Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1918, 1880s, 1860s
Chapter XXVI Our Literati
[p. 340] "Major Horace Bell's Reminiscences of a Ranger is scarcely less significant than Ramona. As Helen Hunt Jackson saw the leisurey pastoral life, so Major Bell saw the little pueblo from the far end of the hotel bar. He wrote with the gusto of the third tequila cocktail, with Mike, the bar-keeper, wiping the damp off the baize table to make room for the writing materials. Ramona is Louisa M. Alcott listening to mission bells . . . a pastoral played with plaintive flutes. Reminiscences of a Ranger reads as though played on a cracked piano in the back room, with a cigarette making yellow smut on the ivory. It is a swaggering, bawdy, delightful record of a little gringo-Mexican town. Some other author is likely to produce another Ramona out of faded dresses packed in trunks and yellowed diaries. But no one else will ever write another Reminiscences of a Ranger.
"Helen Hunt Jackson died in 1884 [1885], but Major Bell was in my time. I knew him well-a pompous, strutting old gentleman who affected a Kentucky colonel, black, planter sombrero and military capes. He looked exactly like his literary style-hifallutin, swaggering and compelling . . . a D'Artagnan, practising law in a frontier town.
"Major [Horace] Bell [1830-1918] had served in the Civil War and came to California in the sixties. His uncle was Alexander Bell, a respected pioneer of parts and influence. The major came to San Pedro by boat and tells of his first mad ride to the pueblo in one of Phineas Banning's stages.
"The pueblo then had about five thousand people-with mud holes in the street, adobes and saloons enough to liquidate a center of population. The major seems to have made [p. 341]a bee-line for the Bella Union bar with the unerring instinct of a carrier-pigeon. Thereafter he attended all the fandangos; saw most of the gun-fights and knew all the scandals; joined an illegal filibustering expedition to Nicaragua; but helped organize the volunteers-the Rangers-who ran down the last of the great Calfornia bandits-Joaquín Murietta. I never saw Major Bell on horseback but I am willing to wager that his tapaderos were so long that they swept the ground; that his saddle had more silver geegaws and that the wheel in his horse's bit made more noise than any of the other silver bits.
"[p. 341] The major kicked out the box from under one of the last murderers lynched in the pueblo, and carried on several feuds with gusto and high drama . . .
"[p. 342] . . .
"For several years, Major Bell [1830-1918] ran a weekly newspaper called the Porcupine [1882-1888] and its quills were as poison arrows. He had a pen that seared and scalded. His particular animosity was the equally pompous Colonel G.J. Griffith who gave Griffith Park to the city [Los Angeles].
" . . .