Scotch Paisano in Old Los Angeles

A Scotch Paisano in Old Los Angeles by Susanna Bryant Dakin reconstructs the career and milieu of Hugo Reid—a Scottish trader turned Californio hacendado—through an extraordinary epistolary record, chiefly his 1836–1852 correspondence with Abel Stearns. Dakin situates Reid within the intertwined commercial, political, and domestic networks of Mexican-era Southern California, tracing parallel lives that converged in Los Angeles and San Gabriel amid secularization, the hide-and-tallow trade, and the disruptions of war and statehood. The letters—carried by runners, riders, and creaking carretas—preserve the texture of “poco tiempo” sociability as well as the practicalities of land, credit, and reputation. Dakin’s editorial frame is avowedly archival: she mines collections from Gaffey to Coronel and Wagner, supplements lacunae with contemporary diaries and mission registers, and acknowledges a sparing use of informed reconstruction where eyewitness testimony fails (Reid’s first landing in 1832, his meeting with Victoria, and their 1837 wedding). Throughout, she balances narrative warmth with documentary restraint.

The study’s interpretive core challenges received mythologies. Dakin corrects the literary afterlife of Reid in Ramona, disentangling Helen Hunt Jackson’s romantic types from the documented lives of Reid, Doña Victoria (of the Comigrabit line), and their family—especially Maria Ygnacia, the “Flower of San Gabriel.” She reads Reid not as a “squaw man” but as a bilingual, freethinking mediator whose naturalization, marriage, and public service bound him to indigenous and Californio communities while keeping a trader’s eye on Pacific circuits from Callao to San Pedro. By pairing close readings of Reid–Stearns letters with contextual chapters on commerce, secularization, the Mexican–American War, and the Gold Rush, Dakin recovers a cosmopolitan frontier in which Scots, Yankees, Kanakas, and Gabrielino-Tongva actors negotiated status, law, and belonging—an historical Los Angeles that was at once provincial and ocean-facing, leisurely and volatile, improvised and consequential.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1939.