Read All About It in the Los Angeles Express, 13 August 1874

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Delving into the pages of Los Angeles newspapers during the peak of the region’s first boom, specifically the years 1873-1875, we learn a good deal about what transpired during that era, which tends to get less recognition for the changes that took place than much larger booms that came in the late 1880s and periodically afterward. It is true that this inaugural spark of development was comparatively modest, but there were many important elements to it, including those revived and/or expanded upon later.

For today’s Read All About It post, we examine the Los Angeles Express and its edition of 13 August, finding a diverse array of material on which to focus. For the first of the two issues, an editorial looked ahead to the December municipal elections, particularly for the Common, or City, Council, advising readers that it was high time “to cast around for the right type of men” for the several positions, which were divided into wards or districts.

The paper continued that “it has been the practice heretofore to wait till the last minute” and, when it was past time for effective organization, voters had “to accept such candidates as had been put adroitly forward by particular interests,” or “rings” in the parlance of the times. It was exhorted that “the people ought to take a new deal in this municipal game” and forestall with immediate action that usual way of selecting and electing candidates.

Moreover, as a recently revised city charter required, there had to be an all-new slate of council members, with the Express observing that “Los Angeles has progressed too far towards the dimensions of a metropolis to trust her municipal interests in the hands of any other than first-class men.” Amplifying its ideas, the sheet added,

We want men who are broad between the eyes, and can look well ahead into the future. They ought to be of our most reliable and intelligent stock . . . Men should be chosen with a view to their liberal and progressive ideas, and they should be of an intellectual calibre [sic] sufficiently comprehensive to understand the great water requirements of this city and the adjacent country. This is the most important subject which can be handled by future Councils.

This was certainly understandable, though a private water company, formed a half-dozen years before, held a thirty-year contract to supply the precious fluid to the city, but no one in 1874 could foresee the immense project that, four decades later, would lead to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, an engineering marvel for its time, though one attended by great controversy. One of those who won election to the Council in mid-December was Elijah H. Workman, who, along with his brother, William H., served several terms with both tending to alternate.

As the fall semester for local schools approached, including the terms for the Catholic Sisters of Charity campus for girls and St. Vincent’s College for males from about fourth grade through college, both of which were to start the following Monday the 17th, the Express reported on substantial changes being made to the high school, which was just a year old.

Dr. William T. Lucky, the principal, established three classes, a senior of eight students who would, after the conclusion of the upcoming year, be the first graduating class; ten in the middle; and three dozen in a junior division. The range of subjects was given, including levels of English, math and science along with history, “mental philosophy,” and surveying, while an assistant was sought to teach Latin and Greek, as well as helping Lucky with the others, though it was noted that “the study of the dead languages will not be made imperative on the pupils.”

Elsewhere, the paper noted with satisfaction that a recently amended statute regarding school textbooks allowed for the state Board of Education to cancel contracts sooner than four years if the price rose above what was initially stipulated. The editorial added that “the principal object of the law is to prevent frequent changes” in pricing, which involved “throwing unnecessary expense upon the parents or guardians of the children. This led the Express to comment that “we do not see that the situation in this regard can be bettered.”

The “Commercial Review” reported that a local company of some size, though unidentified, told the paper that business was substantially larger than at the same time in 1873, though it was modified with the note that it was generally a slow time of the year, including with the harvest still underway. Plums were doing excellently, though the pear crop was expected to be only about a third of normal Yet, the Express noted,

The people in the southern part of the county [where Orange County split off fifteen years later] are very much elated over the prospect of their early connection with our railway system [this being the Southern Pacific’s branch line from Florence south of Los Angeles to Anaheim]. They will certainly reap important benefits from it, one of which will be to establish a better mutual interchange of business throughout the county.

Also highlighted was “a quiet mining excitement” in San Gabriel Canyon, this almost certainly taking place along the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, where prospectors had been working claims for at least twenty years. Dr. James B. Winston, who once owned the Bella Union Hotel and was a Council member and county supervisor, was, with partners, working a ledge which it was claimed was “rich in silver and gold,” with crushing machinery soon to be introduced, while the riverbed was “being worked satisfactorily” with “several hydraulic companies . . . washing the earth on the banks.”

In the “Local Items” of brevities, it was observed that the Lazard brothers, Los Angeles merchant Solomon and Marks, who was in the Misión Vieja (Old Mission) community where the Temple family resided south of the canyon, were busy at their claim and the paper reported that “fine specimens of silver ore taken from the Zapata mine . . . have been exhibited in town.” It was expected that the French-born Jewish siblings would soon build a mill at the claim.

At the new town of San Fernando, not much more than twenty miles north of Los Angeles, founder Charles Maclay, whose friends were among the “Big Four” owners (Crocker, Hopkins, Huntington and Stanford) of the Southern Pacific, informed the Express that “I shall be ready to make deeds for lands sold . . . in about thirty-five or forty days.” He added that a half-dozen houses were in construction, ten freight cars arrived on the 11th and 40 tons of bullion were shipped in return, so that “everything is lively here.” In that “Local Items” section of brevities, it was noted that a lime kiln was started in that area, this being where the bullion was unearthed.

Outside of occasional references to what transpired in the city’s schools, very little was reported in the press about the Angel City’s young people, but the Express did have a brief comment about wayward boys, informing readers that,

Los Angeles is not without her rising stock of hoodlums. Gangs of young Arabs may be seen prowling around the streets of nights till the latest hour. They are not now particularly troublesome, but they are growing up in such a way that they will be apt to turn out first-class hoodlums in a few years. The parents of these vagabondizing youths will have much to answer for, one of these days.

Whatever the activities were—setting fires, smashing windows, harassing residents (including people of color), desecrating graves in the cemeteries, all of which have been noticed in others newspaper research—this is an early reference to gangs, albeit naturally of a much different type than would be discussed in later years in Los Angeles.

Other “Local Items” concerned the acquisition of a drug store by Dr. P.W. Dooner, deemed to be “an educated and practical pharmacist,” presumably setting him apart from the “quacks” who were neither, and who expanded inventory in his Lafayette Block on Main Street and was helped by a “competent compounder” so that “care and skill are exercised in the preparation of prescriptions.”

On Commercial Street, running east from Main toward the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad (recently acquired by the Southern Pacific following a November 1872 subsidy vote that turned over the area’s first line to the rail giant), J.D. Connor took over the Commercial Restaurant, where “a first-class meal is served for 25 cents” with the proprietor said to be “securing a large share of public patronage by the excellent manner in which his house was kept.”

With respect to this eatery, an ad thinly disguised as an article had an interesting take on why people could have such irritable dispositions because it was averred that “the human stomach is the seat of good nature as well as of the digestive functions.” Therefore, even the most even-keeled gent would become less than pleasant when given “a dry, hard, tough steak in the morning.”

Consequently, the account went on, “let a man eat one of [John] McDonald’s delicious, juicy, tender and sweet sirloin or porter house steaks, or one of his splendid chops, and that man will shed sunshine around him the balance of the day.” Why, the piece continued, Sir John Falstaff, a notable character from three of Shakespeare’s plays, would have been mightily impressed at McDonald’s butcher shop and “admired the rich, juicy roasts, the enticing legs of mutton, and the variety of inviting meats Mac carves out to his customers.” Yet, McDonald’s restaurant had been taken over by Connor because of the horrific murder he committed against his wife, Eliza, covered here in a previous post here, but why this ad was left in so much later is strange to say the least.

The column also reported that Felix Signoret, a barber who expanded his entrepreneurship by adding a billiard parlor and saloon and who reportedly led the a vigilance committee that lynched fellow French native Michel Lachenais in December 1870, was nearly finished with his three-story building across Main from the Pico House hotel. The paper determined that the building “is unique in style, and will form one of the most pleasing architectural adornments of our improving city.” A prior post here covered much of Signoret’s life in Los Angeles.

Returning to education, a mineral cabinet at the high school, which sat high up on Poundcake Hill over looking the city, was said to need donated items, while Miss Casad, a teacher, waited or fifty “patent” desks, which arrived at the Los Angeles and San Pedro depot and were soon to be installed “much to the gratification of teachers and pupils.”

A separate article quoted from the San Jose Mercury in Charles Maclay’s former hometown and reporting on an “oil lagoon of this region from San Fernando to the ocean above Santa Barbara” and which was prescient about the potential for petroleum prospecting in areas that later included Santa Paula, Ventura, Summerland and other locales that were fully exploited a quarter century and more later. The Mercury commented that,

If this prospect is a correct one, then all along the line of this stream profitable wells can be obtained, which will not only yield an immense revenue to their owners, but will do more toward building up that section of the State than any enterprise which has hitherto been contemplated.

Referring to Maclay, it was observed that “when the town of San Fernando was first projected oil was not one of the elements that entered into the calculations of its future greatness,” but with the field of that name, in which F.P.F. Temple was a major figure with his Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company, being not far away, the Mercury offered that “it seems more than probable that the wheels of the new town being so liberally lubricated by this immense deposit of petroleum will revolve much faster in the direction of prominence and prosperity.”

As has been oft-observed here before, reading through these issues of historic Los Angeles newspapers from the region’s first boom are instructive and interesting, helping us better understand a core portion, the 1870s, of the Homestead’s interpretive era, spanning from 1830 to 1930, while other papers cover other aspects of that period. So, keep an eye out for future editions of the “Read All About It” series.