Thursday, June 2, 2011
Page 7
PERSPECTIVES (Column)
Ogier Is Member of ‘Rangers,’ a Group of ‘Vigilantes’...or Semi-Vigilantes
By ROGER M. GRACE
145th in a Series
ISAAC S.K. OGIER—who in 1851 served fleetingly as the first district attorney of Los Angeles County (as opposed to a district encompassing this county)—became, while U.S. attorney in Southern California, a charter member of the Los Angeles Rangers. Organized in August, 1853, that band was, roughly, the local counterpart to the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco and similar groups throughout the west.
They were the “vigilantes.”
That term has a decidedly negative connotation, somewhat deserved, but not entirely.
Vigilance committees in the west were principally comprised of respectable, civic-minded individuals. They acted out of desperation: lawlessness was rampant, and taking action to safeguard the community—of which the vigilante’s own family was a part—was an imperative. Courageously, they acted to supplement efforts of law enforcement officials in tracking down and apprehending outlaws…or, sometimes, when law enforcement officials sat back, vigilantes acted in their stead.
Some law enforcement officials had gained their posts through politics and were ineffective. One of the first lawyers in Los Angeles, Joseph Lancaster Brent, defended the “Lugo Boys,” as recounted here recently, and encountered in April of 1851 a need to shield them against a possible lynch mob. In his book, “The Lugo case: A Personal Experience,” he terms the sheriff, George Burrill, “a good man, but timid.” Brent organized Californios (persons born in California before the U.S. take-over of the region from Mexico) to provide protection.
There were instances, many of them, of vigilantes taking the law into their own hands and causing deaths by hanging of those they had determined to have committed crimes warranting such a penalty. What is not widely recognized, however, is that these hangings were not the result, generally speaking, of actions by crazed “lynch mobs.” Rather, juries, though constituted on an impromptu basis, rendered verdicts that were reached in proceedings resembling those held by duly constituted courts of law. And death verdicts were not the only option; often, there was imposition of lesser penalties, such as floggings or merely the mandated return of purloined goods.
Ad hoc justice systems existed, by necessity, on wagon trains and in mining camps. They were brought to towns and cities and produced—whether most often or merely sometimes—justice.
To the vigilantes there may be ascribed both gallantry and gall, valor and violence. They sought noble ends but ofttimes achieved them in ignoble ways.
There were those who wished, quixotically, that the need for them would vanish quickly. The San Diego Herald’s edition of Aug. 7, 1851, contains this item:
“Our Governor [John McDougall] has issued a proclamation deprecating the organization of self-styled ‘Vigilance Committees,’ and hopes the new code of penal laws, about to go into operation, will be found effective in correcting evil, and would have no separate organization independent of law, but might be allowed to act in enforcing its provisions.”
Today, there would be no dissent to the proposition that the “rule of law” and rule by private individuals who arrogate powers unto themselves, are mutually exclusive, and that any civilized people will reach out to the former and abhor the latter.
But that’s today.
Official administration of a justice system in Los Angeles County in its earliest times proved so feeble, criminal violence so rampant, that two years after the governor’s 1851 proclamation, the group known as the “Los Angeles Rangers” was formed.
Historian W.W. Robinson, in “Lawyers of Los Angeles” (1959), terms the Rangers a “semi-vigilante, semi-social group of a hundred or more men who enjoyed themselves while at the same time trying to chase criminals.”
His unexplained description of the band as “semi-vigilante” would seem to stem, at least in part, from its avowed objective of assisting the county sheriff and city marshal.
A spirit of helpfulness to the marshal was not manifested, however, when, in 1853, the Rangers discerned that a practical joke had been played on them by Marshal Alviron S. Beard (their being dispatched to a supposed site of criminal activity that was merely a party), leading to angry retaliation. Lawyer/journalist Horace Bell tells in his 1881 book, “Reminiscences of a Ranger,” of this middle-of-the night “court martial” of Beard and administration of his punishment:
“After defining the crime, the penalty was fixed at ‘cat-hauling in the public water-ditch.’ No sooner said than done. A rope was speedily thrown around the astonished representative of official pomposity, whose arms were pinioned, and the irate Rangers amused themselves until the break of day in dragging the proud dignitary up and down the water ditch, when they left him more dead than alive….”
One of the extrajudicial proceedings in which the Rangers participated is recounted in a Sept. 24, 1853 article in the weekly Los Angeles Star. It’s reported that two days earlier, “a detachment of rangers and a party of citizens held a meeting at which a committee was appointed to nominate a jury of twelve men to hear the evidence, and decide upon the fate of the prisoner,” accused of an assault with intent to rape.
(The suspect was found guilty. The article recites: “[T]he jury recommend[ed] that two hundred and fifty lashes be given him on the bare back; that he have his head cropped, and leave the county as soon as his physicians pronounce him able to do so. And that if he be again found in this county he be hung. The sentence was approved by the meeting, and ordered to be carried into effect. The punishment was inflicted, and the prisoner ordered to leave the county at the expiration of one week, and never to return on pain of death. Many were in favor of hanging the prisoner on the spot, as he was a notoriously bad character, and the punishment and outlawry would only serve to render him desperate.”)
The Rangers, according to Robinson (quoting from a 1953 book) conducted 22 executions in 1854-55 “in accordance with the law or without the law, whichever was most convenient.”
Indeed, to the extent they aligned themselves with lawful executions, they were actually involved in promoting something new, of a “reform” nature. It was not until Monday, Feb. 13, 1854, that “the first judicial execution in this County” took place, according to the next Saturday’s issue of the Star. “A detachment of Rangers…was in attendance,” the article notes.
Gordon Morris Bakken, in his 2001 book, “Law in the West,” observes:
“It has been correctly noted that even the Rangers, although they were under the auspices of the law, did not allow the judicial process to interfere with their mission.”
Officialdom did back this outfit…which no doubt accounts, along with the group’s stated mission, for Robinson’s description of it as being of only “semi-vigilante” nature.
In “Military Units in Southern California, 1853-1862,” a September, 1950 article in the California Historical Society Quarterly, J.M. Scammel tells of a July 23, 1853 letter from 10 leading citizens to Gov. John Bigler. It asks—in light of “the late disturbances, Robberies and thefts and the appaling fact that we live in the midst of an organized band of Villains of the most desperate character”—that arms be sent here. That letter was dispatched in tandem with efforts to organize a local militia.
An article in the Los Angeles Star’s issue of Nov. 5, 1853, reports that the Rangers received by steamboat 40 “stand” of rifles (120 firearms), courtesy of Bigler, “together with equipments for the same.” The article notes:
“The officers of the corps also received their commissions as such, and are thus constituted a part of the volunteer military force of the State.”
Meanwhile, as the Aug. 5, 1853, edition of the Los Angeles Star relates, the “Board of Supervisors have agreed to appropriate $1,000” in support of the Rangers’ operations, “in the confidence that the urgent necessity of the case will cause the next Legislature to reimburse the county Treasury.”
An April 4, 1854 editorial in San Francisco’s Alta California rails against any such reimbursement, explaining:
“The petition for an appropriation of money to the Los Angeles Rangers will, we trust, be rejected. The Constitution provides that no standing army shall be kept up in time of peace, and this body of Rangers, if paid by the Slate, will savor of that character. Every one familiar with the history of the western borders knows how dangerous such bodies may become. We know no evil of the Los Angeles Rangers, but we know that they are not popular with many of the native Californians. There is a good deal of feeling in the northern portion of the State against what is called Lynch Law, and that law we understand it to be the special function of such bodies as the Los Angeles Rangers to execute….”
Legislation was passed on May 15, 1854, authorizing the Los Angeles County treasurer to withhold a total of $3,000 in monies that would otherwise have been routed to the state’s general fund and to apply that money to expenses of maintaining the Rangers.
Correspondence (located at the state archives in Sacramento) between the Rangers’ captain, Dr. A.W. Hope, and William C. Kibbe, quartermaster and acting adjutant general, reflects other requests for arms. A directive of May 25, 1854, from Bigler to Kibbe instructs that 12 army revolvers be sent to Hope.
A letter of April 3, 1854, from Hope to Kibbe characterizes the Rangers as “a cavalry company organized according to law in the county of Los Angeles on the 6th day of August, 1853.” That’s one way the organization could be regarded.
Some view the Rangers as a gang of vigilantes, plain and simple, while others ignore its extralegal approaches and see it as nothing other than a volunteer company of lawmen.
Kevin Starr, in his 1986 book “Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era,” says:
“Mustered together in 1853 in the El Dorado Saloon, the Los Angeles Rangers were a mounted vigilante group of more than a hundred men organized along paramilitary lines.”
In like vein, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s website declares:
“In 1853, in the El Dorado Saloon, Ogier, [County Court] Judge Agustin Olvera and other leading citizens organized the Rangers, a vigilante group that would grow to a hundred members and would lynch at least twenty-two people between 1854 and 1855.”
By contrast, in “Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913,” Harris Newmark recites that Ogier in 1853 “joined the voluntary police.”
The Los Angeles Police Department website describes the cadre as having been “what loosely may be called the City’s first Police Department.”
Robinson notes that lawyers and judges who joined the Rangers included Ogier, Brent, Olvera, and First District Judge Benjamin Hayes.
The extent of participation by Ogier, a U.S. district attorney, is not known. There were more members than there were men on horseback patrol.
An Aug. 5, 1853, article in the Los Angeles Star says that the Rangers “consists of one hundred members, but only twenty five form the active force.” A more modest estimate of the total membership—set at 75— appears in the Sept. 5 issue of San Francisco’s Alta California, in the form of a Sept. 1 letter from a correspondent in Los Angeles. “[T]here are horse, and equipments for 23,” the letter notes.
An item in the Feb. 11, 1854 edition of the Star advises:
“The Rangers — The force of this efficient corps has been increased by the addition of twenty five Foot Rangers to their original number. The company now consists of fifty men, one half of whom are mounted. Scarcely a day passes in which their assistance is not sought, and detachments are nearly all the time in the field.”
Whether Ogier was merely a nominal member or actually joined in chasing bandits or (less likely) walking a beat, his affiliation with the Rangers would have been generally viewed at the time in positive light.
The Aug. 5 Star article recites the “regular predatory visits from Indians from the neighboring mountains, who come here to feed on cattle and carry off horses” a recent raid by “an organized band of robbers,” and the “habitual concealment of offenders,” inferentially by members of the Spanish-speaking community. The comment is made:
“A remedy for this state of things will, we conceive, be found mainly in the organization of the ‘Los Angeles Rangers.’ ”
An article in the Aug. 10 issue of the Southern Californian says of the Rangers:
“They do honor to the military in this part of the State—and in case of invasion by our country’s foes, we have no doubt but that every man of the company will do good service under their banner, spangled with stars of the glorious constellation of states forming our confederacy.”
The Rangers’ approval rating was not, however, 100 percent. The 2002 book, “El Pueblo: The Historic Heart of Los Angeles,” by Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, labels the Rangers “a vigilante group,” and points out:
“Despairing over the high crime rate, prominent Californios at times sided with the vigilantes, as did a number of Mexicans and less wealthy Californios. Other Californios and Mexicans, however, strongly condemned the racial injustices of vigilante rule. Francisco P. Ramirez, for example, the young editor of El Clamor Publico, the American pueblo’s first independent Spanish-language newspaper, while accepting some vigilante activity as a necessary response to lawlessness, often protested that ‘Mexicans alone have been the victims of the people’s insane fury.’ ”
Copyright 2011, Metropolitan News Company