Jack Powers: Race Against Time
3. Los Angeles Turns on Jack
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3. Los Angeles Turns on Jack
From “Remembering Jack Powers” by Bill Horace in the Los Angeles Star, 1876.
Jack split his time between his ranch in Santa Barbara and his trips to San Francisco. Rather than avoiding the metropolis, he was up there more than ever after the McGowan revelations. Bold confidence was Powers' answer in The City. Were he to disappear, the charges might be taken seriously. But San Franciscans found it difficult to think he was a criminal when he showed up in their presence, greeting friends and gambling like the old Jack Powers. He was understood to be a rancher breeding horses, remained remarkably well dressed, and still handsome although no longer quite so youthful. Why should a gentleman like this take up with greaser bandits? It seemed ridiculous. In any case, Jack had to keep a presence in The City or give up his only means of luring victims.
Jack visited Los Angeles only rarely, but was still received with honor and affection when he rode there. The Angeleno gringos had heard something of McGowan's revelations, but were even less inclined than San Franciscans to believe them. The charges against Powers in the Daily Bulletin were clearly driven by that paper's hatred toward McGowan, and were discounted in that light. The Angeleno dons, by contrast, knew a great deal more of Jack's behavior, but saw little reason to object. They understood that their rich countrymen in Santa Barbara were tacitly accepting Powers' depredations because they wanted some resistance to more gringo immigration. Every Californio in the Lower Country treated San Luis Obispo as a sanctuary, their last defense against the absolute humiliation of their race.
* * *
So things stood down in Los Angeles until the day a man named Flores rode to town, a Californian and convicted criminal, released from prison at San Quentin. This Flores made a scene on Main Street, and when the gringo sheriff came out to accost him, Flores shot him dead and rode off laughing.
This outrageous act, as it turned out, was just the starting gun. Flores had assembled sixty Californians and Sonorans, all outstanding riders and most dangerous. They started raiding everywhere in Southern California, on a scale and with a violence that matched what Murrieta did four years before up in the gold fields. The worst, from the perspective of the Angeleno dons, was that these men had the approval and respect of common Californians who, just as up in Santa Barbara, were not unhappy to see violence against the gringos in the name of revolution. But their dons knew that these men were merely criminals for gain, and only using race identity for cover and protection. And so the wealthy Californians drew a line and now decided that they had to join with the Americans, as they had never done before, to crush the danger of pure lawlessness and to undeceive the larger population.
Andreas Pico, brother of the final California governor, was the don most famous for resistance to the gringo army in the War a decade earlier. He was a proud man who had never fully made his peace with the Americans. So when he organized a force of his retainers, the other Angeleno dons all felt compelled to join him running down the bandits. He knew the landscape more than any other man and was a most admired horseman, one who'd often rode matched races with Jack Powers. He used some strategies and tactics more worthy of true warfare to corral the Flores bandits and destroy them. Though some Americans assisted, everybody understood that Californios had turned the tide in a dramatic fashion. The days of crime parading in the name of revolution, first by Saloman and then more famously by Murrieta, were over.
* * *
Jack Powers and his gang played no role in the Flores business whatsoever, and everybody knew it. But the sense was that Jack Powers had inspired Flores with his long success and that even tacit tolerance for Powers' reign in San Luis was now impossible. So Los Angeles fired off a warning shot. Jack Powers was indicted there as somehow being part of Flores' depredations. No attempt was made to back the charges up with evidence. But a warrant issued anyway, and was sent to San Francisco, where Jack was visiting.
Jack engaged the famous lawyer Colonel James, who sought to quash the warrant as entirely defective, as in fact it was. But the Supreme Court justice he applied to wouldn't go along, which Jack understood to be a message. His status and reception in The City had begun to subtly shift with the publicity of race betrayal, pushed so strongly by the Evening Bulletin, and now by news about the Flores Revolution. Jack had every legal right to quash the warrant, but his legal rights apparently no longer mattered, and no judge was willing to protect him on the record. He'd have to go down to Los Angeles and face the charges.
Jack went into hiding, which was easy in The City. He still had many friends there and the charges clearly were fictitious because hadn't visited Los Angeles for months before the Flores raids. After some weeks in concealment, his lawyer managed to assure him that the case would be dismissed were he to show up in Los Angeles, and Powers took the risk. He was released at once because the prosecutor failed to even bother bringing evidence. The entire exercise was just a message that Jack's days of honor in Los Angeles were over, and he no longer would be welcome where he used to be a lord.