Choose Your Weapon

Christopher Burchfield

Description

In Gold Rush–era California, gunfighters weren’t outlaws or desperadoes ― they were were prominent journalists, legislators, governors, and judges. Choose Your Weapon brings to life a now-forgotten time, when California was a raw new state with politics as violent as any banana republic. This was the Golden Age of dueling, when prominent citizens would settle their political and personal disputes with gunfire, according to the venerable law of the code duello. Choose Your Weapon documents every notable duel to have occurred in California, from the arrival of U.S. dueling culture with the first American settlers to the end of dueling’s popularity on the eve of the Civil War.
In the heyday of dueling culture, men from all walks of life, from politicians to manual laborers, fought formal duels. Duels could be triggered by political battles to shape state government―or they could be fought over a woman or a personal slight. Braggarts often proved to be cowards on the field of honor, and many a quiet and peaceable man could shoot with deadly accuracy when reputation was at stake. For the California gentlemen of the 1850s, honor or dishonor―and life or death―could be decided with a single shot.

Informations

• Publié par: Linden Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781610352994
• Langue: English

Extrait

Choose Your Weapon
The Duel in California, 1847-1861
Christopher Burchfield
Choose Your Weapon
Copyright 2016 by Christopher Burchfield. All rights reserved.
Published by Craven Street Books An imprint of Linden Publishing 2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721 [phone] / [phone] CravenStreetBooks.com
Craven Street Books and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-61035-277-2
135798642
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burchfield, Christopher, author.
Title: Choose your weapon : the duel in California, 1847-1861 / Christopher Burchfield.
Other titles: Duel in California, 1847-1861
Description: Fresno, California : Craven Street Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036447 | ISBN 9781610352772 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Dueling-California-History-19th century. | California--Social life and customs-19th century. | California-Politics and government-1846-1850 | California-Politics and government-1850-1950 | Politicians-California-Biography. | Newspaper editors-California-Biography.
Classification: LCC CR4595.C2 B87 2016 | DDC 394/.809794--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036447
For Genedal, to whom I owe very much
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1: Golden Era California
Chapter 2: In the Beginning
Chapter 3: The Duel in America
Chapter 4: The Duel Comes to California
Chapter 5: The Year 1850
Chapter 6: The Keystone Fire-Eater
Chapter 7: The Duel at Coyote Hill
Chapter 8: Murder at Industry Bar
Chapter 9: Judge Terry s First Duel
Chapter 10: Senator Broderick s First Duel
Chapter 11: Juanita Avenged
Chapter 12: California s Dueling Bard of Avon
Chapter 13: Gentleman John
Chapter 14: The Duel at Rancho del Paso
Chapter 15: The Captain and the Auctioneer
Chapter 16: The Leggett-Morrison Duel
Chapter 17: Groveling in Los Angeles
Chapter 18: Honorable Mention: 1852
Chapter 19: The Senate Challenges the House
Chapter 20: The Dentist and the Grocer
Chapter 21: The Surprise Acceptance
Chapter 22: The Fatal Friendship
Chapter 23: The Fool Alternate
Chapter 24: Requiem by Moonlight
Chapter 25: Our Founding Father s Nephew
Chapter 26: The Hubert-Hunt Duel
Chapter 27: A Longshoreman s Affair
Chapter 28: California s Don Quixote
Chapter 29: An Affair of the Heart
Chapter 30: The Democracy versus the Know-Nothings
Chapter 31: Galahad Shot Again
Chapter 32: The Evils of Temperance
Chapter 33: Crawfishing in San Jose
Chapter 34: The Salted Claim
Chapter 35: The Grand Burlesque
Chapter 36: A Fighting Editor Takes a Stand
Chapter 37: Year of Bedlam: 1856
Chapter 38: The Doctors Duel
Chapter 39: When Chivalry Was in Bloom
Chapter 40: Duel at Angel Island
Chapter 41: Honorable Mention: 1858
Chapter 42: Another Exciting Year: 1859
Chapter 43: Duel of Infamy: Part One
Chapter 44: Duel of Infamy: Part Two
Chapter 45: The Duel at Moonlight Flat
Chapter 46: Shootout in Visalia
Chapter 47: Sunrise on Mount Tam
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
Men blown from every border land Men desperate and red of hand Of men in love and men in debt Of men who lived but to forget And men whose very hearts had died Who only sought these wilds to hide Their wretchedness
-Outaw, judge, poet, star member of the dueling fraternity, Ned McGowan, 1879
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank very much my wife, Genendal Lea Burchfield, for her support over the many years of this endeavor. I would also like to thank Sylvia Ann Sheafer of Glendale, Al and Marne Wilkins of Weaverville, and Margaret Bauer of Los Molinos, for their encouragement in undertaking the research and writing of this history of early California. Special thanks also for the technical help provided by Christopher Harper of Chico, Larry Jackson of Heidelberg Graphics of Chico, and Ada Golden of Forbestown.
Also, many sincere thanks to Sybil Zemitis and John R. Gonzales of the California Section of the California State Library in Sacramento, Annie R. Mitchell of the Tulare County Historical Society, Lorrayne Kennedy of the Calaveras County Archives, John Bettencourt of the Sacramento County Historical Society, Betsy Cammack of Sierra City, Michael and Jean Sherrell of The Californians: The Magazine of California History, Daryl Morrison of the University of the Pacific Library, Tod Ruhstaller of the Haggin Museum in Stockton, Robert J. Chandler of the Wells Fargo Bank History Department in San Francisco, Edwin L. Tyson of the Searls Historical Library in Nevada City, and the staffs at the Society of California Pioneers in San Francisco, the California Historical Society Library in San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Huntington Library in San Marino for their help in researching this book.
Preface
I first came across the subject of dueling in California while researching the state s newspapers for a book about its Gold Rush editors. Over the years this led my wife and me into many a county historical society museum and library. Prior to our work I had never considered California a Wild West state in the tradition of Texas, Oklahoma, or Arizona. Yet the following fact began to emerge from the journals we reviewed: even during those state s most turbulent times, they never came close to matching the turmoil that engulfed California during what was then known as its Golden Era, 1849 to 1861.
The disorder was such that it reached far beyond mining claim disputes and barroom brawls, right into the state legislature, the state supreme court, and of course the governor s mansion. Several members of its delegation to Congress became involved in some of the most outrageous acts in our nation s history. At the time I wondered why so few people seemed aware of California s past. Since then several well researched books about its desperadoes and lawmen have come forth. They portray several figures from the 1850s and many more in the years following the Civil War. Still, no single volume focused on the 1850s, when so many desperadoes entered journalism, politics and the professions.
Almost immediately it became apparent that part of the reason for this dearth of information was the newspapers of that period were but single sheets of paper folded over once, presenting the reader with four pages of information only. This quite obviously limited the amount of space the editors could devote to any given incident. The public s slight knowledge of California s more colorful early characters was deepened by the fact that on the heels of the Golden Era arose the Civil War. It was during this period that a reform minded press took hold in the state, while at the same time its history fell into the hands of several like minded historians.
Some of these writers were quite frankly embarrassed by the state s antebellum past. They tended to marginalize, and where they could, eliminate many of its early newspaper editors and politicians from discourse. When comparing one of these certified post-Civil War histories with the incidents described in the newspapers of the 1850s, it was often difficult to believe we were reading about the same state.
The volume on California frontier editors has not yet been completed, but the research did lead to the subject at hand-the fact that so many of its leading journalists were so willing to shed their blood on the dueling ground-very often in shootouts with leading political figures, businessmen, doctors and lawyers. The number of these formal gunfights reached past seventy, far more than any other of the thirty states over the same period. Because so many of these duels did involve politics Choose Your Weapon also presents a sketch of the state s political scene, a sketch that is almost as startling in its variance with the official record as the number of duels.
Toward the end of the research I came across a large number of articles in certain 1880s and 1890s newspapers written by those who had survived that long ago Golden Era. In addition to providing a fresh reminder of how much the culture of California has evolved between 1854 and the present, these columns furnished a reminder of how much the culture had evolved even between the years, 1854 and 1894.
Dueling as an institution left much to be desired. It cost the lives of too many fairly worthy individuals. They were not always fought honorably, and the reasons for which they were fought were often trivial, regarded as such even by the standards of the time. But overall the code duello , and the culture the code duello embodied, presents a projection of the human spirit that reflects rather favorably against the soft, indulgent portrait we see of ourselves today.
1
Golden Era California
One of the most gifted and quarrelsome of California newspaper editors in the 1850s was Andrew C. Russell, a native of North Carolina who came west with the first wave of gold seekers. But like many Southern gentlemen types, he never intended to support himself by mining. Instead he took a seat on the editor s tripod and began penning editorials for the San Francisco Picayune , the fourth newspaper to be established in that town. Impeccably honest and perhaps overly earnest, Russell s editorial style ruffled many feathers.
One of his early editorials caught the eye of Captain Joseph Folsom, a New Yorke