A Murder a Day?: Homicide in 1850s Los Angeles

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, had a nationwide reputation as a den of deviltry.  During the 1850s and, especially, the heyday of the Gold Rush in the first years of that decade, the levels of violence found in the town and country was nothing less than shocking.

Naturally, homicide is the type of crime that gets the greatest amount of attention.  When it comes to trying to get a handle of how much homicide there was during the tumultuous Fifties, however, there is a wide range of information out there.

For example, Horace Bell, a longtime resident who arrived in the town in late 1852, wrote in his entertaining but exaggerated memoir, Reminiscences of a Ranger, published in 1881, that "the year '53 showed an average mortaility from fights and assassinations of over one per day in Los Angeles."  He went on to claim that "police statistics" showed more murders in California than in the rest of the United States and more in Los Angeles than throughout the state.

This excerpt from the 1927 edition of Horace Bell's Reminiscences of a Ranger states that there was more than a murder a day in Los Angeles in 1853.

The polar opposite of Bell in temperament and style was merchant Harris Newmark, a migrant of 1853 to Los Angeles who wrote his Sixty Years in Southern California in, of course, 1913.  Newmark observed that "human life at this period was about the cheapest thing in Los Angeles" and identified Calle de los Negros, or "Nigger Alley" as Newmark expresed it, a short, narrow lane off the southeast corner of the Plaza as where "a large proportion of the twenty or thirty murders a month" took place.

William Lewis Manly, a survivor of the ill-fated Death Valley '49ers emigrant party, wrote in his book, Death Valley in '49, that "the country was overstocked with desperate and lawless renegades in Los Angeles, and from one to four dead men was about the number picked up in the streets each morning."

There were, however, more muted reports.  Rev. James Woods organized a Presbyterian church at Los Angeles in 1854-55 and, in his Recollections of Pioneer Work in California, observed "I do not think it would be much exaggeration to say that, during that year, there was an average of one person killed each week."  Bear in mind that Woods admitted this could be a slight distortion of the truth.

William Brewer who wrote of his experiences as a surveyor through California, stated in his memoir that "fifty to sixty murders per year" was common in Los Angeles in the years prior to his first visits around 1860.

Merchant Harris Newmark in his memoir, Sixty Years in Southern California, claimed that there were some 240 to 360 murders a year in Los Angeles when he arrived in town in 1853.

Then, there is the 11 October 1851 edition of the fledgling newspaper, the Los Angeles Star, which cited a list provided by the deputy sheriff showing that, over the preceding fifteen months, there had been 44 homicides in Los Angeles County.  Twenty of these were in the city and outlying township of Los Angeles.  Notably, seventeen were in the San Bernardino area, which had only recently been established as a Mormon outpost.  Of these, however, eleven were members of the Irving bandit gang killed in a clash with Cahuilla Indians near present-day Redlands.

This latter brings up an important point:  if these bandits were outsiders from northern California who happened to be in the region for a short period of time and then were killed in a pitched battle, how do we define "homicide" or "murder"?  How many more of the reported "homicides" were matters of self-defense, suicide, or other types of death that are distinct from murder?

Finally, there is the ambitious effort mounted by the sociologist Eric Monkonnen and students to tally all homicides in Los Angeles from 1827 to 2002.  Conducted for the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University, the database could not be further refined when Monkonnen suddenly died in 2005.

What the table of homicides show is a range of between eight and twenty-eight incidences during the 1850s, with the peak occurring in 1854 and twenty-five more homicides taking place the following year.  These totals were nearly twice as much as the third highest total, fifteen in 1853.  Subsequent years showed a noted decline, to three each in 1862 and 1863, and then, as Los Angeles experienced its first significant growth in the late 1860s and early 1870s, a rise to as high as seventeen homicides in 1870 and eleven the next year.

There is a problem, however, with this data.  On 24 October 1871, a nightmare of staggering proportions was experienced when a multiethnic mob of Europeans, Americans, Mexicans and Spanish-speaking Californios shot, stabbed and hung nineteen Chinese males (including a 15-year old) in a mass lynching.  These victims inexplicably are missing from the table Monkonnen and his associates compiled.

The Rev. James Woods, a Presbyterian minister in Los Angeles in 1854-55, stated, with not "much exaggeration" that about 50 persons were killed in the town that year in this statement from his Recollections of Pioneer Work in California.

In any case, the significant variations in statistics are notable.  Perhaps the best the can be said is that the extremes of a "murder a day" found in Bell, Newmark and Manly are almost certainly gross exaggerations.  At the same time, the Monkonnen research is probably undercounted.  Maybe Woods, Brewer and the Star were closer to the mark.

Even so, assuming that 30-60 homicides (murders or otherwise) took place in a given year during the 1850s, this is a stunning rate for a town that could not have been much larger than, say, five thousand persons or so.

An important tangent:  the 1850 federal census, conducted in early 1851, tallied 1,610 persons in Los Angeles and 3,530 in the county.  However, a state census taken just over a year later in 1852 came up with a total figure of just under 8,000 persons in the county.  The difference appears to have mainly been in the head count of native Indians.  The federal census only enumerated a couple hundred odd native people, while the state census came up with nearly 4,000!  In 1860, by contrast, the native total was just a little over 2,000 and the city was listed as having over 4,400 residents with the county topping 11,000.

Returning to proportions: even a "modest" total of 30 or 40 homicides in a year for the county is something in the range of 1 in 200 to 1 in 250 or so, if we accept a general figure of 8,000 county residents.  Given that Los Angeles County had a reported 551 homicides among a population of around 10 million or 1 for every 18,000 or so people, it is easy to see how staggering the homicide rate was in the 1850s.  The "murder a day" totals would suggest somewhere around 4.5% of the population of the county was killed in a given year.

Sure, it could be argued that there was much more transiency in Gold Rush-era Los Angeles, so that many of those killed in the town and county were passers-by rather than settled residents.  There is no question, though, that the homicide rate, by any standard, was simply astronomical.

Why is almost certainly impossible to pinpoint with accuracy, just like finding reliable statistics on homicide and other crimes, but this blog will devote significant attention to the environment in mid 19th-century Los Angeles and look to provide some context for these mind-blowing numbers!

Before his death, Eric Monkonnen completed an article on his research for the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and which was published in Autumn 2005.  This statement might be as apt as one can find for the tentative nature of the homicide question and for most of the history of that era of Los Angeles as a whole:

On this basis of this patchwork history, we can begin to understand how a beautiful and prosperous region can become tainted with vicious, lethal crime.  Beginning is the best we can do at this point because social scientists, historians and other scientists cannot yet fully explain the causes of homicide, nor what works in its suppression.  The facts are elusive, the theories and hypotheses unconnected and speculative, and the data difficult to compile . . . as an overview, it raises as many questions as it answers.

This blog and the book of the same name, now being written, basically hold to this view.  We cannot know with certainty how crime and justice interrelate because the evidence is elusive, the interpretations are often speculative, and the data is hard to compile.  More questions are raised than answers.

But, we have to begin somewhere on the path to this fascinating patchwork history of crime and justice in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1875.  Welcome and join me as we tentatively navigate this remarkable journey!