Jack Powers: Lion Among Rats
3. Los Angeles When Jack Arrived
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3. Los Angeles When Jack Arrived
From “Remembering Jack Powers” by Bill Horace in the Los Angeles Star, 1876.
Two troubling events occurred here in late ‘50 and in early 1851 that set the stage for Jack’s arrival in Los Angeles.
The first involved a struggle between the Californian dons and gringo settlers who arrived here as the vanguard of the conquest and had taken charge of governing the former pueblo as an American incorporated city. A band of Utah Indians had ridden down from Great Salt Lake into the San Bernardino Valley and rounded up two hundred horses from the Lugo family rancho. They planned to drive the stock back home to sell to Mormans for good firearms. The Lugo spread was so extensive that the losses weren't noticed until the raiders had already pushed their mustangs over Paso del Cajón, into the Mojave.
The Lugos mustered their vaqueros and rode after. In their party were two teenaged sons of one of the two brothers. Across the pass, they met two teamsters in a wagon, an American and a Cherokee who were headed to Los Angeles for supplies to take back to Death Valley. They told the Lugos that the Utahs weren’t too far ahead, and that their party wasn't large and might be easily surprised. Revived by this intelligence, they galloped hard much longer than expected and their mounts were all exhausted when they caught up with the raiders. But the Utahs had been resting and their party was much larger than the Lugos had been told. The Californios were driven off in shame. They camped the night up in the desert and dragged themselves back home at dawn.
Then a man came through Los Angeles reporting the dead bodies of the gringo and Cherokee, murdered in the desert. The Lugos openly admitted that they'd passed them on the trail, and even that they felt misled by them. But they insisted that they'd not crossed paths again and thus had no idea how they'd perished.
One week later, a retainer of the Lugos, a dissolute young man who'd joined the chase after the Indians, was arrested in Los Angeles on some petty misdemeanor. While in jail, he told the recently appointed gringo sheriff that the teenage Lugo boys had killed the men. He said that they'd snuck out of camp at night, rode to find the victims and then killed them in their sleep before returning to the camp unnoticed. His motives for reporting this (as it was race betrayal even if his claims were true) were the subject of much heated argument. But the gringos grew determined to arrest and try the scions of the grandest family in the county.
This daring move was met with shock and powerful resistance. The Lugo brothers, the father and the uncle of the accused young men, complained that everything about the charges was ridiculous. The distance from their campsite to the crime was far too great, especially for riders and their horses so exhausted by the day's events. The boys were much too young to even contemplate an act like this against strong, well-armed men, and they could not have ridden out and back into the Lugo camp unnoticed. In fact, the Lugos saw these accusations as a naked racial and political assault upon the highest class of Californians, to drive the ugly spike of conquest through their hearts. Nonetheless, they chose to give up both boys to the sheriff and apply at once for bail. They were condemned for this submission, but Old Man Lugo, El Viejo, the grandsire of the family, feared that the Americans were trying to lure the Californians into violent resistance to justify a broad attack on all their rights and properties. The family hired an American attorney, Joseph Brent, who got a hearing date at which the boys were to appear.
In spite of their denials, the boys might well have done it. The entire Lugo party felt that they'd been lied to by the teamsters, almost certainly for racial motives, to set them up to be defeated, perhaps slaughtered, by the Utahs. The victims weren't robbed of their considerable money and no one else had any reason to attack them. And the informer had no motive to make up a tale that must enrage his race against him. Yet it was just as difficult to reckon how two teenage boys could murder such tough characters, or even have surprised them in their sleep. In any case, the gringos were inclined to see at least the white man's murder in the starkest racial terms, and there was open talk of hanging the two Lugo boys to teach the Californians that Americans were now in charge.
Into this stew of racial hatred rode an outlaw gang from Texas, under the command of one Red Irving. These desperados made their camp in the Arroyo Seco, but were much seen about Los Angeles. The city waited patiently for them to leave, but the Texans needed money to continue. On the day before the hearing for the Lugo boys, Red confronted their attorney in a highly threatening tone. He told him that the Lugos had agreed to pay his gang to take their sons from jail, and he was not prepared to give that money up. If the family now decided they would bail the boys, his men must still be paid. If they weren't, they'd kill both boys in the courtroom, and perhaps some other Lugos, too.
Once again, it was impossible to know the truth. The Lugo clan insisted to their lawyer Brent that they had never even spoken with the desperados, but the Americans found it inconceivable that Red would simply make this up. They were prepared to side with Texas border thugs against the most prestigious Californio family.
The Lugos raised a mounted band of seventy, placed strategically around Los Angeles in hopes of spiriting the boys away immediately after being bailed. The Irving gang was only twenty, but they were killers, not vaqueros, and they were counting on at least the tacit help of local gringos. When the boys were brought from jail into the courtroom, the Texans moved in full force with their sidearms drawn. The Californians waited tensely. Irving planned to open fire on a signal, and everyone in town prepared for war between Americans and Californians. And this would certainly have happened had not United States dragoons miraculously appeared in town that very moment, en route to Santa Barbara. The Lugo's lawyer, who had risked his practice and perhaps his life opposing the convictions of his race, convinced the company commander to hold his troops on Calle Principal before the courthouse. The Lugo boys were bailed and rode off with their seventy protectors. Red Irving was so furious that he decided to attack the Lugo Ranch on his way back to the southwest desert and to slaughter every member of the family.
But he and all his men were killed by Indians they savagely abused while on the trail out to the Lugos. The Irving boys were tricked into a canyon where, once trapped beneath a headwall, they were disposed of with mere bows and arrows by Cahuillas hiding in the brush. That no gringos in Los Angeles regretted their demise, even at the hands of Indians, only stiffened the conclusion that Americans would stoop to anything against the Californians.
* * *
The other large event preceding Jack’s arrival in Los Angeles was a gunfight that divided the Americans themselves.
It was late February of '51, the first good opportunity for gringo immigrants to celebrate the birthday of George Washington in Southern California. But as their numbers were still trivial, and as racial tensions were still stewing from the Lugo murder charges, the few Americans among the dons were cautious.
Yes, there were Americans among the great rancheros. Just a handful, but influential because they forged the social bridge between the conquerors and conquered. Chief among these gringo dons was Abel Sterns, a Massachusetts man who somehow found himself in California decades earlier. He set up as a merchant in Los Angeles, when there was little local commerce and the missions owned the land. He converted to the Roman Church, made money, snapped up ranchlands from the shattered missions and, because a rancher and at last a don, became the peer of anyone in California. His long abode home on Calle Principal was nicknamed "El Palacio," not for size or luxury as much as to proclaim Don Abel's status in Los Angeles society.
The bloody scene that broke out at Stern's palace on the Father of His Country's birthday exposed a stark and dangerous divide between two different kinds of recently arrived Americans. About one hundred had come down as settlers -- lawyers, tradesmen, merchants seeking to stay on and prosper as they gradually seized control from Californios. But in addition to these respectable Americans, a roughly equal crew of gringo gamblers descended on the Calle de los Negroes. They had no permanent intentions and were merely riding the titanic wave of wealth then swelling in Los Angeles. These sporting men were always armed and skilled with pistols, as they protected their own banks. And they virulently hated Mexicans. They styled themselves protectors of their race, and prided in this posture, similar to Texas Rangers. The Californios, to them, were simply one more breed of Mexicans, the greaser race their nation had rolled over in the war.
When Don Abel held his Founding Father's celebration, he sent no invitations to the gamblers. This was not a class that he considered gentlemen in any case, but he was even more concerned that no affront be offered to the Latin dons. After all, the purpose of the party was to mix respectable Americans with wealthy Californians in an atmosphere in which, as equal citizens of the United States, all joined in toasting to the nation's greatest hero.
The gamblers didn't like it. They especially didn't like exclusion from this distinctively American occasion while men with darker skins, polluted with the blood of Indians and not even speaking English, were welcomed. The gamblers gathered in a crowd on Main Street, in front of Stern's Palacio. They were armed and brought a log to break the door that had been barred against them. But when they busted through, they met with lead. Don Abel dropped one gambling man himself, as did a number of American respectables. Californios carried knives, not guns, and played no part in the affray. One sporting man was killed, and quite a few were wounded. As this occured only a week before Jack Powers came to town, emotions were still blazing.