Los Angeles in the 1850s.
The next Frontier Partisans Podcast series — Once Upon A Time in Los Angeles — requires a little bit of a personal introduction. I have posted an audio introduction on The Frontier Partisans Podcast. You can listen to it here or on your preferred podcast platform — there’s a little more extemporaneous exploration than what lies below…
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I was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Los Angeles — a town called La Crescenta to be specific. My wife Marilyn and I left Southern California for Oregon in 1993 — 29 years ago. So I’ve spent more of my life in Oregon than I did in LA. Yet, part of me still thinks of LA as “home,” which is probably the way most of us think of the place where we grew up.
Folks are sometimes taken aback when they hear that I come from LA. They see the hat and the boots and my frontier obsessions and it doesn’t jibe with their mental image of LA — which I guess is the stereotypical la-la land of freeways and Hollywood, where everybody is working on a screenplay.
Journalist Emmet Rensin viciously — but accurately — skewered that LA:
“Los Angeles is the culmination of every bad trend of the 20th century: cars and freeways, mass media, and vanity. Suburbia. Playing chicken with the water in a desert. LA hasn’t been aspirational since a Beach Boys song.”
Ouch.
Now, I did bump up against that stereotypical Los Angeles a bit, but my LA was mostly… not that.
I grew up right up against the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. My folks had a cabin in a little mountain town at the end of the Angeles Crest Highway called Wrightwood, so I grew up running around in the woods. My friends and I frequently strung together epic 20-mile hikes in those rugged mountains, which were traditionally capped by getting drunk at The Yodeler.
If we wanted something bigger, we could drive three hours or so and climb Mt. Whitney or hike out of Independence in the Owens Valley up over Kearsarge Pass in the High Sierras.
You didn’t want to be too obviously from Los Angeles — LA stole the Owens Valley’s water in the first part of the 20th century, and Owens Valley folks were still pissed off about it.
Back then, there were plenty of places to go shooting out in the mountains and desert. I haunted the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum (now the Autry Museum of the American West) in Griffith Park, which was a wonderful place to explore the frontier of history and the mythic imagination.
The Palomino Club in North Hollywood and the Crazy Horse Saloon in Santa Ana were two of the best country music venues in America; I saw Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers at the Crazy Horse maybe 15 feet from the stage.
There was a lot to love about that life in Southern California, and I likely would have never left — except that it just got too damn crowded and too damned constrained. The open shooting areas got closed down, and the feds imposed a permit system to climb Mt. Whitney. Hell, the The Palomino Club and the Crazy Horse aren’t even there anymore.
The Rodney King Riots in 1992 were an ugly thing that made Marilyn and I think long and hard about raising a family in the city — or even on the edges of it. We took the Oregon Trail north, and as I hit Ventura I pushed in a cassette of Guy Clark singing “if I can just get off or this LA Freeway without getting killed or caught.”
We were down the road in a club of dust, alright, but I can’t claim that I never looked back. I’m looking back now.
But this ain’t an exercise in nostalgia. Los Angeles is steeped in real-deal frontier history — it’s just buried under acres of cement in what L.A. writer D.J. Waldie called “the landscape of amnesia.”
Mountain Men like Kit Carson, Ewing Young and Jedediah Smith sojourned at Mission San Gabriel in the 1820s, after brutal crossings of the Mojave Desert. In 1854, Mountain Man Andy Sublette was mauled to death by a grizzly bear in Malibu — and it just doesn’t get any more Frontier Partisan than that. There’s a reason that Old Ephraim is on the state flag — although the grizzlies were eradicated right quick.
The Californio bandit Tiburcio Vasquez rode the canyons and washes where I hiked as a teenager, and was finally captured on a Rancho that lies not far from what is now the Sunset Strip. Davy Brown, one bloody bastard and a survivor of the notorious Glanton Gang of Blood Meridian fame, was lynched in downtown LA for killing one Pinkney Clifford.
The young men who flooded into California in the 1850s — men like this dashing feller — were part of a masculine honor culture that often resorted to violence.
In the 1850s, Los Angeles was the wildest of Wild West towns. To bastardize that great writer of LA of a later period Raymond Chandler, “down these mean streets men must go” — men armed to the teeth with Bowie knives and cap-and-ball revolvers. The men who made up the society pf Gold Rush-era Los Angeles came out of honor cultures — Mexico, the American South — and they readily resorted to violence. John A. Lewis of the Los Angeles Star wrote in 1853:
LA Noir got off to an early start.
One of my musical heroes — songwriter and Strat-slinger Dave Alvin is a fourth-generation Californian, and he’s steeped in the history of a Los Angeles well outside the neon glow of Hollywood. In an LA Times story he described the way landscapes of his youth were bulldozed and paved over in LA’s relentless quest for “development.” Something he said in that interview resonates with my mission for these next few podcasts.
“If you can’t go back to that landscape, the orange groves or the stands of oak or whatever, the stories you tell can fill in some of that landscape. I think people are looking to tell those stories. It’s like ripping up cement.”
So join me and let’s rip up some cement and rattle the bones of the Frontier Partisan history that lies beneath it. We’ll see you down the trail.
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As referenced in the podcast:
Matthew says
Look forward to the podcasts!
It is interesting how places of your birth stick with you. I’ve lived most of my life in Colorado, but I still think of myself as a Texan. It’s the state as whole I think of since I moved around a lot as a kid. Of course, in someways Colorado is more western than Texas. I grew up in SUBURBAN Texas after all.
I’ve been thinking of writing a story set in 1850s Los Angeles. A Weird Western. It may be a while before get to it, but I know it will begin with the protagonist killing a man.
JimC says
LA c. 1850s is fertile ground for the Weird Western.
lane batot says
Didn’t Louis L’Amour also write a novel or two about early frontier L. A.?
David Wrolson says
The Lonesome Gods is his Los Angeles novel and for him it is a big book.
Matthew says
I may keep an eye out for that. Is it any good?
David Wrolson says
It has been so long since I read it-At the time I wasn’t real fond of it because it was different from his normal stuff-but I think I would appreciate it a lot more now with age.
Patrick McGowan says
Just listened to the podcast and thoroughly enjoyed it. My youth was spent in a similar way, though not as adventurous but I trekked through Joshua Tree from the time I was a toddler. Hiking on my own at four, much to the concern of my parents, who were greatly relieved when I sauntered back into camp and calmly said, “hi, dad.” Many weeknights spent in Crystal Lake and weekends on Table Mountain. We still had orange groves in Covina until just about my high school graduation.
Up until the mid-nineties there were still quite a lot of playwrights telling the stories of the sprawl pushing against the desert. Sam Shepard being the most famous, but many other playwrights dealing with exactly what you speak about so well; the myth versus the reality.
A great memory from those later years being The Padua Playwrights Festival relocated at that point from Pomona to Cal Sate Northridge. All the shows were sight specific and were tremendous as the “stages” were sometimes gravel pits, gardens, or a small range of hills. This is a detour but I think you will enjoy this. One particular show used a model airplane that came flying from behind the audience and at a particular moment a doll with a parachute was ejected from the plane. It floated down behind a hill and then after a moment, an actor appeared from behind the hill dragging a full parachute. Pretty brilliant.
The paradox at present is now more and more people are using the national parks and monuments and it has caused them to lose their power to renew. Joshua Tree had 3 million visitors last year. More than double what it had just six years ago. That increase in interest probably was one of the causes for permits to climb Whitney. I have been visiting the Owens valley more frequently and have a dream of living there for 15 months when I retire to photograph every day. The Alabama Hills and other places are lousy with people most of the time but most places aren’t too bad if you get there as the sun rises.
JimC says
That was wonderful. Thanks. I cannot fathom 3 million people in Joshua Tree. That ain’t right. I don’t like the permits because I don’t like the permits — they just instituted such on a couple of my favorite places here in Sisters. But I understand that they HAVE to be implemented. The paradox is that to keep places at least somewhat wild, they have to be more intensively managed. Make that dream a reality Patrick. Has to happen.
Damien says
Joshua Tree is over run by city folks. I used to live there rents are skyrocketing.
JimC says
Ugh. All the good places…
David Wrolson says
I know we are roughly the same age and I think (because of popular entertainment) we are all from the LA Basin in a way.
Watching “Emergency” and “Chips’ and so forth at a young age ingrained all the names of the freeways in the brain.
JimC says
I loved “Emergency.” Randolph Mantooth was Cherokee, as it happens.
lane batot says
Los Angeles is without question, one of the most iconic places in the United States, regardless of what anyone says. I have an extremely peripheral connection to the place, having been born there back in 1960. My parents, too–even back then–weren’t sure they wanted to raise their two kids there, and as my Ma especially was homesick for the South(she was a North Georgia girl, my Pa was Texan to the core!), they packed me and my older brother up and moved to North Carolina when I was two years old–in 1962. Yet I still retained faint memories of the high, dry, desert hills behind our home in L. A.. But little else–I grew up a total Southern hillbilly adapted to the Southeastern forest ecosystem! There has always been speculation as to what I would have grown up like, had I remained around L. A., by people who know my background. A gang member? Most think I would have been a surfer dude. But I got to return to L. A. in 2012– the first time since I was two, exactly one-half century from when I left. One look at those strangely familiar high dry, desert hills, and I KNEW what I would have grown up as–not a city gang member, or a surfer dude–NO DOUBT–I would have been a Desert Rat!
Damien says
You would be interested in:
California and the Civil War
California’s Confederate Militia:
The Los Angeles Mounted Rifles
Really interesting story.
I work as an archaeologist in Southern California.