In 1853, there was but one newspaper in the city—a weekly known as La Estrella de los Angeles or The Los Angeles Star, printed half in Spanish, half in English. It was founded on May 17th, 1851, by John A. Lewis and John McElroy, who had their printing office in the lower room of a small wooden house on Los Angeles Street, near the corral of the Bella Union hotel. This firm later became Lewis, McElroy & Rand. There was then no telegraphic communication with the outside world, and the news ordinarily conveyed by the sheet was anything but important. Indeed, all such information was known, each week, by the handful of citizens in the little town long before the paper was published, and delays in getting mail from a distance—in one case the post from San Francisco to Los Angeles being under way no less than fifty-two days!—led to Lewis giving up the editorship in disgust. When a steamer arrived, some little news found its way into the paper; but even then matters of national and international moment became known in Los Angeles only after the lapse of a month or so. The admission of California to the Union in 1850, for example, was first reported on the Coast six weeks after Congress had voted in California's favor; while in 1852, the deaths of Clay and Webster were not known in the West until more than a month after they had occurred. This was a slight improvement, however, over the conditions in 1841 when (it used to be said) no one west of the Rockies knew of President Harrison's demise until over three months and a half after he was buried! Our first Los Angeles newspaper was really more of an advertising medium than anything else, and the printing outfit was decidedly primitive, though the printers may not have been as badly off as were the typos of the Californian. The latter, using type picked up in a Mexican cloister, found no W's among the Spanish letters and had to set double V's until more type was brought from the Cannibal or Sandwich Islands! Which reminds me of José de la Rosa, born in Los Angeles about 1790, and the first journeyman to set type in California, who died over one hundred years old. But if the Estrella made a poor showing as a newspaper, I have no doubt that, to add to the editor's misfortunes, the advertising rates were so low that his entire income was but small. In 1854, the Star and its imprenta, as it was then styled, were sold to a company organized by James S. Waite, who, a year later, was appointed Postmaster of the city. Speaking of the Star, I should add that one of its first printers was Charles Meyrs Jenkins, later City Zanjero, who had come to California, a mere stripling, with his stepfather, George Dalton, Sr.
The Post Office, too, at this time, was far from being an important institution. It was located in an adobe building on Los Angeles, between Commercial and Arcadia streets, and Dr. William B. Osburn, sometimes known as Osbourn—who came to California from New York in 1847, in Colonel Stevenson's regiment, and who had established a drug store, such as it was, in 1850—had just been appointed Postmaster. A man who in his time played many parts, Osburn had half a dozen other irons in the fire besides politics (including the interests of a floral nursery and an auction room), and as the Postmaster was generally away from his office, citizens desiring their mail would help themselves out of a soap box—subdivided like a pigeon house, each compartment being marked with a letter; and in this way the city's mail was distributed! Indifferent as Dr. Osburn was to the postmastership (which, of course, could not have paid enough to command anyone's exclusive services), he was rather a clever fellow and, somewhat naturally perhaps for a student of chemistry, is said to have made as early as August 9th, 1851, (and in connection with one Moses Searles, a pioneer house and sign painter) the first daguerreotype photographs produced in Los Angeles. For two years or more, Dr. Osburn remained Postmaster, resigning his office on November 1st, 1855. While he was a notary public, he had an office in Keller's Building on Los Angeles Street. J. H. Blond was another notary; he had an office opposite the Bella Union on Main Street. Osburn died in Los Angeles on July 31st, 1867.
No sooner had I arrived in San Francisco, than I became aware of the excitement incidental to the search for gold, and on reaching Los Angeles, I found symptoms of the same fever. That year, as a matter of fact, recorded the highest output of gold, something like sixty-five million dollars' worth being mined; and it was not many months before all was bustle in and about our little city, many people coming and going, and comparatively few wishing to settle, at least until they had first tried their luck with the pick and pan. Not even the discovery of gold in the San Feliciano Cañon, near Newhall, in the early forties—for I believe the claim is made that Southern Californians, while searching for wild onions, had the honor of digging out, in the despised "cow-counties," the first lump of the coveted metal—had set the natives so agog; so that while the rush to the mines claimed many who might otherwise have become permanent residents, it added but little to the prosperity of the town, and it is no wonder that, for a while, the local newspapers refused to give events the notice which they deserved. To be sure, certain merchants—among them dealers in tinware, hardware and groceries, and those who catered especially to miners, carrying such articles as gold-washers, canteens and camp-outfits—increased their trade; but many prospective gold-seekers, on their way to distant diggings, waited until they got nearer the scene of their adventures before buying tools and supplies, when they often exhausted their purses in paying the exorbitant prices which were asked. Barring the success of Francisco Garcia who used gangs of Indians and secured in the one year 1855 over sixty thousand dollars' worth of gold—one nugget being nearly two thousand dollars in value—the placer gold-mining carried on in the San Gabriel and San Francisquito cañons was on the whole unimportant, and what gold-dust was produced at these points came to Los Angeles without much profit to the toiling miners; so that it may be safely stated that cattle- and horse-raising, of which I shall speak in more detail, were Southern California's principal sources of income. As for the gold dust secured, San Francisco was the clearing-house for the Coast, and all of the dust ultimately found its way there until sometime later Sacramento developed and became a competitor. Coming, as I did, from a part of the world where gold dust was never seen, at least by the layman, this sudden introduction to sacks and bottles full of the fascinating yellow metal produced upon me, as the reader may imagine, another one of those strange impressions fixing so indelibly my first experiences in the new, raw and yet altogether romantic world.
CHAPTER VIII
ROUND ABOUT THE PLAZA
1853-1854
At the time of my arrival, the Plaza, long the nucleus of the original settlement, was the center of life in the little community, and around it clustered the homes of many of those who were uppermost in the social scale, although some of the descendants of the finest Spanish families were living in other parts of the city. This was particularly so in the case of José Andrés Sepúlveda, who had a beautiful old adobe on some acreage that he owned northwest of Sonora Town, near the place where he constructed a stone reservoir to supply his house with water. Opposite the old Plaza Church dwelt a number of families of position and, for the most part, of wealth—in many cases the patrons of less fortunate or dependent ones, who lived nearby. The environment was not beautiful, a solitary pepper, somewhat north of the Plaza, being the only shade-tree there; yet the general character of the homes was somewhat aristocratic, the landscape not yet having been seriously disturbed by any utilitarian project such as that of the City Fathers who, by later granting a part of the old square for a prosaic water tank, created a greater rumpus than had the combative soldiers some years before. The Plaza was shaped much as it is at present, having been reduced considerably, but five or six years earlier, by the Mexican authorities: they had planned to improve its shape, but had finished their labors by contracting the object before them. There was no sign of a park; on the contrary, parts of the Plaza itself, which had suffered the same fate as the Plaza in San Francisco, were used as a dumping-ground for refuse. From time to time many church and other festivals were held at this square—a custom no doubt traceable to the Old World and to earlier centuries; but before any such affair could take place—requiring the erecting of booths and banks of vegetation in front of the neighboring houses—all rubbish had to be removed, even at the cost of several days' work.
Among the distinguished citizens of Los Angeles whose residences added to the social prestige of the neighborhood was Don Ygnácio Del Valle, father of R. F. Del Valle. Until 1861, he resided on the east side of the square, in a house between Calle de los Negros and Olvera Street, receiving there his intimate friends as well as those who wished to pay him their respects when he was Alcalde, Councilman and member of the State Legislature. In 1861, Del Valle moved to his ranch, Camulos. Ygnácio Coronel was another eminent burgher residing on the east side of the Plaza, while Cristóbal Aguilar's home faced the South.
Not far from Del Valle's—that is, back of the later site of the Pico House, between the future Sanchez Street and Calle de los Negros—lived Don Pio Pico, then and long after a striking figure, not merely on account of his fame as the last of the Mexican governors, but as well because of his physique and personality. I may add that as long as he lived, or at least until the tide of his fortune turned and he was forced to sell his most treasured personal effects, he invariably adorned himself with massive jewelry of much value; and as a further conceit, he frequently wore on his bosom Mexican decorations that had been bestowed upon him for past official services. Don Pio really preferred country life at the Ranchito, as his place was called; but official duties and, later, illness and the need of medical care, kept him in town for months at a time. He had three sisters, two of whom married in succession José António Carrillo, another resident at the Plaza and the then owner of the site of the future Pico House; while the third was the wife of Don Juan Forster, in whose comfortable home Don Pio found a retreat when distressing poverty overtook him in old age. Sanchez Street recalls still another don of the neighborhood, Vicente Sanchez, grandfather of Tomás A. Sanchez, who was domiciled in a two-story and rather elaborate dwelling near Carrillo, on the south side of the Plaza. Sanchez Hall stood there until the late seventies.
The Beau Brummel of Los Angeles in the early fifties was Don Vicente Lugo, whose wardrobe was made up exclusively of the fanciest patterns of Mexican type; his home, one of the few two-story houses in the pueblo, was close to Ygnácio Del Valle's. Lugo, a brother of Don José María, was one of the heavy taxpayers of his time; as late as 1860, he had herds of twenty-five hundred head of cattle, or half a thousand more than Pio and Andrés Pico together owned. María Ballestero, Lugo's mother-in-law, lived near him.
Don Agustin Olvera dwelt almost opposite Don Vicente Lugo's, on the north side of the Plaza, at the corner of the street perpetuating his name. Don Agustin arrived from Mexico, where he had been Juez de Paz, in 1834, or about the same time that Don Ygnácio Coronel came, and served as Captain in the campaign of Flores against Frémont, even negotiating peace with the Americans; then he joined Dr. Hope's volunteer police, and was finally chosen, at the first election in Los Angeles, Judge of the First Instance, becoming the presiding officer of the Court of Sessions. Five or six years later, he was School Commissioner. He had married Doña Concepción, one of not less than twenty-two children of Don Santiago Arguello, son of a governor of both Californias, and his residence was at the northeast end of the Plaza, in an adobe which is still standing. There, while fraternizing with the newly-arrived Americans, he used to tell how, in 1850, when the movement for the admission of California as a State was under way, he acted as secretary to a meeting called in this city to protest against the proposal, fearing lest the closer association with Northern California would lead to an undue burden of taxes upon the South. Olvera Street is often written by mistake, Olivera.
Francisco O'Campo was another man of means whose home was on the east side of the Plaza. Although he was also a member of the new Ayuntamiento, inaugurated in 1849, and although he had occupied other offices, he was very improvident, like so many natives of the time, and died, in consequence, a poor man. In his later years, he used to sit on the curbstone near the Plaza, a character quite forlorn, utterly dejected in appearance, and despondently recalling the by-gone days of his prosperity.