A lucid, lively melding of economic and political history that casts new light on the Golden State.
An exploration of the California Gold Rush, linking it with attempts to join the state to the Confederacy.
It all began at Sutter’s Mill, the mini-empire of “a failed clothier who’d abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland and sailed to America.” John Sutter went as far as he dared in the remoteness of Mexican California to found “a private kingdom in the wilderness,” one staffed by enslaved Indigenous peoples, their numbers augmented by vigilante raids on neighboring villages, with Sutter trafficking captured women and children. In this account by Phibrick (In the Heart of the Sea, 2000; Travels With George, 2021, etc.), this theme of enslavement and violence defined California up to the Civil War and beyond, with white supremacy a constant. Indeed, California legislators worked to pass laws banning Black people from entering the state, while later railroad magnates attempted unsuccessfully to restrict transcontinental travel to whites only. Against this backdrop, an early senator, William Gwin, attempted to unite Southern California with the Confederacy, complete with importing enslaved Black people, but, on realizing that the northern part of the state had all the gold, he suggested that “the state should declare its independence as part of a Pacific Republic extending all the way east to the Rocky Mountains.” To his credit, a senior military officer stationed in California, the future Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, told his officers that should they wish to join the secessionist cause, they should go home to do so, saying, “Strife here would be civil war—not North against South—but neighbor against neighbor; and no one can imagine the horrors that would ensue.” All the same, vigilante violence was so extensive that California provided a “dress rehearsal” for the dissolution of the Union, even if the statehood conferred on California in 1850 admitted it as a free state. As ever, Philbrick untangles this complex story and makes of it an elegant narrative.
A lucid, lively melding of economic and political history that casts new light on the Golden State.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780525562238
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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