Ballin described his murals at the Title Guarantee and Trust Building in a pamphlet published in 1931:
“The part Lieutenant E. O.C. Ord played in the shaping of present-day Los Angeles is given its proper emphasis in the fourth of the panels by Mr. Ballin.

Young Lieutenant Ord, spared from the United States Army long enough to make Los Angeles’ first survey, in 1849, was later to attain fame as General Ord in the Civil War. He is still remembered in Santa Barbara as a most personable and fastidious man and an excellent dancer, being a favorite at the De La Guerra balls. An ardent admirer of the beautiful Trinidad Ortega, he is said to have named one of the streets in Los Angeles in her honor. Primavera, or Spring, Street – after a favorite nickname – carries the memory of this incident.

Los Angeles was so short of funds in 1849 that it neglected to provide Ord with material for permanent stakes. Hence, with the passing of a few years, ‘Ord’s Survey’ became little more than an interesting picture on paper. Nevertheless, it has determined the shape and direction of the whole of present downtown Los Angeles.
In the panel Lieutenant Ord stands in front of the map made by him. Behind Ord is a Mexican who holds a box containing a transit [sic]. To the right in the foreground, a group of Mexican women. In the left background, a slice of life in Los Angeles in 1849.”

As in the "Treaty of Cahuenga" panel, here Ballin depicts a triumphant version of Los Angeles' transition to becoming an American state, casting that transition as peaceful and amicable when in reality, claims to land and resources were hotly contested for decades. The focus in this panel is not on military generals, however, but rather the man who completed the first American survey of Los Angeles, Lieutenant E. O. C. Ord and the map he created of the region. Ballin's choice to include this moment as foundational to Los Angeles' history clearly reflects the purposes of his corporate patrons from the Title Guarantee and Trust Company in erecting their new headquarters in the first place. The company's founder, Edwin Sergeant, had been among the first individuals in Los Angeles to issue authoritative titles to real estate holdings in the city and had acquired some 20,000 maps like the one depicted in this panel during his career. He used those maps, along with a “Book of Disenos” (a survey of Mexican land grants) and records of the acts of the Mexican Ayuntamiento (Council) that preceded the American government, to authenticate disputed land claims from the days of Spanish and Mexican rule.¹ Those documents served as the mechanism through which American understandings of property rights and land ownership had been realized in the region, “guaranteeing” not only individual land claims but also Anglo-American hegemony in Southern California more broadly. After Sergeant's death, the Title Guarantee and Trust Company erected their grandiose new headquarters to serve as a monument to the company’s historic strength and stability and position it at the center of the explosive growth occurring in the city at the time. Ballin has done just that with this panel, underscoring the significance of maps and map makers to the sanctity of the real estate industry and the city of Los Angeles itself.

Ballin again uses costumes in this panel to develop a contrast between his Mexican and indigenous figures and Lieutenant Ord. As in other panels, the Mexican/indigenous characters wear outfits that clearly indicate their ethnicity and implicit inferior status: the male figure wears a sombrero and sarape and the female servants drape themselves in robes. Ballin paints their physical features as deformed, weathered and worn, similarly conforming to prevailing racial stereotypes. Ord, by contrast, wears the sharp attire of a civilized modern man, his face fresh, clean and determined. Ballin's depiction of Ord conveys order, stability, and strength, whereas the Mexican/indigenous characters seem weak, frail and defeated. By painting the figures in this way, Ballin again casts the United States takeover of the region as peaceful, orderly and inevitable in this panel.

Image courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Charles Young Library, University of California Los Angeles.
Appears in the Hugo Ballin Papers, collection number 407, Box 17, Folder 1.

Ballin's quotation appears in his pamphlet, "Murals in the Title Guarantee Building," (Los Angeles: Title Guarantee and Trust Company, 1931).

1. Los Angeles Times, Aug. 4th, 1929 and May 31st, 1931.