Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Lawmen, and Vigilantes
Most of this work is a collection of barely connected anecdotes of outrages and villainy perpetrated in post-Mexican War California from 1848 to 1860. In the absence of strong law enforcement, and with an enormous number of young male emigrants and transients, violence became the primary means of settling disputes. Banditry, personal disagreements, official corruption, dueling, and tensions between the Mexican and American populations increased the risk of bloodshed. The violence abated as the Gold Rush culture was subsumed into more mainstream American society, but it left an indelible imprint on American culture and popular perceptions. The anecdotes gathered by attorney Boessenecker (Lawman, LJ 2/1/98) are interesting, but the analysis is sketchy, mostly limited to the observation that murder rates were much higher then than now and that popular writers and myth-makers drastically distorted the facts of the era. For subject collections in larger libraries.AEdwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KSCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.