From early March until late June, the curious leather-like mahog-
any-red flowers of the western peony and the great clusters of white
or pink blossoms of a shrubby kind of poppy appear along the banks
of mountain streams and among the rocky hills. Two vine-like plants
growing among the low shrubs in this area are the scarlet-flowered
climbing Pentstemon, and the cucumber-plant (sometimes called man-
root because its root is frequently as large as a man's body), which bears
peculiar pulpy fruit covered with spines.
Fields along coastal highways are brilliant during April and May
with yellow-flowered Coreopsis and the purple-flowered dwarf lupine
softens the usually somber-colored cliffs facing the sea. Deep green mats
of bright yellow- and purple-flowered Mesembryanthemum cover beach
dunes and sandy slopes.
Among the plants introduced into the county, the commonest are
NATURAL SETTING 21
the yellow-flowered wild mustard and the white-flowered wild radish,
both brought in by the mission padres. Two other widely distributed
plants are the native yellow-flowered California buttercups, and blue-
flowered Phacelias (baby-blue-eyes), which blossom from February until
late July.
The flowers that brighten the gardens, parkways, and driveways are
too numerous to list. A few of those most commonly planted are
geraniums, cosmos, sweet peas, asters and marigolds, petunias, zinnias,
dahlias, daisies, pansies, violets, roses, hydrangea and chrysanthemums,
snapdragons, gladioli, stocks, nasturtiums, hollyhocks, cyclamen, camel-
lias and lantanas.
Southern California's hospitality to immigrant herbs, trees, and
shrubs is great, and Los Angeles' floral display is drawn from the entire
world. The early Spaniards brought many seeds from their native land,
and the later Mexicans imported numerous forms. Many pioneers
became agriculturists and horticulturists, and sent back home for seeds
and plants.
In late fall the spectacular Poinsettia flares with red. A native of
Mexico, where it is called Flor de Noche Buena (flower of the good
night Christmas Eve), it was introduced here about 1830 and named
in honor of Joel R. Poinsett, one of the earliest American diplomatic
representatives to that country. From Mexico have also come the Copa
de Oro (cup of gold), with yellow funnel-shaped flowers nearly a foot
long; the flaming scarlet-petaled sticky mallow or monacillo (altar
box) ; and numerous forms of the showy flowered Hibiscus.
Many of the beautiful plants in parks and gardens of southern Cali-
fornia have come from China, Japan, and other Oriental countries.
Cotoneasters, firethorns, bamboos, and the Cherokee rose came from
China; the Japanese rose or globe-flower, the gold-dust plant, and the
Kud-zu vine came from Japan; and from Formosa came the large-
leaved ricepaper-plant.
Perhaps the most spectacular of the introduced vines is the wisteria
of the Orient, whose purple and white blossoms appear in spring and
summer. At Sierra Madre a wistaria vine covers more than an acre
of ground and during its flowering season in March it shelters an
annual fete.
Some eucalypti, the first seeds of which were brought to the West
Coast from Australia about 1850, vie in height with the native Sequoias.
The blue-gum is the largest, most useful, and the one most widely
planted in the county. During blossom-time, the abundance of white
flowers in its swaying crown makes it seem dusted with drifted snow.
In contrast to the tall blue-gum is a species of dwarf eucalyptus. Along
North Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills, is a fine display of these
dwarf trees. In August and September they riot with color ; great clus-
22 LOS ANGELES
ters of brilliant scarlet, pink, and orange flowers appear against the
large, dark, glossy leaves. Belonging in the same botanical family, are
the myrtle and its cousins, the Eugenias, beautiful ornamental trees and
shrubs, and the odd Callistemons and Melaleucas, both called "bottle
brush" and bearing very showy flowers.
More than a score of varieties of the acacia have come from Aus-
tralia. From early January until late summer these trees are enveloped
with great sprays of yellow flowers, some also with beautiful fernlike,
silvery blue-green foliage. Also from Australia comes the silk-oak
(Grevillea), a tall, slender tree with fernlike leaves, covered in summer
with comblike golden-yellow flowers. Another native of Australia is
the flametree. In early spring it presents a startling sight with its large,
shining, maple-like leaves, and masses of small cup-shaped flowers of
rich red on scarlet stems.
Blending into this subtropical growth is the pepper tree from the
Andean valleys of Peru ; the first seeds were brought to North America
by sailors more than 100 years ago. This tree, beautiful with drooping
branches and red berries that remain throughout the winter, has almost
become a symbol of California. Other imported plants are the jasmine
from Chile; the gorgeous bird-of-paradise flower and the colletia, from
Argentina; and two plants from Brazil, the red- or magenta-colored
bougainvillea, and the jacaranda tree bearing a mass of light violet-blue
tubular flowers during June and July.
From the Indian slopes of the Himalayas has come the deodar, a
magnificent coniferous tree of pyramidal form, silvery blue-green foliage,
and great sweeping branches. Two others of the same genus, the Atlas
and the Cedar of Lebanon, are equally handsome ornamental trees, and
have been planted in lawns and avenues in the Los Angeles district.
More striking in appearance, however, are three curious imported coni-
fers (Araucarias) : the monkey-puzzle tree from Chile; the bunya-
bunya from Australia; and the Norfolk Island Pine, a tree that was
imported from a small island in the South Pacific where it was dis-
covered by the early English navigator, Captain James Cook.
Besides these exotic woody forms widely represented in the county,
there are, conspicuously planted, numerous kinds of palms. The tall,
graceful Washingtonia is a fan palm indigenous to the canyons along
the southern fringe of the Colorado Desert. Some streets in the older
residential sections of Los Angeles are lined with it. Rivaling the
Washingtonia in popularity are two feathery-leaved palms the Canary
Island, which grows to a tremendous size, and the wine or honey palm
of Chile. A noteworthy growth of palms is in Pershing Square in
downtown Los Angeles, but the Huntington Gardens in San Marino
contain the largest collection of palms in southern California. Hunting-
ton Gardens also has many varieties of cacti and succulents.
NATURAL SETTING 23
Oranges were first brought to California by the missionaries in 1769.
It is believed that the San Gabriel Mission developed the first large
California orange orchard, an area of six acres in which about 400
seedling trees were planted about 1805. Today, flanking the foot-
hills and filling the valleys, stretch evenly planted rows of orange,
lemon, and grapefruit trees. During the blossoming season, from March
until early May, they bear waxy white, pungent flowers. In April,
the deciduous trees of the county are in bloom pink and white apple
blossoms, white apricot blossoms, pink peach blossoms, and the white
flowers of the pear trees. Blending with these are the white flowers
of walnut trees, white and pink flowers of almond trees, and the pale
yellow or green blossoms of the avocado.
<ffW&8&8^
Pueblo to Metropolis
THE history of the Los Angeles area abounds with the gargan-
tuan, the fantastic. Settled more than sixteen miles inland
from a shallow, unprotected bay, it has made itself into one of
the great port cities of the world; lying far off the normal axes of
transportation and isolated by high mountains, it has become one of
the great railroad centers of the country; lacking a water supply ade-
quate for a large city, it has brought in a supply from rivers and moun-
tain streams hundreds of miles away. In little more than half a century
lots listed at a tax sale at a price of 63 cents apiece have increased in
value to the point where they are worth more than that price to the
square inch. It is not surprising that a city of such incredible achieve-
ments should become the home of fantasy; the film industry could not
have found a more stimulating environment.
When Los Angeles became an incorporated city under American
rule in 1850, there was little evidence remaining even at that time to
show that North Broadway, near the Los Angeles River viaduct, once
had been the center of an Indian village, and that this entire area had
at one time been the exclusive province of the Gabrielino Indians.
And yet it was that primitive village which became the nucleus for
twentieth-century Los Angeles.
The predominating linguistic stock was Shoshonean, the great Uto-
Aztecan family which spread across North America from what is now
Idaho southward to Central America. No less than twenty-eight
Indian villages existed in what now constitutes Los Angeles County.
One of these, Yang-na, was situated near the heart of modern Los
Angeles.
These Indians, although primitive, were much more peaceful than
many North American tribes. They seldom warred with other groups.
Robbery was unknown and murder was punishable by death, as was
incest. From chief and medicine man to squaw and child they lived
according to strict ritual and taboos. They believed in only one deity,
called Qua-o-ar, whose name never passed their lips except during
important ceremonies, and then only in a whisper. The men seldom
wore clothing, and women usually had only a deerskin about the waist.
Along the coast women clad themselves in the fur of the sea otter.
The homes, of woven tule mats, resembled gigantic beehives. Agri-
culture and domestication of animals were unknown to these aborigines ;
24
PUEBLO TO METROPOLIS 25
they lived on what was at hand edible roots, acorns, wild sage, and
berries. Snakes, rodents, and grasshoppers supplemented the supply of
such wild game as fell to their crude weapons. They knew little of
basket weaving and nothing of pottery making. Cooking utensils and
ceremonial vessels were made by the simple process of rubbing out a
hollow place in a slab, or block of soapstone. Bows were unknown.
Stone-tipped sticks and clubs were their only weapons. It is not
recorded that these primitive people possessed boats of any character.
SPAIN SENDS THE MISSION FATHERS
Meanwhile, as the fifteenth century ended, adventurers from Spain
and Portugal made their way to the New World. Cortez conquered
Mexico in 1519. Twenty-three years later, in 1542, the age-long
isolation of Yang-na and its fellow villages ended. In that year Juan
Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator in Spanish service, cruised
northward along the Pacific and discovered what is now San Pedro
Bay, naming it Bahia de los Fumos (bay of the smokes) because of
the many Indian campfires he saw along its shore. Sixty years passed
before another ship, captained by Sebastian Vizcaino, entered the bay
in 1602. During the remainder of the seventeenth century, occasional
heavily laden Spanish galleons, returning to Mexico from the Philip-
pines, touched the shores of California to repair their leaking ships and
rest their thirsty, half-famished, scurvy-stricken crews. Tales of these
great canoes and their pale-face sailors circulated among the natives for
decades before white civilization was introduced.
In most sections of America, European colonists launched their
settlements despite the Indians. In California, on the contrary, it was
the presence of Indians that attracted pioneers and led to colonization
and development of the region. Spain long had carried on missionary
work among tribes in Mexico proper; as the eighteenth century drew
to a close, the Spanish determined to bring Christianity to the natives
along the Pacific slope. Conquest of California was to be achieved
"not by force of arms, but rather by the gentle means of persuasion
and evangical preaching."
But if the padres thought only in terms of spiritual conversion of
the natives, government officials were prompted by more worldly con-
sideration to promote colonization of the California slope. Spain spurred
on the effort because other nations were casting covetous eyes on the
section. Sir Francis Drake had visited its shores and had claimed it
for Queen Elizabeth. Imperial Russia was reaching out across the
Bering Sea to the American mainland. And France, with her newly
acquired American empire between the Mississippi and the Rocky
26 LOS ANGELES
Mountains, was already contemplating a move to extend her domain
to the Pacific.
Frail, crippled, fifty-five-year-old Franciscan Father Junipero Serra
and bluff, sturdy Captain Caspar de Portola were chosen to lead the
expedition into hitherto unexplored Upper California and to select
sites for missions. Father Juan Crespi, diarist of the expedition, was to
give posterity its first description of the now famous route, El Camino
Real (the King's Highway), which extends between San Diego and
San Francisco. The expedition divided its forces, one group proceed-
ing overland and the other by sea. After suffering great hardships,
both parties arrived at San Diego Bay in 1769, and a few days later,
on July 1 6, Father Serra founded the Mission San Diego de Alcala,
first link in the chain of twenty-one Franciscan missions in California.
Without waiting to witness the founding, Captain Portola and
Father Crespi, with a force of sixty-seven men, had begun the long
overland trek northward to Monterey, breaking the trail for El Camino
Real. After more than a fortnight of arduous travel, they made camp
near the southern declivity of what now is Elysian Park, not far north
of what was to become the very hub of Los Angeles. Crespi's entry
in his diary for this day on which white men first saw the site of
Los Angeles read:
After traveling about a league and a half through a pass between low
hills we entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and
alders, among which ran a beautiful river from north-northwest, and then,
doubling the point of a steep hill (now Elysian Park), it went on afterward
to the south. . . . This plain where the river runs is very extensive. It has
good land for planting all kinds of grain and seeds, and is the most suitable
site of all we have seen for a mission, for it has all the requisites for a large
settlement. As soon as we arrived, about eight heathen from a good village
came to visit us; they live in this delightful place among the trees on the
river. They presented us with some baskets of pinole made from seeds of
sage and other grasses. Their chief brought some strings of beads made
of shells, and they threw us three handfuls of them. Some of the old men
were smoking pipes well made of baked clay, and they puffed at us three
mouthfuls of smoke. We gave them a little tobacco and some glass beads
and they went away pleased.
Crespi's diary for the next day reported: "After crossing the river,
we entered a large vineyard of wild grapes and an infinity of rosebushes
in full bloom. All the soil is black and loamy and is capable of pro-
ducing every kind of grain and fruit which may be planted." That day
he also reported that members of the expedition "saw some large
marshes of a certain substance like pitch; they were boiling and bub-
bling, and the pitch came out mixed with an abundance of water."
Thus were discovered the La Brea tar pits (bordering on present-day
Wilshire Boulevard) ; and thus was recorded the first indication of
petroleum in western America.
PUEBLO TO METROPOLIS 27
Two years later, Father Serra's associates founded the Mission
San Gabriel Arcangel near the recommended site. It was yet another
decade before some two score settlers, at the command of Governor
Felipe de Neve, founded the town of Los Angeles at Crespi's "delight-
ful place among the trees on the river."
"This place," wrote Father Serra proudly to the Mexican viceroy
in describing the site of San Gabriel Mission, "is beyond dispute the
most excellent discovered. Without doubt, this one alone, if well cul-
tivated, would be sufficient to maintain itself and all the rest of the
missions."
San Gabriel, founded September 8, 1771, more than fulfilled Serra's
high expectations. The natives were converted easily to the new faith
under the benignant but rigorous mission system. The Indians were
trained in agriculture, stock raising, gilding, brickmaking, and other
trades. They were clothed, housed, and fed at the mission they
erected under the padres' tutelage. Their children were taught to
speak Spanish. As early mission records eloquently attest, the natives
quickly learned tasks assigned to them. They labored long and dili-
gently. A few decades later, hundreds of natives were tending thou-
sands of head of cattle, on a million and a half acres of land surround-
ing San Gabriel Arcangel, from San Bernardino Mountains to the
Pacific Ocean.
FOUNDING OF LOS ANGELES
A cornerstone in Spanish colonial policy was the principle that
active colonization must begin once the spiritual mission center and the
military presidios w T ere established. The new governor of California,
Felipe de Neve, acted in conformity with this policy when he recom-
mended to the viceroy of Mexico that a pueblo be established at the
place which Father Crespi in 1769 had suggested as an ideal spot for
a mission. Thus was conceived the settlement that was to become Los
Angeles. The town was ordained by royal decree, and Governor de
Neve worked out every detail well in advance of actual settlement.
Settlers were to be recruited and conducted to the site by government
agents. Each was to be told where to live, what to build, what crops
to grow, and how much of his time must be given to community
undertakings.
De Neve staked out four square leagues a small plaza surrounded
by, seven-acre fields for cultivation ; pastures and royal lands for leasing
to citizens. To plan a town was one thing; to get settlers for it was
another, as the governor soon learned. Despite inducements of land,
money, livestock, and implements, he was unable to obtain settlers from
Lower California, and it was months before a group was recruited in
Mexico, chiefly Sonora. On August 18, 1781, they reached San Gabriel
28 LOS ANGELES
Mission, a small and sorry-looking group of eleven men, eleven women,
and twenty-two children. Only two of the adults were of Spanish
origin, the remainder including one mestizo (half-breed), eight mulat-
toes, nine Indians, and two Negroes. Despite misgivings of the mission
fathers over the venture, De Neve was determined to push his scheme
to realization.
Early in the morning of September 4, 1781, the expedition left
the mission for the official founding of Los Angeles. Governor de
Neve himself led the procession, followed by soldiers, the forty-four
settlers, mission priests and some of their Indian acolytes. The Yang-na
Indians gathered en masse to witness the strange spectacle as the pro-
cession marched slowly around the spot selected for the pueblo, and
the padres invoked a blessing upon the new community. Governor de
Neve made a formal speech, followed by prayers and benedictions from
the clergy. Thus came into being El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la
Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (Sp., the town of Our Lady the
Queen of the Angels de Porciuncula), one of the few cities on earth
which has been deliberately planned in advance and ceremoniously
inaugurated.
Governor Pedro Fages, successor to De Neve, inaugurated the policy
of giving huge grants of land to his old friends and comrades-in-arms.
One of the first of these grants, a rancho of approximately forty-three
thousand acres, went to Juan Jose Dominguez in 1785, and embraced
the territory now included in Wilmington, Torrance, Redondo Beach,
and several smaller communities. It is the only one of the many Spanish
grants of which a considerable part still remains in the possession of
heirs of the original grantees.
The Spanish, and later the Mexican, governors were lavish in their
distribution of vast tracts, each of tens of thousands of acres. Except
for the mission tract and that property directly assigned to the pueblo,
nearly the whole of what now constitutes the coastal area of Los
Angeles County passed into the hands of a score or more Spanish and
Mexican hidalgos. When the eighteenth century ended, the region
was already divided into mission, pueblo, and rancho domain, and for
both the first and last of these the outlook was promising. Huge
expanses covered with ever-increasing herds of cattle, fields of grain,
vineyards, and orchards, all added to the prosperity and prestige of their
owners.
But the pueblo homes remained small, mud-colored, square-walled,
flat-roofed, one-story structures with rawhide doors and glassless win-
dows. Lawns, trees, and sidewalks were nonexistent, and the narrow
streets were seas of mud in winter and clouds of dust in summer.
The civic pride and courage of Corporal Vincent Felix, commander of
the tiny garrison, held this uncomfortable community together. He not
PUEBLO TO METROPOLIS 29
only took his military duties seriously but, unofficially, assumed every
administrative, legislative, and judicial task. Respected, feared, and
loved, the little corporal remained the real power in the pueblo long
after the election of the first of the alcaldes.
By 1790 Los Angeles numbered 28 householders and a population
of 139. By 1800, the population was 315, and there were 30 adobe
houses for the 70 families, as well as a town hall, guardhouse,
barracks, and granaries.
In this remote outpost, social gradations were unknown. No school
existed to train the young in deportment and letters. Mail was carried
to and from Mexico once a month a distance of 3,000 miles over
the Camino Real. Few took advantage of these postal facilities, since
the ability to read and write was rare among the first settlers. There
was little trade or. commerce of any kind. Such as there was remained
largely in the hands of the padres and was carried on through the port
of San Pedro.
There were certain compensations, however, for the primitive life
of that period. No one paid taxes or rent. Each man lived in his
own house and cultivated his own land. As the nineteenth century
descended upon Los Angeles, its citizens were completely oblivious to
that trio of modern civilization : the real-estate agent, the tax gatherer,
and the instalment collector.
Cut off from the rest of civilization, these people neither knew nor
cared for the issues and problems of the world at large. Most were
unaware even of the fact that a young and lusty republic had been born
on the other side of the continent a new nation to which their fortunes
soon would be irrevocably tied. Nor did they realize that a short,
bow-legged Corsican was already at work yanking out the props from
under the three-century-old world power of Spain; that the European
turmoil would soon wipe out Spain's American empire; that in its
wake would follow half a century of strife, culminating in destruction
of Spanish control, and disintegration of Spanish missions and Spanish
customs in California.
It was a principle of the early colonial powers that those regions
they obtained by discovery or conquest were theirs alone to exploit.
The produce of their colonies must be sold to their merchants alone,
and transported in their ships. Likewise the people of the colonies
were permitted to buy only goods produced in the home country or
transported on its ships. Such was the relationship of England to its
American colonies. Such, too, was the relationship of Spain to Cali-
fornia. To Mexico and to Spain went the rapidly accumulating stores
of hides and tallow from the California ranches; from them came the
necessities and occasional luxuries of the Californians.
Yankee traders knew nothing of this forbidden market in California
3O LOS ANGELES
until Captain William Shaler, of Boston, wrote enthusiastically about
it in 1808. Returning from the Orient in 1805, he spent several months
on the California coast trading with Indians and whites, in defiance
of Spanish laws. He saw huge vats of tallow and untold thousands of
hides, obtainable for next to nothing, for which New England shoe-
and-harness makers would pay well. Even more important in the eyes
of this shrewd Yankee were the vast quantities of valuable sea otter
pelts. Realizing that the laws of Spain did not count heavily so long