| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Trial of "Indian Joe": Race and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century West. By Clare V. McKanna Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xiv, 155 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8032-3228-4.)
Kansas Charley: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Boy Murderer. By Joan Jacobs Brumberg. (New York: Viking, 2003. xiv, 273 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-670-03228-X.)
During the last decade historians have produced a spate of interesting, thoughtful studies of individual murder cases, employing rigorous research methods to feed a burgeoning scholarly and popular appetite for true crime books. Clare V. McKanna Jr. and Joan Jacobs Brumberg add to this genre with monographs that explore two 1890 murders. Well researched and accessibly written but lightly documented, these studies analyze murder cases in which people living at the fringes of orderly society were convicted of capital offenses and executed in 1892. Both historians expose the loose, capricious courtroom atmosphere of the era and offer chilling tales about cultural anxieties shaping trials, subverting justice, and spearheading executions.	1
McKanna's The Trial of "Indian Joe" uses court records and newspaper reports to recount the trial of Jose Gabriel, a sixty-year-old Native American itinerant laborer. Derisively called Indian Joe during the trial, Gabriel, who spoke little English and barely understood the legal proceedings, was convicted of murdering and robbing two respectable, elderly farmers in San Diego County, near the Mexican border. The conviction rested on a shaky foundation of evidence but a rock-solid foundation of racism and cultural bias, as journalists, law enforcers, attorneys, jurors, and the judge responded to their fears of Native Americans and the poor.	. . .

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