Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913: Containing the Reminiscences of Harris NewmarkNewmark, Harris
History
Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913: Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark
Newmark, Harris
California, Southern; Los Angeles (Calif.)
Elijah T. Moulton, a Canadian, was one of the few pioneers who
preceded the Forty-niners and was permitted to see Los Angeles well on
its way toward metropolitan standing. In 1844 he had joined an
expedition to California organized by Jim Bridger; and having reached
the Western country, he volunteered to serve under Frémont in the
Mexican campaign. There the hardships which Moulton endured were far
severer than those which tested the grit of the average emigrant; and
Moulton in better days often told how, when nearly driven to
starvation, he and a comrade had actually used a remnant of the Stars
and Stripes as a seine with which to fish, and so saved their lives.
About 1850, Moulton was Deputy Sheriff under George T. Burrill; then
he went to work for Don Louis Vignes. Soon afterward, he bought some
land near William Wolfskill's, and in 1855 took charge of Wolfskill's
property. This resulted in his marriage to one of Wolfskill's
daughters, who died in 1861. In the meantime, he had acquired a
hundred and fifty acres or more in what is now East Los Angeles, and
was thus one of the first to settle in that section. He had a dairy,
for a while, and peddled milk from a can or two carried in a wagon.
Afterward, Moulton became a member of the City Council.
William Workman and John Rowland, father of William or Billy Rowland,
resided in 1853 on La Puente _rancho_, which was granted them July
22d, 1845, some four years after they had arrived in California. They
were leaders of a party from New Mexico, of which B. D. Wilson, Lemuel
Carpenter and others were members; and the year following they
operated with Pico against Micheltorena and Sutter, Workman serving as
Captain, and Rowland as Lieutenant, of a company of volunteers they
had organized. The ranch, situated about twenty miles east of Los
Angeles, consisted of nearly forty-nine thousand acres, and had one of
the first brick residences erected in this neighborhood. Full title to
this splendid estate was confirmed by the United States Government in
April, 1867, a couple of years before Workman and Rowland, with the
assistance of Cameron E. Thom, divided their property. Rowland, who in
1851 was supposed to own some twenty-nine thousand acres and about
seventy thousand dollars' worth of personal property, further
partitioned his estate, three or four years before his death in 1873,
among his nearest of kin, giving to each heir about three thousand
acres of land and a thousand head of cattle. One of these heirs, the
wife of General Charles Forman, is the half-sister of Billy Rowland by
a second marriage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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