Winfield Scott Hancock, whom I came to know well and who had been here before, arrived in Los Angeles in May, 1859, to establish a depot for the Quartermaster's Department which he finally located at Wilmington, naming it Drum Barracks, after Adjutant-General Richard Coulter Drum, for several years at the head of the Department of the West. Hancock himself was Quartermaster and had an office in a brick building on Main Street near Third; and he was in charge of all Government property here and at Yuma, Arizona Territory, then a military post. He thus both bought and sold; advertising at one time, for example, a call for three or four hundred thousand pounds of barley, and again offering for sale, on behalf of poor Uncle Sam, the important item of a lone, braying mule! Hancock invested liberally in California projects, and became interested, with others, in the Bear Valley mines; and at length had the good luck to strike a rich and paying vein of gold quartz. Beaudry & Marchessault were among the first handlers of ice in Los Angeles, having an ice-house in 1859, where, in the springtime, they stored the frozen product taken from the mountain lakes fifty miles away. The ice was cut into cubes of about one hundred pounds each, packed down the _cañons_ by a train of thirty to forty mules, and then brought in wagons to Los Angeles. By September, 1860, wagon-loads of San Bernardino ice--or perhaps one would better say compact snow--were hawked about town and bought up by saloon-keepers and others, having been transported in the way I have just described, a good seventy-five miles. Later, ice was shipped here from San Francisco; and soon after it reached town, the saloons displayed signs soliciting orders. Considering the present popularity of the silver dollar along the entire Western Coast, it may be interesting to recall the stamping of these coins, for the first time in California, at the San Francisco mint. This was in the spring of 1859, soon after which they began to appear in Los Angeles. A few years later, in 1863, and for ten or fifteen years thereafter, silver half-dimes, coined in San Francisco, were to be seen here occasionally; but they were never popular. The larger silver piece, the dime, was more common, although for a while it also had little purchasing power. As late as the early seventies it was not welcome, and many a time I have seen dimes thrown into the street as if they were worthless. This prejudice against the smaller silver coins was much the same as the feeling which even to-day obtains with many people on the Coast against the copper cent. When the nickel, in the eighties, came into use, the old Californian tradition as to coinage began to disappear; and this opened the way for the introduction of the one-cent piece, which is more and more coming into popular favor.