Jack Powers: Lion Among Rats
7. A Shameful Verdict
Link to Start / Introduction / Table of Contents
7. A Shameful Verdict
From “Remembering Jack Powers” by Bill Horace in the Los Angeles Star, 1876.
Den's trespass case proceeded slowly. The Doctor seemed to want to give Jack time to leave Arroyo Burro on his own, without eviction, or to prove to Santa Barbara that Powers was determined to defy the law. So Don Nicholas allowed the case to drag its way through court until mid ‘53, when he at last secured a judgment. But he still refused to move on an eviction while Jack appealed to California's highest court.
Then a sequence of events occurred that shattered the uneasy peace of Jack's rule in Los Angeles. We've mentioned that the Sonoreños had a presence in San Gabriel. The mission there, once the most prosperous in California, was now a slum. The structure, other than the church itself, was occupied by sordid businesses that catered to the wretched Indians who, decades earlier, had been attached to the establishment but failed to move away after the padres lost control of California.
A tiny group of gringos had moved in and taken over. Their leader was a Texan with a grog shop. The Bean boys, Joshua and Roy (since more famous as a judge beyond the Pecos), came out to California as a team. Josh headed a militia that crushed an Indian revolt near San Diego and the state awarded him the rank of general. His grog shop was a rat hole where raw wine was sold in jugs for Indios to guzzle in the ruined mission courtyard.
Murrieta used the mission’s big corral to gather horses, and his Sonoreños were a feature of San Gabriel. Unlike the Californians or the Indians, they wore guns and showed a fierce contempt for gringos. Texans come to California held it their responsibility to defend the gringo race from greasers, and the General was determined to run the Sonoreños out. They were clearly doing something fishy, and he would figure out just what it was. Bean made some very public threats against the Sonoreños, which were returned with somber warnings that he should stick to poisoning the Indians if he wished to stay alive. Everyone around the place expected trouble.
Then the General was discovered dead, shot in the face, outside the village of San Gabriel. Los Angeles was instantly alarmed because it had its own much larger Sonoreño barrio, and Bean being a militia general, his murder signaled a most dangerous and previously unacknowledged challenge to American authority. A vigilance committee was again assembled, this time with more Californian dons because they were the only men out in the country with authority to thoroughly investigate. San Gabriel was a tiny place and all the locals knew what happened. Bean wasn't murdered by a Sonoreño, but rather by a Californian who had stolen off the General's young lover. Bean swore to kill the man, and was looking for him everywhere, but was beaten to the punch. The Californians in the village knew exactly who the killer was, but wouldn't say.
The vigilance committee combed the village and discovered a revolver hidden in the home of Cipriano Sandoval, the local cobbler. The man could not explain the gun and was the last one in the world to own a powerful, expensive weapon. Cipriano was interrogated and then brought to trial. The vigilance committee found him guilty, on his possession of the gun alone, as he'd concealed it and it was almost certainly the murder weapon. He was sentenced to be hanged. But as this outcome served in no way to strike fear into the Sonoreños, the committee grabbed one off the street and charged the man with stealing horses. He would hang beside the cobbler.
The local Californians were in shock. They knew who killed the General, but couldn't tell because the murderer, Bean's competitor in love, was the son of a particularly grand ranchero. The dons sitting on the vigilance committee knew the truth but could not bear to break the back of their admired friend by hanging his sole heir, and so they sacrificed the life of the poor cobbler by not informing the Americans. Once again, and in the worst way possible, the dons had callously betrayed their lesser countrymen, who seethed in silent fury as they heard sentence passed upon the innocent.
But when the Sonoreño horse thief heard his sentence minutes later, he didn't weep like Cipriano. The man rose up in pride and arrogance, declaring to the court he was Reyes Felix, the brother of great Murrieta's lady. He said that hanging him would trigger revolution, a war that would destroy Los Angeles as God destroyed the cities of the plain. His relative commanded a great army, then engaged in stealing horses everywhere in California on the grandest scale imaginable. Should the gringos hang Felix, Joaquin would set the world ablaze in vengeance because he hated all Americans and would drive them out with flames.
The committee didn’t know what they should make of this announcement, but they surely couldn't back down on the hangings. When Jack Powers learned that Murrieta's army was revealed and that his woman's brother would be hanged by the Americans, he was the only person in Los Angeles who fully grasped the danger. He also understood how much the killing of the cobbler would tear the mask off of the divide between the dons and all the lesser Californians. He would not attend the hanging in San Gabriel. There was nothing he could do and he refused to be involved. The Angeleno gringos understood that it was most unlikely that a man like Cipriano would have murdered Bean, and that his hanging would enrage the lower class of Californians that were the bulk of city residents. And they were frightened by the threats of Murrieta's relative because they now knew who’d been ruling in Sonoratown.
The execution happened in the most depressing climate, meteorological and mental. The sky was dark with clouds that threatened a late rain in an unusual humidity. The crowd of mostly local Californians stood silent, moody and distinctly apprehensive. Up to the fatal moment, most expected Cipriano to reveal the name of the true killer on the scaffold, the man for whom he'd plainly hid the gun. When the cobbler finally crossed himself and dropped without a word, a woman vomited. This modest man, so used to bowing to his betters, could not manage even to protect his life by fingering a don. This act of degradation, amounting to a suicide, shattered something in the common class of Californians, so humiliated by their craven weaknesses. Their dons were pandering to gringos and betraying their paisanos, merely to protect their properties.
The Sonoreño's hanging was much more dramatic than the cobbler’s. He told the crowd that they, the Californios, and not just the Sonorans, would be avenged by Murietta's army. Los Angeles would burn and war against the gringo conquerors would spread like wildfire. When the noose was fixed around his neck, he spit into the hangman's face. His drop was ugly and he struggled long. The Californians blamed this on the gringos as deliberate, and the kicking man (for they had failed to tie his feet securely) could hear before he died their cries and gasping down below.
* * *
Murrieta and his hombres fled Los Angeles the moment that they learned their comrade was arrested. Sonoratown was emptied of its men before the gringos knew that it was happening, and only women and some children stayed behind. Los Angeles was terrified and braced for an attack. Calle de los Negroes effectively shut down. It seemed the surest target for assault, with so many locals packed there in the evenings and with so much gold to steal. The Americans organized a company of rangers and girded for attack. Weeks passed but nothing happened.
Jack already understood the situation because Rijo learned of Murrieta's plans directly from Joaquin himself. Murrieta had no interest in Los Angeles with its tiny gringo population. His war was with Amercians in greater California and he knew what it would take to drive them out. He moved his army to the Mother Lode, divided into companies on horseback. His men appeared from nowhere and attacked the mining towns with overwhelming force and cruelty. One day they were somewhere and the next day they descended on a settlement a hundred miles away. Terror echoed through the canyons of the great Sierra, and the miners fled on rumors, at least half of which were true. It seemed there was not one, but rather many different armies in precise coordination.
The goal was to cut off the flow of gold to San Francisco, to choke The City of its commerce and compel the recent conquerors of California to flee back to the East. This was no foolish notion because a panic spread like yellow fever . The people of the north, who did not know Joaquin as he was known down in Los Angeles, believed that there were five Joaquins, of which Murrieta was but one. This was the only way that they could understand the vast front of the war. Nor was Murrieta only targeting Americans. He hated the Chinese who had begun to settle in the state and, because Americans would not allow their competition, found profit washing out the tailings of the played-out placers for whatever gold remained. The Sonoreños savaged all these helpless, unarmed people everywhere they found them. First the gringos had brought Protestants into a Roman Catholic land, and then they brought in pagans to defile it more. That was how Joaquin conceived it.
The state commissioned a full company of rangers. Large as it was, it had no chance against the Sonoreño army, but it stumbled onto luck. On word that Murrieta was ensconced in Cantua Canyon, in the remotest section of the Coast Range, the rangers struck the place and killed some men, including one that they believed to be Joaquin and took his severed head away to claim a bounty. Any Angeleno could have told them, from his ink black hair alone, that this could not have been the famous huero. But their claim that they had killed Joaquin seemed credible because the revolution suddenly expired.
Once again, alone among the California gringos, Jack Powers knew what happened because Jose Rijo told him. The Murrieta Revolution had imploded from within. The Sonoreños shared their captain's hatred of Americans, but their love of gold was even stronger. His men had come to care more for the banditry than for his racial goals of cleansing California. Murrieta felt his army slipping from his grasp and so he changed directions also. He'd set his wife up in an isolated ranch near San Francisco and had been sending her his booty, amounting to a princely fortune, to bury on the property. He'd abandon his own army before it abandoned him.
The claim that he'd been killed by rangers, which was received throughout the state as truth, gave him his opportunity. He stole away from his own men, and would have taken wife and gold and sailed to Mexico completely unidentified, but he was shot above the knee in a ridiculous encounter on the highway, in an argument with someone who had no idea who he was. By the time he reached the ranch he was expiring from loss of blood. Only his beloved Rosa sailed from San Francisco with the money.