# Adobe Days/Chapter 10

Chapter X
El Pueblo de Nuestra Sen̄ora la Reina de los Angeles
Los Angeles was about ninety years old and I about one when we first met, neither of us, I am afraid, taking much notice of the other. For over twenty years San Francisco had been a city, a most interesting and alive city, making so much stir in the world that people forgot that Los Angeles was the older; that her birth had been ordained by the governor and attended with formal rites of the church and salutes from the military way back in 1781, when the famous revolution on the east coast was just drawing to a successful close. Until the stirring days of ’49, San Francisco was insignificance on sand hills. Then her rise was sudden and glorious and the Queen of the Angels was humble. But she was angelic only in name. She was a typical frontier town with primitive, flat-roofed dwellings of sun-dried bricks, much like those built in ancient Assyria or Palestine. Saloons and gambling houses were out of proportion in number, and there were murders every day. The present crime wave is nothing in comparison.
My father first saw Los Angeles in January, 1854, when he was camped with his sheep on the Rancho San Pasqual; his arrival was a few months later than ​that of Mr. Harris Newmark, who, in his book Sixty Years in Southern California, so vividly describes the village as he found it.
By the time I knew it there had been a great change. There were some sidewalks, water was piped to the houses, gas had been introduced; several public school buildings had been built; there were three newspapers, The Star, The Express, and The Herald. The public library had been founded,—it occupied rooms in the Downey Block where the Federal Building now stands, and Mary Foy, one of Los Angeles’s distinguished women, had begun her public service as a young girl in attendance. Compared with what it had been twenty years before, Los Angeles was a modern, civilized city; compared with what it is now, it was a little frontier town. At school I once learned its population to be 11,311.
We lived first on Temple Street, near Charity. Once Los Angeles boasted Faith and Hope Streets as well, but only Hope remains, for Faith has turned to Flower, and Charity masquerades as Grand.
Next door to us lived a Jewish family whose girls sat on the front porch and amazed me by crocheting on Sunday. I had not known that any Jews existed outside the Bible. Perhaps this family was the nucleus for the present large colony of Hebrews that now fills the neighborhood.
Temple Street was new and open for only a few blocks. Bunker Hill Avenue was the end of the settlement, a row of scattered houses along the ridge fringing the sky. Beyond that we looked over empty, ​grassy hills to the mountains. Going down the first hillside and over towards Beaudry’s reservoir for a picnic, I once found maidenhair ferns under some brush, and was frightened by what sounded like a rattlesnake—probably only a cicada. Court Street disappeared in a hollow at Hope, where a pond was made interesting by a large flock of white ducks.
Across the street from us on top of a hill that is now gone, at the head of a long flight of wide steps, stood “The Horticultural Pavilion,” destroyed a few years later by fire. It was replaced by Hazard’s Pavilion, an equally barn-like, wooden building on the site of the present Philharmonic Auditorium. The first Pavilion held county fairs, conventions, and operas. It was in this place that I once had a great disappointment, for when I was hearing Pinafore a child ahead of me suddenly coughed and whooped, and I was removed with haste just at the most entrancing moment. The opera had been put on in London first in the spring of ’78. It had reached Los Angeles by ’79, and we revelled in its wit and melody with the rest of the world.
It must have been somewhat later than this that the city took such pride in the singing of one of its own girls, Mamie Perry (Mrs. Modini-Wood) who was educated abroad and made her debut in Italy. Another name that will recall many a concert and social event to old timers is that of Madame Mara.
In this building I once saw a strange instrument, a box into which one could speak and be heard half a ​mile away at a similar contraption—a very meek and lowly promise of our present telephone system.
At this fair, where there were exhibited fruits, jellies and cakes, quilts and long strings of buttons, when the mania for collecting them was at its height, I remember that some ladies, interested in the new Orphans’ Home, served New England dinners, in a room decked as an old fashioned kitchen with spinning wheels and strings of corn and drying apples. Among them were my mother and Mrs. Dan Stevens, two slender, dark-haired young women, wearing colonial costume and high combs—my mother, who so soon after left this world, and Mrs. Stevens, still among us, loved and honored for her many good works.
Mrs. Stevens tells me that this was at the time of the visit of President and Mrs. Hayes and a party of government officials, the first president of the United States to come to California. All Los Angeles turned out to welcome them, although there was enough bitter partisan feeling left to cause some neighbors of ours to walk past him in line while refusing to shake the hand of the man who they believed usurped Tilden’s rightful place.
The celebration began with speaking from a grandstand built in front of the Baker Block, followed by a reception given to Mrs. Hayes and the ladies of the party in the parlors of the fashionable St. Elmo Hotel, still standing but now fallen to low estate.
After this the presidential party went to the county fair at the pavilion where there was more speaking, a public reception and a formal dinner. Dr. David ​Barrows contributes as his memory of this great occasion—the memory of a small boy who had been brought down from the Ojai Valley—his amazement to observe that Secretary Sherman kept his cigar in his mouth while making his address. It was during this speech that a little boy came forward bringing a great bouquet, the gift of the local florist, but suffered so from stage fright that he refused to mount the platform and my small sister, standing near, was substituted. She marched serenely across the stage, delivered the flowers to Mrs. Hayes, was kissed by her, then by the speaker, and final glory, by the President himself. I am sure it was the most lime-lighty moment of Nan’s modest life.
This bouquet was not the only gift we afforded our distinguished visitor. The other was a cup and saucer, fearfully and wonderfully made of sectors of red, white and blue cambric, stitched round and round until it was stiff by a little hole-in-the-wall sewing-machine agent.
After inspecting our fruits, vegetables, cookery, button strings and other fancy work the party was entertained at dinner by the leading women of Los Angeles in the improvised New England kitchen at the fair. The city council granted them the privilege and appropriated toward expense the generous sum of twenty-five dollars, all the council could afford toward banqueting the most distinguished party that had yet visited the City of the Queen of the Angels, so said Mayor Toberman. But every grower of fine turkeys or prize fruit or vegetables and every notable maker ​of preserves brought in offerings in kind so that in spite of the council’s thrift a most generous feast was spread before our guests.
Speaking of politics recalls the wonderful torchlight processions of a later period when I, with my cousins, shouting little Republicans, perched on the fence at their residence on the corner of Second and Broadway and delightedly recognized our fathers under the swinging, smoky lights.
I happened to be in Maine during the Blaine-Cleveland campaign and once rode upon a train to which Mr. Blaine’s special car was attached. It interested me to see that when he got out at one station for a hasty cup of coffee at a lunch counter, he poured the hot liquid into his saucer to drink. Was that doing politics, being one of the people, or was it simply that the mouth of a presidential candidate is as susceptible to heat as that of an ordinary mortal? I was much edified, as I was not accustomed to saucer-drinking. When the train reached Boston towards midnight, it was met by a most gorgeous torchlight parade and a blare of music.
When Garfield died, Los Angeles had a memorial service and a long daylight procession headed by a “Catafalque,” (a large float, gruesomely black), on which one of my schoolmates, Laura Chauvin, rode to represent, I suppose, a mourning angel. Later its black broadcloth draperies were used to make souvenirs and sold for some deserving cause. We purchased a pin-ball the size of a dollar, decorated with a ​green and white embroidered thistle,—a curious memento of a murdered president.
But I have been lured by memories of processions as is a small boy by martial music, away from my ordered account of where I have lived in Los Angeles. The second year we moved to the Shepherd house, (so-called because of its owner), where presently my brother, Llewellyn Bixby, junior, in direct answer to my prayers, came through the ceiling of the front bedroom straight into the apron of Mrs. Maitland,—a two-day-late birthday present for me. So I was told. My sceptical faculty was dormant.
This house still stands at the top of the precipice made by the cutting of First Street between Hill and Olive Streets.
The lot in front was very steep, with zig-zag paths and terraces, in one of which was a grove of banana trees, where fruit formed, but, owing to insufficient heat, never ripened well. Do you know the cool freshness of the furled, new, pale green leaves? Or how delightful it is to help the wind shred the old ones into fringe? One by one the red and gray covers for the circled blossoms drop, and make fetching little leather caps for playing children.
In those days the hill had not been hacked away to make streets, and where now is a great gash to let First Street through there was then a breezy, open hill-top, whereon grew brush and wild-flowers. The poppies in those days were eschscholtzias (the learning to spell the name was a feat of my eighth year), ​and were not subjected to the ignominy of being painted with poinsettias on fringed leather souvenirs for tourists. The yellow violets were gallitas, little roosters, perhaps because in the hands of children they fought to the death, their necks hooked together until one or the other was decapitated. The brodiæas, or wild hyacinths, sometimes now called “rubbernecks,” were called cacomites, (four syllables), a word of Aztec origin brought to California by people from Mexico where it was applied to a different flower but one having like this one a sweet edible root.
Between the weeds and bushes there were bare spots of ground where, by careful searching, one might find faint circles about the size of a “two-bit” piece. Wise ones knew that these marked the trap doors of tarantula nests. It was sport to try to pry one open, with mother spider holding it closed. We young vandals would dig out the nests, interested for a moment in the silky lining and the tiny babies and then would throw away the wrecked home of the gorgeous black velvet creatures that did no harm on the open hill side.
At this house Harry and I conducted an extensive “essence factory,” collecting old bottles far and near, and filling them with vari-colored liquids, obtained by soaking or steeping different flowers and leaves. We used to drink the brew made from eucalyptus leaves. The pepper infusion was pale, like tea; that made from old geraniums was of a horrible odor,—hence we liked to inveigle innocent grown folks into smelling it. The cactus solution was thick, like castor oil, ​and we considered it our most valuable product, having arrived thus early at the notion that difficulty of preparation adds to the cost of a manufactured article.
North of us were several houses containing children—and here I found my first girl play-mates—Grace and Susie, Bertha and Eileen. The level street at Court and Hill, protected on three sides by grades too steep for horses, was our safe neighborhood playground. I never go through the tunnel that now has pierced the hill without hearing, above the roar of the Hollywood car, the patter of flying feet, the rhythms of the witch dances, the thud-thud of hop-scotch, the shouting boys and girls defending goals in Prisoner’s Base, the old, old song of London Bridge, or the “Intry mintry cutry corn” that determined who was “it” for the twilight game of Hide-and-Seek—and then the varied toned bells in the hands of mothers who called the children home.
We played school, jacks, marbles, tag, and an adaption of Peck’s Bad Boy, and, between whiles, dolls. Even Harry played with them when we were still youngsters—say eight or nine. He didn’t seem young to me then—he was just himself. I called him “Hab.” My aunt tells of finding us once about our housekeeping, he doing the doll family washing, and I papering the house. In our menage there was no sex distinction as to the work to be done.
We girls, as we grew a little older, had a collection of small dolls, none over four inches long, and the various marriages, deaths, and parties kept us busy. I tailored for the whole group, having apparently a ​talent for trousers, which early experience undoubtedly encouraged me in later life to gather in all the stray pantaloons to cut over into knickerbockers for my numerous boys.
Raids on the Chinese vegetable wagon provided supplies for our cooking over a row of small, outdoor fire-places we had built in a low bank in our yard. Once my mother was much disturbed to find a little pot of squirrel meat cooking on the stove. She needn’t have worried, for I knew as well as she that strychnine, slipped into a small piece of watermelon rind, transferred its evil potency to the body of the little beast that ate it. But it was sport to hang him up as I had seen the men do at the ranch when butchering a sheep, to skin him and dress the meat, and pretend it was a stew for Isabel, the doll. I had a large collection of squirrel skins tacked up on the barn at the Shepherd house.
After a couple of years we built our own house in the same neighborhood on the south-east corner of Court and Hill Streets. It began as a seven room cottage, white with green blinds to suit father. Later the roof was raised and a second story inserted and the house painted a more fashionable all-over gray, to suit the ladies.
My mother was a happy woman when, after eleven years of married life, she moved into her very own home. A few months later she suddenly died, leaving my father widowed a second time, a lonely man for the remaining fourteen years of his life.
Mother had never been a strong woman and was ​unable to withstand an attack of typhus fever, contracted when on an errand of kindliness to a sick and forlorn seamstress. I often wish I might have an adult’s knowledge of mother,—my child memories are beautiful. She was tall and slender, with quantities of heavy brown hair, dark eyes, and unusual richness of color in her cheeks which is repeated in some of her grandchildren. It amuses me to recall that I had such absolute faith in her word that on one occasion when she had visited my school and a girl remarked upon what a beautiful mother I had, I stoutly denied the allegation, for had she not herself assured me that she was not pretty?
I suppose that her New England conscience and native modesty could not allow even her little daughter to tell her how lovely she really was. I am told that she “had a knack of clothes” and I remember some of them well enough to confirm the opinion. Her taste allowed beautiful materials and much real lace, but of jewels there were none except some brooches that performed useful service and the wedding and engagement rings that held sentiment.
It was a sad thing that just when her dearest wish, that for her own home, was fulfilled, she must leave it and her three babies for some one else to care for. Fortunately her dearly loved, next-older sister was able to take her place.
At the time we built there seemed to be but two styles of architecture in vogue, one square on a four room base and the other oblong on a six room plan, the narrow end being to the street, with one tier of rooms ​shoved back a little in order to provide a small porch,—we chose the latter. Every such house had a bay window in the projecting end, that being the front parlor, and all windows visible from the street must have yellow, varnished inside blinds.
One evening while the building was going on we went over as usual for our daily inspection and noted that the newly set studding marked the coming rooms. The connecting parlors seemed small to our eyes and tastes not yet trained to apartment and bungalow court proportions, so on the following morning father ordered out the wall between proposed front and back parlor, and our large sitting room,—living room it would be called today, was ordained. It, was unusual in Los Angeles where the prevailing mode demanded the two parlors. This room was large enough, 18’ x 33’, to stand the height of the ceiling, fourteen feet. Wide, high double-doors opened into the hall, opposite similar ones into the reception room, giving a feeling of spaciousness to the house.
The furnishing was of necessity more or less that which it is now customary to damn as mid-Victorian,—walnut furniture and a wealth of varying design in carpet, curtains, upholstery, wall-paper; but the whole in this case was kept in harmony by a key color, a medium olive, relieved by soft shades of rose and tan. Even the woodwork was painted to match the ground color of the walls, instead of glistening in the usual glory of varnished redwood or yellow pine. Everything was in good taste except a fearful and wonderful ceiling that was wished on us by the local wall​papering nabob. How fortunate that the walls were so high it was almost out of sight!
Over our heads were the two plaster of Paris centerpieces from which lighting fixtures sprang, first hanging lamps with prismatic fringes, later gas chandeliers. These fruits and flowers were tinted and gilded. Around them was a cream colored sky, set with golden stars, small ones, not planets,—limited in extent by an oval band of brocaded red velvet, this being the pet aversion of Aunt Martha. Outside this pale there was a field of metallic colored paper with an all-over design like chicken wire; next came a border of flowers and something modest to connect the whole artistic creation with the side wall.
We had a ceiling, but there were many things characteristic of the period that we did not have. We never had a “throw,” nor a gilded milking stool with a ribbon bow on one leg; we never had a landscape painted on the stem of a palm leaf, nor oranges on a section of orange wood; we did not hang in any door a portière made of beads, shells, chenille ropes or eucalyptus seeds, all of which things were abroad in the land.
The room contained four bookcases, a rosewood square piano, a large table, a sofa and several easy chairs. From the walls looked down upon us Pharoah’s Horses, The Stag in the Glen, and the Drove at the Ford, (suitable subjects the vogue provided for a family dependent upon livestock), but these were not all, for there were a few reproductions of old masters, a fine portrait of grandfather in his youth, and a ​picture of the sweet-faced mother who had gone to Heaven, as we children said.
At one end of the room was a white marble mantel with a large grate, always annoying us by its white patchiness in the low toned room, but contributing cheer with the coal fire that, through more than half the year, burned all day long. Los Angeles had no furnaces in those days, but the family was suited by the single fireplace, for one could choose the climate he wished from torrid zone near the grate to arctic in the bay window, where the goldfish circled their watery globe.
The room was the center of a happy family life, where, of an evening, all read by the light of the student lamp, or indulged in games, dominoes, authors, crambo, or logomachy, sugar-coated ways of getting training respectively in addition, names of books and writers, verse-making and spelling. Father rarely went out, and after the reading of his evening paper might join a lively domino tournament or amuse himself with solitaire.
Until the very last years of his life he busied himself at odd jobs about the house. Sometimes it would be a session with the grandfather clock, sometimes it would be chopping wood. He had the willow brought up from the ranch in long pieces, which he cut and stacked under the house. He raised chickens and at first cared for a horse and cow. Later we kept two horses, dispensed with the cow, and had a man for the livestock and garden and to drive us about town. We did not have a dog regularly but always cats, classical ​cats. Æneas was very long-legged and Dido lived with us a long time. I think it was she who went every evening with father for his after dinner walk and cigar.
One Thanksgiving time the wagon from the ranch came, bringing us a couple of barrels of apples, a load of wood and a fine turkey for the feast day. Imagine our dismay, one afternoon, to see it mount up on its wings and soar majestically from our hill top back-yard down to the corner of First and Broadway below. He escaped us but, I presume, to some one else he came as a direct answer to prayer.
Father was always interested in flowers and was very successful in making them grow. Usually there was a box of slips out in the back yard. Often he would bring in a rich red Ragged Robin bud, dew-wet, to lay by mother’s napkin for breakfast. For himself he put a sprig of lemon-verbena in his button-hole. For some reason, he excepted orange colored flowers from his favor. He made mock of the gay little runners by twisting their name into “nasty-urchins.”
The windows of my room, directly over the parlor, were covered with a large, climbing “Baltimore Belle,” an old-fashioned small cluster rose that I never see now-a-days. From my side window I looked out on a long row of blue-blossomed agapanthus, interspersed with pink belladonnas, flowers that in summer repeated the blue of the mountains touched at sunset with pink lights.
Every night when ready for bed, I opened the in ​side blinds and looked at the mountains and up to the stars and enlarged my heart, for what can give one the sense of awe and beauty that the night sky does?
The location of our home on the brow of a hill was chosen because of the view and the sense of air and space. Below us was the little city, the few business blocks, the homes set in gardens on tree shaded streets, the whole surrounded by orchards and vineyards. On clear days we could see the mountains far in the east and the ocean at San Pedro, with Santa Catalina beyond.
One very rainy winter, possibly ’86, we watched the flood waters from the river creep up Aliso Street and into Alameda: we saw bridges go out and small houses float down stream. Then it was that Martin Aguierre, a young policeman, won the admiration of everyone when he rode his black horse into the torrent and rescued flood victims from floating houses and debris in mid-stream. One of the girls in my room at school lost all her clothing except what she wore, and we had a “drive” for our local flood-sufferer.
This was a very different river in summer. I once saw a woman whose nerves had been wracked by dangerous winter fordings when the water swirled about the body of the buggy, get out of her carriage, letting it ford the Los Angeles river while she stepped easily across the entire stream. She had a complex, but she didn’t know that name for her fear!
Beyond the river and up the hill on the other side stood, stark and lonely, the “Poor House,” the first unit of the present County Hospital. Many a time ​when the skies forbore to rain I had it pointed out to me as my probable ultimate destination; for, after the bad middle years of the seventies when to a general financial depression was added a pestilence that killed off all the lambs, and to that was added a disastrous investment in mines, the firm of Flint, Bixby & Co. was sadly shaken, and it was of great moment whether or not sufficient moisture should come to provide grass and grain for the stock. So, if the sun shone too constantly and the year wore on to Christmas without a storm the ominous words, “a dry year,” were heard and the bare building across the river loomed menacingly. But it always rained in time to save us!
Rain and overflowing rivers connote mud. Walkers on the cement sidewalks beside our paved streets little realize what wonderful mud was lost when Progress covered our adobe. With its first wetting it became very slippery on top of a hard base, but as more water fell and it was kneaded by feet and wheels, it became first like well-chewed gum and then a black porridge. I have seen signs that warned against drowning in the bog in the business center of town. An inverted pair of boots sticking out of a pile of mud in front of the old Court House once suggested that a citizen had gone in head first and disappeared.
Small boys turned an honest nickel or two by providing plank foot-bridges or selling individual “crickets” which the wayfarer might take with him from corner to corner. As the sun came out and the mud thickened the streets became like monstrous strips of ​sticky fly paper. We walked the cobblestone gutters until our rubbers were in shreds, or, when necessity drove us into the gum, lost them.
A friend assures me that one Sunday morning she set out for a church near the center of the city, that she made slow progress for a block and a half, and then, realizing that so much time had passed that she could not arrive in time for service, turned around and went home. It had taken her an hour and a half to make the round trip amounting to three blocks.
There is no mud so powerful when it is in its prime as adobe, and when it dries in all its trampled ridges and hollows, it is as hard as a rock. It takes all summer to wear it down level, ready to begin over again with the new rains. There are a few places yet, where, some rainy day if you are feeling extra fit, you may try a stroll across a Los Angeles street and learn to sympathize with a captured fly.
Certain other interesting kinds of soil are also covered up in Los Angeles. On the southwest corner of Temple and Broadway there is mica cropping out between the strata, and up by Court Street Angel’s Flight there is a nice white formation very like chalk. I liked to cut it into odd shapes.