The first hackney coach ever built in Los Angeles was turned out in September by John Goller for J. J. Reynolds—about the same time that the Oriental Stage Company brought a dozen new Concord coaches from the East—and cost one thousand dollars. Goller was then famous for elaborate vehicles and patented spring buggies which he shipped even to pretentious and bustling San Francisco. Before the end of November, however, friends of the clever and enterprising carriage-maker were startled to hear that he had failed for the then not insignificant sum of about forty thousand dollars.
Up to the fall of the year, no connection existed between Temple and First Streets west of Spring; but on the first day of September, a cut through the hill, effected by means of chain-gang labor and continuing Fort Street north, was completed, to the satisfaction of the entire community.
About the middle of October, a petition was presented to the Common Council calling attention to the fact that the Los Angeles Water Company two years before had agreed to erect a fountain on the Plaza; and declaring that the open place was little short of a "scarecrow for visitors." The Company immediately replied that it was ready to put up the fountain; and in November the Council ordered the brick tank taken away. At the beginning of August, 1871, the fountain began playing.
During the second marshalship of William C. Warren, when Joe Dye was one of his deputy officers, there was great traffic in Chinese women, one of whom was kidnaped and carried off to San Diego. A reward of a hundred dollars was offered for her return, and she was brought back on a charge of theft and tried in the Court of Justice Trafford, on Temple Street near Spring. During the trial, on October 31st, 1870, Warren and Dye fell into a dispute as to the reward; and the quarrel was renewed outside the courtroom. At a spot near the corner of Spring and Temple streets Dye shot and killed Warren; and in the scrimmage several other persons standing near were wounded. Dye was tried, but acquitted. Later, however, he himself was killed by a nephew, Mason Bradfield, whose life he had frequently threatened and who fired the deadly bullet from a window of the New Arlington Hotel, formerly the White House, at the southeast corner of Commercial and Los Angeles streets. Mrs. C. P. Bradfield, Bradfield's mother and a teacher, who came in 1875, was the author of certain text-books for drawing, published by A. S. Barnes & Company of New York.
Failures in raising and using camels in the Southwest were due, at least partially, to ignorance of the animal's wants, a company of Mexicans, in the early sixties, overloading some and treating them so badly that nearly all died. Later, Frenchmen, who had had more experience, secured the two camels left, and by 1870 there was a herd of no less than twenty-five on a ranch near the Carson River in Nevada, where they were used in packing salt for sixty miles or more to the mills.
On October 31st, the first Teacher's Institute held in Los Angeles County was opened, with an attendance of thirty-five, in the old Bath Street schoolhouse, that center being selected because the school building at Spring and Second streets, though much better adapted to the purpose, was considered to be too far out of town! County Superintendent W. M. McFadden was President; J. M. Guinn was Vice-President; and P. C. Tonner was Secretary; while a leader in discussions was Dr. Truman H. Rose, who there gave a strong impetus to the founding of the first high school.
Soon after this Institute was held, the State Legislature authorized bonds to the amount of twenty thousand dollars for the purpose of erecting another schoolhouse; and the building was soon to be known as the Los Angeles High School. W. H. Workman, M. Kremer and H. D. Barrows were the building committee.
Mentioning educators, I may introduce the once well-known name of Professor Adams, an instructor in French who lived here in the early seventies. He was so very urbane that on one occasion, while overdoing his polite attention to a lady, he fell off the sidewalk and badly broke his leg!
In a previous chapter I have spoken of a Frenchman named Lachenais who killed a fellow-countryman at a wake, the murder being one of a succession of crimes for which he finally paid the penalty at the hands of a Vigilance Committee in the last lynching witnessed here.
Lachenais lived near where the Westminster Hotel now stands, on the northeast corner of Main and Fourth streets, but he also had a farm south of the city, adjoining that of Jacob Bell who was once a partner in sheep-raising with John Schumacher. The old man was respectable and quiet, but Lachenais quarreled with him over water taken from the zanja. Without warning, he rode up to Bell as he was working in his field and shot him dead; but there being no witnesses to the act, this murder remained, temporarily, a mystery. One evening, as Lachenais (to whom suspicion had been gradually directed), was lounging about in a drunken condition, he let slip a remark as to the folly of anyone looking for Bell's murderer; and this indiscretion led to his arrest and incarceration.