Cazador is Spanish for “hunter”, so this street’s name is a sly nod to the pioneer who once owned the entire Mount Washington/Glassell Park/Cypress Park area: Jesse D. Hunter (1806-1877). The Kentucky native came to San Diego in 1847 during the Mexican–American War as a captain in the Mormon Battalion. He relocated to Los Angeles after the war and established a brick factory – apparently the city’s first – downtown. It’s said that he exchanged a DTLA brick house for land here in 1856, and Hunter Ranch was born. Hunter’s widow Keziah (1814-1889) sold the 2,790 acre property to George W. Morgan and Albert H. Judson in April 1882; a month later, her kids had her decreed mentally incompetent. Regardless, Morgan and Judson promptly subdivided the land as the Hunter Highland View tract. Cazador Street was named in 1906 on the Hunter Heights tract. Scandalous footnote: Jesse Hunter married Keziah Brown in 1827, then married Lydia Edmonds in 1846. (The latter died in childbirth the following year.) As there’s no indication that he and Keziah divorced and then remarried, Hunter was surely a polygamist.
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