“In the Perfect and Mellow Hours of its Fruition”: A Travelogue of Greater Los Angeles by “Socrates Hyacinth” in The Overland Monthly, January 1869, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

For much of the 19th century, increasing numbers of Americans, amid rapidly rising rates of literacy and a growing middle class with more time for leisure, including the reading of ever-growing numbers of books, journals and magazines, newspapers and more, the travelogue was of great popularity. Much of this was derived from trips abroad and the retelling of the experience of wonders in foreign lands, but often equally as novel were descriptions of portions of the American continent, especially the vast West, for those in the eastern and southern states to enjoy.

California, especially during and after its Gold Rush, was a prime area for visitors to see and describe and plenty of reading material was published to broadcast its diversity in climate, landscape and people to the rest of the country and overseas. Authors returning to the east often wrote books concerning “El Dorado,” and Golden State newspapers were regularly cited in the eastern press, but California-based magazines were also good sources of information.

Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine was a pioneer journal that was published in San Francisco from 1856 to 1861 and aimed at attracting tourists from elsewhere in the country. Its demise took place as the Civil War erupted and difficult economic times ensued through flood and drought, but, in the postwar period came The Overland Monthly, which debuted in 1868 and aimed to be a literary journal like those in the east with poetry and other fiction prominent among the descriptive content about California.

A regular contributor to the publication through the mid-1870s first garnered attention under the nom de plume of “Socrates Hyacinth,” though why the pen name was concocted is, apparently, unknown, unless the concealed author planned to publish contributions later on in book form under his own name. Whatever the reason, “Hyacinth” wrote his first work in the January 1869 issue of the Monthly as the first part called “On Foot in Southern California” of a series of his ramblings through California and this post highlights it as the content concerned greater Los Angeles before the scribe headed north.

“Socrates Hyacinth” was actually Stephen Powers (1840-1904), born in Watertown, Ohio, in the southeastern portion of the Buckeye State not far from the border with West Virginia. His father, William, was a farmer of some means, at least according to self-reported property values in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. By the time the latter was conducted, Stephen was attending the University of Michigan and matriculated from there with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1863 (though obituaries stated he graduated two years earlier.)

He clearly had a flair for the written word by then, as his oration in the “Junior Exhibition” in March 1862 on “The Classics Versus the English,” apparently comparing the literary productions of ancient and modern societies, was “a well-delivered production,” though the Ann-Arbor Courier Register avowed that “the gentleman attempted rather high gestures for so small a man,” perhaps a reference to his deeply-perfumed prose.

Maybe he learned to tone it down a bit because, when commencement came in mid-June 1863, the scholar delivered a poem and an oration at the graduation ceremony. The Detroit Free Press observed that the first, which concerned his fellow graduates, “possessed much merit,” particularly in praise of those students who served in the Civil War, an adjudged that “it was above the standard of poems usually heard on such occasions.” With respect to the speech, a look forward at “July 4, 1876,” the paper remarked,

It was an amusing imaginative picture of the few coming years, and its many capital hits drew forth frequent applause. In all respects it ranked among the best of the day.

After completing his studies, Powers went to work as a journalist and covered events related to the terrible conflict that tore at the fabric of American democracy for nearly two more years. In the final months of the war, he was in New Orleans as a correspondent for the New York Times, though, as was usual, without a byline.

Powers clearly experienced a good deal and amassed a significant amount of information, while drawing attention for his journalistic prowess, because it was widely reported in the spring of 1866 that he at least twice appeared before the Reconstruction Committee, a joint panel of members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives tasked with laying out the structure of postwar government in the defeated Confederate States of America.

Having spent much of his time during the conflict reporting from Florida, Louisiana and Texas, Powers explained to the committee his views on the unlikely prospects of a new revolt from the South or of any possible foreign entanglements from that region and did so while current working for the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper. Incidentally, another journalist giving his views on the situation was Benjamin C. Truman, later publisher of the Los Angeles Star and author of a regional travelogue from 1874, Semi-Tropical California.

It looks like Powers remained with the Cincinnati newspaper for a couple of more years before leaving the Ohio metropolis and heading to North Carolina, from which he left on a long solo journey, starting in Raleigh by foot across the southern portion of the country to California—in this he may have inspired a jaunt some fifteen years later by another Ohio resident and literary figure, Charles Fletcher Lummis, who went on to be a prominent figure in Los Angeles.

The first article for the Monthly, “On Foot in Southern California,” begins with “Socrates Hyacinth” approaching our region, sometime in the fall of 1868, from the southeast along the main road, often called the Colorado and then becoming the Butterfield stage and Pony Express routes, from Yuma, through San Diego County and past Temecula with the narrative beginning in modern Corona at the west edge of today’s Riverside County. He noted the “very dry plain” on he walked as he approached the Santa Ana River, which he assumed he would have to ford with difficulty, though he realized that, like the local watercourses generally, it was quite shallow.

The scribe then observed that “the Chino valley is colossal for width” and that it had “almost everything characteristic of autumnal California with “fiery corn-fields and the broad farms of barley-stubble,” along with willows, tule, mustard and other plant material along “the slothful [Chino] creek.” Then there were “countless ashen or tawny acres of pasture” and arroyos, or washes, “sluiced down from the [southern portion of the Chino] hills” to the west” and “in hideous deep gulches.” Also unimpressive were “ugly foothills, tawny with a thin hair grass that crackles beneath the shoes,” all of this along west side of the 71 Freeway just north of the 91 Freeway and the San Gabriel (generally known then as the Sierra Madre) Mountains “baring their brown heads for very heat, which stands quivering on end, like the hair of one electrified.”

Matters brightened considerably, however, when “Hyacinth” ventured further north a few miles north of “El Rincon,” which is about where the Prado Dam is at the junction of those freeways. With color found, “there are valley pastures of generous hue; there are myriads of grazing cattle; and again there is, on one side of the valley,” again the Chino Hills to the west, “a gorgeous tinted phylactery of foothills.”

It may well be that “Socrates” made his passage into greater Los Angeles during a Santa Ana winds condition, as he added that locals informed him that it would have been far better had he arrived in the spring.” Travelers who had so done would gaze upon “the land, in its green and sumptuous robes, its regal habiliments of promise . . . in a faint and general magnificence,” but would view the fall as a “blemish” on “all its beautiful ripeness, all its fulfillment of sound and juicy fruitage. He, however, claimed that he was happier to have come at this time of year, asserting,

I chose to see California in the perfect and mellow hours of its fruition, however withered that might be its leaf, rather than in the shining days of its blossom; and I had nothing to regret.

The Chino Valley, he continued, had little irrigation because, in that time of year, the creeks had very little flow and were “a mere slice of waters,” while stream banks were so tall and steep that it inhibited the use of ditches to take water to fields, while fights between neighboring farmers were purportedly such that “it two contend . . . the one will slit the other’s trench that is on his ground, and thus mar his corn.” Those growing corn, pumpkins and other crops generally relied on artesian wells, but barley, grapes and wheat did well unirrigated thanks to “harvests through the summer drought to ripeness on the impulse given by the March [or just earlier] rains.”

“Hyacinth” continued that, “for the first time in my journey, I ascended one valley, and crossed over to descend another,” without an ascent between hills or mountains and that “the broad prairie-like valley of the Chino suddenly pitches a tack from the westward to the southwestward, sweeps around a copperas-colored headland, plumed with live-oaks, and then shrinks into a dwarf.” The writer thought it was a continuation of the Chino Valley when, after spying some cactus “in a very black bog, I crossed a feeble rill and found it was trickling away from the Santa Ana.”

The account went on that “springs soon made it the San José [Creek], capable of watering a hundred fields.” What the author did was follow the route to the north end of the Chino Hills and then made the turn to the west and southwest where Highway 71 goes north of the 60 Freeway and then the road followed today’s Pomona Boulevard, where it met San José Creek and then became Valley Boulevard. Just recently, the hamlet of Spadra was developed near the adobe residence (his surviving brick home was constructed in 1875) of Louis Phillips, owner, for the last half-dozen years, of the southern portion of Rancho San José. Spadra resident William W. Rubottom and F.P.F. Temple completed a cut-off road to San Bernardino that also passed close to where “Socrates” traveled.

The writer noted that there were “hills all rounded and shorn and shaven,” and these were likely the San José range rising from where Cal Poly Pomona is and continuing west for several miles through modern Walnut and West Covina, as well as that northern end of the Chino Hills. It was also observed that “the land puts on a broad and solemn countenance to meet the Pacific” well more than thirty miles away. As he continued west, he added that “at first the San José gives only narrow willowed slips of flats; and all the hills are marshalled close along, round and bare and conical” while “it is as if the valley was trenched a hundred feet deep in an immense rolling plateau, whose river [San José Creek] edges were fashioned into rows of huge mounds [such as that recently developed into industrial property at the northeast end of the City of Industry, where the 57 and 60 freeways meet], and longer fragments of hills.”

Moreover, “valley and mount and plain are all deeply laid with that fat brown-black loam—the adobe—which is one of the wonders of California.” In fact, the official name for his thick soil is Puente,” though our traveler added that “valley and mound alike were then a hard desert of very faded green” and that “in all this greenish-brown desert one mound shows on its slopes two or three bright dwarf-walnuts; another, perhaps as many live oaks; while another covers its loamy head and with a skull-cap of cactus.” Next, as “Hyacinth” entered the eastern limits of Rancho La Puente, it was reported,

Down the San José I seemed to be walking in a foreign land. Many of the low hills [the Puente range], at a distance south of the stream, stood out in fine old brown . . . Sometimes the stream buried itself so deep in its narrow bed that the valley seemed to sweep right across. Again it had shreds of willow and live-oak fringes; and hiding on these timbered banks, as if averting their eyes from the strange vast nakedness around, were houses, neat and pretty and airy . . . with yards of tobacco-trees, weeping willows and pimientas [pepper trees].

While it is possible, “Socrates” wrote of the houses in Spadra, now southwest Pomona, he might well have been talking about the settlement, mainly of New Mexican families on the right, or north, side of the road in a portion of today’s Walnut. He then wrote that “as I traveled further down [west]. the valley broadened grandly out,” this seeming to mean as he got into the area where the Rowland and Workman family homesteads were situated and a large plain was to be found to the north where much of La Puente, West Covina, Baldwin Park and the unincorporated Bassett community are now.

The correspondent commented “there was no longer any tree” excepting some plants and “I passed one great herd after another of horses . . . proud and wild in their splendid beauty.” It was said there was “not a stall, nor a crib, nor a blade of hay, within miles; and I wondered much hat all these frisky animals ate for grass.” He then went closer to some of the tamer steeds, avoiding the cattle that “wanted to look at my heels,” and found that “they were gathering the burrs of the burr-clover, strewn in myriads on the ground.”

Other travelers noted the prevalence of this plant, amid the dry environments of greater Los Angeles, while adding that this was highly-nutritious for livestock of all kinds. It was added that “in the early summer the clover fills these burrs with oily seeds” and, once the blossoms withered and died, “only these burrs and crushed stems are visible.” This led the author to exclaim, “see how Nature lays up store for these noble herds through the drought!” It should be added that, after two years of terrible drought in 1863 and 1864, decent rainfall returned and the winter of 1867-1868, before the writer’s visit, was one of heavy precipitation and flooding, as well as a new course created for the San Gabriel River.

If our scribe stopped to visit or spend the night at either of the residences of the Rowland and Workman families, which was commonly the case for travelers at the time, he did not mention it. After more than a quarter century, the aging ranchers, John Rowland and William Workman, having secured, after long court battles and bureaucratic red-tape lasting some fifteen years, received their federal land patent in spring 1867 and then had their massive Rancho La Puente, not far under 50,000 acres, surveyed and subdivided.

La Puente was largely intact, though, in 1868, Workman sold more than 5,000 acres to Peregrine Fitzhugh and, with the region’s first development boom just underway by the time “Socrates Hyacinth” ambled into the valley, many changes were soon to be afoot in the next several years. Workman, for example, and his son-in-law, F.P.F. Temple, opened, around the time of the writer’s visit, the bank of Hellman, Temple and Company, and were making concerted efforts to move into the growing business world.

With “Socrates Hyacinth” leaving the Rancho La Puente and heading closer to Los Angeles, we’ll have a layover for a night and return tomorrow with part two, so be sure to check back with us then.