The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Criminal Justice, 1859

The last year of the 1850s found the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors having relatively little business to conduct in the matter of the administration of criminal justice.

It may have been that, after the tremendous spate of violence that roiled the town and county during the tumultuous years of the Gold Rush and the peak of ethnic tension and violence of 1856 and 1857 with the Jenkins/Ruiz incident and the massacre of Sheriff Barton and his posse and the resulting manhunt, the situation was significantly calmer in terms of problems between the Latino and Anglo populations.  In fact, the next major community incident would not be until late in 1863 and even that didn't appear to be ethnically motivated.

Possibly, the economic downturn that came with the end of the Gold Rush by the middle Fifties, the national depression of 1857, and local malaise as cattle ranches were stuck with a glut in the inventory of livestock, kept some criminality lower than in the flush years before, especially property crimes like larcenies.

This isn't to say, however, that there weren't continuing spasms of violence.  For example, the 22 October 1859 edition of the Los Angeles Star lamented that "it is the misfortune of our city, to be infested by a band of worthless vagabonds, too lazy to work, but ready to steal, and murder, too, if necessary to carry out their depredations."

Vagabonds could imply that the moribund economy led drifters into the area, as the paper asserted they were "the offscourings of other localities."  The paper claimed none receny crimes could be attributed to local, permanent citizens.  Consequently, the article concluded "the crimes committed by these outlaws are charged against our community, and we have to bear the burden of their turpitude."

The Los Angeles Star of 22 October 1859 lamented the crimes committed by "vagabonds" from outside the county--a common complaint during the crime-ridden 1850s.

In any case, 1859 was a rather mundane year compared to its predecessors.  A sign of that was at the 7 February board meeting, when the county treasurer was ordered to transfer funds from the armed bandit fund, created to pay for expenses in hunting bandits during those rougher years earlier in the decade, to the Current Expense [General] Fund.

The following day the board reasserted the tax levy for the Jail Fund as 30 cents for each $100 of assessed property, which, again, shows how low tax rates were for a basic public service that took up a majority of the county's expenses.  Regarding the jail, the same 8 February meeting included an authorization by the board's Committee on Contingent Expenses to the jail physician to examine the quality of the food provided to prisoners, as per the order of 4 February 1858.

There had also been a change in the jailor.  Joseph H. Smith, who was defeated in the sheriff's race in 1858 by James Thompson, had been in charge of the facility, but was replaced by Richard Mitchell.  Mitchell years later would be among the several men deployed by Sheriff William R. Rowland in the well-planned and executed capture of famed bandit Tiburcio Vásquez in spring 1874.

Previous posts pointed out the matter of juror lists and the question of whether the ethnic imbalance in these pools were directly tied to whether defendants in the county's courts could receive justice.  After all, a trial by a jury of peers could, to some people, signify a balance of ethnicity (though not of gender, because women were not then allowed to serve on juries).  In the mid 19th century, however, peers simply meant persons from the community.

Moreover, as also stated here, an analysis by this blogger of over 1,200 criminal court cases from 1850 to 1875 and of those that had a stated disposition showed that the conviction rate differentials between those cases involving Spanish-surnamed defendants and those who were American or European were small.  In addition, even as juries became even more skewed towards American and European majorities after 1865, the conviction rate difference narrowed.

The only recorded jury lists in the 1859 minutes came in May and August, when 68 jurors were identified.  Of those, eight had Spanish-language surnames, comprising about 12% of the total, more or less consistent with previous lists, but still very low.  What isn't known, incidentally, is what proportion of Los Angeles County residents on the tax rolls were Spanish-surnamed and whether their representation on those rolls were significantly lower than for Americans and Europeans.

In 1858, a measure, approved by the California legislature, to put the matter of a $25,000 loan for a new court house before the county's voters was narrowly defeated in the early September election by a matter of just a few dozen votes.  The supervisors decided to take up the idea again in 1859 and secured the legislature's approval for a new ballot measure.

In August, as an aside, five new election precincts were created for Los Angeles County, with most of them having some connection to a mining boom that took place in what were then usually called the Sierra Madre, but later changed to San Gabriel, Mountains.  These precincts included two called the "Upper and Lower San Gabriel Mines" up in San Gabriel Canyon above the new precinct of Azusa, as well as San Francisco [San Francisquito] Canyon, near modern Santa Clarita and where there was mining activity, as well as Tehachapi.  The last of these was in Los Angeles County for seven years until the creation of Kern County in 1866.

Now all of these were sparsely populated regions of the county, so how much influence any or all of these could have had on the court house vote is questionable, given that most people either resided in the the city of Los Angeles or the township of that name that surrounded it.

Not that it really mattered, actually, as the published returns in the minutes of the 19 September board meeting revealed that the court house loan only secured 162 yes votes, while 1,766 persons voted no!  Is it any wonder that the county gave up the idea of trying to secure a loan for a new court house and turned once again to prominent citizen Jonathan Temple?

Recall that Temple, who paid for the Ord Survey of 1849, the first professional survey of Los Angeles, sold the Rocha Adobe to the county in 1853 for a little over $3,000 with the adobe housing the courts, as well as city hall and county offices.  In 1859, Temple, who two years before, built one of the earliest brick commercial structures in town, which became the first of several structures comprising the Temple Block, took an "island" between Main and Spring and between Temple and 1st streets, and built the Market House, which also contained the first true theater on its second floor--years before the Merced Theatre was constructed near the Plaza.

This has been discussed here on the blog before, but Temple's Market House, designed as a commercial structure after the fashion of Faneuil Hall in Boston, which was near Temple's hometown of Reading, Massachusetts, came at the wrong time because of the poor economy.  However, Temple and the city and county came to an agreement to convert the structure to the court house, as well as city and county offices.

Notably, Temple ran for supervisor in the September elections, along with his half-brother, former supervisor and city treasurer, F.P.F. Temple, Temple's father-in-law William Workman, half-owner of Rancho La Puente in the eastern San Gabriel Valley and thirteen other candidates.

This card taken out by Ezra Drown in the Star's edition of 27 August 1859 addressed accusations that he was a former "Know Nothing", a name for the nativist, xenophobic American Party that controlled local and state politics briefly in the mid-1850s and a "Black Republican" running for district attorney in a Democratic-dominated county, filled by Southerners.  As noted at the bottom by the paper, Drown actually worked on behalf of Democrats to counter "Know Nothing" politicians.

  There was an interesting political situation in Los Angeles, reflecting the national problem of the impending slide towards Civil War and respecting views of states' rights, slavery and so forth.  Mainstream Democrats, who ruled the political roost in Los Angeles, uniformly won elections, but there was an alternate group of Democrats, who weren't as solidly pro-Southern, who ran in this campaign, including Workman and a few others.

Yet, some office seekers were from the northern states and managed, on occasion, to secure election.  One of these was Abel Stearns, who came to Los Angeles in 1829, the year after his fellow Massachusetts native Jonathan Temple and, like him, became a prominent merchant.  Stearns managed to win a seat as a supervisor in the 1859 campaign, though both Temples were defeated (F.P.F. came fairly close at 160 votes behind Stearns, but Jonathan only secured 261 votes.)

The other winners for supervisor seats were Ransom B. Moore, Cristobal Aguilar, Antonio F. Coronel, and Gabriel Allen.  Aguilar and Coronel were prominent Californios, discussed here before, who held political office frequently in the first quarter century of the American era.  

Allen, a native of New York, came to California as a soldier in the Mexican-American War and then returned east for several years.  In 1852, he journeyed back to dig for gold, but shortly after came to Los Angeles.  He married a local Latina, and became known as a road builder, particularly the difficult Tejon Road, north from Los Angeles towards San Francisco.  After his single term oin 1859-60, Allen turned to ranching and farming, but returned to serving as a supervisor in the mid-1870s for a full term and part of another (they were then 2-year terms).  He owned property in what is now the Costa Mesa area of Orange County, near Tehachapi and mines in Arizona.  He lived in Los Angeles until his death at 80 in 1899.

Moore hailed from St. Joseph, Missouri, where he became a newspaper reporter and editor before migrating to California in 1853 and settling in the new "American town" of El Monte as a cattle rancher.  His only foray into politics was his single term as a supervisor though he was an election inspector for the "Old Mission" precinct south of El Monte, where the original site of Mission San Gabriel was at Whittier Narrows.  Moore later lived in San Bernardino and owned the Rancho San Gorgonio in the pass of that name. In the 1880s, he relocated to Arizona and died there in 1904.

This list of township justices of the peace and constables for Los Angeles County appeared in the 8 October 1859 issue of El Clamor Público.  Copies of this paper were provided courtesy of Paul Bryan Gray.

Other election results included the reelection of County Judge (who presided over the Court of Sessions where most criminal matters were heard) William G. Dryden by a vote of 1197-937 over attorney and federal district judge Kimball H. Dimmick; the election of Tomás Sánchez, who had a prominent role in the manhunt for Sheriff Barton's killers, as sheriff by a 938-815 margin over Joseph H. Smith, with Frank H. Alexander securing 439 votes; and Southern firebrand E.J.C. Kewen besting former incumbent Ezra Drown for district attorney, 1115-902.   

Among the several townships and elections for justices of the peace and constables, William C. Warren, a young, new arrival to town finished third as a constable for Los Angeles township, but he would later by marshal and get involved in an infamous gunfight with one of his constables--this will be recounted in a future post here.  At San Gabriel, Roy Bean, whose brother was murdered in another incident to be related later here, was reelected as a constable.  Bean would go on to notoriety in Texas as a judge known as "The Law West of the Pecos."

As for the latter part of 1859, news was pretty scanty regarding criminal justice administration matters.  On 14 November, the supervisors rejected a claim from Juan Sepulveda for guarding the jail because it stated that new sheriff Sánchez did not get board approval for Sepulveda's appointment. 

A week later, after proposals were sought for a jail physician, there was only one respondent, this being prominent doctor John S. Griffin, who came to Los Angeles with the invading American military in 1846 and became a well-known citizen (and staunch supporter of the South.)  Interestingly, another physician, J.C. Welsh, was given a contract on 2 December, to supply medicines to the jail and hospital at $50 per month, but this was rescinded and lowered to $19.25 per month.  It is not clear if this interfered with Griffin's contract, however.

On 21 November, the board ordered Sánchez to have a nuisance, involving some structure, in the jail yard at the Rocha Adobe abated "and caused the house to be removed and properly constructed," with the monies to come from the jail fund.  Former jailor Francis J. Carpenter was hired to carry out this work.  Two weeks later, at the 3 December meeting, the supervisors ordered the sheriff to have jail inmates build a ten-foot tall wooden fence around the jail yard.

As a tangential note, the 6 December meeting had a record of rumors reaching the supervisors of an impending effort to unite Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties (as noted here before, San Bernardino County was carved out of Los Angeles in 1853, which created what is still America's largest county by area).  The rumor seemed to have enough behind it that the board adoped a resolution protesting against such a move.  Whatever effort there was went nowhere, though.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the end of 1859 also meant the final issue, on 31 December, of Los Angeles' first Spanish-language newspaper, El Clamor Público, which has been referred to many times in this blog, and will in future posts.  The economy, low subscriptions and the political and social problems felt by its proprietor, Francisco P. Ramirez, were among the factors for the shuttering of this remarkable newspaper.

We'll be coming back later to more of the Board of Supervisors minutes, but will move onto other criminal justice administration matters in the meantime.