El Campo Santo Cemetery: Walking Among Legends

Don Pio Pico (1801-1894) lived most of the 19th century and saw in his long lifetime astonishing changes in California and Los Angeles from the Spanish era to the Gilded Age.  A merchant, landowner and member of the legislature, Pico was the last governor of the Mexican era as well as a capitalist who built structures in Los Angeles during its first boom in the late 1860s and early 1870s, including the still-standing Pico House hotel.  Financial troubles, a raft of lawsuits and a swindle plagued his later years and he was evicted from his suburban ranch and died, seen as something of a relic of pre-American California at the Los Angeles home of a daughter.  In 1921, his descendants agreed to move the remains of the ex-governor and his wife Maria Ignacia Alvarado, sister of another governor, to a newly completed mausoleum in El Campo Santo at what is…