Romance On El Camino Real: Reminisence and Romances Where The Footsteps of the Padres Fall

ROMANCE ON EL CAMINO REAL. In this autobiographical novel, Jarrett T. Richards vividly describes the practice of law in frontier Santa Barbara. ––“Quite a commodious courtroom did duty for two courts alternatively, the Santa Barbara in the 1880s district court, which had jurisdiction over Santa Barbara and two neighboring counties, and the county court. After a criminal received his sentence, he was, without trouble, marched from the courtroom through the sheriff’s office, into the adjoining jail, from which, it being with the entire building of soft adobe, he could, when night came, quietly dig himself out, leave the country and save the county future expense.” –– ––Herman saw the friar, with sad face beneath his cowl, pass from the poor wretch’s cell, and saw the woe-begone countenance of the condemned looking pleadingly out through the bars, and he shuddered. There was no hope of escape for that poor devil, for he was well guarded by men that thirsted for his blood; not only Frenchmen, but the partisan American pioneers, and Mexican War soldiers. They hated with a deadly hatred the Indians and Mexicans, and this hatred was returned to these partisans; though many an American in sickness and distress was, with the warmth of hospitality, received into the houses of the natives, and tenderly cared for and nursed. Not many years before, a native and his poor young boy had been mercilessly lynched at night, for stealing a cow to eat, almost the custom of the country, and at the same time there existed in the mountain fastnesses a band of native desperadoes who robbed and brutally murdered American travelers.––