“The Topanga Chain Gang”
by Pablo Capra
 |
| The convict camp at the mouth of Topanga circa 1913. Photo by Theresa Sletton, c/o Huntington Library. |
The LA County Prison chain gang had been in Topanga on and off since 1898, when they worked on the first road through the Canyon.
A stockade was built near the beach in September 1911 to house them while they were doing improvement work, but two months later a brush fire passed through and likely burned it.
Another prison camp was built in April 1913, when the chain gang was tasked with building a whole new Topanga road that would stay on the south side of the creek until the S-turns, eliminating the inconvenience of multiple crossings. The camp had…
…a large steel cage where the men are kept. This cage is covered with a tent and inside the bunks are placed tier upon tier so that there are sleeping quarters for nearly a hundred men….
The “village” is the last word in neatness, and the rock bordered walks from tent to tent, with the trees and canyon as a background, make a beautiful scene.
—“Santa Monica’s Points of Beauty and Interest,” The Daily Outlook, 1913-07-26
The embellishments were thanks to Sheriff William Hammel (1865-1932), who had campaigned for…
…country quarters for prisoners where open-air occupations can be provided in the effort to make better citizens of wrongdoers… not down on the river bottom, though, but on a hill, where there’s plenty of fresh air and sunlight and a wide sweep of view; let’s give ‘em the best we’ve got.
—“Treat ‘Em Like Human Beings,” Los Angeles Times, 1912-11-08
Other reforms Hammel fought for were to pay prisoners for their work, and to give them dignified uniforms.
[We should] quit the idea of making clowns of the prisoners and make them look like civilized human beings by clothing them in decent suits of one color.
—“Treat ‘Em Like Human Beings,” Los Angeles Times, 1912-11-08
 |
| View of Topanga Canyon road under construction. c/o Randy Young Collection. |
Clearly, Hammel was an idealistic and ethical man. He was childhood best friends with one of Los Angeles’s first Hispanic sheriffs, Martin Aguirre (1858-1929). When Hammel became sheriff in 1899, he brought Aguirre back into the department as a deputy.
Hammel also hired Los Angeles’s first African American deputy sheriff, Julius Loving (1863-1938). The next sheriff fired Loving, but Hammel was later reelected and rehired Loving, who rose in the ranks to become one of the most respected men in the department.
But Hammel’s idealism sometimes blinded him or made him conceited. He called the prison camp the “Hammel Recreation Camp,” and the new road the “Hammel Highway.” When he brought the LA County Board of Supervisors to inspect the work, he treated them to a surprise barbecue. They then lectured the prisoners about dignity, patriotism, and the unfairness of their plight, and gave them a half-day off to swim in the lagoon. The day’s “entertainment” continued with Hammel taking his guests to the new movie studio Inceville, where Sunset meets PCH today, to see a silent film and meet the Native American tribe that lived there as Western actors.
Others shared Hammel’s disconnect about what was really going on with the chain gang, whose typical crimes were vagrancy, failure to support their families, and assault.
The Daily Outlook article titled “Points of Beauty and Interest” featured the prison camp next to the La Brea Tar Pits, and described it in the same touristy language. Of the prisoners, the article said, “They are a happy and contented lot, for they are kindly treated and well fed and the work is not very hard.”
Another article conjured up a vision of the camp that could have been painted by Thomas Kinkade.
The picture presented was one for the brush of an artist…. The great dormitory sits in the center of what will soon be a beautiful garden. The prisoners have already marked off the plot for flower designs….
—“Would Abolish Convict Labor,” Los Angeles Times, 1913-05-14
 |
| After a day of building roads in Topanga, contracted mule and wagon teams followed the creek bed to the beach, circa 1913. c/o Topanga Historical Society. |
On July 29, 1914, Al F. Young (1875-1935), a Santa Monica real estate agent and Elk, started a bus line to Topanga Beach that he advertised as a sightseeing tour.
First there is Santa Monica canyon itself, said to be the place where vast pirate treasures have been hidden. Then there is the long wharf, the longest in the world, and just beyond this is the Japanese village, always a source of wonder to visitors in California. The burning mountain, whose fame is nation-wide and whose solution is the enigma of scientists is seen on this trip. Santa Ynez canyon and the famous moving picture camp and village is one of the main stops…. The county convict camp at the mouth of the [Topanga] canyon always proves a point of interest and is within a stone’s throw of the terminus of the line.
—“Bus Line on Coast,” The Daily Outlook, 1914-07-28
Santa Monica Librarian Elfie Mosse (1868-1939) started a feel-good campaign to bring the prisoners donated books, although she cautioned that “Too sensational literature is not desired.”
But the unhappiness of the chain gang couldn’t be denied.
In February 1914, Margarita Castor walked from Oxnard to Los Angeles to beg for the release of her husband Cacino, who had stolen a suitcase. Her devotion persuaded a judge to release Cacino on probation, and moved Deputy Sheriff Martin Aguirre to “pass the hat” in the department for Cacino.
There were also many prison breaks. The biggest was on August 26, 1915, when 10 men, relying on a noisy generator to mask the sound of filing through the bars, escaped through the roof of their cage and fled into the hills.
The escapee who caused the most alarm was Native American Francisco Flores, a repeat criminal who had already served time for an 1895 attempted murder. “Flores, Firewater, Fight” was the Los Angeles Herald headline describing that shooting, which seriously wounded another member of his tribe.
Flores was from the Zanja de Cota reservation in Santa Barbara County. In 1896, he went to court to protest a church group that was trying to steal his tribe’s land.
By 1899, he was routinely getting locked up in Los Angeles for small thefts and vagrancy. “He costs the city too much for gasoline…. We have to haul him to the station in a patrol wagon too much,” a police officer quipped.
The Los Angeles Times, describing Flores’s beaten demeanor in court, said, “He listened to the sentence and warning with stoical indifference, not seeming to care whether he was in jail or at liberty.”
Flores successfully vanished after the prison break.
 |
| Charlie Chaplin escapes from the Topanga Beach convict camp in The Adventurer, 1917. |
The new Topanga road was completed on May 29, 1915, and for the first time it went straight through to the Valley. A celebration was held by the Automobile Club of Southern California, this time at the Top of Topanga. Afterwards, a parade of cars, decorated with pennants, drove down and back to the city. No stop was made at the beach.
The chain gang immediately began working on new projects, like building the road up Tuna Canyon and raising the coast road. By the end of their time at Topanga Beach, late 1916, their enchanting myth had disintegrated like the American flag flying over their prison.
The miserable apology for the nation’s emblem is weather-worn, tattered and faded, and flutters in pathetic ribbons before the gaze of hundreds of auto parties bound over the coast road or through the scenic canyon.
—“Flag in Distress,” Santa Monica Bay Outlook, 1916-07-10
***
This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.
...
