HERO OF HORSEPOWER

LOS ANGELES LAWMAN WILLIAM HAMMEL TAMED ONE OF THE WEST'S WILDEST TOWNS WITH HARD WORK AND HORSELESS CARRIAGES.

- 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.

A Badge Well Worn