LA County law enforcement officers killed by bandits honored in Irvine — 167 years later – Orange County Register

On January 23, 1857, notorious horse thief Juan Flores and his band of bandits engaged in a violent shootout with pursuing Los Angeles County law enforcement, killing four of them.

The officers, Los Angeles County Sheriff James Barton, Deputy Charles Daly, and Constables William Little and Charles Baker, were on horseback heading south toward San Juan Capistrano after learning that a gang of thieves were threatening the safety of the inhabitants of the mission city. But little did they know that the group had been alerted to the arrival of Barton and his men and had hatched a plan to ambush them.

Barton, Daly, Little and Baker lost their lives in the line of duty on a mound of land near the 405 and State Highway 133 interchange and the Spectrum Center, nicknamed Barton Mound.

In the 167 years since their murders, highways, cars and housing have taken over the vast plains of what is now Irvine, where these four men on horseback were gunned down. The site was designated a California Historic Landmark on June 20, 1935.

And on Monday, April 1, nearly a century after that designation, a metal plaque commemorating their bravery was unveiled in front of the hills where the shooting took place.

“As we look around this afternoon, it’s hard to imagine what Southern California looked like more than 140 years ago and how the people of that era lived,” said retired Army Lt. Los Angeles Sheriff John Stanley. “All around us the land was largely deserted, rolling grassland. But in January 1857, danger for its inhabitants also lurked all around them, in this seemingly pristine setting. »

In the 1850s in Orange County – then part of Los Angeles County until 1889 – the law was loose and chaos and violence were rife.

There was little law enforcement in this vast county, almost the size of Maine, that included all or part of present-day Kern, San Bernardino and Orange counties, Stanley said.

This, coupled with resentment felt by Mexican Californians due to many rancheros losing land they owned before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (ending the Mexican-American War and giving California to the United States ), resulted in largely unbridled gang activity. and violence between the area’s non-Hispanic settlers and the indigenous people who inhabited the land, in which Flores and his gang played a leading role, Stanley said.

During the last two months of 1856, Stanley said, Flores and his gang, who called themselves “Las Manillas,” meaning “the handcuffs,” harassed residents of central and southern California.

A convicted horse thief who had escaped from San Quentin Prison, Flores traveled to San Juan Capistrano with his gang where they committed a robbery and murder in January 1857, resulting in the death of German tavern owner George Pflugardt.

Barton and five other men – two of whom he deputized: blacksmith Charles T. Daly and wagon driver Alfred Hardy – traveled south en route to San Juan Capistrano, intending to apprehend Flores and his gang and put an end to their reign of terror in the region. , Stanley said.

But when they arrived in the area that is now surrounded by apartment buildings and part of the San Diego Creek Pedestrian Trail, they were ambushed by Flores and his group. Only Daly and Hardy survived.