Hugo Reid
Hugo Reid (April 18, 1811 – December 12, 1852), born in Scotland, was an early resident of Los Angeles County, who became a naturalized citizen of Mexico and married a local Gabrieleña. Reid wrote a series of newspaper letters that described the culture, language, and modern circumstances of the local Tongva (Gabrieleño) people, and criticizing their treatment by Franciscan missionaries who administered the Spanish missions in California.
Born to Charles Reid and Essex Milliken, at Cardross, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, on 18 April 1811, Reid established a trading house in Hermosillo, Mexico in the late-1820s with a business partner, William Keith, and first visited Los Angeles, then a part of Mexican Alta California, in 1832. He married a Gabrieleña woman (a Mission San Gabriel convert renamed Victoria) and adopted her children, María and Felipe.
Reid and his wife were granted the 13,319-acre (53.90 km2) Rancho Santa Anita following secularization of Mission San Gabriel ranch lands, and built an adobe house there in 1839. The grant was confirmed by Alta California Governor Pio Pico in 1845. A restored adobe, known as the "Hugo Reid Adobe", was in fact built on a different nearby site by a later owner. Both Reid's original site and the current adobe are located at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, part of the former estate of Lucky Baldwin, in what is now the town of Arcadia. Reid was nicknamed the Scotch Paisano during his days as a Scottish settler in Mexican Southern California.
Reid wrote a series of 22 letters which were published in the Los Angeles Star during 1852, and which provide an important ethnographic picture of the little–known Gabrieliño and were republished in book form several times. He died in Los Angeles on December 12, 1852. His funeral was held at the old Our Lady Queen of Angels church, on Main Street in Los Angeles, and was buried in the adjacent cemetery. His body was later moved to the Campo Santo (cemetery) on North Broadway (now the site of Cathedral High School), and then disinterred again and placed in the new Calvary Cemetery in the East Los Angeles section of the city.
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