by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The second and final part of our post regarding the coverage by the Los Angeles Herald newspaper of the centennial celebration of the founding of the Angel City takes us to the 6 September 1881 edition, reviewing the activities of the prior day when the paper took the day off because of the scale and scope of the festivities.
Notably, the first part included mention of the fact that former Los Angeles Star publisher and author Benjamin C. Truman raised the question of whether the founding date was the 5th, as evidently proven by documents in the possession of resident Juan Toro, but which were not described or summarized, or the 4th, the date traditionally assigned. A half-century later, when the 150th anniversary was celebrated, Thomas W. Temple II, in one his earliest published works, postulated that the 4th was the actual date, based on his mining of original sources from 1781.
In any case, it may have been that the 5th was chosen for a parade, dinner and other events because it was a Monday and there was a prevailing view that the Sabbath should be a day of rest, not of celebration. Whatever the reason was, the city of probably around 13,000 (the prior year’s federal census count was north of 11,000, but these are generally undercounts) appears to have thrown itself quite a 100th birthday party—a far cry from the near complete absence of recognition today.
The Herald began its detailed summary by observing that,
The demonstration of yesterday in honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Los Angeles, was one of the grandest and most complete in every detail that has ever taken place on the Pacific Coast. The day opened beautifully, the sun shinning [sic] brightly, a gentle breeze moderating its rays and producing a temperature that made out-door exercise pleasant and comfortable. At an early hour the streets began to fill with people, whose gay attire, contrasted with the decorations on every hand, presented a gala appearance. Across Main and Spring streets numerous festoons of green were extended, bearing dates and mottoes appropriate to the occasion . . . all the available bunting in the city was flying at mastheads and many blocks had additional colors flying in small flags and banners stretched from cornice to cornice. Evergreens were everywhere displayed, giving a cool and breezy aspect to the thoroughfares.
It was added that a platform in front of the Court House (built in 1859 by Jonathan Temple as a commercial structure) on the Main Street side as well as one in front of the Plaza Church to the north on the same street were highly ornamented and the Church “bore handsome decorations and mottoes” as well as a transparency marking the centennial.
The parade, described in terms of its divisions in part one, began at 2 p.m. as scheduled, though it was added that a carreta provided by former State Treasurer Antonio F. Coronel was “driven by an Indian and drawing two old Indian women—Benjamina, aged 117 years, and Laura, 103.” Also striking was mention that one vehicle contained a “German revolutionist of Forty-eight [1848, a year of much turmoil and violence in Europe]—in military costume,” though what this was supposed to represent relative to the celebration was left unexplained.
The hose carriage of the 38s volunteer firefighting company (a professionalized fire department was a few years away yet) was decorated with “miniature figures of Washington, Franklin, the Caballero, and the typical Fireman,” an interesting quartet, to be sure, as well as an “old skiff labeled 1781 and bearing pioneers.” The Confidence Engine Company’s entry included a Miss Sánchez “reclining on [a] bearskin robe and dressed to represent California. Moreover, Coronel rode in a carriage with “other old Spanish Americans.”
Praising the city’s firefighters for their efforts and contributions, the Herald also lauded the fact that “the Spanish caballeros, in their costumes of the ancient times and their richly caparisoned horses, gave to the pageant a brilliancy such as read of in the accounts of the tournaments of the olden time.” It remarked that Toro, along with Horace Bell, author of the recently published Reminiscences of a Ranger (Bell and other living members of the Los Angeles Rangers paramilitary organization of the 1850s were parade participants) gave remarks in Spanish and English, respectively, following the procession.
A separate piece on the “Plaza Demonstration” called the gathering “imposing . . . as it deserved to be” and added that “nothing is more suggestive of the olden times than this venerable relic,” though it should be pointed out that the Church, as now, was a functioning parish church. As mentioned in part one, flags of the Papacy, Spain and the United States flew together and the platform behind the fence at the parsonage bore portraits of Spain’s King Alphonso XII and President James A. Garfield, who was shot in Washington on 2 July and who died two weeks after the parade, on 19 September.
Hortense Sacriste, later the wife of lawyer and United States Senator Stephen M. White, performed on the piano as well as conducted the music and singing during the event, while Toro and the parish priest, Rev. Pedro Verdaguer spoke. The featured orator was Superior Court Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda, whose remarks for the Independence Day celebration of 1872 were considered the finest ever given in the region. The jurist, who appeared in a parade vehicle with his colleague Judge Volney E. Howard and the first district judge in 1850, Oliver S. Witherby, comments began, strikingly, with the observation that,
One hundred years ago, and those friendly hills that shelter us, those lovely valleys that smile in all the splendor of wealth and beauty that nature can lavish, were cold, gloomy, and savage. Dense, frowning forests, desolate plains, solitary shores, impressed upon the country a type of utter desolation. Hordes of primitive people, with no past to enrich their present, and no future to look to for hope, stalked over the land. Providence had not yet placed upon this remote region the seal of peace and civilization.
Having thusly dispensed with the greater Los Angeles of the indigenous era, spanning many generations over thousands of years, the orator credited the Roman Catholic Church with the colonization under Spain so that “henceforth the emblem of the cross was to glitter in the sunlight of this wilderness” thanks to “the great zeal of the priest” and “the daring enterprise of the Spanish soldier.”
The result, Sepúlveda intoned, was that “this land was converted into a paradise” and the missionary was further lionized for “a weary apostleship, full of toil, peril and suffering.” Ever mindful of where he was speaking, he continued, “and we meet on this spot, trodden by their footsteps, on the centennial of the founding of the pueblo, to commemorate the event and offer our homage to the men who first planted the seeds of religion, industry and intelligence in the fruitful soil of our lovely valleys.”
The judge’s romanticized reverie went so far as to suggest that, “while the day is crowded with fond remembrances of the days that are past” and that “those times are forever gone,” what the Church and her representatives did reflected “the fair accompaniments of opulence and refinement, of knowledge and power” and, notably, “redeemed the land from barbarism without shedding one drop of blood, without allowing one solitary tear to flow.” If an indigenous person or descendant was to have been allowed to respond, one wonders what the rejoinder would have been.
Since those glorified days,
Progress and civilization have transformed all. In the midst of culture, surrounded by prosperity and comfort, and enjoying all the blessings of civil and religious liberty, we scarcely realize the phenomenal march of events of science, art, commerce, education, political and social life within the short space of one century . . . We live now in the maturity of society, when all is advancement, development and improvement. Hardly anything of the old remains. Our pueblo but retains few of its ancient features and even these are disappearing day by day. All around is different.
He exhorted his hearers to honor those who came before and be true to themselves, while “cherishing the principles, institutions and morals that have made our country great” and committed “upholding in its march of glory the Republic” and “teaching our children . . . to honor the memory of those who first planted civilization on our shores.” In this way, those to come would, he claimed, be “tolerant, intelligent, moral, exalting the dignity of our nature, resisting tyranny, oppression and injustice, not enfeebled with vices and luxury, but simple, hardy, self-reliant and virtuous.”
The eloquent jurist and orator concluded,
With a heart that loves you, giving utterance to my words beneath the same stars that shone over many of us in our infancy, I ask you so to comport yourselves that the blessings we now enjoy so amply may be perpetual and that the end may be as sublime as the beginning, pure as the stream when it leaves it source. May he who at the distance of another century shall stand here to celebrate this day, still look around upon a free, happy and virtuous people!
Not much over two years later, Sepúlveda left Los Angeles and the country to move to México, where he had a law practice and held high positions in the administration of President, and dictator, Porfirio Díaz. After the Revolution of 1910, a century after the one that led to the nation’s independence, Sepúlveda, who barely made it out with his life, returned to Los Angeles, finding himself a stranger in his own home town, and he died a couple of years later in late 1916.
Other comment regarding the day included the note that “the two youngest pioneers” in the parade were Edward S. Hereford of San Gabriel, who settled in the area when he was five years old, his mother becoming the second wife of the late Benjamin D. Wilson, and William W. Jenkins, who was thirteen when arriving with his family from Ohio and who had an oft-controversial long life. A tidbit of later significance was the presence of a former Santa Barbara newspaper editor and current federal agent in Alaska, Harrison Gray Otis, who soon settled in Los Angeles, took over the Times newspaper (the first issue of which appeared on 4 December 1881) and built it and himself into positions of great power in the region.
Another report concerned “the first appearance of the Eagle Corps,” another in a long line of citizen militias, or para-military organizations dating back about three decades. The Herald remarked that “it is a fine, soldierly body of men and would be a credit to any city” as “the boys looked and marched well, showing that, short as is the time since their organization, they have been faithfully drilled.” The Corps morphed into the local brigade of the National Guard by the end of the Eighties.
Los Angeles County Clerk Andrew W. Potts presented to the paper the reply the prior week of a special invited guest, General Winfield Scott Hancock, who expressed his regret that he and his wife could not attend the celebration. Hancock, a Union Army hero of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, was the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1880, losing to Garfield, but, as his note to Potts stated, “I was a resident of Los Angeles for a few years,” stationed under future Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston in this area from 1858 until the outbreak of the war, “and passed through one of the epochs of progress of that interesting country.” Actually, it was a period of economic struggle, though that worsened after he left.
Lastly, there is an editorial comment by the Herald about the centennial festivities, which began with the claim that, “we have no hesitation in saying that the celebration of the Los Angeles centenary yesterday was the finest thing we have seen on the American continent, bearing in mind the legend multum in parvo [“a great deal in a small space”].” This allowed for the relatively small population of the Angel City, but the paper further remarked that “the procession which defiled through our streets was unique and interesting in the superlative degree.”
The piece then turned to a lengthy description of the value of the presence of Latinos and indigenous people, stating,
the Mexican or Native California departments were those which would first arrest the attention of the average American from the Eastern States. First appeared a delegation of old time Native California caballeros, on mettled [spirited] steeds, whose trappings would enlist attention anywhere. They were heavy with silver embossments and strong with matted horsehair. The uniforms of these revivors of the old Mexican splendor and gorgeousness would have delighted the participants in a tournament of Ashby de la Zouche [said in Sir Walter Scott’s famed novel, Ivanhoe, to be famous for medieval jousting] . . .
The next most noticeable feature in the procession was an old time “carreta,” on wooden wheels, which contained two venerable Mexican dames [see above for reference to Benjamina and Laura being indigenous] . . . Laura, who is a comparatively youthful feminine, looked as if she might still be relied upon for a brilliant pas in any fandango gotten up on short notice. The female Methuselah who rejoices in 117 years [though not of the purported 139 years of Eulalia Pérez de Guillen, who died in 1878] . . . showed the progress of years. She was, indeed, but a very slight improvement upon a mummy of the age of the Ptolemies.
Continuing that the celebration would have been commendable to a city four times the size of Los Angeles, the paper again congratulated the fire companies for their spirit and enthusiasm, while the new military company was also feted for “a creditable display.” The Herald, however, ended by proclaiming that “the really interesting incidents . . . were those which threw light upon the past of a very noted historical section of a country which has too few traditions to neglect those which still lie ready to the hand of the chronicler.”
The paper again reminded readers that “the Latin races ought to have been prominent in the display of yesterday, and we are glad to say that they carried out the onus which lay upon them to perfection. They appeared in full numbers and with marked distinction.” Given how little attention is paid now to the birthday of Los Angeles, it is interesting and instructive to see how the commemoration was back in 1881 prior to the boom that, several years, later transformed the Angel City in ways much more far-reaching than anything Sepúlveda and the others present likely could have imagined.