What was That Anniversary Date Again?

LAPD Common Council minutes from 21 Dec 1868 meeting

Historical mystery author Anne Louise Bannon reveals why L.A.P.D. personnel aren’t really sure how old the department is.

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Anne Bannon author photoRelevant History welcomes back historical mystery author Anne Louise Bannon, who writes the “Old Los Angeles” mystery series set in the 1870s and featuring Maddie Wilcox, and the “Freddie and Kathy Roaring ‘20s” series featuring Freddie Little and Kathy Briscow. Her most recent title is Death of the City Marshal. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. To learn more about Anne and her books, visit her web site and blog, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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One of the most fun things about diving into the Research Rabbit Hole is that you never know what you’re going to find. Or not find.

For example, the founding of the Los Angeles Police Department. You’d think that it would be pretty straight-forward to identify the actual date of the department’s founding. The L.A.P.D. Museum cites 10 March 1869 as the date. The problem is there are no city council minutes with that date. There are minutes from 1 March 1869, which do not mention the police at all. There are minutes from 15 March 1869, which mention disciplining a couple police officers for “cruelty to a squaw.”

Even more interesting, there was a police committee dating back to 1855, and there is also a council minutes record from roughly the same time, designating the City Marshal as police chief, in addition to his other duties (which included collecting city taxes).

Even L.A.P.D. historians don’t seem to know where that 10 March date comes from. I know because they were emailing my husband to find out, and my husband forwarded the email to me for the fun of it.

Let me explain how my husband, Michael Holland, happens to be part of this. He’s the archivist for the City of Los Angeles. We never intended that he would become my personal research assistant, but, dang, it’s convenient. It was kind of his fault that happened. You see, his lecture on L.A.’s Zanja system (which was how they irrigated the city’s farms and vineyards before Mulholland raped the Owens Valley) got me started on my Old Los Angeles series, which I set in the 1870s for a lot of reasons I won’t go into here.

When is the real anniversary?
What this all boils down to is that the L.A.P.D. is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its founding this year—and we don’t really know when it was or what they’re counting from. There were police in L.A. before 1868, but we have reason to believe that they were volunteers. And we have a record in the City Council minutes from 21 December 1868 in which the mayor was to appoint “a City Police” made up of four men who would be employed by the city. So, my personal guess is that the mayor took his sweet time doing the official appointing and that whatever paperwork, if any there was, did not end up in the city records.

One of the men that the mayor recommended to be appointed as an officer, J.F. Dye, would play a part in a drama almost two years later that would result in the first officer killed in the line of duty. That victim was also the first person to be chief of the paid force, City Marshal William Warren. One thing that does make this so confusing is that the terms “Police Chief” and “City Marshal” appear interchangeably in the council minutes from 1855 on. This event became the basis for the second mystery in my “Old Los Angeles series,” Death of the City Marshal.

A rough place
Los Angeles was a pretty rough place from the 1850s on. The pueblo was founded in 1781, while California was still part of Mexico and under Spanish rule. When Mexico finally gained independence from Spain in 1821, it still controlled Alta California. Americans started arriving in the late 1840s and by 1848 had gained control of the state via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In 1849, gold was discovered up north, and that brought even more Americans to Los Angeles. These were mostly failed miners and other transients, resulting in a lot of violence, mostly bar fights. By the late 1860s and into 1870s, it was still very violent, but families were moving in, and that meant things were starting to calm down, alas, not by much.

LAPD Common Council minutes from 21 Dec 1868 meetingBy the fall of 1870, the police force had been expanded to six men. No surprise, the single most common petition made to the Common Council (as it was known at the time) was to request more police officers. The population had grown to around 5,700, still mostly men. Murders were down, but not by much, and one of the guys doing a fair amount of the killing was none other than City Marshal Warren. The other guy was probably Deputy Joseph Dye.

Warren and Dye had started out as friends. Warren needed someone especially tough to patrol the worst parts of town. The problem was that both were hotheads, prone to shooting first and asking questions later. They had a falling out and, on 31 October 1870, got into a gunfight over who had the rights to the bounty on a prostitute.

I did massage the history a little in Death of the City Marshal. In the novel, Warren does not die of the wounds sustained in the gunfight, although in real life, he did. You can’t really have a whodunit if you know whodunit. We know what really happened because the court records are a lot more complete, and there were a lot of witnesses to the affray, which was thoroughly covered in the newspapers of the day.

I’ll be diving into the Research Rabbit Hole again soon. It’s always so much fun to see what I can find. But sometimes, it’s what I don’t find that makes things fun.

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Death of a City Marshall book coverA big thanks to Anne Louise Bannon! She’ll give away an ebook copy of Death of the City Marshal to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available worldwide.

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The History of Wine in Los Angeles

Anne Louise Bannon author photoRelevant History welcomes back Anne Louise Bannon, who wrote her first novel at age fifteen. Her journalistic work has appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Wines and Vines, and in newspapers across the country. She created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog with her husband, Michael Holland, and is the co-author of Howdunit: Book of Poisons, with Serita Stevens, as well as author of the “Freddie and Kathy” mystery series, set in the 1920s, and the “Operation Quickline” series and Tyger, Tyger. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. For more information about her and her books, visit her web site, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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The fun thing about my latest novel, Death of the Zanjero, is that it really couldn’t take place anywhere but in Los Angeles, California, or at any time but in the 19th century. Okay, I could have pushed it to the early 20th century, but by then, the odds were not good that the body of the Zanjero (or water overseer) would come floating up as the sluice gate opened to a rancho’s zanja (irrigation ditch). Lots of places, even as far away as New Mexico, had zanjas for irrigation and zanjeros overseeing them. But they didn’t have the wine industry that Los Angeles did—one that predates wineries in Livermore and the Napa Valley.

Junípero SerraYes, you read that right. California’s wine industry actually began in Los Angeles. There were older vineyards in Arizona and other Spanish outposts. That’s because they needed wine to celebrate Mass, and making your own was somewhat easier than importing it from Spain. And, in the late 18th century, when Father Junipero Serra and company started trekking up Alta California, leaving the twenty-one missions behind, it only made sense to plant olives and grapes.

Spanish wines
I have heard it said that the reason the padres mostly planted a supposedly inferior variety that we know today as the mission grape was that the government in Spain didn’t want New World wines competing with theirs. That does not entirely make sense to me, but the mission grape was certainly plentiful, and the padres used it to make a fortified wine that resembled Jerez, or sherry. The version they made in what became Los Angeles was one they called angelica.

Now, Los Angeles was founded in 1781, and that’s presumably when the first vineyards were planted. But what really got the industry part of the pueblo going is when the appropriately-named Jean Louis Vignes, a Frenchman, first brought French varieties, such as cabernet sauvignon and others, and decided that an area just to the west of the river (now downtown Los Angeles) would be perfect for growing them. He later sold his business to his nephews, the Sainsevain brothers. Another man, Matthew Keller, planted out a good bit of what is now Malibu. By the 1840s, San Francisco and Napa were importing grapes and wines from Los Angeles. Not much changed when the Americans took over in 1850 and California became a U.S. state.

How this affects my novel
I ended up setting Death of the Zanjero in 1870 because I did not want to deal with the Civil War (although the city remained a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers). I chose winemaking as a profession for my main character, Maddie Wilcox, because my husband and I are passionate about wine and we both found the wine history of our local area fascinating. Around that time, about 3,000 acres were planted with vineyards, and upwards of 5,000 acres, if you count the Anaheim Colony, which was part of Los Angeles County at the time and later became Orange County.

It wasn’t the biggest crop by any means. In 1880, there were 10,000 acres of the notoriously hard to grow wheat across the county, 60,000 acres of corn, and 90,000 acres of barley. Oranges, which were to play a much larger role in how our community grew, were there, but not in any significant force. According to the same 1880 history of the county that I got the above numbers from, there were around 34,000 oranges trees in all of the county, with roughly 200 trees per acre, that makes 170 acres of what would become our signature crop.

The end of the vineyards
OrangesSo, what happened? The railroads. In the middle of the 1870s, Henry Huntington and his pals started building steam engine railroads that connected Los Angeles to the rest of the country. This did two things. One, it opened up the market for oranges because you could finally ship them cross-country to the more heavily populated east before the fruit spoiled. Two, it brought people to Los Angeles. In 1870, there were roughly 5,700 people in the city of Los Angeles. In 1880, the town’s population doubled and grew at an even faster rate until by 1920, it had increased tenfold to 577,000. That’s only fifty years.

Also, in the mid-1870s, over-production caused the price of grapes to bottom out, and then the area was hit with Pierce’s Disease, which thrashed a goodly chunk of the vines. With people moving in, land became more valuable for housing than grapes. Oranges were still relatively hard to get in other parts of the country because they couldn’t be grown just anywhere, so that made them more valuable to plant. Wine grapes, not so much.

There are still wineries in Los Angeles. In fact, one of the state’s oldest, continuously running wineries, San Antonio Winery, is based here. Malibu has its own American Viticulture Area designation for its vineyards and several wineries, although that’s a very recent thing, and none of the old vineyards exist. There are even more wineries moving into the area. It’s a nice return to a formerly proud tradition—and one that made that a very fun background for a novel about a corrupt official getting murdered and the widow who finds herself trying to find whodunit.

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Death of the Zanjero book coverA big thanks to Anne Louise Bannon. She’ll give away a paperback or ebook copy of Death of the Zanjero to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery of the ebook is available worldwide. Delivery of the paperback is available within the U.S. only. Special option for a U.S. winner: In lieu of a book, and if you qualify age- and state-wise, Anne will send you a half-bottle of angelica, a delightful sherry-style wine, made from possibly the oldest vines in the state of California.

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What the Heck was Teapot Dome, Anyway?

Anne Louise Bannon author photoRelevant History welcomes back Anne Louise Bannon, a historical mystery author and journalist whose journalistic work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Wines and Vines, and in newspapers across the country. She created the Oddball Grape wine blog with her husband, Michael Holland. She also writes the romantic fiction serial White House Rhapsody, book one of which is out now. Her novels include the Freddie and Kathy mystery series, set in the 1920s, the Operation Quickline series, and Tyger, Tyger. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. The Last Witnesses officially launches on 28 April, with pre-orders available now. For more information about her and her books, visit her web site, subscribe to her newsletter, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Goodreads.

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One of the fun things about writing a mystery set in the 1920s is that there was so much going on, including a raft of scandalous behavior within the administration of President Warren G. Harding. But while we may have heard of Teapot Dome, how many of us actually remember what it was?

Yet, in my most recent novel, The Last Witnesses, which is set in October 1925, much of this was headline news. And since some of the action is tangentially connected to the scandal, my characters do spend some time talking about it. The story still makes sense even if you don’t know about Teapot Dome, but just to bring folks up to date, here it is.

Harding’s administration was possibly the most corrupt of any in American history. His pick to head the Veteran’s Bureau got caught selling medical supplies intended for the military to outside vendors. Harding’s attorney general spent most of the ‘20s under investigation. And that was far from all.

However, the big one, the one everyone associates the most with Harding and the 1920s was Teapot Dome, an oil field in eastern Wyoming, almost directly north of Casper. Back in the early part of the Twentieth Century, the U.S. Navy got the bright idea that it might be a good thing to not drill on certain oil fields on federal land and keep that oil in reserve in case of an emergency. The problem was a whole bunch of oil magnates at the time were salivating all over the place to go drill on the Naval Reserves.

Even then, you couldn’t just go drilling without paying the owners for the oil. So, the oil magnates would pay for leases that would allow them the mineral rights on a given land and then drill. In the case of Teapot Dome, the U.S. Government owned the land, with the Navy in control, and the Navy was not going to let it happen.

But in 1921, Warren Harding gets sworn in as president and appoints his poker buddy Albert Fall as Secretary of the Interior. Shortly after that, Fall talks the Navy into giving the Department of the Interior control over the Reserves at Teapot Dome and by spring of 1922, neighbors are noticing that drilling is going on where it’s not supposed to be. The local senator, John B. Kendrick, initiates an investigation, and over the course of several years, it comes out that oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny had bribed Fall with massive amounts of money, including a $100,000 “loan” from Doheny, well over $1 million in today’s dollars.

Fall might have gotten away with his little scheme—after all, he did have the legal right to lease the land to Doheny and Sinclair, even if he wasn’t supposed to. What did him in was that folks noticed he was living more than a little above his pay grade. He was eventually convicted of taking bribes, but Doheny got off pretty much scot-free and Sinclair served six months for jury tampering.

Harding had the good luck to die in August, 1923, just as this was all starting to go public, and may not have known what Fall was up to, or some of the other nefarious goings on in his administration. Some of those ended up in the book. Like I noted, it’s one of the reasons I find the 1920s such a fun one for murder mysteries.

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The Last Witnesses book coverA big thanks to Anne Louise Bannon. She’ll give away a paperback or ebook copy (winner’s choice) of The Last Witnesses to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery for the paperback is available after 28 April and in the U.S. only.

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The Winner of Fascinating Rhythm

Warren Bull has won a copy of Fascinating Rhythm by Anne Louise Bannon. Congrats to Warren Bull!

Thanks to Anne Louise Bannon for the discussion on what started the Great Depression for American farmers. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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Farming in Kansas in the 1920s

Anne Louise Bannon author photoRelevant History welcomes Anne Louise Bannon, an author and journalist who wrote her first novel at age fifteen. Her journalistic work has appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country. She was a TV critic for over ten years, and created the Odd Ball Grape wine education blog with her husband, Michael Holland. She also writes the romantic fiction serial White House Rhapsody. She is the co-author of Howdunit: Book of Poisons with Serita Stevens, as well as mysteries Fascinating Rhythm, Bring Into Bondage, and Tyger, Tyger. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. To learn more about her and her books, visit her web site, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

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It’s hard to tell the behind-the-scenes story of my latest novel Bring Into Bondage without mentioning the book that came before it, Fascinating Rhythm. The books are set in the 1920s and feature editor Kathy Briscow and her socialite author boyfriend Freddie Little. In Fascinating Rhythm, we find out that Kathy comes from Hays, Kansas, a small farming town pretty much dead center in the country, which in turn becomes the setting for Bring Into Bondage.

I purposely chose a rural town for Kathy’s original home. Right after World War I, the country started urbanizing, and as of the 1920 census, just over half the U.S. population lived in cities for the first time ever. Barely fifty years before, only five percent of the population had. One of the hot tunes from that post-Great War era was “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?)” It was not only happening, it was on people’s minds. So it made sense that my feisty office worker came from a rural background.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a far richer background than I thought. Okay, I did know, in a vague, “they said so in history class” kind of way that what we know as The Great Depression actually started for American farmers shortly after the end of World War I. But what caused the farming depression, namely debt, became one of the underlying themes in Bring Into Bondage, which is set on the farm belonging to Kathy’s parents.

There were a lot of different causes, but basically, farmers were caught in a spiral of producing too much, which caused crop prices to fall, then having to produce more to make up for it, causing crop prices to fall still lower. Frederick Lewis Allen, in his short history of the decade, Only Yesterday, partially laid the blame on mechanization. But other sources have also pointed out that the farmers had seen a boom in crop prices during the Great War, when not only did they feed the U.S., they exported crops to war-torn Europe. Once the war was over, so was the need for imported food. Which meant an even larger supply in the U.S. In any case, what caused the larger part of farmers’ problems was that they took out mortgages to either buy more land or to buy the new mechanical equipment.

Farming has never been easy. But in the 1920s, there were no subsidies and no other social safety nets. You relied on your neighbors, as Kathy’s family does, even though the family farm is under attack by mysterious vandals. Freddie mentally refers to Kathy’s family as being dirt poor. There’s a sense of frugality in this family that we don’t recognize today in our abundant, throw-away culture. When Ma Briscow sends the five-word telegram to summon Kathy home, Kathy is upset because Ma uses two words she didn’t need. Telegrams cost five cents per word, and to carelessly spend ten cents when every penny counts means Ma is very upset indeed.

The title of the book comes from the biblical book Nehemiah (5:5), in which some of the Israelites are complaining that they can’t get justice for their children, who have been sold into bondage, because other men have their lands. In short, they have been mortgaged out to the hilt and are now in bondage, themselves. Kind of like farmers in Kansas were in the 1920s.

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Fascinating Rhythm book coverA big thanks to Anne Louise Bannon. She’ll give away a copy of Fascinating Rhythm to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available worldwide for an ebook and in the U.S. only for a trade paperback.

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