CHAPTER XVIII
FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH THE TELEGRAPH
1860
In 1860, Maurice Kremer was elected County Treasurer, succeeding H. N. Alexander who had entered the service of Wells Fargo & Company; and he attended to this new function at his store on Commercial Street, where he kept the County funds. I had my office in the same place; and the salary of the Treasurer at the time being but one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, with no allowance for an assistant, I agreed to act as Deputy Treasurer without pay. As a matter of fact, I was a sort of Emergency Deputy only, and accepted the responsibility as an accommodation to Kremer, in order that when he was out of town there might be someone to take charge of his affairs. It is very evident, however, that I did not appreciate the danger connected with this little courtesy, since it often happened that there were from forty to fifty thousand dollars in the money-chest. An expert burglar could have opened the safe without special effort, and might have gone scot-free, for the only protector at night was my nephew, Kaspare Cohn, a mere youth, who clerked for me and slept on the premises.
Inasmuch as no bank had as yet been established in Los Angeles, Kremer carried the money to Sacramento twice a year; nor was this transportation of the funds, first by steamer to San Francisco, thence by boat inland, without danger. The State was full of desperate characters who would cut a throat or scuttle a ship for a great deal less than the amount involved. At the end of five or six years, Kremer was succeeded as County Treasurer by J. Huber, Jr. I may add, incidentally, that the funds in question could have been transported north by Wells Fargo & Company, but their charges were exorbitant. At a later period, when they were better equipped and rates had been reduced, they carried the State money.
On January 2d, Joseph Paulding, a Marylander, died. Twenty-seven years before, he came by way of the Gila, and boasted having made the first two mahogany billiard tables constructed in California.
The same month, attention was directed to a new industry, the polishing and mounting of abalone shells, then as now found on the coast of Southern California. A year or so later, G. Fischer was displaying a shell brooch, colored much like an opal and mounted in gold. By 1866, the demand for abalone shells had so increased that over fourteen thousand dollars' worth was exported from San Francisco, while a year later consignments valued at not less than thirty-six thousand dollars were sent out through the Golden Gate. Even though the taste of to-day considers this shell as hardly deserving of such a costly setting, it is nevertheless true that these early ornaments, much handsomer than many specimens of quartz jewelry, soon became quite a fad in Los Angeles. Natives and Indians, especially, took a fancy to the abalone shell, and even much later earrings of that material were worn by the Crow scout Curley, a survivor of the Custer Massacre. In 1874, R. W. Jackson, a shell-jeweler on Montgomery Street, San Francisco, was advertising here for the rarities, offering as much as forty and fifty dollars for a single sound red, black or silver shell, and from fifty to one hundred dollars for a good green or blue one. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the Chinese consumed the abalone meat in large quantities.
Broom-making was a promising industry in the early sixties, the Carpenters of Los Nietos and F. W. Gibson of El Monte being among the pioneers in this handiwork. Several thousand brooms were made in that year; and since they brought three dollars a dozen, and cost but eleven cents each for the handles and labor, exclusive of the corn, a good profit was realized.
Major Edward Harold Fitzgerald, well known for campaigns against both Indians and bandits, died on January 9th and was buried with military honors.
On January 10th, Bartholomew's Rocky Mountain Circus held forth on the Plaza, people coming in from miles around to see the show. It was then that the circus proprietor sought to quiet the nerves of the anxious by the large-lettered announcement, "A strict Police is engaged for the occasion!"
The printing of news, editorials and advertisements in both English and Spanish recalls again not only some amusing incidents in court activities resulting from the inability of jurists and others to understand the two languages, but also the fact that in the early sixties sermons were preached in the Catholic Church at Los Angeles in English and Spanish, the former being spoken at one mass, the latter at another. English proper names such as John and Benjamin were Spanished into Juan and Benito, and common Spanish terms persisted in English advertisements, as when Don Juan Ávila and Fernando Sepúlveda, in January, announced that they would run the horse Coyote one thousand varas, for three thousand dollars. In 1862, also, when Syriaco Arza was executed for the murder of Frank Riley, the peddler, and the prisoner had made a speech to the crowd, the Sheriff read the warrant for the execution in both English and Spanish. Still another illustration of the use of Spanish here, side by side with English, is found in the fact that in 1858 the Los Angeles assessment rolls were written in Spanish, although by 1860 the entries were made in English only.
A letter to the editor of the Star, published on January 28th, 1860, will confirm my comments on the primitive school conditions in Los Angeles in the first decade or two after I came. The writer complained of the filthy condition of the Boys' Department, School No. 1, in which, to judge by the mud, "the floor did not seem to have been swept for months!" The editor then took up the cudgel, saying that the Board formerly paid a man for keeping the schoolroom clean, but that the Common Council had refused any longer to pass the janitor's bills; adding that, in his opinion, the Council had acted wisely! If the teacher had really wished the schoolroom floor to be clean, contended the economical editor, he should have appointed a pupil to swing a broom each day or, at least, each week, and otherwise perform the necessary duties on behalf of the health of the school.