocking her three-year-old daughter, when she observed a young Mexican named Jesús Romo—a stocky man known as El Gordo—ride up to her husband’s general merchandise store, some twenty or thirty yards from the house. William Turner prided himself on his good relations with the Mexicans and Californios who made up the majority of his patrons, insisting they were his good friends. “I did not share his confidence,” Mrs. Turner wrote in a candid memoir not published until after her death, many years later. “I was afraid of them. They were alien to me, and looking on their swarthy faces I thought of Vásquez—Vásquez the notorious, whose name was a terror throughout the state. I distrusted the whole race.” Handing the child to her sister, Mrs. Turner wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and tucked a large revolver into the folds. “I don’t like the looks of that Greaser,” she announced. “I am going down to the store.”
When she entered, her husband was showing Romo his stock of leather boots. As he turned to retrieve another pair, Mrs. Turner saw Romo pull a knife, throw an arm around her husband’s neck, and begin slashing at his throat. “I heard my husband utter an unearthly groan as the razor edge sank into his flesh, and I saw him thrust his hands between the knife and his throat, cutting his fingers to the bone.” Grabbing the revolver, she jammed it into Romo’s back and pulled the trigger, but she had not cocked it and it snapped. She dropped the weapon and jumped onto Romo’s back. Mr. Turner broke free and ran outside. Romo shook Mrs. Turner off and went in pursuit. She picked up the revolver again, cocked it, and succeeded in firing a round at his back, but missed. Romo spun around, pulled his own pistol, and fired point blank. Mrs. Turner had already turned to run, and the ball smashed into her back and lodged in her chest. “Oh, I’m killed,” she cried as she dropped to the ground. Romo ran back into the store, grabbed some eighty dollars in silver coin, and fled. The couple would recover from their horrible wounds, but he lost the use of his right hand and she lost the baby. “Mrs. Turner is a brave woman,” editor James Madison Bassett declared in the Herald, a new Los Angeles daily, only a few months old. “The courage and presence of mind which she exhibited in saving the life of her husband would do credit to a Joan of Arc.”
Word of the outrage spread through the neighborhood, and soon groups of armed men were gathering at Workman’s Mill. Many of her husband’s Spanish-speaking customers were among them, led by a local farmer named Francisco Bustamante, who according to Mrs. Turner was “first in the field, proving his friendship by actively organizing and leading the main searching party.” Rather than showcasing ethnic cooperation, however, the manhunt greatly exacerbated existing tensions. The night following the attack on the Turners, a group of Monte Boys rode south from Workman’s Mill to Pío Pico’s El Ranchito, where Romo had once been employed. Shouting and waving their revolvers, they invaded the Pico’s bunkhouse and rousted his vaqueros, who responded with angry stares and muttered threats. Romo was not among them.
A constable’s posse located the culprit several days later, hiding in a pile of driftwood on the river bottom, less than a mile from the scene of the crime. Romo attempted to run, but was brought down by both loads from a double-barreled shotgun. Seriously wounded, he confessed. He had attacked William Turner to steal his money, he said, and shot his wife to prevent her from shooting him. The men loaded him into the bed of a wagon and drove to Workman’s Mill, where the Turners identified him before a large but orderly crowd. The constable then announced he was taking Romo into Los Angeles to hand him over to the sheriff. They had not gone far when he was stopped by a small group of mounted men who seized Romo and dragged him to a nearby oak, from which he was summarily hanged. According to Mrs. Turner, the tree was destroyed not long thereafter by Romo’s relations. They “chopped it down and burned it,” she wrote, “burned every leaf and branch, and scattered the ashes to the four winds.”
Benjamin Truman of the Star applauded the hanging. “Swift and terrible as the retribution meted out to this miscreant, we have yet to hear of a single person by whom the act is disapproved,” he wrote. “If irregular and extra-judicial punishment for crime was ever warranted in any instance, it was in this.” Editor Bassett offered a more nuanced version of the same argument in the Herald. “There are instances,” he wrote, “where justice can only be attained through unlawful acts. The hanging of El Gordo was one.” He had failed in his attempt to murder the Turners but succeeded in killing their unborn child, for which he deserved to die. But since the law did not treat that crime as a homicide, the state would not have executed him, so the people had to. “We may preach law and order as long and as strong as we like, but when the people find the law will not protect them, they will protect themselves,” wrote Bassett. “We must protect ourselves—legally if possible, but we must protect ourselves.” These arguments had been heard many times before. A correspondent in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin offered a starker explanation. “Perhaps the fact that Vásquez has become rather a lion and a hero than a culprit has had something to do in provoking wild vengeance in the case of El Gordo.”
The group who lynched Romo, the Star reported, included “some of the worthiest and most respected citizens of Los Angeles County.” Yet in accordance with editorial custom, none of the local papers identified those men by name, despite the fact that, as Rebecca Turner wrote in her memoir, everyone in the neighborhood knew who they were. The coroner’s jury reported they had been “unable to find any indictment in the case, for want of evidence identifyi
ng any of the persons who committed the crime.” The verdict outraged the Californio and Mexican communities, who packed an angry public meeting held in San Gabriel. Pío Pico, smarting from the invasion of his ranch, cursed the Monte Boys, and swore that he and his vaqueros would “kill the whole damn lot of them.” A few days later, an open letter addressed to Pico appeared in the Herald. “If, by chance, some one of the vigilantes has a bad end by your hand or your influence or the friends of the late Jesús Romo, may God forgive you,” it read. “Neither one nor two will pay the debt. As soon as we begin, God alone can see the end.” It was signed “Monte Vigilantes.” The 1874 incident at Workman’s Mill, ending in threat and counterthreat, pointed to continuing ethnic tensions and the enduring appeal of vigilantism. It is important to note, however, that Jesús Romo was the last man hanged by vigilantes in Los Angeles County.
Not long after the lynching, Francisco Bustamante, the Mexican friend of Mr. Turner’s, announced that he and his large family were relocating to another part of the county. “I am now out of favor with my countrymen,” he told the Turners. Friendships across ethnic lines raised the suspicions of some of his neighbors, and fearing for his safety Bustamente had taken to wearing a revolver. “He embraced us both,” Mrs. Turner wrote, and “as his big arms enfolded me, the old terror rushed back like a great wave. I shuddered inwardly and felt a knife between my ribs.” Mrs. Turner felt a little ashamed of herself. “There was no earthly reason for the fantastic emotion,” she wrote, “since Bustamante was loyalty itself. But I couldn’t help it to save my soul, and I was glad when his foot was in the stirrup and he was waving his hand from the bend in the road.”
Eternity Street Page 52