by Paul R. Spitzzeri
With this latest entry in the “Read All About It” series of posts culling material from the Museum’s collection of historic greater Los Angeles newspapers, we look at the 13 March 1874 edition of the Los Angeles Express, published as the region approached the peak of its first boom, modest as it was compared to the many which followed. The paper prominently featured, aptly befitting its moniker, a railroad locomotive, symbolic, as it was for any town seeking not only continued viability but potential future expansion into cityhood, given that the lack of a rail connection was almost a sure guarantee of decline and, in many cases, the withering away into a ghost town.
Los Angeles had long been the subject of speculation of its rail-destined future, at least as far back as some two decades, when federal surveyors descended on the area to investigate possibilities for a transcontinental railroad terminus. In fact, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, tasked with overseeing these plans, took the advice of those who suggested that a 35th parallel route from the southern states to the rudimentary harbor at San Pedro, and made that recommendation. As the country edged closer and inexorably to the Civil War, however, there was no way the Union, comprised of northern states, would choose anything but a route from that region, while Davis ended up as president of the Confederate States of America.
In spring 1869, the transcontinental route was completed and, later that year, local capital finished the region’s first railroad, the Los Angeles and San Pedro, a marked achievement to be sure, but only a first step toward what was envisioned in connecting the Angel City with eastern points. After the mighty Southern Pacific, which controlled much of the Golden State’s rail service, sought to bypass Los Angeles with a line heading to what is now Yuma, Arizona at the Colorado River, enough pressure was brought to bear on Congress, that the SP was forced by an 1871 federal charter to build through our area. That same year, the first federal appropriations for improvement at the harbor were made for dredging and a breakwater to significantly improve shipping there.
Next came negotiations between the company and Angelenos about specifics of how this was to be done, with F.P.F. Temple one of the cadre of local negotiators. In early November 1872, Los Angeles County voters approved a subsidy that entailed some $600,000 as well as giving the SP control of the Los Angeles and San Pedro and, in return, the rail giant would not only construct its main line from the north to Los Angeles and then east through the San Gabriel Valley (and William Workman’s portion of Rancho La Puente, with a depot nearby), but also a branch line from Florence (south Los Angeles) to Anaheim.
By April 1874, the Puente depot was completed and Workman, well into his Seventies, could take advantage of passenger service to and from Los Angeles. Around this time, however, his son-in-law Temple was already working with other local figures to develop a new railroad project that would tap the booming silver mines of Inyo County in eastern California—where Temple and Workman also had their own interests in the boomtown of Cerro Gordo—and circumvent the SP and its monopoly on shipping.
This is where the highlighted issue of the Express, which ran a featured editorial called “The Complement of the Harbor,” with the piece observing that,
The complement of an accessible harbor to Los Angeles is the construction of a railroad which will make it the ocean outlet for the trade of Southern Utah, Southeastern Nevada and Northern Arizona. A railroad from here to Cerro Gordo will ultimately effect that great purpose, and is the one thing needed to place our city on the road to a commercial prosperity second only to that of San Francisco. The project seems formidable now, but if once undertaken in the right way it will move along to completion as smoothly as it were buttered with National, State and local subsidies.
While the paper commented that local money was obviously foundational, it added that “no city, however affluent, is capable, by herself, to furnish the means for the great improvements which enhance to commerce of cities and bring wealth to their doors.” Chicago was hailed as a preeminent example of how the development of rail lines made it a commercial center with corresponding prosperity and wealth.
As to this region, the Express reflected that “with the opening of our harbor to mercantile marine of the world, Los Angeles takes her place as an important commercial outlet” and “then becomes the natural base of supply of an immense territory rich in mines and possessing a diversity of soil capable of producing anything necessary to the want or luxury of man.” Like the Windy City, the paper pondered, Los Angeles would have access to “the coffers of the capitalists of the world.”
Further, asserted the sheet, “all we have to do is to take such steps as our interests demand to show the feasibility of required improvements, and capital will seek us.” This included the imperative of a narrow-gauge railroad to the Cerro Gordo area, from which silver was sent by mule and wagon teams, and such a project, it was confidently asserted, “would pay from the very start.” It was claimed that there were “a dozen Cerro Gordos” in the vast regions of Inyo and San Bernardino counties and “we have now only a faint idea of the great precious metal capacity of that remarkable intermediate region.”
Rising in its rhetoric, the Express exhorted its readers that,
It is our duty to make the first practical move in all enterprises calculated to benefit our city. If we neglect to do this, we leave the opportunity to more energetic people to burn away from us the natural tributaries to our prosperity. If we hesitate at undertaking a great work because we have not within ourselves the means to accomplish it, we shall always remain a small provincial city; but if we start out on the idea that our situation is the basis of our great wealth, and show people abroad that it is to their interest to aid us, we can accomplish any reasonable work we may undertake.
It was averred, moreover, that once it was understood that local capital was undertaking a railroad to the eastern California mining regions and that it “is the complement which shall render the commercial logic of our harbor complete, and establish us as the great ocean outlet for a territory larger than the New England States,” than there would surely be capital flows heading south from San Francisco and it “and other financial points will has hasten to our aid.
The only way, though, that this could be expected is if it was clear that “we must do something” and “must show that we have faith” while also showing that “we know and feel we are the key to this great commercial development.” In so doing, the editorial concluded, it would be “our own earnest acts [that would] justify capitalists in placing their money in our enterprises.” As noted above, Temple and others soon formed the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, though whether it was really felt that local money could push the project to completion or that early surveys and construction would entice outside capital is a notable question.
In fact, Temple, as president of the L.A.&I., oversaw the work of engineer James U. Crawford in surveys, most critically at Cajon Pass, which the SP desperately tried to claim but failed as Crawford and his team reached it just before the crews of the rail titan. Despite active campaigning for stock subscriptions in Los Angeles, what fifteen years later became Orange County and in San Bernardino County, it was clear that outside money was needed.
United States Senator from Nevada, John P. Jones, who had considerable mining interests in eastern California, as well as his state, ended up buying a majority of stock and assumed the chief executive role, with Temple moving to treasurer. He, however, wanted a branch line constructed first to connect Los Angeles with his new seaside resort town of Santa Monica. While this was finished in fall 1875, the collapse of the state economy (following the rest of the country and its “Long Depression” which ensued two years earlier) a few months earlier and which led to the failure of the Temple and Workman bank, the rest of the project stalled amid the moribund economy and the L.A.&I. was sold to the SP in 1877—the Santa Monica line is now the route of the E Line of the Metro interurban train system.
On that editorial page, the Express quoted from the Inyo Independent, published at the county seat of Independence, and which reported that
We have it from good authority that earnest work is going on both in San Francisco and Los Angeles in favor of the Cerro Gordo and Los Angeles narrow gauge. A number of capitalists in both places are very favorably disposed toward the enterprise, and we feel quite confident active work on the road will be commenced this very Spring. We truly believe there is not a more promising railroad enterprise offering on this coast.
The Independent also stated that the existing freighting company, controlled by Los Angeles’ Remi Nadeau, ran two teams every day from the mining town of Cartago and which daily hauled some 340 bars of silver weighting some 15 tons, this being about 60% of all the product that emerged from the blast furnaces. The problem was that the company did not have the means to ship what was needed because of “the almost impassable condition of the roads especially down near Los Angeles,” including those trying to ford rivers and streams.” It was, however, anticipated that some relief was expected “when the [Southern Pacific] railroad begins to take their freight at San Fernando,” where a new town was springing up next to a depot site.
Another couple of small editorial items concerned the recent passage by the California Senate of a local option law that would permit towns, cities and counties to ban liquor sales in their jurisdictions by approval of a majority of voters. The Express commented that women in San Francisco attended a Board of Supervisors meeting there to petition for the prohibition of such sales at grocery stores, as well as to reduce the number of “dram shops,” or taverns. There was some movement along this line in greater Los Angeles, as well, nearly a half century before national Prohibition was effected by amending the Constitution.
In the “Local Items” column, we learn that the Irish denizens of the Angel City were ready to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a “parade, oration and a grand ball in the evening;” that new rail cars, constructed at Wilmington, for use by the SP on the Spadra and San Fernando lines were at the Los Angeles depot where Alameda and Commercial streets met; and that water-logged streets after the prior day’s rains were already dried out. In a religious news item, Bishop William Ingraham Kip of the Episcopal Church was to arrive by steamer from San Diego and would be conducting a service and confirmation rites at the Good Templars Hall.
Most entertainments at the time were held at the German-operated Turn Verein Hall on Spring Street and the Merced Theatre, adjacent to the Pico House, just south of the Plaza—these structures and the Masonic Hall still with us today. At the former, Samuel W. Piercy and others were performing in a benefit for the city’s library, established in late 1872 with Thomas W. Temple, F.P.F.’s son and cashier and the family bank, with local amateurs including Antonio Franco Coronel and Miguel S. Arevalo among those providing musical entertainment.
At the latter, the Express reported that “a good house was in attendance last night” for a performance by a troupe including eight-year-old actor Fay Templeton, who had a long stage career well into the 20th century, with the paper remarking that she “was as naïve and piquante [sic] as ever in her personation of the great singer” Jenny Lind. It added that Templeton “has a most astonishing voice for an infant, and sang charmingly a difficult piece,” with the request that “the management should give us more of little Fay,” with that day’s matinee and evening performances including her signature “Cupid’s Medleys,” with the remark that it was a highlight “in which little Fay [will] give us a world of good things.
In the brief listing of court proceedings, an indigenous woman listed as “Aselsa,” actually being “Celsa,” was indicted on a charge of murdering her infant child and, having no counsel, the judge, Ygnacio Sepúlveda, one of the few Latinos (along with Coronel, who was recently State Treasurer) in a position of power in Los Angeles, appointed C.N. Wilson as her lawyer. A not guilty plea was entered and a jury pool ordered—Celsa was acquitted of the charge when the trial was held not quite a month later.
Returning to the Cerro Gordo mining region, the Express again quoted the Inyo Independent regarding the reported movements of the notorious bandido, Tiburcio Vásquez and up to nine men who were said to be at the town of Coso, some sixty miles south of Cerro Gordo, before leaving the area. Soon, the gang ended up in Los Angeles, attempted a robbery of Alessandro Repetto, a rancher in what is now Monterey Park, and then eluded capture for some weeks until he was nabbed at a house in modern West Hollywood. After a period of some celebrity, while in the county jail awaiting extradition to the north on a murder charge, Vásquez was executed in spring 1875.
We’ll return soon with another “Read All About It” post and there are more 1870s Los Angeles newspaper accounts to share, as well, so be on the lookout for those.