Horace Bell was a nephew of Captain Alexander Bell, of Bell's Row; and as an early comer to Los Angeles, he joined the volunteer mounted police. Although for years an attorney and journalist, in which capacity he edited the _Porcupine_, he is best known for his _Reminiscences of a Ranger_, a volume written in rather a breezy and entertaining style, but certainly containing exaggerations.
This reference to the Rangers reminds me that I was not long in Los Angeles when I heard of the adventures of Joaquín Murieta, who had been killed but a few months before I came. According to the stories current, Murieta, a nephew of José María Valdez, was a decent-enough sort of fellow, who had been subjected to more or less injustice from certain American settlers, and who was finally bound to a tree and horsewhipped, after seeing his brother hung, on a trumped-up charge. In revenge, Murieta had organized a company of bandits, and for two or three years had terrorized a good part of the entire State. Finally, in August, 1853, while the outlaw and several of his companions were off their guard near the Tejón Paso, they were encountered by Captain Harry Love and his volunteer mounted police organized to get him, "dead or alive;" the latter killed Murieta and another desperado known as Three-fingered Jack. Immediately the outlaws were despatched, their heads and the deformed hand of Three-fingered Jack were removed from the bodies and sent by John Sylvester and Harry Bloodsworth to Dr. William Francis Edgar, then a surgeon at Fort Miller; but a flood interfering, Sylvester swam the river with his barley sack and its gruesome contents. Edgar put the trophies into whiskey and arsenic, when they were transmitted to the civil authorities, as vouchers for a reward. Bloodsworth died lately.
Daredevils of a less malicious type were also resident among us. On the evening of December 31st, 1853, for example, I was in our store at eight o'clock when Felipe Rheim--often called Reihm and even Riehm--gloriously intoxicated and out for a good time, appeared on the scene, flourishing the ubiquitous weapon. His celebration of the New Year had apparently commenced, and he was already six sheets in the wind. Like many another man, Felipe, a very worthy German, was good-natured when sober, but a terror when drunk; and as soon as he spied my solitary figure, he pointed his gun at me, saying, at the same time, in his vigorous native tongue, "Treat, or _I shoot_!" I treated. After this pleasing transaction amid the smoky obscurity of Ramón Alexander's saloon, Felipe fired his gun into the air and disappeared. Startling as a demand like that might appear to-day, no thought of arrest then resulted from such an incident.