Kenneth Libo and Irving Howe We Lived There Too St. Martin's: NY, 1984, 347 pp., 1984, 1913, 1853, 1850s
" . . .
"Whereas San Francisco had grown into a full-fledged city in a few years, Los Angeles remained a dusty little cow town until well after the Civil War, When Harris Newmark arrived via Nicaragua in 1853, there were no more than a few thousand settlers living in an assortment of flat-roofed houses spread out helter-skelter from the town's center into the flatlands beyond. What follows are Newmark's recollections of those early days, taken from his memoirs, Sixty Years in Southern California (c. 1913)
"After heavy winter rains mud was from six inches to two feet dep, while during the summer dust piled up to about the same extent. Few city ordinances were obeyed; for notwithstanding that a regulation of the City Council called on every citizen to sweep in front of his house to a certain point on Saturday evenings, not the slightest attention was paid to it. Into the roadway was thrown all the rubbish: if a man bought a new suit of clothes, a pair of boots, a hat or a shirt, to replace a corresponding part of his apparel that had outlived his usefulness, he would think nothing, on attiring himself in the new purchase, of tossing the discarded article into the street where it would remain until some passing Indian, or other vagabond, took possession of it. So wretched indeed were the conditions, that I have seeen dead animals left on the highways for days at a time. . .
"The principal industry throughout Los Angeles County, and indeed throughout Southern California, up to the sixties, was the raising of cattle and horses-an undertaking favored by a people particularly fond of leisure and knowing little of the latent possibilities in the land; so that this entire area of magnificient soil supported herds which provided the whole population in turn, directly or indirectly, with a livelihood. The live stock subsisted upon grass growing wild all over the county, and the prosperity of Southern California therefore depended entirely upon the season's rainfall . . . If the rainfall was sufficient to produce feed, dealers came from the North and purchased our stock, and everybody thrived; if, on the other hand, the season was dry, cattle and horses died and the public's pocketbook shrank to very unpretentious dimensions . . ."