by Paul R. Spitzzeri
William Workman’s farming and ranching enterprises at Rancho La Puente for nearly 35 years from the late Mexican period in the 1840s through the first quarter-century of the American era into the mid-1870s included his early focus on raising cattle, first for their hides and tallow and, then, with the onset of the Gold Rush, fresh beef.
The waning of the Rush, the importation of better breeds of beef cattle and the terrible climatic conditions of the first half of the 1860s, with fearsome floods followed by devastating drought, wreaked havoc on greater Los Angeles’ cattle industry, as animals died en masse, and the livelihoods of ranchers severely impacted. It was not until November 1864, around the time of the presidential election, that weather conditions began improving and a slow rebound from the long financial crisis started to ease.
It is hard to document this period, as so few records have survived, with respect to the impacts of this era on Workman’s economic position, but he (pardon the pun) weathered the difficulties, while many of his fellow ranchers did not. We do know that a stroke of luck came in January 1864 when a close friend, William Wolfskill, shared grazing land less affected by the drought at the foothills at the north side of the San Bernardino Mountains, near modern Apple Valley, so that Workman and John Rowland, his La Puente co-owner, who sent 5,000 cattle and 1,000 horses suffered fewer livestock losses as they pastured their animals there until May 1865.
Workman’s grandson, John Harrison Temple, who would have been about seven or eight years old at the time, recalled many years later, as expressed in a 1921 regional history by playwright and poet John Steven McGroarty:
[Workman] was compelled to kill some two thousand head to save their hides. The cattle were driven into a large corral from day to day and were shot. John H. Temple recalls seeing cattle go up to a cactus patch so weak that they could scarcely walk and in attempting to get something to eat would literally cover their heads and mouth with cacti. It was one of his greatest ambitions to follow his grandfather through the corral and see bring his bullock[s] down. He was considered one of the best shots in the West, and proved it many a day, though he was sixty-three years of age.
Given the timing of the situation, the survival of a pair of bills of lading, issued to Workman on 4 and June 1864, from the forwarding and commission firm of Tomlinson and Company as well as the owners of the steamship Senator may well relate to the mass slaughter of cattle. Before we get into speculation on what was shipped, let’s provide a little background on the ship and the Tomlinson business.
The side-wheel, coal-fired Senator, with a white-oak hull and two masts for sailing and spanning 219 feet, was constructed at a cost of $90,000 in New York City in 1848, the year that the Gold Rush burst forth, and it ran an Atlantic seaboard route for a short time. After a seven-month journey around the Horn of South America, it arrived at San Francisco in October 1849. The craft contained a quartet of well-decorated bridal suites, staterooms trimmed in rosewood and a salon paneled in ash and walnut, while steerage passengers had use of a kitchen.
While the craft initially plied the route to and from Sacramento and other northern California routes, it was later put into use by the California Steam Navigation Company for a coastal route that, by summer 1856, included San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, San Diego and our rudimentary port at San Pedro/Wilmington. At this latter, the steamer had to anchor off shore about a mile because of sand bars and other inhibitors that prevented landings at the wharves, so lighters, or smaller steamers were used to ferry freight and passengers to the Senator.
By the mid-1860s, the age of the ship caused some complaint among passengers and others utilizing it and some retrofitting and remodeling was undertaken. It was owned by three other companies until it was taken out of service in 1882 and refashioned into a barge. The craft was sold to a New Zealand company and was utilized there until around 1910. The 10 May 1864 edition of the Los Angeles News, which complained in February about the lack of commercial transport in favor of wartime freight during the war and called for something of a boycott by locals, ran a feature on the recently sold Senator, acidly observing:
She may yet ride the waves for years—all right—yet this does not do away with the probability that she may at any time go down with all on board—[and] again put Los Angeles in mourning for the loss of some of her most valuable citizens. The Senator has monopolized the trade of the Southern coast for many years [eight]; she has been well patronized at the most exorbitant rates for passage and freight, for which there has been little or no reciprocation on the part of her owners, in the way of accommodation . . . [the operation of the ship] has been only the merciless “grab” by a swindling monopoly for the people’s money, while they care not a straw for human life . . . those more heartless than the highwaymen [robbers] . . . She is manned by an experienced and gentlemanly set of officers—highly respected in this community . . . [but] is kept afloat and “propelled solely by and for the benefit of the pockets” of the Steam Navigation Company, whom the people of California know only to their own sorrow and regret.
This rhetoric sounds very much like that which would appear in local newspapers about a decade later when the Southern Pacific Railroad began operations in greater Los Angeles and was a monopoly (including when it took over the local Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, which ran between the Angel City and port) that raised local ire over its passenger and shipping rates.
John J. Tomlinson (1826-1867) hailed from Cumberland in western Maryland near the Pennsylvania border and migrated, when young, with his family to Illinois, living near Peoria. When he was about 20, he migrated on the California-Oregon Trail, to the latter territory, remaining there until the outbreak of the Gold Rush, upon which he moved to Shasta County. In May 1857, while living in Red Bluff and operating a delivery business, he secured a contract to transport copper ore from mines in southern Arizona Territory to Fort Yuma and passed through Los Angeles on the way.
The work proved to be highly challenging and Tomlinson, disappointed in the financial returns from the contract, decided to relocate in Los Angeles, specifically the San Pedro/Wilmington port area, where he opened a forwarding and commission business first with wagonmaker John Goller. This put him in competition with Phineas Banning, who came to the area about a half-dozen years earlier and established his forwarding and commission enterprise that dominated in the port area. Not surprisingly, Banning viewed Tomlinson as an existential threat and legal battles ensued for a few years, leading to a settlement by which the two could operate their firms. Tomlinson, who built a structure and corral on Spring Street between Temple and 1st streets, then occupied, early in 1867, a lot long owned by Jonathan Temple and Temple and New High street, though he died shortly afterward. When the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad was completed in 1869 between the city and port, the firm was sold to the rail company
Among Tomlinson’s partners was Jonathan D. Dunlap (1825-1904), a native of New Hampshire, who resided in Zanesville, Ohio before joining the Army during the Mexican-American War, working in the commissary department and then as chief clerk for a Mississippi rifle company. Following the war, Dunlap spent some time at Panama, doing commission and auction work, and then migrated by sea to California arriving about the time it entered the Union in September 1850. After some mining, Dunlap became associated with Tomlinson in the north and came with him to Los Angeles, working as agent in the commission and forwarding business for a couple of years. He roamed through western territories before landing a position at Los Angeles as a federal marshal, holding this job for over twenty years.
Another main figure in the business was John M. Griffith (1829-1906), born in Baltimore and a resident of Vancouver, Washington before joining, in 1857, the California Steam Navigation Company at Sacramento, where he married Tomlinson’s sister Sarah. Four years later, the couple joined Tomlinson, after Dunlap’s departure, and an encomium stated that Tomlinson “and Mr. Griffith [were] very prominent and energetic citizens of Los Angeles county” while “they made things very lively,” as noted in the court battles, “for the equally irrepressible General Phineas Banning.” Griffith, who ran the Tomlinson enterprise for about two years after his brother-in-law’s death and sold it to the Los Angeles and San Pedro, was later best-known to Angelenos for his long-standing lumber business, including with Santa Cruz capitalist, Sedgwick J. Lynch.
It is likely the handwriting of Griffith, though it may be of his brother-in-law, on the company’s bill of lading, dated the 7th, to Workman, which recorded the $20 freight charge for the Senator, lighterage for 80 feet of goods at four cents per foot, and a $3.50 charge for forwarding. The steamship’s bill, dated the 4th and signed by the purser, noted the charge for the 80 feet, comprising five packages.
In 1864, the Senator was advertised as landing at the aforementioned ports and that, from 1 April or thereabouts, it would travel twice monthly to these destinations, leaving San Francisco on the 3rd and 18th at 9 a.m. The ad was in the name of California Steamship Navigation Company President Samuel J. Hensley, though the above 10 May article recorded that he’d just sold his interest in the line.
Notices during the year in the Angel City’s two newspapers, the News and the Star, record that the Senator hauled material for mining operations in southern California and Arizona, including at Holcomb Valley, north of Big Bear; Santa Catalina Island, which was recently purchased by San Francisco capitalist James Lick and where Workman and F.P.F. Temple would soon pursue mining interests; and along the Colorado River, where a mining boom was underway. There were also reports of bullion being transported on the craft.
The steamer also provided the essential service, despite the complaints noted above, of mail and newspaper deliveries, while criminals to and from San Quentin State Prison or those captured and being sent to locations where they were wanted (Louis Love, wanted for the murder of Ramón Carrillo, who, in turn, was accused of the 1862 killing of Rancho Cucamonga owner John Rains, was one such example in August) also were transported. Mohave Indian Chief Irataba also was ferried on the craft, with the 21 May edition of the Star highlighting his visit after going to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln, this followed by the establishment of a Colorado River Reservation. Federal officials, including Judge Fletcher M. Haight, who had an important role in the land claims for ranches and District Attorney Billington C. Whiting, were passengers on the Senator during the year.
Union Army troops were also transported on the craft, including those stationed at Camp Drum, or Drum Barracks, to keep a close eye on the Confederate-supporting populace who comprised the majority of Los Angeles-area denizens. Another passenger was Timothy Guy Phelps, recently a member of the House of Representatives and a former state legislator, who was on “a thorough and most successful canvass” of the southern counties and who “will be able to report fine progress for the Union cause,” claimed the pro-Union News in an October edition as the presidential election neared (incumbent Lincoln only narrowly won the Los Angeles County vote because of the presence of soldiers in the area).
A local luminary was reported as a Senator passenger in the 18 June 1864 edition of the Star with the paper briefly commenting:
After a visit to the Eastern States and the European continent, our fellow citizen John Temple, Esq., returned to Los Angeles this week.
Temple and his wife Rafaela Cota likely visited their only child, Francisca de Ajuria, and her children, perhaps after the death of her husband, Gregorio, as well as family members in his hometown of Reading, Massachusetts, which he left over four decades before to settle in Hawaii, where he was a merchant for several years prior to sailing, in 1827, to Mexican California. The following year, he became the second Anglo to settle in Los Angeles, opened its first store and later owned the 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos in the modern Long Beach area, where his two-story adobe house, built in 1844, is the centerpiece of a historic site.
It was not long after their return that Jonathan and Rafaela decided to move to San Francisco, perhaps, at least in part, because of the dire conditions in greater Los Angeles. Los Cerritos was sold for $20,000, well under a dollar an acre, to the sheep-raising firm of Flint, Bixby and Company, but, shortly afterward, at the end of May 1866, Jonathan died in the northern metropolis. Rafaela, disposing of remaining Los Angeles property, including the valuable Temple Block, the center of the commercial section of town, which was sold to brother-in-law, F.P.F. Temple, moved to Paris and remained with her daughter until her death more than two decades later.
Finally, there is an interesting letter from Wilmington, which only recently replaced “Old San Pedro,” by “CIVIS” in the Star of 11 June worth mentioning. It was noted that the correspondent,
cannot refrain from informing your readers of the substantial progress made [at Wilmington], thus enhancing the taxable property of the county—while our good city of the Angels is plodding along, not a movement being observable in brick, stone or the primitive adobe. He found, in fact, a town, thickly populated, and resounding with the hum of busy industry.
Included in the description was “an immense warehouse, for the reception of the freight in transitu [sic] by the steamers and schooners of the San Francisco trade,” while new houses, a hotel, a school, a Templars Hall built by soldiers stationed at the barracks, were noted, as were “belonging to the port, are two steamers and numerous small craft.”
Quite a bit of detail was provided on Camp Drum and Drum Barracks, including the commanding officer’s dwelling, which still stands as a City of Los Angeles museum, as well as “an immense house with observatory, intended for the residence of Mr. Banning,” who was credited with getting the federal government to establish the military outpost. It was added that the dwelling “is an imposing structure, giving evidence of extensive accommodations, and when finished will be an appropriate outwork of the busy locality,” the edifice is also a historic site.
At the end of his missive, “CIVIS” noted,
Being at the beach on steamer day I went on board the Senator, which had a large freight list of the staples of our county—wool, wine, hides, &c.
It seems certain that the bills of lading to Workman from Tomlinson and Company and the Senator correspond to this “steamer day” and it may be that the hides that were among those “staples” on the lengthy freighting record included those from the mass slaughter of Workman’s cattle during the drought. In any case, these innocuous documents are notable ones about the transportation of goods from greater Los Angeles during the Civil War period.