Tag: animal cruelty

A Bad Way With Horses


Nov.12, 1907
Los Angeles

Half a block from his home at 1131 Westlake, John P. Shumway Jr. was badly injured when the carriage he was driving collided with the 11th Street trolley. Shumway was thrown about 20 feet, striking the pavement head-first, and the horse ran for the stable, pulling what was left of the smashed carriage, witnesses said.

Shumway was carried to his home, where his father, Dr. John P. Shumway, treated him for a concussion, bruises and cuts. A year later, the family filed a personal injury suit against the Los Angeles Railway, seeking $10,355 ($204,938.83), although The Times failed to report the outcome of the trial.

Whether Shumway was a troublesome sort before is unclear, but his problems continued. In 1909, he was arrested for passing a forged check for $25 at the Pioneer bar on North Main Street. He claimed that he was given the check for work he had performed and was freed when he promised to repay the money.

A few months later, he was fined $60 for cruelty to a horse. Witnesses said Shumway overloaded a three-horse truck in South Pasadena and

Mullen in Bad Plight


May 18, 1907
Los Angeles

William Mullen, a black strikebreaker for the Pioneer Truck Company, was delivering a shipment of lumber when he realized that he had lost some of his load and retraced his route to look for it.

At the Southern Pacific railroad crossing at Alameda and 2nd streets, Mullen noticed some lumber leaning against a shack belonging to a railroad flagman named Caulfield, who was presumably white. Mullen asked Caulfield if there was more of his lumber inside the shack and Caulfield said no.

Mullen challenged Caulfield, knocked him to the ground and began kicking him when Patrick Connelly, a union teamster for the Water Department and also presumably white, intervened, although it