EVENING EXPRESS, Los Angeles, California, June 3, 1873

• Rare old wild West publication

A very early newspaper from this now-famous city on the West Coast. The population in L.A. was about 6,000 at this time.
News of the day and a wealth of ads. An engraving of an early train is featured in the masthead, and page 3 has an illustrated ad for a stage coach line from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Four pages, never bound, various small tears at the margins, some discrete archival mends, good condition.

Background: This four-page June 3, 1873 issue of the Evening Express holds exceptional historical rarity, originating from an era when Los Angeles was an isolated agricultural outpost of roughly 6,000 residents—eight years before the founding of the Los Angeles Times and three years prior to the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in Southern California. Predating the region's late-19th-century real estate and population booms, surviving physical copies of Southern California newspapers from the early 1870s are extremely scarce due to low original print runs and the ephemeral nature of daily newsprint. Visually capturing a city on the cusp of modern transit, the issue prominently features an engraving of an early steam train within its masthead—symbolizing the town's eager anticipation of rail connectivity—alongside a rare illustrated advertisement on page 3 for the Los Angeles to San Francisco stagecoach line, which served as the primary, grueling multi-day overland connection of the time. Together with a rich assemblage of local notices, business cards, and period advertisements, this issue offers an extraordinarily rare, primary-source glimpse into frontier commerce, transit, and daily life in early Los Angeles.