by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Day one of Tombstone Tales, our new cemetery-centric program highlighting El Campo Santo, the burial ground at the Homestead that dates back to the 1850s, and which will focus on a specific person or persons each October, is now in the books with our featured “residents” being Don Pío Pico (1801-1894), the last governor of Mexican-era California, and his wife, Doña María Ignacia Alvarado (1808-1854).
The couple, interred in an imported cast-iron tomb in Calvary Cemetery, located at the base of the Elysian Hill , were brought to the newly completed Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum at El Campo Santo in spring 1921 and have been resting in peace next to their compadres in the Workman and Temple family for over a century.
The program consists of an illustrated presentation covering some of the history of the Workmans and Temples, the cemetery, the Picos, their burial at the old Calvary (the current cemetery opened in East Los Angeles just two years after Pico’s death) and the move to El Campo Santo, followed by a tour of the burying ground with a review of its history and the paying of respect to Don Pío and Doña Ygnacia.
We are offering Tombstone Tales again tomorrow at Noon, 1, 2 and 3 p.m., so if this post stirs some interest, come down and join us. What the focus here is concerns the remembrance of Don Pio in the pages of the newly launched Los Angeles monthly magazine, The Land of Sunshine, which debuted in June 1894, so the paean to the ex-governor appeared in the fifth issue in October.
The issue is full of great articles and information on the Angel City’s parks, churches, the oil industry, its Chinese community, “Spanish” cooking and more, so we are going to return in coming days with a post specifically on these pieces. For now, we’ll devote our attention to the Pico encomium, which was written by Harry Ellington Brook (1849-1924), who was born in London to a merchant and, as his obituary in the Los Angeles Times put it, “a gentlewoman.”
It was added that inoculation from smallpox as a baby caused the loss of hearing in one ear and the use of a finger and he took up the study of health at age 12, spending a decade roaming Europe from his late teens to late twenties and furthering his interest in what he termed “nature cures.” In 1877, soon after this long sojourn, he migrated to the United States and quickly moved to San Francisco, where he edited a publication pointedly called The Wasp.
What followed was a period in the mountains of the Golden State and Arizona Territory and continued his journalistic career in the mining regions of the southern part of that region, including in Tucson. Married to a widow with four children with the couple having two more together, Brook then settled in the Angel City in 1886 and immediately joined the staff of the Times, which was established a half decade prior.
Brook continued working for the paper until his death, excepting five years in the Teens when he published a health magazine called Brain and Brawn. Two-and-a-half years before his death, he received a “special degree” from the American Society of Naturopathy, in which it recognized his “work as an editor, leader and rational physician,” this last being undefined. The Society of Naturopaths, however, note that the practice of naturopathy is based on “the belief that the body has the innate wisdom to resist disease and the mechanisms to self-regular and recover from disease” with an emphasis on a healthy diet and lifestyle.
In its obituary, Brook’s longtime employer observed that, “he has never compiled any volumes, his newspaper and magazine work having usurped his time,” an interesting turn of phrase, “to the exclusion of such work.” He did, however, write publications that were widely published and read in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Los Angeles City and County, issued by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and, in 1893, Land of Sunshine: Southern California, created to promote the region at the famous World’s Fair in Chicago and which directly led to the establishment of the magazine of that name.
In his article on Pico, Brook began by observing that “one by one the men who played a prominent part in the history of Southern California before the American occupation are passing away,” with one of these, not mentioned in the piece, being Antonio Franco Coronel (1817-1894), a former state treasurer who also collected an important cache of material related to pre-American California.
Noting that “more than ninety-three years is a remarkable age even in the long-lived community,” the author commented that, in Pico’s passing on 11 September, “Southern California loses one of the most interesting links between the early easy-going days of Mexican supremacy and the age of American progress in which we now live”—note the contrast of “easy-going” with “progress.”
Further, commented Brook, Pico “was a type of Californians in the pastoral age, now forever gone, and was otherwise interesting as carrying in his own person the history of the last twenty years of Mexican sway in California” and it was notable that it was added that, regarding his Spanish ancestry, “he traced them for many generations” and “also believed that he had Aztec blood in his veins.”
With respect to his origins at Mission San Gabriel, where he was born on 5 May 1801, Brook wrote that Pico resided there until he was 19, as México was on the verge of winning its independence from a crumbling Spanish empire, and that “as an acolyte assisted the priests in religious services.” It was noted, though, that “most of his early life was spent in the open sunshine on horseback,” which Pico accounted (and Brook, as a “nature cure” advocate, undoubtedly latched onto for his essay) was essential for “his sound constitution and his prolonged life.”
Concerning politics, the writer recorded that Pico was a vocal or a senior official for the diputación, the legislative body for the department of Alta California under Mexican rule and “his influence increased, and he was election senior vocal and was entitled to be governor ad interim.” While Brook then asserted that “at the time there was no Governor, but one was soon appointed who was hostile to Pico, and in consequence he [Pico] retired,” this incorrectly states the conditions of the 1831 revolution against Manuel Victoria that was discussed in yesterday’s post on this blog.
In 1834, the piece continued, Pico was hired to deliver and butcher 5,000 head of cattle for the Mission San Gabriel, though it was not stated that this was during the time of secularization, coming out of a decree from México City that shut down the missions, released their lands for private grants and converted the churches into parishes. Also not mentioned was that Pico was the appointed administrator for the secularized Mission San Luis Rey in modern Oceanside in northern San Diego County.
As to his role in politics, Pico returned to the diputación and Brook, after noting that power was too strong in Los Angeles, which officially went from a pueblo, or town, to a ciudad, or city, in 1835 and it became the capital of Alta California, mentioned that this was shifted to Monterey, which remained the seat of administration.
Brook’s telling of the history of this time is scattershot, but he observed that, in February 1845, “a bloodless battle of two or three days’ continuance was fought in the San Fernando valley,” specifically where Studio City and Universal City are just beyond Cahuenga Pass, at which time Manuel Micheltorena, one of the appointees of México City who were usually turned out and sent back by Californios accustomed to semi-independence, was defeated.
As we noted before on this blog, William Workman had a notable role in this conflict as a “captain” of the extranjero (foreign, meaning Americans and Europeans) volunteers gathered by Pico, and Brook continued that, “upon the expulsion of Micheltorena Los Angeles again became the seat of government, with Don Pio Pico as Governor,” due, however, to his position as senior vocal of the diputación.
In under a year-and-a-half, though, came the invasion of American naval forces under the command of Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who was accompanied by Army Colonel John C. Frémont, who’d seized San Diego at the end of July 1846 after arriving their by ship and then marched north. The combined forces entered Los Angeles without a shot fired, though Brook erred in stating that the date was 15 August, when it was two days earlier.
In any event, Pico, “without discovery by the American forces,” decamped to México prior to the capture of the Angel City and it was added that “some little effort was made by the Americans to capture” the governor and General José Castro, who commanded the Californio defense, which was then left to Pico’s brother, Andrés, who inflicted a devastating defeat on an American Army force at San Pascual near San Diego and signed the Treaty of Cahuenga that marked the conclusion of local fighting, and José María Flores, who led the defense of Los Angeles before its final capture on 10 January 1847, ending the war in California.
Brook remarked that Pico “made no permanent home in Mexican territory” and, in 1848, after the war ended, the former chief executive returned, passing through San Diego before ending his journey at Mission San Fernando, where Andrés Pico resided. Before that, however, Pico spent some time at the Workman House, for which his host was roundly criticized by Jonathan D. Stevenson, the American military commander in the Angel City, for being “ever hostile to the American cause.”
The account then ended abruptly by merely stating that Pico “settled on his own ranch, the Santa Margarita, where he lived until 1864.” From there, it was as if Brook saw no value in relating any of the last three decades of Pico’s life, yet Don Pio remained a wealthy and prominent Californio, owning much of the San Fernando Valley and the Rancho Paso de Bartolo, where his longtime home, El Ranchito, was situated and still stands as a state historic park in Whittier.
In 1868, as Los Angeles was embarking on its first boom, the ex-governor constructed the Pico Building on the east side of Main Street in the midst of the growing downtown commercial district centered around the nearby Temple Block. The main tenants of his structure was the bank of Hellman, Temple and Company, of which compadres William Workman and F.P.F. Temple were partners.
The fact, however, that Brook could overlook the building of the Pico House hotel, for which Don Pio sold his San Fernando holdings and expended a very large sum in an earnest effort, unsuccessful as it was, to keep the Plaza, the historic center of Spanish and Mexican Los Angeles, economically viable, is nothing short of astonishing.
Finally, it would have been more than proper for Brook to have at least addressed the terrible legal judgment rendered against Pico regarding a loan he obtained from merchant Bernard Cohn and which the latter argued was a deed—the affair was nothing less than a swindle. The result was that the 90-year old, who was, however, still active and vigorous for a nonagenarian, was evicted from his El Ranchito and forced to move to Los Angeles to live out his remaining days.
What Brook did conclude, insufficient as it was in fact, had a respectful sentiment:
Pio Pico was liberal, generous, and a gentleman of the old school, exercising the most lavish hospitality. At one time he counted his acres in Southern California by the hundreds of thousands, but one after another his possessions went to money lenders, and at the time of his death the house that sheltered him was a gift from an old-time American friend [Jonathan Trumbull, also known as Juan José, or J.J., Warner did assist him in his later years, but did not, as far as is known, provide his last residence, which was with Pico’s daughter].
What seems obvious to a historian in hindsight is the question of why Brook, who’d only been in Los Angeles for eight years and likely did not know Pico well, if at all, was selected to write this essay. There were certainly many others in the Angel City who could have undertaken this task, though it is possible that the author interviewed those who knew the ex-Governor well. In any case, we’ll return tomorrow with another paean to the late Don Pio, penned by someone who was in Los Angeles far long and, presumably, knew him far better than Brook.
If this post sparks curiosity in Tombstone Tales, please join us tomorrow at Noon, 1, 2 or 3 p.m. and hear more of the stories of the Picos, El Campo Santo Cemetery and how Don Pío and Doña Ignacia were relocated to their final resting places. We hope to see you then!
One thought