Hero of Horsepower - Los Angeles lawman William Hammel tamed one of the West's wildest towns with hard work and horseless carriages.

Los Angeles lawman William Hammel tamed one of the West's wildest towns with hard work and horseless carriages.

- BY J.R. Sanders

Los Angeles, California.

Not everyone's picture of a wild-and-woolly Western town-even though Wyatt Earp, who spent his last years there, claimed Tombstone in its heyday "wasn't half as bad as Los Angeles." Policing the City of Angels, and the 4,000-square-mile county of coastline, desert and mountains encompassing it, took a special breed of lawmen. Men like Billy Hammel.

Native Angeleno William Augustus Hammel was born March 13, 1865. The son of a doctor and educated at Santa Clara University, young Billy-likely to his parents' chagrin-took a brief stab at cowboying in Arizona. He soon returned to California and might have settled in the grocery business but for his brother-in-law, L.A. County Sheriff George Gard.

In mid-April 1885 Melcado Garcia, a notorious "horse-thief and desperado," had traded gunfire with a deputy sheriff near the San Gabriel Mission. Gard swore in Hammel as a special deputy and sent him and boyhood friend Martin Aguirre, a county constable, on Garcia's trail.

They followed it northwest through the Arroyo Seco and, finding Garcia "wounded in bed" the deputy's bullet in his chest-30 miles away at San Fernando, captured him without further gunplay. Thus in true Old West fashion, Hammel embarked on a career spanning four decades, taking L.A. law enforcement from its horseback days to the mechanized 20th century.

When William Hammel was born in 1865, Los Angeles County had under 15,000 residents. When Sheriff Hammel died in 1932, the county had grown to over two million. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

A Badge Well Worn