No sooner had the County of San Diego been formed than the sheriff came out here to collect taxes on property, including just about everything, cash, corn, carts, and cattle.

To the mission educated Warner Ranch Indian, Antonio Garra, this was taxation without representation, a rallying cry from the birth of our nation [ours, not his].

He organized the famous 1850 “Garra Uprising” in the face of threats to seize Indian cattle for taxes. Indians had no voice in the new U.S. government or courts. They had enjoyed rights and protections under Spanish and Mexican law, without taxes. Now, the army was encamped at Santa Ysabel and volunteers had burned the Cupeno village at what we now call Warner’s Hot Springs. Nervous soldiers and militiamen tried in vain to interpret signal fires on surrounding hilltops.

Things escalated into a widespread tax rebellion to force the non-Indian aliens out of the back country. In an attack on Warner’s ranch, the house was burned and four “Americans” were killed at Agua Caliente, the hot springs. Warner had kept a horse saddled and he fled to his vaqueros by Lake Henshaw’s Monkey Hill at the old Indian village of Tagui.

Garra was caught and tried by court martial before liquor dispenser and militiaman Joshua Bean for treason, murder, and robbery. Bean was also the first San Diego mayor under the new U.S. government, conducting most city business across the bar of his grog shop.

Army Major Justus McKinstrey, owner of Rancho Santa Ysabel, protested eloquently the treason charge, arguing that Garra owed no allegiance to the new State of California, his enemy, and was properly a native prisoner of war, having defended his homeland from invaders.

It was a sound argument, and so the court sentenced Garra to be shot only for murder and robbery, dropping the treason charge. In order to convict him of anything, they had to overlook the lack of any evidence of Garra’s direct participation.

Right after sentencing, Garra was marched at the head of a firing squad to a grave you can still visit in Old Town San Diego’s Campo Santo, next to the entrance. Padre Juan was badgering the reluctant Garra into a pray-along, mumbling and bumbling his Latin, but the educated Garra helped him along with it. His skills with diverse Indian languages had made him a prime suspect for coordinating the rebellion.

The January 7, 1852 Herald reported how Garra kneeled at the head of his grave, as a crowd looked on. Garra asked forgiveness for any misdeeds and granted forgiveness to the crowd. Townsfolk noted his dignity and composure, and it appears they did not enjoy the execution as much as usual. The pesky padre badgered him also to accept a blindfold. Garra finally relented, just to get it all over with. They said he fell into his grave laughing, which may reflect a nightmarish collective sense of shame.

The reporter wrote: “The sun’s last rays were lingering on Point Loma whilst bells of the neighboring church chimed vespers. In an instant the soul of a truly brave [man] winged to regions of eternity, accompanied by melancholy howling of dogs, aware of the solemnity, casting a gloom over the assembled hundreds. They failed not to drop a tear over the grave of a brave man.”

Some months later, Cosmos, an Indian delivered up with a noose already around his neck, confessed to the killing and hanged himself from a peg in his cell wall.

Mayor Bean started the new city government off corruptly by selling City Hall and public land to himself and a drinking buddy. He and the new city council pioneered graft with a bloated $5000 contract for a shoddily built cementless jail just to the right of the Campo Santo and with an arrangement for renting out jailed Indians for forced labor. He was killed that same year in an argument over a woman. A poor shoemaker was hanged for the crime before a different man confessed.

Executions needed to be expedited, because jail space was limited and there were over 800 California homicides a year, not counting undocumented Indian, Mexican and Chilean miners, who either fled the goldfields or bled upon them.

Mayor Bean’s rascally brother Roy was soon jailed in Old Town for intent to commit murder on a fleeing victim. He had a number of lady admirers and one brought him a nice homey meal of tamales, one of which had a small knife in it.

Roy Bean used that knife to dig himself through that infamous cobblestone jail’s wall and ended up in Texas where he nominated himself the infamous “Law West of the Pecos” in his saloon/courthouse. A photo of the pompous signage atop his “groggery” is an icon of old west lore. He misspelled it “The Jersey Lilly” for a celebrity beauty of variable virtue immortalized in a BBC series. An amorous situation concerning another lady got him incompletely hanged. He was left alone to twitch and gurgle, but the lady emerged from behind a bush and cut him down, leaving him with a bad case of rope burn and neck pain, which did no good to his personality. People called him the “hanging judge”, but he was as much hangee as hangor.

I swear I am not making any of this up. I have actually had to leave out a bunch of really crazy stuff for fear young readers might lose some respect for our hallowed American legal traditions.

You can google more about these people, if you have nothing better to do.