Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California

"In Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California, the author presents a portrait of a society in flux, where ancient Spanish and Chinese legal practices collided with English common law and the "Code of the West," where greed, poverty, and downright meanness created tensions that frequently led to bloodshed.

The text, enhanced with testimony from contemporary sources and illustrated with period photographs, is an engaging and intelligent study of a frontier society where the law was neither omnipresent nor, frequently, impartial."--BOOK JACKET.