A Scotch Paisano in Old Los Angeles: Hugo Reid's Life in California, 1832-1852 Derived from His Correspondence

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, ...