TROUBLE IN CHINATOWN
On the evening of October 24, 1871, Los Angeles County Sheriff J.F. Burns was a few miles south of the city when word reached him there was trouble in Chinatown. Reaching Calle de los Negros an hour later, Burns found in place all the makings of a massacre—a popular rancher shot in the chest, Chinese assassins hiding among innocent Chinese citizens, a city marshal with tenuous control of his officers, and an armed mob of vigilantes. Although Burns had failed to prevent the deadliest riot yet in Los Angeles history, the former schoolteacher employed hard-earned life lessons to end the killings.
Born in Clifton Springs, New York, on September 27, 1831, James Franklin Burns spent his teen years in Kalamazoo and Coldwater, Mich. A promising student, he attended an academy in Jackson County, then taught public school in Michigan and Pennsylvania for a few years. But the booming West beckoned, and in February 1853 he set out for California. As Burns made his way up the Missouri River, the paddle-wheel steamer he was aboard grounded near St. Joseph, delaying him a few days, long enough to witness a slave auction. A committed abolitionist, he noted in his journal the spectacle “made an impression that has never left me.”
In May he joined Mormon Bishop Thomas Burdick’s California-bound wagon train in Kanesville, Iowa (present-day Council Bluffs), a party that grew to 119 travelers. Burns described the 1,000-mile stretch along the Mormon Trail to Salt Lake City as “comparatively easy, without special incident.” Their luck was about to change. Delayed by sickness, the party knew snowfall would soon make the Sierra Nevada impassable, so they instead headed southwest to pick up the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles.
Forty-five dusty miles down the trail they reached Provo, just east of Utah Lake, where Burns married Burdick’s 24-year-old daughter, Lucretia.
