California’s foremost cultural historian, Kevin Starr, wrote in his Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era that “American literature in Southern California begins” with the publication of Reminiscences of a Ranger. This rollicking book is the most important chronicle of Los Angeles during those rough-and-tumble days of the early 1850s as it transitioned from a Mexican town to a “semi-gringo” town. It also is the first cloth-bound book to be printed, bound, and published in Los Angeles, which in itself signaled the town’s progress.
          Like so many others, Bell came to California in 1850 as a gold seeker, failed to strike it rich, and headed to Los Angeles in 1852 in search of better prospects. When violence was becoming so commonplace in “El Pueblo,” he joined the Los Angeles Rangers to campaign against the banditti that roamed the streets and countryside. Not one to pass up a good fight, the Kentucky-born Bell left Los Angeles in 1856 to accompany William Walker’s filibustering expedition in Nicaragua, then joined the forces of Benito Juárez in Mexico in 1859, and finally enlisted in the Union Army. Surviving the Civil War, he returned to Los Angeles, practiced law, fought local corruption, and from 1882 to 1888 published The Porcupine, a periodical aptly named for its stinging style.
          Bell wrote Reminiscences of a Ranger from 1878 to 1881. His journalistic skills permeate the volume allowing him to capture the flavor of Los Angeles during the violent and raucous early 1850s when his rangers struggled to bring peace to a town better known as “Los Diablos.” He covered the activities of such then-well-known characters as Joaquín Murieta, Jack Powers, Jim Savage (“the Tulare King”), and scores of others. While much of the volume focused on brawls, lynchings, drinking, gambling, and other assorted vices, it also offered a wonderful view of the mixing of cultures in Southern California. His eloquent accounts of fandangos, fiestas, a stagecoach race, and a cattle stampede demonstrate another side of life. Bell wrote with sympathy concerning the plight of the Indians and Californios. Rightly proud of his literary endeavor, Bell plugged the volume in The Porcupine, writing “It is unique, fresh, sprightly, combining the grave and the gay, the sad and mirthful, history as cheery as fiction, seen from the bright side of life. 457 octavo pages; gold embossed; bound in cloth; $2.00 postpaid.” Typical of books bound in that era, it was issued in different colors of cloth including blue, green, and red.
          It is not clear how well Bell’s book sold upon publication. One story had it that a fire destroyed most of the first edition, but as documented by Lawrence Clark Powell, Bell sold the Holmes Book Store a cache of 200 copies in 1904. Because of the book’s compelling subject matter and breezy style, several later editions have been published beginning in 1927 with Wallace Hebberd. The 1933 edition issued by Primavera Press used Hebberd’s leftover sheets and added a new title page. A three-volume, slipcased production of 1,500 copies came out between 1965 and 1967 as a seasonal gift issued by Advertisers Composition Company. In 1999, the prestigious University of Oklahoma Press brought out another edition with a fine introduction by John Boessenecker.

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: Biographical Files, California State Library; Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1971), pp. 279-91; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 31-34; Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950), pp. 51-59.