Alexander Bell died on July 24th, after a residence of twenty-nine years in Los Angeles.
Beginning with the seventies, attention was directed to Santa Monica as a possible summer resort, but it was some years before many people saw in the Bay and its immediate environment the opportunities upon which thousands have since seized. In the summer of 1871 less than twenty families, the majority in tents, sojourned there among the sycamore groves in the Cañon where J. M. Harned had a bar and "refreshment parlor." The attractions of beach and surf, however, were beginning to be appreciated, and so were the opportunities for shooting—at Tell's and elsewhere; and on Sundays two or three hundred excursionists frequently visited that neighborhood, Reynolds, the liveryman, doing a thriving business carrying people to the beach.
Speaking of this gradual awakening to the attractions of Santa Monica, I recall that school children of the late sixties held their picnics at the Cañon, going down on crowded stages where the choicest seats were on the box; and that one of the most popular drivers of that period was Tommy O'Campo. He handled the reins with the dexterity of a Hank Monk, and before sunrise Young America would go over to the corral, there to wait long and patiently in order to get an especially desirable seat on Tommy's stage.
With the completion of the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad, excursions to Catalina began to be in vogue; but as the local population was small, considerable effort was needed sometimes to secure enough patrons to make the trips pay. Thus an excursion for Sunday, August 13th, was advertised by the skipper of the steamer Vaquero, a couple of dollars for the round trip being charged, with half price for children; but by Saturday morning the requisite number of subscribers had not been obtained, and the excursion was called off.
Otto J. and Oswald F. Zahn, sons of Dr. Johann Carl Zahn who came here about 1871, were carrier-pigeon fanciers and established a service between Avalon and Los Angeles, fastening their messages, written on tissue paper, by delicate wire to the birds' legs. For some time the Catalina Pigeon Messengers, as they were called, left Avalon late in the afternoon, after the last steamer, bringing news that appeared in the Los Angeles newspapers of the following morning. Usually the birds took a good hour in crossing the channel; but on one occasion, Blue Jim, the champion, covered the distance of forty-eight miles in fifty minutes.
On the evening of August 23d, the announcement came over the wires of Don Abel Stearns's death in San Francisco, at five o'clock that afternoon, at the Grand Hotel. Late in October, his body was brought to Los Angeles for final interment, the tombstone having arrived from San Francisco a week or two previously. Awesome indeed was the scene that I witnessed when the ropes sustaining the eight hundred pound metallic casket snapped, pitching the coffin and its grim contents into the grave. I shall never forget the unearthly shriek of Doña Arcadia, as well as the accident itself.
With the wane of summer, we received the startling news of the death, through Indians, of Frederick Loring, the young journalist and author well known in Los Angeles, who was with the United States Exploring Expedition to Arizona as a correspondent of Appleton's Journal. "Bootless, coatless and everything but lifeless," as he put it, he had just escaped perishing in Death Valley, when the stage party was attacked by Apaches, and Loring and four other passengers were killed.
In September, during Captain George J. Clarke's administration as Postmaster, foreign money-orders began to be issued here for the first time, payable only in Great Britain and Ireland, twenty-five cents being charged for sending ten dollars or less; and shortly afterward, international money-orders were issued for Germany and some other Continental countries. Then five or six hundred letters for Los Angeles County were looked upon as rather a large dispatch by one steamer from San Francisco and the North; and the canceling of from twelve to fifteen dollars' worth of stamps a day was regarded as "big business."
Vincent Collyer—the Peace Commissioner sent out with General O. O. Howard by the Government in 1868—who eventually made himself most unpopular in Arizona by pleading the cause of the scalping Apaches in the fall of 1871, put up at the Pico House; when public feeling led one newspaper to suggest that if the citizens wished "to see a monster," they had "only to stand before the hotel and watch Collyer pass to and fro!"
In the fall, tidings of Chicago's awful calamity by fire reached Los Angeles, but strange to say, no public action was taken until the editor of the Los Angeles News, on October 12th, gave vent to his feelings in the following editorial: