Hellacious California!: Tales of Rascality, Revelry, Dissipation, and Depravity, and the Birth of the Golden State

In 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California can and does furnish the best bad things, including purer liquors…finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic] than anywhere else in America. Lured by boons of gold and other exploitable resources, California’s settler popula