by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Having, in the first part of this post, mined Sheldon G. Jackson’s 1977 biography of merchant and rancher Henry Dalton to detail the migration of the London native to Peru and his business endeavors on the west coast of the Americas, including in México and its furthest reaches with the department of Alta California, we now look at the opening entries in the first of the ledgers that Dalton kept for his mercantile operations at his Los Angeles store as well as at his Rancho Azusa, where his southern neighbors at Rancho La Puente were John Rowland and William Workman.
Jackson mentioned in his work that Dalton had $50,000 in inventory when he opened the business in the Angel City and had ready customers from among the elite in local society and this is certainly reflected on those first few pages of the tome, with the accounting dated 30 September 1845. The store was located on a block with frontages on the calles Principal and Primavera, or Man and Spring streets, as well as across the latter, Court Street, later Franklin and no longer extant.
It was noted that the tienda was the basis for Dalton’s endeavors at the time in Alta California and “an important retail store for the people of the city,” while vessels operated by him add more to the inventory there. Jackson also noted that, while there was a manager for day-to-day operations, “Dalton himself took care of the bookkeeping, giving attention to it between voyages.” Lastly, the historian observed that “the name of practically every important inhabitant of the Los Angeles region appeared on his books.”
Meanwhile, Dalton, purportedly responding to an idea of a sort of British colonization scheme for California, embarked on the acquisition of ranch land in the San Gabriel Valley, that, in short order, involved the ranchos Azusa, San Francisquito and Santa Anita, and a bit of an empire on tens of thousands of acres. This was something, notably, that did not involve fellow English native William Workman, who, to our knowledge, had no connection to any such scheme, whatever plausibility there may or may not have been just prior to the American invasion of 1846-1847.
It is probably no surprise that the first customer listed in the inaugural Dalton ledger was Jonathan, or John, Temple, who opened Los Angeles’ first store upon arrival there in 1828. This was located just north of Dalton’s place, in what became the Temple Block where Main and Spring converged and where Temple soon ran west from that intersection. It may further not be unexpected that Temple’s purchases from Dalton, having taken place on the 8th, 14th and 15th of that month, comprised 37% of the total for that month, more than 202 pesos of the north of 547 that was collected from individual sales.
It is, moreover, more than usual that among the articles Temple purchased were rebozos (a short of shawl) that was a staple for women in the City of the Angels, while fabrics such as burato (crape) and “Blue Dril” (a lightweight, soft cotton) were also purchased along with “tunicos de lada,” this appearing to mean a type of shirt. A dozen pairs of silk gloves, a large quantity of “assorted iron,” an amount of listones, or wood slats, silk ribbon, and 14 metates were also listed among the purchases.
It is unclear how many of these articles were bought by Temple for his store or for personal use and, given that his brother, Pliny, who was a clerk in that business was married the prior day (and baptized a Roman Catholic, as well, taking the name Francisco, so that he was thereafter known as F.P.F.), the 29th, to Antonia Margarita Workman, one wonders if at least some of the purchases were for wedding gifts.
Like Dalton, John Temple closed his Los Angeles store in 1856, though he soon built two of the city’s finest brick commercial buildings, including the southern end of the Temple Block and, just below that, the Market House (soon to be the Court House, as well as city hall and county administrative offices), while managing his 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos in what is now Long Beach and nearby communities. It would be interesting to know the nature of the relationship among the rivals, but unless there are some items in the Dalton Collection at the Huntington Library that attest to it, evidence has so far been elusive.
The next largest set of purchases, about a quarter of the month’s dealings, were to another American merchant, Alexander Bell (1801-1871), who hailed from southwest of Pittsburgh and lived in Mexico for nearly twenty years before migrating to Los Angeles. His Bell Block of adobe construction was built in 1845 at the corner of Aliso and Los Angeles streets, served as United States military headquarters after the American seizure of the pueblo (during which time Bell served as a captain of local American volunteers), and then was Mellus Row, when acquired by another merchant, Massachusetts-born Henry Mellus. Bell’s nephew, Horace, was the highly entertaining, if oft-factually challenged, author of the 1881 memoir, Reminiscences of a Ranger, and the posthumous On the Old West Coast (1930.)
Bell acquired from Dalton a goodly amount of fabric including black corduroy, silk, the blue drill, and crape, along with rebozos, women’s underwear (calzoneras), black corduroy (pana negra), sleeves (mangas), 90 Huacal sombreros (hats), starch (almidon), rope (cuerdas), 24 pairs of stockings, and trousers. Another major purchase, repeated by many others that month, was for three bales of sugar, an article of obvious high demand.
Charles Flugge was a German merchant who came to California in 1841 with the Bidwell-Bartleson Party, which concluded its trip in the Bay Area at the same time the Rowland-Workman Expedition ended its journey in greater Los Angeles. After a short stint in Oregon, where Americans and Europeans settled in the Willamette Valley, Flugge briefly served as clerk to John Sutter at his domain near Sacramento and then came to the Angel City and opened his store.
In early 1847, he, Domingo Olivas and William Workman comprised emissaries sent by Californio general José María Flores, who was Dalton’s brother-in-law, to meet at Mission San Juan Capistrano with Commodore Robert F. Stockton as American forces marched from San Diego to retake Los Angeles (captured the previous summer and then liberated by the Californios). Five years later, reportedly insane, Flugge was found dead in the countryside after wandering from his home. His transactions, about 10% of the total for September, included sugar, 12 dozen women’s shoes and “an invoice for sundry rebozos from Guadalajara,” the major Mexican city where Dalton frequently conducted business.
David W. Alexander (1812-1887), was a native of Ireland who came to this area in late 1842 with John Rowland’s second expedition from New Mexico and, in 1845, was operating a store at the rudimentary port town of San Pedro in partnership with Jonathan Temple. He went on to a variety of ventures and adventures in his many years in the region, shared in a prior post here, and his purchases included corduroy, blue drill cotton and a metate.
Abel Stearns (1798-1871), from Massachusetts, arrived in the City of the Angels just after Temple and opened the pueblo’s second store, though even more than Temple and Dalton, amassed a remarkable empire of land in south and southeastern Los Angeles County (long before the creation of Orange County). As noted in part one and by Jackson, Stearns rented out space in his adobe mansion, El Palacio, to Dalton for storing his goods, evidently having no problem with competition. Stearns later became too land rich and cash poor and was in deep financial trouble before his death.
His purchases seemed to be a mix of personal and professional, with the latter including sugar and fabrics, as well as a guitar and “1 ladies saddle with Reins,” these perhaps for his young wife, Arcadia Bandini, who was left a substantial estate thanks to the wise management and sale of Stearns’ lands by a trust. Her second husband, Robert S. Baker, razed El Palacio to build the Baker Block (1884), the site now being where U.S. 101 runs below Main Street, while he constructed the Hotel Arcadia in Santa Monica because of his ownership of land there with Edward F. Beale of Rancho Tejon. Beale and Baker acquired 5,000 acres of Rancho La Puente from William Workman and ran livestock there for years.
William Howard was listed as purchasing shawls and a sarape, or a shawl-like cloak usually worn by men, and the record appears to read “for Self.” This is probably William Davis Merry Howard (1818-1856), a Boston native who was on a sailing ship crew that sailed to California when he was 21. He worked for some years up and down the Pacific coast engaged in trading in the hides and tallow from cattle that were the backbone of the California economy and, in 1845, opened a store with Henry Mellus in Yerba Buena, later renamed San Francisco and where Howard was a major figure until his death with a street there named for him.
Ireland native Richard Den followed an older brother Nicholas to Santa Barbara in 1843, coming on a ship on which he was a surgeon, though he apparently did not have a medical degree (it is said the siblings studied the subject at the University of Dublin). After a brief stint in Los Angeles, Den went to Monterey where he obtained a departmental license to practice medicine and was enlisted to fight an outbreak of smallpox, a frequent scourge in the period.
He returned to the Angel City in summer 1844 and was apparently living there when he purchased a scarifitator, used by physicians for bloodletting, a practice no longer used for treatment, a harp and two hats. After some two decades in Santa Barbara, running the Rancho San Marcos, Den moved back to Los Angeles and practiced as a doctor until his death in 1895.
P[erfecto] Hugo Reid was mentioned in the first part of this post, the native of Scotland being an employee of Dalton in Peru for a short time before he moved to Hermosillo, in the northern Mexican state, adjoining California, of Sonora and was a merchant there for some years. He settled in Los Angeles in 1832, married an indigenous woman, Bartolomea, whom he named Victoria and moved on to land she was given near Mission San Gabriel because of her years of service to that institution.
Reid soon became an expert on the region’s native peoples and wrote a series of letters, published long after his death in the Los Angeles Star and was grantee, through his wife, of Rancho Santa Anita, which, as we noted before, was sold to Dalton. In 1846, Governor Pío Pico, in advance of the American invasion, sold the lands of the Mission to Reid and William Workman, though this was, nearly twenty years later, invalidated by the federal government. Reid died in 1852 at age 40 and remains best remembered for his 22 article on the local Indians. His purchases from Dalton included sugar, crackers, two metates and 1,000 cabalongas, this appearing to be the yellow oleander or thevetia peruviana—Reid was known for his extensive experimentation with plants.
“Miguel” Pryor was born Nathaniel Pryor in Kentucky about 1806 and might have been the son or nephew of Nathaniel Hale Pryor, a key member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. There is some confusion over whether the elder or younger Pryor, if they were related, was part of the fur trapping expedition led by father-and-son Sylvester and James O. Pattie that left Taos, New Mexico in September 1827 and worked the Gila River. When the party reached the Colorado River where Yuma is now, half turned back to New Mexico, including William Workman, wo resided in Taos, while the rest entered California and were arrested on charges of having a forged passport.
After his release, Pryor settled in Los Angeles and hunted sea otters with his friend from Taos, William Wolfskill and Richard Laughlin (also of the Pattie party), while becoming widely known for his silversmithing skills and worked as a keeper of the Stearns store warehouse. Pryor, who acquired sugar from Dalton, went on to serve with the American invading forces during the Mexican-American War and died a few years after his purchase of a bale of sugar from Dalton.
Santiago (James) Johnson (1798-1847) was from the West Midlands of England and arrived at San Pedro aboard a ship in 1833. He married María Carmen Guirado in Sonora, México and brought her, their children and her parents to Los Angeles. Carmen’s sister, Nieves, was the wife of Alexander Bell, while one of the Johnsons’ daughters, Adelaida was married to Henry Mellus’ brother, Francis, and then, after his death, David Alexander. Like Pryor, Johnson’s sole purchase from Dalton was a bale of sugar, with both undoubtedly buying the precious article for home use.
Having discussed the Americans and Europeans who did business as among the first customers at Dalton’s Los Angeles store in September 1845, we’ll turn to the concluding part three in a few days and identify who his Californio clientele were as he launched his business in late Mexican-era Los Angeles.