City-Makers: The Story of Southern California's First Boom

City-Makers: The Story of Southern California's First Boom by Nadeau, Remi A.. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780870460395.

In an account as swift-paced as a novel Remi Nadeau tells of the sudden invasion of southern California by American farmers in 1868, and of the group of men who changed a sleepy pueblo into the bustling city of Los Angeles.At the same time the discovery of silver in California gave the settlers a market for their crops and made a boom inevitable. Soon brick buildings supplanted adobe shops along the main streets. Los Angeles had begun its phenomenal rise, and its leaders quickly sought to make it the rail center of southern California.The ensuing struggle of two railroads — the Southern Pacific and its rival, the Los Angeles and Independence — for the silver trade, and the fight for the strategic pass that could give it to them, provide tense, suspenseful reading. Colorful characters — stage robbers, vigilantes, real estate boomers, mule-team freighters, silver seekers — make this an exciting book on a little-known chapter in Californias history.