by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As the 1870s dawned, greater Los Angeles was in the early stages of its first significant and sustained period of development, or its first boom, and the fortunes of E.J.C. Kewen, attorney and orator, were correspondingly lifted during this era, which lasted until 1875-1876. His law firm with James G. Howard, formed in 1865, was highly successful and it was said that the duo handled much of the prominent criminal defense business in the Angel City.
Among the more prominent cases in which Kewen and Howard were involved were the defenses of Robert Cage, who killed Tomás Mianez, an employee of F.P.F. Temple, in a dispute over stray livestock; Bernard Newman, a squatter on land owned by Temple, William Workman and Juan Matias Sánchez who was tried for shooting a Sheriff’s deputy serving an eviction notice; and some of those charged with lynching victims of the horrific Chinese Massacre of October 1871.
While it does not appear that Kewen had many business interests outside his firm or the operation of his San Gabriel Valley ranch, of which we’ll discuss below, it was revealed in May 1875 in the years-long suit between ex-Governor Pío Pico and Antonio Cuyas, who signed a long-term lease to operate a hotel in Don Pío’s Pico House, still standing at the southwest corner of the Plaza in Los Angeles, that “the partnership was dissolved on the 28th of June 1872, by Cuyas assigning his interest to [lawyer Frank] Ganahl, Kewen & Howard.” It is not clear how long Kewen had an involvement in the hostelry, however.
Another interesting account from this period came from George W. Gift, a Nashville native and Navy veteran of the Mexican-American War who resided in Los Angeles in the 1850s and early 1860s, served in the state legislature, and was a founder of the Los Angeles Rifles militia. Gift was among many locals who, as supporters of the Confederacy during the Civil War, took his state-issued weapons and headed east. He joined the Confederate Navy, served through the end of the conflict and was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, returning to Nashville.
Gift sometimes wrote colorful letters to Los Angeles newspapers and the Los Angeles Herald of 19 November 1873 and noted that “Ned Kewen is still one of you,” while adding that he’d heard of the latter’s confinement at Alcatraz during the late war. Gift recalled that he once ran for County Surveyor for the ticket of John G. Downey, who soon succeeded to the governor’s chair, while Kewen ran for District Attorney and that he read “one of Ned’s famous Know-Nothing speeches,” referring to Kewen’s alleged membership in the xenophobic and reactionary American Party, briefly ascendant in California during the mid-Fifties. Gift concluded by offering to Kewen to “let by-gone[s] be by-gones, old man, and let us cross palms without a secret grudge.”
Referring, however, to the boom in the Angel City, Gift, in a letter appearing in the Herald of 5 April 1874, observed that many in Nashville were looking to move elsewhere because of the effects of Reconstruction including so many Blacks in positions of political power in Tennessee, and would “bring money, brains and energy” to Los Angeles. Gift recommended,
If you would send Ned Kewen to canvass Mississippi and Alabama, I think it would swell your population by thousands. I venture that if he were to speak of California at Columbus [Kewen’s Mississippi hometown] he would be heard by every white man within ten miles of the town, and the same thing would occur everywhere. Send him along . . . I wish very much I could make the people on your side see matters as I do. You do not hesitate to spend money to import red-republicans, but you make no move to secure a far better and more useful population. Bestir yourselves.
Gift’s suggestion was not taken up and the race politics of the Reconstruction South were not of much import in greater Los Angeles and California, though that of the Chinese most certainly was. Nothing has been located specifically on Kewen’s views on that topic, but it would be surprising if he was not anti-Chinese, especially if he was a Know-Nothing. While much of the post-war immigration to this region comprised Southerners, especially in sections like Los Nietos (modern Whittier, Santa Fe Springs, Downey and such areas), later booms, like in the 1880s, were largely led by Midwestern migration.
Kewen was also the proprietor of El Molino Viejo, the grist mill associated with the Mission San Gabriel and situated in a sylvan setting in what was commonly called Old Mill, as well as Kewen, Canyon in today’s San Marino and next to Benjamin D. Wilson’s Lake Vineyard, part of which now includes the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. The property, presented to Kewen and his wife Fannie by her father, Dr. Thomas Jefferson White, increasingly was recognized as a showplace in what was often called the “San Gabriel Fruit Belt,” along with Lake Vineyard, Leonard J. Rose’s Sunny Slope and others.
An early brief description of El Molino was provided by the Los Angeles Star of 14 June 1871 on what would become a typical tour of the Fruit Belt and its most prominent denizens. Wilson received the lion’s share of the attention, but Kewen was said to have “75,000 [grape] vines, 800 walnut, and 500 orange trees, and 300 each of lemon and olive trees.” The account added that, “it must be recollected that from a little elevation in the centre of this garden city, may be seen the broad Pacific on the one hand, and upon the other two hundred miles of mountains, part of the year covered with snow. No such picture may be seen on the Mediterranean sea.”
The 17 June 1873 edition of the paper, cited a visit by a journalist from the San Diego World, possibly Joseph D. Lynch, who soon came to Los Angeles (not long after two other future notables, Benjamin C. Truman, who ran the Star for a couple of memorable years, and Will H. Gould, who had a law career of more than a half-century in the Temple Block), who waxed poetically about the ranch:
Our friend Col. Kewen is a happy man. He was defeated for Congress [see below] and compelled to stay in his Paradise at “El Molino.” He will find the fragrance of his orange and lemon groves very much preferable to the fetid area of the Congressional “marble halls.” . . . How any man set down in such groves could want to go to Congress, passes our understanding. Lucky man! He couldn’t make the riffle [disorder?], and is compelled to know the delights of a fair modern edition of Eden in his enchanting “El Molino.”
The reverie the focused on a box of oranges sent by Kewen for the journalist to sample and the conclusion, notable given the rivalry between the Angel City and San Diego, was that “our tooth hereafter will never allow us to belittle Los Angeles” and that “our palate would be at deadly feud with our pen were we ever again to attempt it.”
Lynch was the editor for George A. Tiffany and Company and its Los Angeles Express when he made a visit to El Molino, described in that paper’s edition of 31 August 1874. Telling readers that “we were on the magnificent domain of the silver-tongued and poetic Colonel Kewen,” Lynch soared into the prosy ether with a remarkable and nearly interminable monologue on the rapture experienced at the ranch:
Here we found the delightful irregularities of hill and dale, all submissive to the chaste design of a mind refined in the elaboration of nature into scenes of artful diversity. Here aspiring fountains in full play rising from rock-piled pyramids; there a winding avenue crossing a bridge spanning a mimic river; here a great willow weeping all over in the ample circumferance [sic] of its extensive spread; there a poplar, in its pride of stateliness, bringing up the pomp of war and circumstance in its cockade; here an ancient pear tree, drooping under its heavy burthen of production; there grand old sycamores, mouth-watering peach bearers, and an endless variety of shrubs and plants. In the midst of this gorgeous profusion of giant growth and pigmy vegetation, rose the solid walls of the Kewen mansion. Not a door or jalousie [window blind or shutter] in the house was closed, but all open as day, emblematic of the knightly hospitality of the courteous master and gentle mistress of this Fruit Belt castle.
Alas, the visit had to end and Lynch concluded with the note that “the shadows admonish us that we must hurry from this enchanting scene” and he reluctantly left “as lovely and picturesque a spot as ever gratified the longing eye” of a Persian satrap or Hindu prince.
The Star of 10 June 1872, in supporting Kewen for his candidacy for a seat in the House of Representatives, manifested no doubt as to his portended success and it insisted that “it is certainly time that the existence of our section should be recognized.” Despite the region’s growth and resources, not to mention “its unwavering devotion to Democratic [Party] principles,” the paper complained that greater Los Angeles “has hitherto been completely ignored in partisan favoritism.”
As for Kewen, the paper insisted, “success is assured under his leadership” and it claimed there were “no enmities arrayed against him” because “his cordial and winning manners disarms even political animosity.” It stated that he had ample political experience and averred that “we want just such a man in our national councils” as “his conceded ability and animated and polished elocution will ever secure him attention and respect.” Asserting that “no factious opposition will be made against him,” the Star concluded that “capable, honest and bold, he can safely be entrusted with the vital interests of Southern California.”
The paper, in its edition of 22 June 1872, reprinted the biographical sketch, penned by friend and law partner Jim Howard, of Kewen that was published in Representative and Leading Men of the Pacific and which has been mined already for this post. The idea, however, was to give readers a better perspective on his candidacy, which the Star supported, for a seat in the House of Representatives, but we turn now to the Weekly Express of 22 August that is the featured artifact from the Homestead’s holdings here.”
The paper devoted space to “Kewen’s San Diego Speech,” scoring the candidate for “his oily tongue” as he lavished praise on the planned Texas and Pacific Railroad project of Tom Scott but was deemed guilty “of a covert attack on this city and Wilmington—and, indeed, the entire section of country tributary to it—by denouncing the Wilmington breakwater and discouraging further appropriation for its completion.”
This takes us back a decade to Kewen’s arrest and confinement at Alcatraz on a complaint by three unidentified Los Angeles residents concerning his purported disloyal statements and the 1865 campaign for state senate mounted by Phineas Banning, the “Port Admiral” of Wilmington. It was speculated that Banning, a dedicated Union supporter during the Civil War, might have been one of the trio that turned Kewen in to military authorities, while Kewen campaigned against Banning in his successful seeking of the Senate seat.
It may be that Kewen’s opposition was both an attempt to get San Diego voters to support his House candidacy as well as to exact further revenge on Banning, who not only used his position with the Union Army to particular patriotic and financial benefit during the war (such as with Camp Drum, of which the Drum Barracks remain a short distance from his Wilmington house), but to secure federal funding for the breakwater to improve the harbor.
The San Diego World, mentioned above, quoted Kewen in his stump speech as uttering that “God and nature have given to the harbor of San Diego, what all the national treasure can never give to Wilmington,” it being true that the southern city has a much better natural harbor than what is now the almost entire human-made Port of Los Angeles, and that “the breakwater projected there is the most complete bilk ever attempted on earth.”
The Express claimed that,
No recent event has caused a more profound sensation or so aroused the indignation of the people of this city and Wilmington, regardless of party, as has the publication of Kewen’s “Breakwater speech.” Had the comet actually collided with the earth, or a medium-sized bomb-shell burst in every counting-room and office in this city our people would not have been more startled.
When the Star tried to support Kewen after his address, it was belittled for the assertion that “this defence [sic] is lame and unsatisfactory” because it claimed that there were “facetious remarks made by him in his recent San Diego speech.” Moreover, it was stated that the Star left out important parts of the speech, specifically his reference to the “bilk” that also meant, he said, that the “money expended thus was literally sunk in the ocean.”
Adding that such comments could hardly constitute a joke, the Express quoted from the San Diego Union‘s coverage of the speech and Kewen’s remark that the local breakwater was “a mythical advantage to Los Angeles; the people there knew it, and he knew it” and that he further told the crowd that he was “identified with [San Diego’s] progress, body, soul and heart,” including its desire for federal funds to improve transportation and shipping improvements. When asked to again tell the crowd what he thought of the Wilmington breakwater, Kewen then apparently brought up the “bilk” and the sunken taxpayer money, though the Star wrote the latter off as a “mere simple pun” and said the former was about the “manner of its construction” not the concept.
Writing from El Molino on the 18th, Kewen issued a statement to the Star, in which he explained that,
In making the declaration that the enterprise would not meet the sanguine expectations of its projectors [Banning and others], and would probably result in “mythical advantage,” I was echoing what had been the expression of many intelligent minds. In any utterance with which I have been accredited on the subject, it was far from any desire or intention on my part to create an impression or justify the remotest inference, that I was, or would be, inimical to its completion. On the contrary, so vast are the aims and purposes sough to be accomplished by that projected improvement, that it would be the greatest dereliction of private wish or public duty to seek to arrest the determination of its practical value, by checking its progress and depriving it of the substantial test of experience.
Kewen, no doubt recognizing the damage done by alienating the feelings of voters in the most populous portion of the congressional district, concluded by averring that he would “favor the most liberal appropriations” for harbors, not only at San Pedro (note he did not use the word “Wilmington”) and San Diego, but at Santa Barbara “or elsewhere upon the Coast.” After all, he had to support anything that worked towards “facilitating the march and the interests of Commerce.”
The Express was not impressed. It countered that Kewen “carefully dodges the salient points of his San Diego speech and neither admits nor denies” his most pointed comments. Despite his professions of support for the “San Pedro” project, the paper wondered, “can he consistently ask for public money for such a purpose?” With this remarks, it insisted, “he has thrown away in advance whatever of influence he might have had in Congress in the premises, and were he elected and should arise in his place to move for an additional appropriation for the Wilmington breakwater,” than the San Diego speech would be brought up by “the enemies of Southern California and our Coast improvements.”
The paper ended its vituperative remarks by asking,
What success would he be likely to meet with in advocating “the most liberal appropriations” for the furtherance of a project which he himself had publicly declared was not only of “mythical advantage” but was actually “the most complete bilk every attempted on earth?” Can the people of this and adjoining counties afford to run the risk of sending such a Janus-faced trimmer to Congress in place of Mr. [Sherman O.] Houghton who has been tried and found true to us? We have no fears that they will try the experiment.
As noted above, Kewen lost the race to Houghton, who served two terms from 1871 to 1875. It should be added that, in early November 1872, county voters approved a deal to provide a $600,000 subsidy and control of the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, the only local line, to the Southern Pacific Railroad, as it built, by mandate of Congress, its main northern route through Los Angeles and a branch from Florence [South Los Angeles] to Anaheim.
The harbor at Wilmington and San Pedro eventually became, in no small part thanks to United States Senator Stephen M. White (a future law partner of Kewen) and his lobbying of the selection of it over the Southern Pacific’s Santa Monica as the main regional port and appropriations for it, the most important on the Pacific Coast. So much for “mythical advantage”!
We’ll continue tomorrow with part four, so check back in for that.