Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977, 603 pp., 1909, 1876, 1869, 1781
"Since the founding of the city of Los Angeles in 1781, fur traders, travelers, and immigrants had been making use of the natural habor afforded by San Pedro Bay, twenty miles south of the city. Until the gold rush, San Pedro had been one of the most important shipping points on the West Coast. "It was the only port for a distance of eighty miles," Richard Dana wrote of San Pedro in Two Years Before the Mast, "and about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plain country, filled with herds of cattle, in the center of which was the pueblo of Los Angeles-the largest town in California-and several of the largest missions; to all of which San Pedro was the seaport."
"By 1869 . . . Los Angeles voters passed a bond to finance a . . . public-owned railroad . . . The line was subsequently given to the Southern Pacific in 1876 as part of the deal to get the SP to make Los Angeles its southern terminal . . ."