by Paul R. Spitzzeri
We at the Homestead are fortunate to have, in the Museum’s collection, a good many Workman and Temple family artifacts, most of them donated by descendants and which are not only instrumental in better understanding the history of the family, but of greater Los Angeles. The first local family historian was John H. Temple (1856-1926), who owned the 75-acre Homestead from 1888 to 1899 and who gathered a significant number of documents and photographs that, two years ago, were donated by his great grand-niece, Josette Temple, to the Museum.
John provided some of the materials in his possession to John Steven McGroarty, a writer and journalist best known for his The Mission Play, performed for about two decades to roughly two million persons at San Gabriel. McGroarty, who served in Congress and was also California’s poet laureate in addition to earlier work as editor of The West Coast Magazine, set out around 1918 to write what became the three-volume, Los Angeles: From the Mountains to the Sea, which included biographies paid for by those who wanted their mini-histories included in the book, which was published by The American Historical Society out of Chicago in 1921.
This work included Temple’s biography, as well as that of his father, F.P.F., and uncle Jonathan, and there are a few surviving fragments of items that he collated for McGroarty. Presumably, Temple kept the originals and provided the writer his handwritten copies, as is the case with the featured object for this post: a 26 December 1843 letter written by F.P.F. Temple to his brother, Abraham, who resided in the family’s longtime hometown of Reading, Massachusetts, northwest of Boston.
It is certainly good that Temple wrote this out and then received it back, because the original has not, so far, appeared to have survived. It is a rather short piece of correspondence and professes to contain “nothing of importance,” though it, in fact, does have some notable items. Moreover, to have anything survive from 1840s Los Angeles, especially in those last years of the Mexican era, is always welcome to that can learn about the little pueblo that was an outpost in the “Siberia of México.”
As 1843 came to a close, the 21-year old F.P.F. Temple (1822-1880), who still went by his birth name of Pliny (the “F” for Francisco, a baptismal name, was not bestowed on him until the former Congregationalist became a Roman Catholic immediately preceding his marriage to Antonia Margarita Workman at the end of September 1845), had been in Los Angeles for about a year-and-a-half. He came to Mexican California in summer 1841, after a six-month sea voyage around the Horn of South America aboard the bark/barque (a sailing ship with three of more masts, with the rear one positioned fore-and-aft rather than as a square sail) Tasso. Apparently, the young man intended his visit, which included his first meeting with half-brother Jonathan (1796-1866), who was 26 years older (they were the first and last children of the same father with different mothers) to be a year, but, liking Los Angeles, he stayed.
Jonathan left Reading before F.P.F. was born, being among the early American settlers in the kingdom generally denoted as the Sandwich Islands, better known to us as Hawai’i, and was a merchant in Honolulu for several years. In 1827, he left for California and, after a brief sojourn at San Diego, where he was baptized a Catholic and became a Mexican citizen, came to Los Angeles, opening the pueblo’s first store. A baker’s dozen of years later, F.P.F. joined the enterprise, working at the store until 1849, when he left to investigate possibilities in the newly discovered fields of the Sierra Nevada Mountains during the great Gold Rush.
Abraham Temple (1814-1851) was very close to his younger brother and a trio of posts previously published here share preserved pieces of correspondence between the siblings from January 1842, June 1844 and October 1845. At one point, Abraham even considered and broached with F.P.F. the possibility of relocating to Los Angeles, but decided to remain at Reading, where he died, leaving behind his widow, Cassandana Bickford, and daughters Ellen (who became acquainted with F.P.F.’s son and John’s brother, Walter, in 1926, two years before her death) and Alice. The missives between the two covered in this blog show that Abraham, who was a farmer, was called upon by F.P.F. to send materials to California as well as transact other business.
This letter begins with the note that “the Barque Tasso will in a few days leave the coast for the U.S.” and the ship (used in cross-Atlantic travels before plying the route to the Pacific from the East Coast and then used in the sea otter trade along the California coast from 1845-1848) which carried Pliny to California was the same to carry this missive. As virtually any personal correspondence had at a time when infectious diseases were rampant and death seemingly ever-present, F.P.F. added that his health and that of Jonathan were “very good.” Then came his declaration that “I have nothing of importance to write you at this time,” but then he noted,
Business remains dull on the coast owing to the scarcity of rain the year past, there not being grass sufficient to fatten the cattle. We have not received even one bag of tallow this year, so you can judge more or less the condition of the country at present.
With its semi-arid Mediterranean climate, greater Los Angeles was totally at the mercy of the weather cycles, including what later became identified as El Niño and La Niña, in which the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean’s waters is a prime factor in determining precipitation via the jet stream. Other sources, including the United States Geological Survey and such other California residents as John Bidwell, who lived in the north, verify that 1843 and 1844 were dry years.
Anyone who has read the classic Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, published the year before F.P.F. came to California, knows that the economy in greater Los Angeles was wholly dependent on the hide-and-tallow trade, in which cattle skins for rendering into leather and fat (tallow) for the manufacture of candles and soap, for anything beyond subsistence derived from local agriculture.
To read that Jonathan Temple’s store did not get even a single bag of unprocessed tallow is indicative of dire conditions—though, in 1844, when he acquired the 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos in what is now Long Beach (perhaps became persistent drought led relatives of his wife, Rafaela Cota, to sell it to him) and became a prominent cattle rancher, rainfall was plentiful. One can only imagine, moreover, what F.P.F.’s future in-laws, William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, were experiencing at their portion of Rancho La Puente, twenty miles east of Los Angeles, as they, too, were nearly totally reliant on the yield of their cattle herds for their livelihood.
Another item that struck F.P.F. as “nothing of importance” was that “the Mexican General has left this place with his troops and gone to windward to Monterey, they will probably return the coming season.” The reference here was to Manuel Micheltorena (1804-1853), who hailed from the city Oaxaca in the state of that name, southeast of México City. He was a brigadier general in the Mexican Army when, at age 38, he was appointed by President Antonio López de Santa Anna to be governor of the department of Alta California. The problem was that the Californios, as the Spanish-speaking residents of the territory referred to themselves, were largely used to self-government being so isolated from the rest of the country, and did not take well to appointed governors sent from the south.
Moreover, Micheltorena, evidently foreseeing resistance, brought an armed force of about 300-400 men, many paroled from prison to join the detachment, and these were derisively referred to as cholos, a term used later locally to refer to poor Mexican laborers. The new governor, replacing Californio Juan Bautista Alvarado, took his time making his way north, as his term officially began on 30 December 1842, to the departmental capital at Monterey, including a long sojourn at Los Angeles. While Micheltorena leisurely traveled through California, a United States Navy invasion of Monterey took place on the mistaken understanding that war broke out between the two neighboring republics, though this rash act was soon rectified by Commodore Thomas Ap Catesby Jones. Despite this, the governor took his time reaching his capital.
In February 1845, exasperated Californios, led by Pío Pico, the head of the department assembly, fomented a revolt against Micheltorena, who marched south to confront Pico and the rebels, including a detachment of extranjeros (foreigners) led by William Workman, who was assisted by John Rowland. A battle near Cahuenga Pass involved virtually no casualties, but Micheltorena agreed to resign in favor of Pico, who became the last governor of Mexican-era California, and return to México. He served his country during the Mexican-American War and died in 1853 at age 49.
Temple then informed his brother that,
A few days since a Mexican Party arrive from Santa Fe with blankets, it being the principal trade between California and New Mexico. There also arrived from Sonora a small party of miners to work in the mines of California. There has been at times nearly two hundred persons working at the Placer or mine and a good quantity of gold taken out.
Here, too, are events hardly comprising “nothing of importance.” The first mention was of the important trade over the misnamed Old Spanish Trail, which was actually opened in 1829 during the Mexican era and which linked Santa Fé, the capital of New Mexico, with Los Angeles. As Temple noted, blankets were sent west, while horses and mules were the principal objects transported east (the Missouri mule, the Show Me State’s official animal, actually had Mexican origins, including along the Santa Fe Trail, which emanated from Franklin, Missouri—home of William Workman’s brother, David—when that important trade route opened in 1821 and which William used four years later to migrate to Taos, New Mexico.) The Old Spanish Trail, which the Workmans used to migrate to this area, continued in operation for another five years, until 1848, when new routes to California rendered it obsolete.
As for the “mines of California,” this referred to a gold discovery made at Placerita Canyon, at the west end of the San Gabriel (known then as the Sierra Madre) Mountains, near modern Santa Clarita. Francisco López, of a prominent Californio family including administrators of the San Gabriel and San Fernando missions and founders of Paredon Blanco (Boyle Heights), stumbled upon gold flakes there in March 1842 and a rush was on to find more of the precious metal. Though minuscule compared to the Gold Rush of 1848 and afterward, there was some trade in the mineral over the next several years through Los Angeles, including by Abel Stearns, another Massachusetts native and Angel City merchant, as well as Temple, who enlisted Abraham to take gold dust to the American national mint at Philadelphia and cash it in, as the 1844 letter noted.
With this missive, however, Temple made his first efforts at shipping the precious metal to the east, informing Abraham,
I send you enclosed a sample and should like to have you take it to some Goldsmith, one experienced in the business to ascertain the real value. It can be bought here for cash at twelve dollars per ounce, should it prove to be good as there is every appearance of it, it will bring at the mint from eighteen to twenty dollars, and therefore be a source of speculation.
With that, Temple ended his correspondence by asking to be remembered to his other siblings and, incidentally, made no mention of the Christmas holiday, which was largely frowned on by the Puritans of early America and still not that widely celebrated in 1843 (although, just a week before Temple’s letter, English writer Charles Dickens published his novella, A Christmas Carol). In California, locals would often hold a holiday pageant, Las Pastorelas or Los Pastores related to the search of Joseph and Mary for lodging at Bethlehem in advance of the birth of Christ, attend Midnight Mass and follow with a feast and dancing.
While F.P.F. Temple dismissed his letter as containing “nothing of importance,” it obviously contains a number of notable pieces of news and his son obviously thought so 75 years later as he sent a copy to McGroarty for his history of Los Angeles. Someday, we’ll look at the Temple biographies in that book for a post on this blog.