Concerning Mateo, I recall an interesting illustration of early fiscal operations. He deposited thirty thousand dollars with S. Lazard & Company and left it there so long that they began to think he would never come back for it. He did return, however, after many years, when he presented a certificate of deposit and withdrew the money. This transaction bore no interest, as was often the case in former days. People deposited money with friends in whom they had confidence, not for the purpose of profit but simply for safety.
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.