 The one-story adobe structure was built in 1835 by "three American trappers" — William Wolfskill, Joseph Paulding and Richard Laughlin — as a home for Isaac Williams, a New England merchant who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1832.In 1851, when Horace Bell, the author of the seminal historical work "Reminiscences of a Ranger," first came to Los Angeles, the hotel was owned by James Brown Winston, a medical doctor, and Alpheus P. Hodges, the city's mayor.Bell's book, published in 1881, recounted how the hotel looked when he had stayed there thirty years before