by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Our first Tombstone Tales program, a new offering featuring El Campo Santo Cemetery with a focus on persons interred in the burying ground established by the Workman family in the 1850s, has passed and we hosted over eighty visitors for an illustrated presentation followed by a visit to the just slightly under an acre site for a general overview of the cemetery as well as paying respects to this year’s subjects: Don Pío Pico and his wife Doña María Ignacia Alvarado.
Yesterday’s “intermission” post looked at a recollection of Don Pío in the pages of the October 1894 issue of The Land of Sunshine magazine and this one examines remembrances by Henry D. Barrows in what he called “A Biographical and Character Sketch of the Last Mexican Governor of Alta California” and which was read at a meeting of the Historical Society of Southern California.
The Society was just over a decade old, being formed in November 1883 at a meeting held in the City Council chambers with Jonathan Trumbull (Juan José, or J.J.) Warner in the chair. Warner played a key role in finding lodging in Los Angeles for Pico after the 90-year old was evicted from his El Ranchito adobe house on the Rancho Paso de Bartolo in Whittier—this now as state historic park—and remained close to Pico until the ex-governor’s death on 11 September 1894.
Other founders of the Society included former county surveyor George Hansen, Barrows, Dr. Joseph P. Widney, educator James M. Guinn, John Mansfield, J,Q.A. Stanley, and eleven other men. In 1884, the organization issued its first annual publication with articles on the region’s history and this continued for four decades until a quarterly was established in the mid-1930s—this continues today.
As for Barrows (1825-1914), he had a long-standing interest in greater Los Angeles history and wrote a good deal about it during his six decades in the Angel City. A native of Mansfield, Connecticut, east of Hartford, he had a notable musical talent and was an expert on the flute, piano, violin and a number of wind instruments. In his mid-twenties he taught music in Boston and, in 1852, headed for California, then in the midst of the Gold Rush.
He was working in the mines when he was hired in 1854 by William Wolfskill, one of the most prominent personages in Los Angeles, to be tutor for Wolfskill’s children. A half-dozen years later, Barrows married his employer’s daughter, Juanita, and the couple had a daughter before Mrs. Barrows died in childbirth.
A connection to the Workman family was that Barrows married Alice Woodworth, the widow of Thomas Workman, nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste and who was killed in a steamer explosion at Wilmington in 1863. Alice, however, died in childbirth, leaving a daughter and Barrows was married to Bessie Greene and they had a son. Another was recently discussed in a post on this blog about horse thieves in 1861.
Among the minority of Union supporters during the Civil War in a southern California that leaned heavily towards the Confederacy, Barrows secured an appointment from President Abraham Lincoln to serve as federal marshal for the local district and did so during the entirety of the horrific sectional conflict and an additional year beyond it. He followed this by winning election separately as the city and county superintendent of schools and was also a trustee of city schools.
In 1864, Barrows was the junior partner with John D. Hicks in a store that sold tin, copper and sheet iron, stoves, roofing material, lead and iron pipe and more and a Temple family connection is that Thomas W. Temple, eldest son of Antonia Margarita Workman and F.P.F. Temple, joined the concern four years later and remained until he became a teller in his family’s bank after it opened in late 1871. The firm became H.D. Barrows and Company in summer 1872 and he ran the business through the remainder of the decade.
Barrows also was the local unnamed correspondent for the San Francisco Bulletin in the 1860s and continued contributing articles for newspaper and magazines throughout much of his life. Not only was her a founder of the Historical Society, but served as its president in 1888, was first vice-president in 1894 and wrote a number of articles for the annual publication, including his essay on Pico, which began with the observation that the former governor’s life “extended over the greater part of the nineteenth century.”
After relating the other family members of the three boys and seven girls born to José María Pico and María Estaquia Gutierrez, Barrows stated that,
In a dictation of reminiscences made by Don Pio in 1881 to the writer, he said that the earlier years of this life, or rill about 1849, were mostly spent in San Diego; and that he still remembered some of the old settlers there in 1813 . . . nearly all of whom were the ancestors of he numerous families . . . now living in this and other counties of Southern California.
Among those named were Antonio María Lugo, later owner of the ranchos San Antonio, San Bernardino and Santa Ana del Chino; Claudio López, whose family included the settlers of Paredon Blanco (Boyle Heights), mayordomos of the missions San Gabriel (himself) and San Fernando, and the discoverer of the gold mines at Placerita Canyon near today’s Santa Clarita; and members of such prominent families as the Alvarados, Cotas, Dominguez, Poyorenas, and Verdugos.
A manuscript written in Spanish, apparently by Pico, was translated by Barrows and recounted the imprisonment of Don Pío’s father for sentiments expressed in 1810 for Mexican Independence, the struggle for which against Spain took a decade, while another soldier, Ygnacio Zuñiga remained in chains through the conflict. Pico’s document related recollections of the 1812 earthquake that destroyed the church at Mission San Juan Capistrano and more, while it also recorded that, after José María’s death in 1819, “I had to overcome many difficulties to move my mother and brother and sisters to the Presidio of San Diego,” where a sister, Concepción Carrillo, resided.
In 1821, Pico continued, his brother-in-law, José Antonio Carrillo, hired him to deliver barrels of liquor for the northern missions and related how, when visiting Governor Vicente Sola, the last of the Spanish chief executives of Alta California, the latter expressed surprise that Pico wore his father’s military uniform. This led Don Pío to say that his father left it to him and that he was entitled to wear it—leading Sola to affirm this privilege and providing a letter of recommendation to the commanding officer at San Diego, who appointed Pico lieutenant of a militia.
Barrows also related stories of Pico’s visit to San José, the oldest of the three pueblos in Alta California and which was founded in 1777, four years before Los Angeles and two decades before Branciforte, which soon floundered, though Santa Cruz was later built there. There was also a remembrance of an 1828 incident involving an incident involving the attempt to try a citizen before a military tribunal and Pico’s brief imprisonment as he refused to deliver documents from San Diego to Los Angeles because he supported the citizen’s claims that this was improper. This led Pico to say, “from that date I began to know the sacred rights of a citizen.”
There was also a condensed summary of the 1831 revolution Pico led against Governor Manuel Victoria, an appointee of México City, and which was discussed in Friday’s post based on Don Pío’s 1877 interview for the collection of Hubert Howe Bancroft. This version does not materially differ much from the Bancroft dictation and what Barrows added was that Pico was a member of the diputación, of legislature of the department of Alta California, for nearly fifteen years from 1828 to 1842.
Briefly recorded was Pico’s marriage to Ignacia Alvarado, which lasted from 1834 to 1854 and produced no children, while Don Pío also was the administrator of Mission San Luis Rey, in modern Oceanside, for a half-dozen years after its secularization in 1834. In 1841, he secured grants to the ranchos Santa Margarita and Las Flores, though it was actually the first of these, also known as San Onofre y Santa Margarita, that was given to Pico and his younger brother, Andrés, at that time, with Las Flores added three years later and consolidated with the first grant. Today, the Camp Pendleton Marine base is on the ranch, with the original adobe residence still standing.
Notably, Pico’s role in a second revolution against a governor, this one being, Manuel Micheltorena, another appointee of the Mexican government was not discussed by Barrows and it should be noted that William Workman, who became a compadre, or close friend, of Pico, was the captain of extranjero (foreign—meaning Americans and Europeans) volunteers under Don Pío.
It was noted that Pico was temporary governor for over a year, not confirmed by México City until mid-April 1846, though soon after the American invasion of Alta California took place. With the first seizure of Los Angeles in August, Barrows wrote, “the authority of Mexico and of the local Mexican civil officers in California finally came to an end,” though nothing was said about the uprising of the Californios and the retaking of the Angel City, which necessitated a second campaign by the Americans, in which Workman had an important role as a negotiator and bringer of the flag of truce when the town was taken again in January 1847.
Barrows continued that “Governor Pico left Los Angeles, and went, by way of Lower [Baja] California, to Sonora,” though nothing was mentioned about why in terms of fleeing likely arrest and imprisonment, as well as a futile effort to seek support from the central government. In any case, the writer made short shrift of Don Pío’s life after the war, though unlike Harry Ellington Brook in an encomium featured in yesterday’s post, there was this brief summation:
After the close of the war he returned, I believe, in 1848 [this included a stay at the Workman House, which angered Col. Jonathan D. Stevenson, American garrison commander at Los Angeles, who called Workman “ever hostile to the American cause” for not turning in his guest and compadre], and, accepting the inevitable, he became thereafter a good American citizen, making his home mostly at beautiful “Ranchito,” [on the Rancho Paso Bartolo and which is now a state historic park in Whittier] till he was ejected therefrom by the hard hand of the law [really, a swindle perpetrated by Bernard Cohn who argued Pico signed a deed to his property rather than what Don Pío understood to be a loan], two of three years ago, when he was offered an asylum in the house of his old friend of more than sixty years’ standing, Col. J.J. Warner, southwest of this city [near the University of Southern California], where he continued to reside till shortly before his death, when he came into the city in order to better avail himself of necessary medical attendance.
In the early seventies Governor Pico built and equipped the “Pico House,” which then as the largest and most commodious hotel in the city.
With this, the biographical portion of Barrows’ essay came to a close and it offered more substance than that of Brook, though it would have been good to have added that Don Pío also built, in 1868, the Pico Building on the east side of Main Street, a short distance south of where the Pico House was erected on the Plaza in an effort to keep the historic center of pre-American Los Angeles economically active.
Pico undoubtedly recognized that the Americans and Europeans were shifting the core of downtown in the growing city during its first boom to the south. The Pico Building’s commercial tenant was Hellman, Temple and Company, with F.P.F. Temple and William Workman the partners of the brilliant Jewish merchant, Isaias W. Hellman. When that partnership dissolved in early 1871 after about two-and-a-half years, Hellman’s Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank, formed with ex-Governor John G. Downey, operated there for several years.
What could have been mentioned, as well, was that Pico’s well-intended efforts with the Pico House were for naught, as the hotel never realized expectations, while the owner also tussled in lawsuits for years with managers. In fact, the governor, as his biographer Carlos Salomon has observed, was involved in many lawsuits over his life.
While Barrows referred to “the hard hand of the law,” the Cohn suit, which dragged on for years in the courts until the state supreme court issued a ruling in 1891 against Pico could also have been expanded on, even slightly. Pico’s final years were also remarkable as a prior post here has summarized and which was discussed in the “Tombstone Tales” program this weekend.
For Barrows’ “character sketch” of Don Pío, we’ll return tomorrow with part two of this post, so be sure to join us then.
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