Horace Bell: Reminiscences of a Ranger, Part One

For those interested in the history of nineteenth-century Los Angeles, there are two autobiographies that are standard reading: that of merchant Harris Newmark, who arrived in the town in 1853, and the one written by Horace Bell, who predated Newmark by a matter of months, coming to town in 1852. The difference between the two is dramatic, however,

Newmark's book, Sixty Years in Southern California, published in 1913, is a collection of factual reminiscences laid out chronologically, offering relatively little commentary, and, frankly, lacking a sense of narrative and story.  Subsequently, many people use Newmark almost like a reference book, picking out the book when they want to learn more about a person or event.  He has been and will continue to be utilized here on this blog with great frequency.

Bell is an entirely different chronicler in his two works, Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881, reprinted in 1927) and On the Old West Coast, published in 1929 after his death.  While he liked to refer to himself as a "truthful historian," Bell was far more interested in telling rollicking, action-packed, character-based tales than laying out a series of facts.  Anyone with a good general understanding of the 1850s, which is the period in which Reminiscences largely takes place will be able to find many substantial errors and energetic exaggerations in Bell's text.

This is, in no way, a suggestion that Bell not be consulted.  His books are highly entertaining, but they need to be taken with a factual grain (or two or dozens) of salt.

A native of Indiana who came, as so many thousands did, to Gold Rush California in 1850 when he was barely out of his teens, Bell migrated south to Los Angeles in late 1852 where he had an uncle, Alexander Bell, a prominent merchant (though, strangely, Bell never refers to him as a relative in Reminscences when he talks about him at all.)

His detailing of the stage ride from the rudimentary harbor at San Pedro to the village of Los Angeles is the template for how the rest of Reminiscences is written.  The prose is lively, full of alleged, colorful quotes by the people Bell wrote about and replete with italics and exclamation points to hammer home the feeling about the wild frontier community that the author was determined to make as clear as possible.

While Bell delighted in talking about desperadoes, card sharks, immoral and unethical bigwigs, fallen women, gambling houses and other places of entertainment, and the like, he professed to have an aversion to discussing the horrors of extreme violence and the accompanying atmosphere surrounding much of Los Angeles' sordid criminal history, even as he often betrays himself by doing just that.  Still, he claimed that his purpose was to take more of a lighthearted approach, using comedy filled with irony and no small amount of critical commentary about events and persons.

Later an attorney and publisher of a relatively unknown weekly paper, accurately styled The Porcupine, Bell had an acidic, aggressive and confrontational style when it came to those contemporaries he did not like, while he could, on the other hand, be effusive, warm and highly complimentary of those he did.  Often the objects of his disdain went nameless in the text, except for some mocking sobriquet, such as "a most useful man" or "Old Horse Face."

When it came to criminal matters, Bell found himself arriving in Los Angeles just as a major event was taking place.  Joshua Bean, general of an Indian-fighting militia and owner of a San Gabriel salloon, was recently murdered and, the day after settling in, Bell found "a very small adobe house, with two rooms, in which sat in solemn conclave, a sub-committee of the great constituted criminal court of the city."  In other words, he stumbled upon a popular tribunal of citizens acting, ostensibly, in support of the legally-constituted courts in trying the matter of the men accused of killing Bean.

Bell, soon to join a militia of citizens formed to fight crime known as the Los Angeles Rangers (covered here in recent posts) and later a filibusterer with William Walker in Nicaragua, portrayed himself in Reminiscences as diametrically opposed to vigilantism.  In mocking tones, he reported upon the "very refined proces of questioning and cross-questioning" utilized in the tribunal and the way in which any contradictory statements made by a defendant who was "frightened so badly that he would hardly know one moment what he had said the moment previous" were considered "conclusive evidence of guilt."

It is interesting in this case to compare Bell's account with that of the sole newspaper in town, the weekly Star, and, in fact, the Bean murder will be covered here in more detail later.  For now, it is enough to say that the several men subject to the popular tribunal were, not surprisingly, found guilt and lynched.  While it was rumored that the legendary Joaquin Murrieta (or one of the several possible variations of him said to be roaming California) was directly involved in the Bean murder, Bell accepted his presence as an incontrovertible fact.

Having heard the substance of the trial, Bell departed and saved the hanging of the condemned men for a later, dramatic discussion, complete with a rainstorm, bursts of thunder and the like, and went on to talk about how Los Angeles "was certainly a nice looking place" in the midst of a Gold Rush windfall that enriched a great many ranchers and merchants in the small town through the lucrative cattle trade.

His tour on that second day in town, of course, included the more colorful establishments in town, including the many grog shops, gambling dens and other places of entertainment in and around the Calle de los Negros, known by Anglos as Nigger Alley, though the place was actually named for a dark-skinned Mexican who lived there in previous years.

This is where Bell made his famed, unsubstantiated, but generally accepted allegation that "the year '53 showed an average mortality from fights and assassinations of over one per day in Los Angeles."  He went on to say that "police statistics showed a greater number of murders in California than in all the United States besides, and a greater number in Los Angeles than in all of the rest of California" for the same year, though there is no citation, naturally, for the sources.

As noted here previously, there are other sources that suggest that the murder rate in Los Angeles was far lower and, almost certainly, far more accurate, but even at a few dozen documented murders in a given year, for a town of just several thousand, the rate is still astronomical.  What Bell doesn't discuss in any detail is just why the conditions were present for such a marked rate of murder in Gold Rush-era Los Angeles.

In any case, there is no question that crime and violence were mind-numbingly high in a community lacking monetary and material support for policing and court operations, abundant in young men from many ethnic and racial backgrounds and willing to fight out their differences in many kinds of circumstances, including those fueled by alcohol as well as prejudice, and awash in a sentiment that encouraged personal (or even group) justice over existing legal structures.

Bell's exaggerations serve the purpose of the dramatic storytelling that animated him, even if the grains of truth in his assertions need to be picked out and analyzed at a level of detail and corroboration he studiously avoided.  Still, his accounts are valuable because they are so rare and, again, because his style is so fun to read.

The next post takes us to his association with the Rangers and other tales of crime and violence in 1850s Los Angeles.