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Review
| Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California, by Clare V. McKanna, Jr. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. 148 pp. $29.95, cloth.
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| Just how violent the frontier West was has been a topic of debate among historians. This author persuasively argues for the concept of "critical convergence," showing that the bringing together of a number of factors will dramatically escalate violence in a frontier setting. These factors include rapid population growth, different races and cultures in close proximity, liquor, firearms, young single men, and a boomtown environment offering saloons, brothels, and gambling. The result is a powder keg producing violence touched off by insults to honor, accusations of cheating at cards, jealousy, drunkenness, and guns or knifes at hand. He finds his evidence in seven California counties and the homicides that took place there from the gold rush era to the end of the 19thcentury. Within this setting, McKanna examines four groups involved in homicides, focusing on who committed murder and how they met, or did not meet, with justice. |
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McKanna's study involves crimes committed by whites, Hispanics, Chinese, and Indians but there is little of the mythic West here. Drawing on pardon applications, prison registers, coroners' inquests, case files, and Superior Court minutes, McKanna constructs a statistical analysis of how these four groups were treated in the courts. The findings may be obvious, but the statistical support for them is impressive and offers fresh insights into understanding violence in the West. In the counties studied, Chinese mainly murdered other Chinese; Hispanics murdered their own kind in almost sixty percent of the cases, with white victims second at twenty-seven percent; Indians murdered other Indians in about fifty-three percent of the cases, with white victims around thirty-seven percent; and whites mostly killed other whites, but also killed more Hispanics than did the Indians and Chinese combined. What kind of justice did these murderers get? Indians were found guilty eighty percent of the time, Chinese forty percent, Hispanics fifty-four percent and whites forty-three percent. Indians and Hispanics were executed in greater percentages than whites and Chinese. Poor whites were much more likely to be convicted than prominent ones. Only one white was convicted of murdering an Indian, and this was in 1890, in Calaveras County, where whites and Miwok Indians were learning to coexist, and the murderer had no social standing in the white community. The statistics demonstrate the bitter truth that in a white-dominated society, minorities were not going to get what by any modern standards would be considered a fair trial. McKanna cites cases of prominent whites killing Indians and Hispanics and being acquitted or having indictments dismissed. |
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McKanna also finds that the so-called "code of the West" had little application in California. According to the code, which seems to have been known best among cattlemen in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, one was never to shoot an unarmed man or shoot a man in the back, was never to accept an insult without a fight, and was never to back off from a fight. McKanna cites cases where the murderers of unarmed men were acquitted, as were backshooters, especially if they were prominent men. Challenges to honor were made in the dubious atmosphere of brothel and saloon, with drunkenness influencing behavior. The evidence clearly supports McKanna's contention, "In nineteenth-century California the scales of justice were unbalanced." |
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Although his book is brief (108 pages of text), McKanna succeeds in making his case for injustice in the areas he studied. However, the book does not treat homicide in Los Angeles County, and it measures murder rates in only four gold rush area counties. The sampling may well be representative of the entire state, as McKanna argues, but he does leave the door open as to whether his conclusions apply to other Western states and territories. Teachers of California and ethnic history, and anyone wishing to incorporate McKanna's findings into a discussion of racial prejudice in the 19th century, will find this book of considerable value. Students who choose the book for a book review because of its apparent brevity may find the statistical discussions tough going and not what they expected in a book with this title. Since Advanced Placement and Honors classes are expected to have more serious criteria in book selection, they may find it valuable as an example of how careful research yields important conclusions. |
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| Los Angeles Valley College |
Abraham Hoffman |
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