Discover the Secret Lives of HIstoric Downtown Saturday Oct. 8th and Sunday Oct. 9th

The Last Bookstore Presents….

  

Tours of the Secret Lives of Downtown 

Saturday October 8th & Sunday October 9th

Starting at The Last Bookstore's  home in the Spring Arts Tower at 453 S. Spring Street, you can take guided walking tours of Historic Downtown Los Angeles’s secret past, its present history in making - and its future - with two different tours offered this weekend.  

Saturday October 8th will have back to back 'Historic Downtown 101' tours at 11 AM and 1 PM  and then on Sunday October 9th - the day of ciclavia when Spring will be closed to cars to allow for bicycles - there will be the "How Los Angeles Invented the Wild West Tour' at 11 and then at 1PM depending on who makes the first reservation there will either be a repeat of the Wild West Tour - or an encore of  the "Historic Downtown LA 101 Tour". All these 90 minute tours are only $15 per person. For reservations call 213-804-8396. 

MORE DETAILS ON THESE TWO SUNDAY TOURS WILL BE IN THE NEXT POST THAT WILL BE UP SHORTLY

This Saturday October 8th, the “Historic Downtown 101” tour is a general introduction to our rapidly developing neighborhood and an overview of the multiple histories of the streets of Broadway, Spring and Main.  All tours begin at THE LAST BOOKSTORE at 453 S. Spring Street in the Spring Arts Tower and will be led by long time Downtown resident Brady Westwater who, besides being involved with the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council, the Historic Downtown BID, Gallery Row, Art Walk, and the BOXeight & CONCEPT Fashion Weeks, has brought over 150 businesses, artists and non-profit institutions to Downtown.

This tour will be given from 11 AM to 12:30 PM this Saturday October 8th and from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM and for reservations call 213-804-8396.  And all 90 minute tours are only $15 per person.

If you are a participant, you will see where first motion picture theater was built,  the place where Babe Ruth signed his contract with the Yankees, the hotel where Charlie Chaplin lived when he made his early films (and the place where he made his Los Angeles vaudeville debut in 1910), where Bing Crosby was discovered - plus the homes and haunts of everyone from actor Nicholas Cage, the Black Dahlia, Rudolph Valentino, LA’s version of Jack the Ripper, President Teddy Roosevelt, the Night Stalker, western outlaw Emmet Dalton,  actor Ryan Gosling and more.  And you will also visit where O. J. Simpson bought his knife.

You’ll explore an intersection where all four buildings were often visited by gunfighter/sheriff Wyatt Earp since they were all built or occupied by friends of his from Tombstone during the shoot-out at the OK Corral.  At this intersection you will also discover what John Wayne, a prime minister of Italy, Houdini, Winston Churchill, boxer Jack Dempsey, Greta Garbo, President Woodrow Wilson and multiple Mexican boxing champions all had in common here.

You will also see where the first new lofts were opened, the places where Gallery Row and the Art Walk began and where Fashion Week returned to Downtown.  You will see many of the new boutiques, designer showrooms and stores that have recently opened in the area along with getting a sneak preview of what will soon be happening in the area.

Tickets for all this are only $15 per person - free for children under 8 - and reservations can be made by calling Brady Westwater at 213-804-8396 or emailing bradywestwater@gmail.com.  All credit card orders will be processed  at Last Bookstore and cash payments may be made at the start of the tour.   All proceeds will go towards the revitalization and the study of the history of the neighborhood.  

Lastly, future tours will feature specialized areas of interest such as architecture, art of all kinds, shopping and food, single streets, sports (from steer wrestling to Luchador wrestlers to a Sumo wrestler), transportation, specific periods of history, the hidden Wild West history of Los Angeles, movie locations, Downtown after hours and many other aspects of the neighborhood.  

We will also be soon starting weekday & evening tours on what it's like to live in Downtown Los Angeles. You will be introduced to the many of stores, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues (and often their owners, too) - along with being given previews of one of a kind special events - so you can get a feel for what it is like to live in Downtown Los Angeles.

We expect this tour to be popular with not only people considering moving to Downtown and people who work in Downtown and who would like to know what to do after hours in Downtown - but also to recent and even long established Downtown residents who want to know more about their neighborhood.

For future updates and more information go to www.historicdowntownlosangeles.blogspot.com

45% off Book Sale! New AND Used Books!

Historic Downtown's Metropolis Books Closing Sale now has all new and used books at - 45% OFF!  And Julie still has a good selection of books about Downtown and Los Angeles in stock - but they won't last long at these prices.

Metropolis Books The Downtown Source for Books 440 S. Main St. L.A. 90013 Phone-213-612-0174  Fax-213-612-0635 www.MetropolisBooksLA.com  http://metropolisbooksla.wordpress.com/ Shop with us 24/7 online  Monday 11-5 Tuesday-Saturday 11-6:00

Urban Planning (and Mike Davis) in Historic Downtown Tour - Plus Tour of LA's Secret Wild West History!

Brand new Historic Downtown Los Angeles Tour will be held this on his Sunday!  

On Sunday morning,September 11^th  - there will be the very first ‘Urban Planning & Historic Downtown Los Angeles’ -  at 11 AM and then at 2 PM there will be an updated version of the ‘How Downtown Los Angeles Invented the Wild West’ tour. 

Both tours will start at THE LAST BOOKSTORE at 453 S. Spring, on the 5^th Street side of the Spring Arts Tower and they are still only $15 per person.  For reservations call 213-804-8396.

At the request of some USC urban planning students, the standard Historic Downtown LA Tour - The Past, Present and Future of Downtown - will become a totally new tour examining HIsotric Downtown’s Past, Present and Future from the viewpoint of Urban Planning. 

It will also include a small part of an upcoming tour featuring Mike Davis and his writings about Downtown in City of Quartz and the Ecology of Fear that will cover the exact places he wrote about so you can determine for yourself what is fact and what is fabrication.

And then, on the 2PM Wild West Tour,  you will discover that long before the famed Western cowtowns and mining camps Tombstone, Dodge City, and Deadwood existed, Los Angeles was the first town where all the trappings of the Wild West were created.   You will also discover LA was a far ‘wilder’ town than any Western town that followed after it. Tours, led by Brady Westwater, will begin at the 10,000  square foot THE LAST BOOKSTORE - 453 S. Spring Street.  Call 213-804-8396 for reservations.

Description of what WILD WEST TOUR will cover.

Besides ‘inventing’ the original Wild West, Los Angeles also remained part of the Wild West for far longer than other place (from 25 years to over 90 years - depending upon the definition of the term - compared to the average period of 3 or 4 years to 10 years of other towns) and LA was also one of the few towns built upon both cattle and mining.

It started in the 1820’s when Los Angeles (founded in 1781) became the end of the Old Spanish Trail and the Western end of the Santé Fe Trail.  During that time LA was regularly visited by many of the early West’s leading mountain Men and fur trappers and a number of these early pioneers ended up settling down in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles was also home to the first Western gold rush in 1843 - five years before gold was discovered by John Marshall (who also spent time in Los Angeles) at Sutter’s Mill.

As the largest city in California, Los Angeles was also involved in multiple revolutions and insurrections during both the Spanish and Mexican eras and the exporting of hides from San Pedro starting in the 1820’s made LA the first major cowtown west of the Rockies.  And after the Gold Rush started, Los Angeles rancho owners made cattle drives to Northern California gold camps, a full fifteen years before the first cattle drives left Texas.

The money from those cattle started Los Angeles’s first boom and immediately made LA a magnet for gamblers, bandits and get rich quick artists.   And many of them were the most hardened criminals who were run out of the gold camps by vigilantes.

That’s possibly why when one historian states that from 1870 to 1885, the five Kansas cowtowns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Wichita had a total of 45 homicides during fifteen years, about of three per year per town - in contrast, Los Angeles, when it’s Wild West days were just getting started in 1850, had 31 homicides in a one year - more than all five major Kansas cowtowns had - combined - over 15 years.  

And on a per capita basis LA’s murder comes to 1,240 homicides per 100,000 while the national rate even in the lawless 1990’s was… 9 per 100,000.

So LA didn’t just have the highest murder rate in the old West doing the 1850’s - frontier Los Angeles had the highest homicide rate in all of American history.  And even those statistics were likely surpassed in the middle and late 1850’s when it was commonly said - and only partly in jest - that LA had close to a murder a day every day of the year.

So LA’s secret Wild West history isn't just that LA was the wildest town in the history of the Wild West - - but that LA was single-handedly practically as wild as the entire rest of the West put together.

But that is the only the start.   Besides murders, frontier Los Angeles was also home to stage robberies, multiple vigilante or rangers organizations (the first one in 1836), far grander saloons and gambling halls than any other cowtown, countless posses that regularly rode over multiple counties, jail breaks, lynchings (including one led by the Mayor),  far more gun fights than any other Western town, some of largest man hunts in Western history, bandit gangs that dwarfed those that terrorized other cowtowns, a 10 year two family blood feud that began with two murders and ended up in the ‘Shootout at the Bella Union Hotel’ and more sheriffs, marshals, deputies and police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty than in any other town, including one marshal who was killed his own deputy. 

And almost all of this happened 10 years before Dodge City existed, 15 years before Deadwood was founded and 20 years before Tombstone dug its first mine. 

But  even during the comparatively quiet  1870’s - after its peak years - when the rest of the West was just… beginning its heyday… this ‘quieter’   and the always entertaining  stage robberies of Dick Fellows.  And LA’s Wild West history continued on until  continued on with a final train robbery in the 1890’s in the San Fernando Valley in the 1890’s  and Wyatt Earp being hired for special assignments by the LAPD in the 1900’s and 1910s.

This makes LA the only place in the West with an uninterrupted Wild West history that ran uninterrupted for almost  100 years - from Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson and Peg Leg Smith in the mid-to late 1820's to Wyatt Earp in the late  1910’s.

That’s why it’s not surprising many famous characters of the Old West began their careers in Los Angeles. Wyatt Earp worked here as a teamster or stage driver when he was in his teens, Judge Roy Bean - later to be famed as the law West of the Pecos (and played by Paul Newman) - was head of the Los Angeles Rangers in LA before there was even anything West of the Pecos, the lost Dutchman of the Lost Dutchman mine began his mining career here, Outlaw Belle Starr's outlaw son was born here and Kit Carson and Jon C. Fremont both visited here several times before fighting here during the Mexican War.

And that’s only the start of how LA invented the Wild West. 

Because after rest of the West died down elsewhere, many of the leading characters of the era moved - or returned to -  LA from the  1880’s to the 1920’s, which is one reason why much of early Downtown was built by mining and cattle money.   Many of them then also helped reinvent the Wild West in one more way.  But this time in was for the Hollywood Western films that told the all stories of all the now famous Cowtowns and Mining camps of the Wild West - all of them with just one exception.

Los Angeles.  The place where the Wild West started - and where it ended.

And, again, for reservations or more information - call 213-804-8396.

New Urban Planning (and MIke Davis) Tour This Sunday - Plus A Tour of LA's Secret Wild West History!

Brand new Historic Downtown Los Angeles Tour will be held this on his Sunday!  
On Sunday morning,September 11^th  - there will be the very first ‘Urban Planning & Historic Downtown Los Angeles’ -  at 11 AM and then at 2 PM there will be an updated version of the ‘How Downtown Los Angeles Invented the Wild West’ tour. 

Both tours will start at THE LAST BOOKSTORE at 453 S. Spring, on the 5^th Street side of the Spring Arts Tower and they are still only $15 per person.  For reservations call Brady Westwater 213-804-8396.

At the request of some USC urban planning students, the standard Historic Downtown LA Tour - The Past, Present and Future of Downtown - will become a totally new tour examining HIsotric Downtown’s Past, Present and Future from the viewpoint of Urban Planning. 

It will also include a small part of an upcoming tour featuring Mike Davis and his writings about Downtown in City of Quartz and the Ecology of Fear that will cover the exact places he wrote about so you can determine for yourself what is fact and what is fabrication.

And then, on the 2PM Wild West Tour,  you will discover that long before the famed Western cowtowns and mining camps Tombstone, Dodge City, and Deadwood existed, Los Angeles was the first town where all the trappings of the Wild West were created.   You will also discover LA was a far ‘wilder’ town than any Western town that followed after it. Tours, led by Brady Westwater, will begin at the 10,000  square foot THE LAST BOOKSTORE - 453 S. Spring Street.  Call 213-804-8396 for reservations.

Description of what WILD WEST TOUR will cover.

Besides ‘inventing’ the original Wild West, Los Angeles also remained part of the Wild West for far longer than other place (from 25 years to over 90 years - depending upon the definition of the term - compared to the average period of 3 or 4 years to 10 years of other towns) and LA was also one of the few towns built upon both cattle and mining.

It started in the 1820’s when Los Angeles (founded in 1781) became the end of the Old Spanish Trail and the Western end of the Santé Fe Trail.  During that time LA was regularly visited by many of the early West’s leading mountain Men and fur trappers and a number of these early pioneers ended up settling down in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles was also home to the first Western gold rush in 1843 - five years before gold was discovered by John Marshall (who also spent time in Los Angeles) at Sutter’s Mill.

As the largest city in California, Los Angeles was also involved in multiple revolutions and insurrections during both the Spanish and Mexican eras and the exporting of hides from San Pedro starting in the 1820’s made LA the first major cowtown west of the Rockies.  And after the Gold Rush started, Los Angeles rancho owners made cattle drives to Northern California gold camps, a full fifteen years before the first cattle drives left Texas.

The money from those cattle started Los Angeles’s first boom and immediately made LA a magnet for gamblers, bandits and get rich quick artists.   And many of them were the most hardened criminals who were run out of the gold camps by vigilantes.

That’s possibly why when one historian states that from 1870 to 1885, the five Kansas cowtowns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Wichita had a total of 45 homicides during fifteen years, about of three per year per town - in contrast, Los Angeles, when it’s Wild West days were just getting started in 1850, had 31 homicides in a one year - more than all five major Kansas cowtowns had - combined - over 15 years.  

And on a per capita basis LA’s murder comes to 1,240 homicides per 100,000 while the national rate even in the lawless 1990’s was… 9 per 100,000.

So LA didn’t just have the highest murder rate in the old West doing the 1850’s - frontier Los Angeles had the highest homicide rate in all of American history.  And even those statistics were likely surpassed in the middle and late 1850’s when it was commonly said - and only partly in jest - that LA had close to a murder a day every day of the year.

So LA’s secret Wild West history isn't just that LA was the wildest town in the history of the Wild West - - but that LA was single-handedly practically as wild as the entire rest of the West put together.

But that is the only the start.   Besides murders, frontier Los Angeles was also home to stage robberies, multiple vigilante or rangers organizations (the first one in 1836), far grander saloons and gambling halls than any other cowtown, countless posses that regularly rode over multiple counties, jail breaks, lynchings (including one led by the Mayor),  far more gun fights than any other Western town, some of largest man hunts in Western history, bandit gangs that dwarfed those that terrorized other cowtowns, a 10 year two family blood feud that began with two murders and ended up in the ‘Shootout at the Bella Union Hotel’ and more sheriffs, marshals, deputies and police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty than in any other town, including one marshal who was killed his own deputy. 

And almost all of this happened 10 years before Dodge City existed, 15 years before Deadwood was founded and 20 years before Tombstone dug its first mine. 

But  even during the comparatively quiet  1870’s - after its peak years - when the rest of the West was just… beginning its heyday… this ‘quieter’   and the always entertaining  stage robberies of Dick Fellows.  And LA’s Wild West history continued on until  continued on with a final train robbery in the 1890’s in the San Fernando Valley in the 1890’s  and Wyatt Earp being hired for special assignments by the LAPD in the 1900’s and 1910s.

This makes LA the only place in the West with an uninterrupted Wild West history that ran uninterrupted for almost  100 years - from Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson and Peg Leg Smith in the mid-to late 1820's to Wyatt Earp in the late  1910’s.

That’s why it’s not surprising many famous characters of the Old West began their careers in Los Angeles. Wyatt Earp worked here as a teamster or stage driver when he was in his teens, Judge Roy Bean - later to be famed as the law West of the Pecos (and played by Paul Newman) - was head of the Los Angeles Rangers in LA before there was even anything West of the Pecos, the lost Dutchman of the Lost Dutchman mine began his mining career here, Outlaw Belle Starr's outlaw son was born here and Kit Carson and Jon C. Fremont both visited here several times before fighting here during the Mexican War.

And that’s only the start of how LA invented the Wild West. 

Because after rest of the West died down elsewhere, many of the leading characters of the era moved - or returned to -  LA from the  1880’s to the 1920’s, which is one reason why much of early Downtown was built by mining and cattle money.   Many of them then also helped reinvent the Wild West in one more way.  But this time in was for the Hollywood Western films that told the all stories of all the now famous Cowtowns and Mining camps of the Wild West - all of them with just one exception.

Los Angeles.  The place where the Wild West started - and where it ended.

And, again, for reservations or more information - call 213-804-8396.

This LABOR DAY - Monday Sept. 5th - Discover How Los Angeles Invented The Wild West - on one of Two Walking Tours!

Learn How The Wild West Happened First In Downtown Los Angeles on Today's Historic Downtown LA Walking  Tour!

This Labor Day, Monday September 5th, THE LAST BOOKSTORES’s Tours of Historic Downtown LA presents its latest guided walking tour - “How Los Angeles Invented the Wild West (and why no one knows it!)” from 11:00 AM - 1:15 PM and again from 1:30 PM until 3:45 PM.  Call 213-804-8396 for more information or reservations.  And each tour is still only $15 per person.

WILD WEST TOUR

This Monday you will discover that long before the famed Western cowtowns and mining camps Tombstone, Dodge City, and Deadwood existed, Los Angeles was the first town where all the trappings of the Wild West were created.   You will also discover LA was a far ‘wilder’ town than any Western town that followed after it. Tours, led by Brady Westwater, will begin at the 10,000  square foot THE LAST BOOKSTORE - 453 S. Spring Street.  Call 213-804-8396 for reservations.

Description of what WILD WEST TOUR will cover.

Besides ‘inventing’ the original Wild West, Los Angeles also remained part of the Wild West for far longer than other place (from 25 years to over 90 years - depending upon the definition of the term - compared to the average period of 3 or 4 years to 10 years of other towns) and LA was also one of the few towns built upon both cattle and mining.

It started in the 1820’s when Los Angeles (founded in 1781) became the end of the Old Spanish Trail and the Western end of the Santé Fe Trail.  During that time LA was regularly visited by many of the early West’s leading mountain Men and fur trappers and a number of these early pioneers ended up settling down in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles was also home to the first Western gold rush in 1843 - five years before gold was discovered by John Marshall (who also spent time in Los Angeles) at Sutter’s Mill.

As the largest city in California, Los Angeles was also involved in multiple revolutions and insurrections during both the Spanish and Mexican eras and the exporting of hides from San Pedro starting in the 1820’s made LA the first major cowtown west of the Rockies.  And after the Gold Rush started, Los Angeles rancho owners made cattle drives to Northern California gold camps, a full fifteen years before the first cattle drives left Texas.

The money from those cattle started Los Angeles’s first boom and immediately made LA a magnet for gamblers, bandits and get rich quick artists.   And many of them were the most hardened criminals who were run out of the gold camps by vigilantes.

That’s possibly why when one historian states that from 1870 to 1885, the five Kansas cowtowns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Wichita had a total of 45 homicides during fifteen years, about of three per year per town - in contrast, Los Angeles, when it’s Wild West days were just getting started in 1850, had 31 homicides in a one year - more than all five major Kansas cowtowns had - combined - over 15 years.  

And on a per capita basis LA’s murder comes to 1,240 homicides per 100,000 while the national rate even in the lawless 1990’s was… 9 per 100,000.

So LA didn’t just have the highest murder rate in the old West doing the 1850’s - frontier Los Angeles had the highest homicide rate in all of American history.  And even those statistics were likely surpassed in the middle and late 1850’s when it was commonly said - and only partly in jest - that LA had close to a murder a day every day of the year.

So LA’s secret Wild West history isn't just that LA was the wildest town in the history of the Wild West - - but that LA was single-handedly practically as wild as the entire rest of the West put together.

But that is the only the start.   Besides murders, frontier Los Angeles was also home to stage robberies, multiple vigilante or rangers organizations (the first one in 1836), far grander saloons and gambling halls than any other cowtown, countless posses that regularly rode over multiple counties, jail breaks, lynchings (including one led by the Mayor),  far more gun fights than any other Western town, some of largest man hunts in Western history, bandit gangs that dwarfed those that terrorized other cowtowns, a 10 year two family blood feud that began with two murders and ended up in the ‘Shootout at the Bella Union Hotel’ and more sheriffs, marshals, deputies and police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty than in any other town, including one marshal who was killed his own deputy. 

And almost all of this happened 10 years before Dodge City existed, 15 years before Deadwood was founded and 20 years before Tombstone dug its first mine. 

But  even during the comparatively quiet  1870’s - after its peak years - when the rest of the West was just… beginning its heyday… this ‘quieter’   and the always entertaining  stage robberies of Dick Fellows.  And LA’s Wild West history continued on until  continued on with a final train robbery in the 1890’s in the San Fernando Valley in the 1890’s  and Wyatt Earp being hired for special assignments by the LAPD in the 1900’s and 1910s.

This makes LA the only place in the West with an uninterrupted Wild West history that ran uninterrupted for almost  100 years - from Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson and Peg Leg Smith in the mid-to late 1820's to Wyatt Earp in the late  1910’s.

That’s why it’s not surprising many famous characters of the Old West began their careers in Los Angeles. Wyatt Earp worked here as a teamster or stage driver when he was in his teens, Judge Roy Bean - later to be famed as the law West of the Pecos (and played by Paul Newman) - was head of the Los Angeles Rangers in LA before there was even anything West of the Pecos, the lost Dutchman of the Lost Dutchman mine began his mining career here, Outlaw Belle Starr's outlaw son was born here and Kit Carson and Jon C. Fremont both visited here several times before fighting here during the Mexican War.

And that’s only the start of how LA invented the Wild West. 

Because after rest of the West died down elsewhere, many of the leading characters of the era moved - or returned to -  LA from the  1880’s to the 1920’s, which is one reason why much of early Downtown was built by mining and cattle money.   Many of them then also helped reinvent the Wild West in one more way.  But this time in was for the Hollywood Western films that told the all stories of all the now famous Cowtowns and Mining camps of the Wild West - all of them with just one exception.

Los Angeles.  The place where the Wild West started - and where it ended.

And, again, for reservations or more information - call 213-804-8396.

Sat. August 27th and Sunday Aug. 28th -Two Walking Tours Of Historic Downtown Los Angeles, First, Discover How Los Angeles Invented The Wild West - And Then The Overview Tour of the Past, Present and Future of Historic Downtown Los Angeles!

Learn How The Wild West Happened First In Downtown Los Angeles - and then Discover the Secret Histories of the Past, Present - and Future of Historic

Downtown Los Angeles!

This Saturday, August 25 and Sunday Aug. 26 THE LAST BOOKSTORES’s Tours of Historic Downtown LA presents its latest guided walking tour - “How Los Angeles Invented the Wild West (and why no one knows it!)” both days  from 11:00 AM - 1:15 PM and then the Historic Downtown Los Angeles 101 Tour - an overview of the secret past, present and futures of Historic Downtown Los Angeles will run from 1:30 PM until 3:45 PM.  Call 213-804-8396 for more information or reservations.  And each tour is still only $15 per person per tour.

WILD WEST TOUR

This Saturday and Sunday you will discover that long before the famed Western cowtowns and mining camps Tombstone, Dodge City, and Deadwood existed, Los Angeles was the first town where all the trappings of the Wild West were created.   You will also discover LA was a far ‘wilder’ town than any Western town that followed after it. Tours, led by Brady Westwater, will begin at the 10,000  square foot THE LAST BOOKSTORE - 453 S. Spring Street.  Call 213-804-8396 for reservations.

Description of what WILD WEST TOUR will cover.

Besides ‘inventing’ the original Wild West, Los Angeles also remained part of the Wild West for far longer than other place (from 25 years to over 90 years - depending upon the definition of the term - compared to the average period of 3 or 4 years to 10 years of other towns) and LA was also one of the few towns built upon both cattle and mining.

It started in the 1820’s when Los Angeles (founded in 1781) became the end of the Old Spanish Trail and the Western end of the Santé Fe Trail.  During that time LA was regularly visited by many of the early West’s leading mountain Men and fur trappers and a number of these early pioneers ended up settling down in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles was also home to the first Western gold rush in 1843 - five years before gold was discovered by John Marshall (who also spent time in Los Angeles) at Sutter’s Mill.

As the largest city in California, Los Angeles was also involved in multiple revolutions and insurrections during both the Spanish and Mexican eras and the exporting of hides from San Pedro starting in the 1820’s made LA the first major cowtown west of the Rockies.  And after the Gold Rush started, Los Angeles rancho owners made cattle drives to Northern California gold camps, a full fifteen years before the first cattle drives left Texas.

The money from those cattle started Los Angeles’s first boom and immediately made LA a magnet for gamblers, bandits and get rich quick artists.   And many of them were the most hardened criminals who were run out of the gold camps by vigilantes.

That’s possibly why when one historian states that from 1870 to 1885, the five Kansas cowtowns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Wichita had a total of 45 homicides during fifteen years, about of three per year per town - in contrast, Los Angeles, when it’s Wild West days were just getting started in 1850, had 31 homicides in a one year - more than all five major Kansas cowtowns had - combined - over 15 years.  

And on a per capita basis LA’s murder comes to 1,240 homicides per 100,000 while the national rate even in the lawless 1990’s was… 9 per 100,000.

So LA didn’t just have the highest murder rate in the old West doing the 1850’s - frontier Los Angeles had the highest homicide rate in all of American history.  And even those statistics were likely surpassed in the middle and late 1850’s when it was commonly said - and only partly in jest - that LA had close to a murder a day every day of the year.

So LA’s secret Wild West history isn't just that LA was the wildest town in the history of the Wild West - - but that LA was single-handedly practically as wild as the entire rest of the West put together.

But that is the only the start.   Besides murders, frontier Los Angeles was also home to stage robberies, multiple vigilante or rangers organizations (the first one in 1836), far grander saloons and gambling halls than any other cowtown, countless posses that regularly rode over multiple counties, jail breaks, lynchings (including one led by the Mayor),  far more gun fights than any other Western town, some of largest man hunts in Western history, bandit gangs that dwarfed those that terrorized other cowtowns, a 10 year two family blood feud that began with two murders and ended up in the ‘Shootout at the Bella Union Hotel’ and more sheriffs, marshals, deputies and police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty than in any other town, including one marshal who was killed his own deputy. 

And almost all of this happened 10 years before Dodge City existed, 15 years before Deadwood was founded and 20 years before Tombstone dug its first mine. 

But  even during the comparatively quiet  1870’s - after its peak years - when the rest of the West was just… beginning its heyday… this ‘quieter’   and the always entertaining  stage robberies of Dick Fellows.  And LA’s Wild West history continued on until  continued on with a final train robbery in the 1890’s in the San Fernando Valley in the 1890’s  and Wyatt Earp being hired for special assignments by the LAPD in the 1900’s and 1910s.

This makes LA the only place in the West with an uninterrupted Wild West history that ran uninterrupted for almost  100 years - from Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson and Peg Leg Smith in the mid-to late 1820's to Wyatt Earp in the late  1910’s.

That’s why it’s not surprising many famous characters of the Old West began their careers in Los Angeles. Wyatt Earp worked here as a teamster or stage driver when he was in his teens, Judge Roy Bean - later to be famed as the law West of the Pecos (and played by Paul Newman) - was head of the Los Angeles Rangers in LA before there was even anything West of the Pecos, the lost Dutchman of the Lost Dutchman mine began his mining career here, Outlaw Belle Starr's outlaw son was born here and Kit Carson and Jon C. Fremont both visited here several times before fighting here during the Mexican War.

And that’s only the start of how LA invented the Wild West. 

Because after rest of the West died down elsewhere, many of the leading characters of the era moved - or returned to -  LA from the  1880’s to the 1920’s, which is one reason why much of early Downtown was built by mining and cattle money.   Many of them then also helped reinvent the Wild West in one more way.  But this time in was for the Hollywood Western films that told the all stories of all the now famous Cowtowns and Mining camps of the Wild West - all of them with just one exception.

Los Angeles.  The place where the Wild West started - and where it ended.

And if you want to find out reason why that happened and why no one knows about this secret history of Los Angeles - or many of the other of many secret histories of Los Angeles - that will all be explained during   the afternoon tours this Saturday and Sunday.  

And, again, for reservations or more information - call 213-804-8396.