The Golden Gazette

Not This Gazette,

The other Gazette

Not quite history but pretty close, this book is a collection of items culled from California newspapers from 1848 to 1857. The format is one page per month for every month from March 1848 to December 1857. Many interesting items but not history because we cannot know how much has been left out. From the evidence presented here, it seems that everybody (especially newspapermen) was fighting duels almost on a daily basis. Maybe that was the case or maybe the editor picked out every single dueling story he found and so dueling is vastly overrepresented. On the other hand, each item is a story that actually appeared in a newspaper of the time. Mr Ross, the editor of this compilation, does say that "Their writing style, however, has been modified to make the accounts more readable today." This always makes me a little uncomfortable because we can never know what is not there, it might be that one gem that throws new light upon the whole.

Very Close to Being Real History

In spite of the limitations

In spite of my reservations, this is a historical document. The format does allow us to see some stories' development over time. Two notable examples are Joaquin Murietta and William Walker. The Joaquin story grew until there were bandits named Joaquin pillaging every corner of California. Finally one Joaquin, Joaquin Murietta was killed and his head preserved for public display and that particular theme disappeared although robbery and banditry seems to have continued at the customary pace. I had known about William Walker's filibustering expedition in Nicaragua for a long time, but I had not realized; 1. that he started out as a California journalist and 2. before Nicaragua, he tried to invade Baja California.

This is a Bedside Book

For casual browsing

Not a historical reference for citation or extensive study. Even so, it has some valuable lessons about the history of the American West. It can be easy to miss how dynamic the Western scene was. Most of the things we think of as Western, the gold rush, cowboys and cattle drives, wagon trains and sodbusters, covers a span on only ten or twenty years before they were gone forever, to be replace by another overwhelming wave of change. The first page has an item giving San Francisco's population as being 812, a village. The last page, just shy of ten years later gives the city a population of 60,500, a major city. So; not really history but lots of interesting and quirky bits of historical information. You can get it here.