California Gold (23 page)

Growth was slow; in 1820 Los Angeles still had only 650 inhabitants. She was a quiet, unsophisticated, not to say rustic queen in those days. But the influx of Anglos during the Gold Rush transformed her, and she became a haven for the desperate and violent, with fights, robberies, murders, and lynchings a way of life. San Franciscans derided her as the City of Fallen Angels.

In 1871 two members of the city’s small Chinese population quarreled, and when a policeman stepped in to mediate, he was killed. Over four hundred Angelinos rose up and ran riot, claiming nineteen victims in and around the Chinese district at Sanchez Street. This did nothing to improve the Queen’s tough and tawdry reputation.

A number of businessmen were concerned about the lawlessness, and perhaps even more, about the declining cattle trade, and felt that bringing in the railroad would establish stronger links with the more civilized outside world. The Southern Pacific was quite willing to lay track to Los Angeles, but demanded payment of an appropriate subsidy. Using this simple plan, the railroad had built southward through the San Joaquin Valley. Communities that appreciated the railroad’s benevolence and remunerated it accordingly soon saw the rails coming over the horizon. Los Angeles paid a subsidy, in the form of special assessments, totaling $600,000. Other, less enlightened communities like San Bernardino saw the railroad choose an alternate route, often miles away.

A second, simultaneous force helped civilize and populate Southern California. In 1872 a New York journalist named Charles Nordhoff published
California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence.
This hymn to climate and opportunity stampeded hundreds onto the westbound cars. No other book on the Golden State was so influential.

A torrent of similar promotions poured out; there had been nothing like it since the heyday of Gold Rush literature. Meanwhile, the Southern Pacific finished its tracks to Los Angeles in 1876. Always spinning its own elaborate web, the railroad soon determined that allowing a second line—a competitor—to enter Southern California would serve its devious ends. In 1885 the SP sold its Mojave-Needles division to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, in exchange receiving assurances of no competition in certain other places. Everyone, from railroad mogul to small merchant, wanted and needed to generate more business. They needed tourists, but permanent population too. So the SP slashed passenger fares, and the Santa Fe retaliated. Seventy dollars from the heartland to the Pacific. Then fifty dollars. Then fifteen. Then five. Then, for a few dizzying days,
one
dollar, Kansas City to Los Angeles.

Each railroad’s promotion department worked as never before, organizing special state or group excursions from the East, churning out ads and literature that extolled the California way of life. The Los Angeles city fathers supplemented these efforts with advertising of their own. Each citizen became a booster, taking every opportunity to tell a newcomer about Southern California. Soon the excursion trains were rolling over the Sierras by day and by night, spilling hundreds of wide-eyed passengers into the Los Angeles sunshine. Hundreds every month, then hundreds every week, then thousands. Eager real estate dealers awaited them; the breakup of the great
ranchos
had made land available.

The Los Angeles boom was on. The Queen threw off her shabby past and confidently faced the future. No one dared call her rough, lazy, or backward any longer. She was wide awake; she was modern; she was a
booster.

M
ACK ARRIVED IN LOS
Angeles on a hot autumn day, the second Monday of October, 1888.

He came from the direction of the sundown sea, riding west to east on an old pack mule he’d earned by working three weeks in Monterey. The owner was ready to shoot the mule so Mack took it in lieu of half his wages.

He found that the mule had plenty of miles left in it, plus a determination to prove it was not yet ready to die. Mack liked that kind of determination.

From Monterey, he passed along a wild, spectacular coast where mighty waves struck and exploded on giant rocks beneath sheer cliffs. Some days he saw one traveler, some days none. Little towns cropped up occasionally; otherwise, the coast was a beautiful wilderness.

In San Luis Obispo a tavern keeper told him Charles Crocker had died in August, taken by a diabetic seizure at the railroad’s own Del Monte Hotel in Monterey. Two of the Big Four were gone. An age was passing.

Yet as Mack jogged south, he felt himself journeying back in time. The occasional
ranchos
or frame cottages reminded him not of modern, civilized San Francisco but of the West he’d crossed on foot. This was frontier, lonely and grand.

At the same time, around thriving Santa Barbara, he began to notice differences in the land. The sun seemed brighter. The plant life wasn’t the same as in Northern California; here grew towering palms, and cactus, and many fernlike pepper trees. He rode by lemon groves with villas of white-painted adobe drowsing shyly deep within.

He followed a trail over the Santa Monica Mountains and down to the Pacific. His hair was long, to his shoulders now, and his hazel eyes were clear and full of hope again. He felt strong and fit. His nose was healing, the clogged, painful breathing cleared up, but he bore a permanent souvenir of the beatings: a ridge, like a tiny earthwork on a sun-browned hillside.

When he reached the shore, he whooped with delight and ran up and down the sparkling sand, turning somersaults and walking on his hands. He stripped naked and raced into the surf, yelling for joy when the foaming waves picked him up and rolled him back. The defeats in the City were forgotten. He loved this sunshine, this ocean, this new fresh face of California.

After camping overnight, he rode east toward the town that lay in the bow curve of the Los Angeles River. He saw workers cultivating pea fields and extensive fig orchards. In the foothills of the mountains he came on a sign of the land boom Wyatt Paul had described. A large, flat tract had been laid out with small pepper trees marking the blocks. One lonely manor house rose in the distance. A whitewashed sign said the subdivision was
HOLLY WOOD
.

Through the haze of the autumn afternoon, he first saw the city as an unlovely hodgepodge of frame and brick buildings jutting above the flat coastal plain. Drawing closer, he saw single-story adobes, tan or brown, spread around the central district. To the northeast of town, beyond the river, the land rose in a series of low plateaus. Distant white cottages, tiny as dollhouses, marked other subdivisions. Behind it all was the breathtaking loom of the San Gabriels.

He nudged his mule, which he’d named Railroad, and the old beast dutifully jogged a little faster. Mack felt himself an experienced, not to say worldly-wise Californian.

He was twenty years old.

The citizens of San Francisco scorned Los Angeles as a primitive cow town, and there was something to be said for that. Almost immediately, Mack found himself pushing against an oncoming herd of cattle and the fierce-looking
vaqueros
driving them. Next he came on a spring wagon with a rear wheel mired in a black hole that gave off a tarry stench. A burly citizen stepped in the black ooze in order to push the wheel with his shoulder.

“Goddamn
brea.
Why don’t they fill these holes?”

“
Brea
,” Mack said. What was it? Did it have value? He tucked the word away in memory. He’d seen other tarry holes in the area, he recalled.

Starting at the outskirts, there was evidence of frenzied real estate activity. Mack saw signs nailed on fence posts, jutting up in weed patches, crudely painted on adobe walls.

SUBURBAN EXCURSIONS!

LOTS! LOTS!! LOTS!!!

CORNER LOTS—INSIDE LOTS!

BUILDING LOTS! INVESTMENT LOTS!

“LIVE IN THE LAND OF WEALTH AND HEALTH”

Agents pleaded for immediate attention and promised affordable El Dorados and Xanadus in mystical, musical-sounding places—Santa Monica, South Pasadena, Monrovia, Riverside.

Bemused by this excessive promotion, he soon arrived on Los Angeles Street, an ugly thoroughfare flanked by uglier commission warehouses where farmers were unloading produce wagons. He turned left one block to a parallel street, the main business artery, named, with scant imagination, Main Street.

It was a street of jarring contrasts. Men in cowman’s garb told time from two elaborately modern clock towers in the business district. Chinese people scurried on errands, and Mexican women walked sedately, their heads covered by black shawls. There was a great deal of horse and wagon traffic, every sort of conveyance, from buckboards to two-wheeled ox-drawn
carretas.
He saw horsecars on the tracks in the middle of the street, kerosene lights, and silk dresses, and many more side arms, worn openly, than he’d ever seen up north.

Most evident and visible, however, were the tourists: men, women, and children of every age and physical type, easily spotted by their excited expressions, pale faces, and dark, heavy clothing. They rode in bunting-draped wagons, haggled at storefronts advertising real estate, sat on their luggage outside the St. Charles Hotel contemplating its no vacancy sign. The tourists reminded Mack of the people he’d met on his walk through the states of the Midwest. Their numbers astounded him.

At the corner of Main and the town plaza, he passed an imposing three-story stucco hotel with rows of tall arches fronting both sides of its corner site. Two stone pediments, one overlooking each street, proclaimed it the
PICO HOUSE
.

In the plaza he dismounted and drank from a trickling fountain under the shade of a cypress. Suddenly four distant gunshots disturbed the afternoon, and there was a sound of horses galloping away. Railroad perked up his ears, but no one else paid much attention. An unseen guitarist resumed his music.

A hooting train whistle lured Mack past an unprepossessing chapel with a bell tower, the Church of Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles, to the railway depot. An SP passenger train was arriving, spouting smoke from its beehive stack and steam from under its cars. Pop-eyed visitors leaned from the windows, pointing, exclaiming, inhaling the air.

A ratty youth ran along the train waving a placard on a stick:
REAL ESTATE OPPORTUNITIES
! “Right here, folks,” the tout called. “Talk to me first.”

Mack was encouraged. “Looks like the boom’s still on, doesn’t it?” he said to Railroad.

The mule was anxious to please, but couldn’t manage a reply.

On his way back to the plaza, Mack noticed more touts accosting tourists. And real estate offices crammed into the most unlikely locations: ground-floor rooms partitioned by blankets, shanties, even a covered wagon. Surely, with all this promotional frenzy, he should be able to make some money.

At the Pico House, he watched the arrival of a six-horse stage covered with desert dust. While porters unloaded luggage, he slipped inside and discovered a central court with a splashing fountain, banks of fresh flowers, and caged birds twittering. Guests coming and going tipped their hats or paused to greet a distinguished man of eighty or more who sat in an alcove that suggested a place of honor. The man was burly, square-headed, with bronzed skin and pure white hair cropped close. Despite the warm day he wore a frilled shirt, large cravat, and an old coatee with velvet collar and cuffs. Mack counted six silver finger rings of varying design. The old man had an air of dignity and power, his face reminding Mack of a schoolbook engraving of Victor Hugo. To each person who addressed him, the man replied courteously and gravely in Spanish.

A porter bore down. “No loitering here.”

“That’s no way to treat a stranger,” said a gentleman on his way out of the hotel. The man was slim as a reed and swarthy, with a Mongol mustache and snapping dark eyes. He wore a frock coat and flat hat, and carried a pile of legal documents. The porter scowled and left.

“
Lo más justo y honrado
,” the stranger said with a nod at the white-haired man.

“The just and—what?” Mack said, following him toward the street. “My Spanish isn’t that good yet.”

“The most just and honest man. Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. He’s a revered figure. He built this hotel. Unfortunately he managed his investments poorly. He no longer owns it, but everyone pretends he does.”

They reached the outdoor arcade beneath the arches, and Mack untied his mount. “Fine-looking mule,” the stranger said. “What’s his name?”

“Railroad. I named him that because he gives a better ride than the SP, his price is fair, and you never have to worry about him cheating you.”

The stranger laughed. “You have a nice sense of humor, sir.”

Mack hadn’t thought about it, but he guessed it was coming back after his bad time in the City.

“You’re a newcomer,” the man added.

“I am.”

“We have many. When I came up to Los Angeles five years ago from the state of Durango, the town had a population of twelve or thirteen thousand. Last summer, perhaps fifty-five or sixty thousand, a good two thousand of them Escrow Indians.”

“Escrow what?”

“It’s the local name for real estate promoters and developers. A greedy and ruthless tribe, the Escrows,” he said, flashing another smile. “They lie in wait for the unwary visitor, incited by our civic boosters such as Colonel Otis of the
Times
newspaper, who yearns to give our town some of the luster and prosperity of San Francisco. Three to five excursion trains cross the border into California every day. Very good for the Escrows, very bad for the rest of us who live here. However, it won’t last. Too much of everything inevitably bursts the bubble. It’s already starting to happen.”

“The town looks crowded.”

“Nothing compared to ’87. That was the peak. Come, I’ll show you.”

What he showed was an Escrow Indian’s notice board, with prices and locations erased and reerased so that the latest postings seemed to peep from a chalky cloud.