Corbitt, who at one time controlled, with Dibblee, great ranch areas near Santa Bárbara, and in 1859 was in partnership with Barker, owned the Santa Anita rancho, which he later sold to William Wolfskill. From Los Angeles, Corbitt went to Oregon, where he became, I think, a leading banker.
Louis Mesmer arrived here in 1858, then went to Fraser River and there, in eight months, he made twenty thousand dollars by baking for the Hudson Bay Company's troops. A year later he was back in Los Angeles; and on Main Street, somewhere near Requena, he started a bakery. In time he controlled the local bread trade, supplying among others the Government troops here. In 1864, Mesmer bought out the United States Hotel, previously run by Webber & Haas, and finally purchased from Don Juan N. Padilla the land on which the building stood. This property, costing three thousand dollars, extended one hundred and forty feet on Main Street and ran through to Los Angeles, on which street it had a frontage of about sixty feet. Mesmer's son Joseph is still living and is active in civic affairs.
William Nordholt, a Forty-niner, was also a resident of Los Angeles for some time. He was a carpenter and worked in partnership with Jim Barton; and when Barton was elected Sheriff, Nordholt continued in business for himself. At length, in 1859, he opened a grocery store on the northwest corner of Los Angeles and First streets, which he conducted for many years. Even in 1853, when I first knew him, Nordholt had made a good start; and he soon accumulated considerable real estate on First Street, extending from Los Angeles to Main. He shared his possessions with his Spanish wife, who attended to his grocery; but after his death, in perhaps the late seventies, his children wasted their patrimony.
Notwithstanding the opening of other hotels, the Bella Union continued throughout the fifties to be the representative headquarters of its kind in Los Angeles and for a wide area around. On April 19th, 1856, Flashner & Hammell took hold of the establishment; and a couple of years after that, Dr. J. B. Winston, who had had local hotel experience, joined Flashner and together they made improvements, adding the second story, which took five or six months to complete. This step forward in the hostelry was duly celebrated, on April 14th, 1859, at a dinner, the new dining-room being advertised, far and wide, as "one of the finest in all California."
Shortly after this, however, Marcus Flashner (who owned some thirty-five acres at the corner of Main and Washington streets, where he managed either a vineyard or an orange orchard), met a violent death. He used to travel to and from this property in a buggy; and one day—June 29th, 1859—his horse ran away, throwing him out and killing him. In 1860, John King, Flashner's brother-in-law, entered the management of the Bella Union; and by 1861, Dr. Winston had sole control.
Strolling again, in imagination, into the old Bella Union of this time, I am reminded of a novel method then employed to call the guests to their meals. When I first came to Los Angeles the hotel waiter rang a large bell to announce that all was ready; but about the spring of 1859 the fact that another meal had been concocted was signalized by the blowing of a shrill steam-whistle placed on the hotel's roof. This brought together both the "regulars" and transients, everyone scurrying to be first at the dining-room door.
About the middle of April, Wells Fargo & Company's rider made a fast run between San Pedro and Los Angeles, bringing all the mail matter from the vessels, and covering the more than twenty-seven miles of the old roundabout route in less than an hour.
The Protestant Church has been represented in Los Angeles since the first service in Mayor Nichols' home and the missionary work of Adam Bland; but it was not until May 4th, 1859, that any attempt was made to erect an edifice for the Protestants in the community. Then a committee, including Isaac S. K. Ogier, A. J. King, Columbus Sims, Thomas Foster, William H. Shore, N. A. Potter, J. R. Gitchell and Henry D. Barrows began to collect funds. Reverend William E. Boardman, an Episcopalian, was invited to take charge; but subscriptions coming in slowly, he conducted services, first in one of the school buildings and then in the Court House, until 1862 when he left.
Despite its growing communication with San Francisco, Los Angeles for years was largely dependent upon sail and steamboat service, and each year the need of a better highway to the North, for stages, became more and more apparent. Finally, in May, 1859, General Ezra Drown was sent as a commissioner to Santa Bárbara, to discuss the construction of a road to that city; and on his return he declared the project quite practicable. The Supervisors had agreed to devote a certain sum of money, and the Santa Barbareños, on their part, were to vote on the proposition of appropriating fifteen thousand dollars for the work. Evidently the citizens voted favorably; for in July of the following year James Thompson, of Los Angeles, contracted for making the new road through Santa Bárbara County, from the Los Angeles to the San Luis Obispo lines, passing through Ventura—or San Buenaventura, as it was then more poetically called—Santa Bárbara and out by the Gaviota Pass; in all, a distance of about one hundred and twenty-five miles. Some five or six months were required to finish the rough work, and over thirty thousand dollars was expended for that alone.
Winfield Scott Hancock, whom I came to know well and who had been here before, arrived in Los Angeles in May, 1859, to establish a depot for the Quartermaster's Department which he finally located at Wilmington, naming it Drum Barracks, after Adjutant-General Richard Coulter Drum, for several years at the head of the Department of the West. Hancock himself was Quartermaster and had an office in a brick building on Main Street near Third; and he was in charge of all Government property here and at Yuma, Arizona Territory, then a military post. He thus both bought and sold; advertising at one time, for example, a call for three or four hundred thousand pounds of barley, and again offering for sale, on behalf of poor Uncle Sam, the important item of a lone, braying mule! Hancock invested liberally in California projects, and became interested, with others, in the Bear Valley mines; and at length had the good luck to strike a rich and paying vein of gold quartz.