Jack Powers: Lion Among Rats
4. Jack Charms Los Angeles
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4. Jack Charms Los Angeles
From “Remembering Jack Powers” by Bill Horace in the Los Angeles Star, 1876:
Jack rode down from Santa Barbara with two comrades. Outwardly, Los Angeles didn't look much changed. Same wide, dusty streets trailing out into the country. Same long whitewashed stretches of adobe, here and there relieved by cactus blooms. But after dark, Jack visited the Calle de los Negroes and was astonished. The little strip was roaring on a weeknight, such that one could barely pass. Inside the Aguila de Oro, the most popular cantina, all was chaos. No less than thirty gringo gamblers jammed the tiny space, with more gold stacked up on their tables than Jack had ever seen. Between shrill music and the shouting of excited play, he couldn't hear a word said next to him.
Jack wasn't heading back to San Francisco without a triumph over Den. When he absorbed the picture in Los Angeles, and especially when he learned about the fight at “El Palacio,” his fine imagination clicked like tumblers in a lock. He suggested to the settlers that they needed an effective small police force he might build out of his Army friends in Santa Barbara, all of whom had served as Hounds in San Francisco. The local gambling scene was now producing weekly homicides, in a city where such crimes had been unheard of. The killers and the victims were all gringo desperados drifting through Los Angeles like Irving's gang, attracted by the action. Public safety and the commerce of the city both demanded that the danger be pushed far from Calle de los Negroes and the plaza. As this was surely in the interests of the sporting men themselves, and as the gamblers' trade engendered all the crime, it was only fair to tax them in support of Powers’ regulators. The settlers also wanted to intimidate the gamblers with some countervailing force, to discourage them from challenges like that attempted on the holiday. They weren't convinced that Jack could get the sports to go along, but he seemed confident.
This confidence was not misplaced. Jack was certain he could field a dozen men. That might not seem like much against one hundred hardened gamblers, but Jack's followers would be a loyal band, bred to military discipline. A sporting man himself, Jack knew gamblers were all loners, fiercely independent and in ruthless competition with each other. However much they might gang up in some aggression, they'd never risk their lives in any mutual protection.
Convincing them to pay and to accept the check of Powers' "Veterans" (as Jack now called his boys) was even easier than he expected. Not that the gamblers welcomed it, but they yielded to his natural superiority. Jack's looks, his clothes, his manners, and especially his speech because he'd started to affect the accents of the Irish aristocracy he had learned around Hs Lordship, all these features of his image had miraculous effect with them. Jack had already begun to grasp while at the Mission that his most potent gifts were in his bold theatricality and in the glamor it evoked. Now he turned his energies entirely in this direction because dusty, dry Los Angeles appeared to crave the fantasy of glamor even more than San Francisco.
* * *
But this was just the keystone of Jack's marvelous ambitions, not the full and noble arch. It was remarkable how the pieces fit together. The humiliation he’d endured from Den had burned inside him like a furnace, and now he hit upon the perfect way to win back his prestige in Santa Barbara by taking charge of wealthier Los Angeles. To do so, Jack would have to be received as the full social peer of Angeleno dons. This required owning land, but retainers were even more important. Men who called you their patrón were the wellspring of all power in this semi-feudal landscape which had never known much government.
Jack understood that, in the eyes of Californios, his Veterans were just a gringo gang unless they were his formal ranch retainers, connected to some property. If Powers had some land, and could present his Vets as his dependent hands, however shallow or fictitious this pretension, he'd be admitted to the company of Angeleno dons and therefore equal at the very least to Dr. Den. Inspired by His Lordship back in Ireland, Jack conceived that he could dominate Los Angeles society by opening a house for private gaming, restricted to the wealthiest of dons and gringo settlers. There was no reason for the local ton to waste their dignity on Calle de Los Negroes when they could recreate in Jack’s exclusive sala.
So Jack went back to Santa Barbara to recruit his men, which went easily. And while there, he decided that his ranch should be in Santa Barbara, rather than around Los Angeles. He’d noticed that a piece in the Arroyo Burro now lay vacant and, being part of the great Santa Barbara Mission spread, Jack knew the property was owned by Dr. Den. But Jack also knew that this was one of many lands that had been handed out to wealthy Californios by the last departing governor when the Americans invaded, using fraudulent, backdated grants. When Jack was just a private in the Army, this was notorious in Santa Barbara, and the de la Guerra family spoke of it unguardedly around him.
If Don Nicholas (as Den was called) should try to throw him off Arroyo Burro as he’d already done at College Ranch, Jack could sabotage his claims to the entire Santa Barbara Mission spread, and some other ranchlands granted to Den’s family, just as the process of confirming all land titles was commencing. And Jack could confidently assume that all the other Barbareño dons would stop Nick Den from setting off a fire that could engulf their titles, too. The opportunity was simply too delicious, so Jack just squatted on Arroyo Burro, asserting no one owned the land and he could therefore take it for a homestead under laws of the United States. The insult and the challenge to Don Nicholas were self-evident to everyone in Santa Barbara.
* * *
With his Veterans assembled and a ranch in place, Jack’s final step was to create his private gambling room to draw the ton beneath his spell. He found a home with a verandah right on Calle Principal, boasting a particularly spacious sala. The key to quick success, he understood, would be the presence of a woman as his hostess and to take turns with him at dealing monte. Women dealers were a feature of top gambling halls in San Francisco, but would be revolutionary in conservative Los Angeles. Fortunately (for Jack in those days was still blessed with luck) he found his perfect partner on a trip to San Francisco. Francoise Barre, the widow of a Frenchman who’d been killed while privateering down in Mexico, spoke a fair amount of English. But more importantly, she was a dressmaker of talent and true Parisian taste. The clothes she made for her own wearing were exceptional and made her look like an aristocrat. Nothing could be more to Jack’s own liking, and she became precisely the sensation in Los Angeles he desired. No gentleman could possibly resist the opportunity to meet and even gamble with a lady of such continental elegance. In a city full of dirt and horse manure, an evening spent in company of Madame Barre was glamor.
Indeed, all the city’s ton would have packed into Powers’ sala from the get go had he not sought to be selective. Recalling everything about his boyhood days around His Lordship’s gambling parties, and Her Ladyship’s insistence that the power to define elite society is fundamental, Jack knew that he must make his house exclusive, and that jealousy to be invited would augment his prestige. He lacked sufficient knowledge of Los Angeles, however, to choose the proper invitees, and once again his luck rewarded him. The duties at this journal at that moment, when The Star had just commenced its publication, were shared between myself (Bill Horace) and a Mexican named Jose Rijo, who edited our final page in Spanish. Rijo was unusually well educated for Los Angeles, a young man driven from his wealthy family in the Capital for some shocking indiscretion, and sent to the most distant place that anyone in Mexico could think of. He still wore clothing in the style of an hidalgo, an important point in Jack’s assessment, and spoke the purest Castelliano, such as awed the Angeleno dons. He also spoke good English and passably good French, and thus could translate for Francoise.
Rijo’s efforts for The Star paid little and used little of his time. His real work was to translate at the meetings between the California dons and gringo lawyers. These lawyers had descended on Los Angeles because the ranchers were all terrified about the new commission that could confirm or void their titles to their vast estates. All the dons had hired attorneys, none of whom spoke Spanish, and as the consultations were so sensitive and consequential, involving tricky legal concepts, only an educated gentleman could translate. In this capacity, Rijo was made privy to so much confidential information that he came to master everything about elite society from his peculiar point of vantage. No one could more confidently pick and choose the invitees to Powers’ sala whose participation mattered most, and whose friendship would most certainly impress the dons in Santa Barbara and thereby skewer Dr. Den. Rijo was present every night to translate, and to manage awkward turns in conversation between Americans and Californians. I, too, was at Jack’s sala every night because, as editor of the city’s only paper, I knew perhaps as much about the state of things among the Angeleno gringos as Rijo knew about the dons. So Jack relied on me for information he could get from no one else to further smooth his path among respectable Americans.