 All right, we're ready to begin. Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for our program, Galatius, California, Tales of Rascality, Revelry, Interpretation and Depravity and the Birth of the Golden State with author Gary Neu. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute. And we're very pleased to welcome Gary back for his new book. Now, certainly after such a tumultuous day at our nation's capital yesterday, this reflection on California history may not make us so proud of our past, but it certainly gives us character and also shows us that anything is possible here in the Golden State. Galatius, California tours the rambunctious and occasionally appalling amusements of the Golden State, including gambling, duels, knife fights, racist dining and gluttony, prostitution, fandangos, cigars, con artistry and demon drink. Historian Gary Neu unearths a myriad primary sources, which some of which have not even been seen before, to create this wonderful book of tales of California. And again, we're very pleased to welcome Gary back. Now, of course, in the middle of all this story is Mechanics Institute, since we were founded in 1854, and we continue to be one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. And of course, in 1854, we were one of the more civilizing influences with our library and our chess club, civilizing wild San Francisco. So if you're new to the Mechanics Institute, please see our website and also tell your friends to join up on our e-list to hear about more of our programs that are all happening online. Also, our talk will be followed by Q and A. So again, if you have questions, you can put them in the chat and Pam will be reading off the questions to Gary and we'll have a nice conversation afterwards. Also, the book, Palatius, California can be purchased at alexanderbook.com and Pam will also put that in the chat. So if you'd like to purchase books from our local bookstore, that would be great. And now I would like to introduce our guest, a Sierra Nevada native and current resident, Gary Newey taught at the Sierra College from 1987 to 2012. There he founded the Center for Sierra Nevada Studies and served as its director until his retirement. His previous titles include Sierra stories, tales of dreamers, schemers, bigots and rogues, also published by Hay Day, which won the gold medal for best regional nonfiction from the next generation indie book awards and also illuminated landscape, a Sierra Nevada anthology, which he co-edited and also distant horizon documents from the 19th century American West. And you can visit his website at garynewey.com. And also I wanna thank our great colleagues over at Hay Day for collaborating on this program. It's always a pleasure to work with our local publishing house. So once again, I wanna say that Gary's writing is as wonderful, colorful and as entertaining as his subject. So please welcome Gary Newey. Well, thank you, Laura. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I wanna say thank you to you at Mechanics Institute and to thank you and Pam who's running the keyboards for our little band here tonight. As Laura mentioned, this is the second time I've spoken for Mechanics Institute, very different circumstances. It was in 2017 when I talked about my then book Gold Rush Stories. It's different now, of course, we're all in our little Zoom cubicles and I hope you all are doing well in these challenging times. I know I've been stuck in this house since March and I gotta tell you, the people who actually live here really wish I would leave, but what are you gonna do? Hopeful at Eastern. I am glad to be here and thank you all for being here tonight. I'd like to talk to you tonight about and you saw the cover. I'm gonna go about my book, my new book, Coletius, California. And I thought I'd start by talking about the origins of the book. As Laura mentioned, I've written other books about 19th century America. I'm gonna do a little show and tell here. A book called Distant Horizon documents of the 19th century American West with Hay Day illuminated landscape on Sierra Nevada literature, which I did with my friend Rick Heidi. Laura mentioned was Sierra Stories, which is unusual stories of the Sierra Nevada, also a Hay Day and Sierra College Press book. And when I was here before in 2017, it was Gold Rush Stories, which are stories about California Gold Rush, a Hay Day and Sierra College Press book too. And when I did these books, there's something I discovered and I really didn't realize this until I did my Gold Rush Stories book. And that is when I looked at these events and the individuals that I was writing about invariably with very few exceptions, whatever they did, whatever was impactful or noteworthy was tied to a vice. When they were doing it, they were gambling or they were drinking or they were smoking or they were fighting or dueling or eating too much or involved in a crime like prostitution or they were con artists or they were involved with certain forms of entertainment or listening to a singer or watching a stage show at the time of the event. And I thought to myself, if I'm going to get a real sense of what this 19th century world of California and the American West is like, I should focus on the common denominator which are the vices. So I decided in Helacious, California to write about in the 19th century California world about these various forms of vices and how they impacted the development of California, the birth of the Golden State, the Gold Rush Year all the way through the end of the 19th century and to focus on that. And that's what the nature of the book is. So our theme tonight, what I'm going to talk about in Helacious, California is life in 19th century California. And it was a period of enormous memorable change. And if we look at it, we see the development of a vision of California that we have today that's a not always accurate one. The vision we have of California today is we're innovative, we're a kind of classic, we're rule breaking, we're on the cutting edge of societal development. And many of those kind of venerable California traits as we see them today can be traced back to the 19th century in California and with these vices attached to them. The time period that the book deals with is from 1821 to 1900, from when Mexico gained independence from the Spanish empire all the way to the end of the 19th century. And an examination of the vices of the time period. And if you think of California in the 19th century, there were huge changes, enormous changes. And most of them in the 1821 to 1900 period occurred in the first 30 years through 1850. Just think about this. California went from being a distant outpost of an empire, the Spanish empire, to a largely ignored province of Mexico, Alta, California, to a short lived independent republic, the Bear Flag Republic, to a period at the beginning of the Gold Rush era in which there was a curious mix of what historians call a self-governing dominion in which California was basically on its own with very little law and a military governorship and then statehood. And all of that happened within about a 30 year period within a generation with all of the major social changes, with all of the different legal systems, with all of the various cultures that were rushing in to California. And then you layer on top of that the impact of the seminal event of 19th century California which is the Gold Rush in which you have huge population bursts, 1500% increase in population in one year. 300,000 people come in a matter of months basically to California. You have the single largest migration of people to a single place for a single purpose in 600 years since the Crusades. Huge changes. And out of this comes this vision we have of California. And if you look at this old California period, I really think it can be summarized in a string of four letter words. And you don't have to, you don't have to cover your ears for these four letter words. It's words like fear and love and lust, hate, loss, pain, hope. And probably the most significant one of this time period, the word free. Personal liberty, freedom from government interference, freedom to do whatever you wanted without fear of a retribution was hugely important. But it wasn't just exclusive to 19th century California. This is true throughout the United States. And they are really true today. They describe all of our experiences regardless of the year. Human nature doesn't change much. But what made old California's experience different which is I focus on in Alacias, California is that there was a sense of immediacy and urgency and intensity that was very, very unique. And it helped define the California we know today in a very complex and complicated way. 19th century California was all about rapidity, all about rapid change. There was a Scottish observer who came to the California Goldfields in 1853. His name was John David Borthwick. And when he wrote about society in the gold rush, he wrote this, he said, the everyday jog trot of ordinary human existence was not a fast enough pace for Californians in their impetuous pursuit of wealth. The longest period of time ever thought of was a month. Everything was turnover, everything was change. Everything was impermanent. This was a world, 19th century California that was dedicated to impermanence. It was a world that revered change. It expected change, it desired change. It was the stamp of this society. And out of this, how it played out was there was this live for the moment, anything goes ethos that developed. It translated into specific things for instance, like courtships were very short in California. Throughout the United States in the 19th century, courtships were either short or very long. And in California, they were uniquely short. It was not unusual for courtships from meeting somebody to getting married to take place in a day or two. That was not uncommon in the 19th century. That also leads to another characteristic, which was that marriages were often very brief in which the short courtships led to incompatibility. And as a result, California led the nation by far in divorces. Just to give you an idea, the second state in terms of divorces per capita was New York. California was one. California had twice as many divorces per capita annually than New York, which was the second state. It also was a world in which because everything changed rapidly and things were ephemeral. Towns, relationships and so forth that quick resolutions to disputes were also quite common. And this could take the form of violence. Dueling, for instance, was a way to bypass, in some cases, a non-existent legal system. And so California was characterized by a sense of violence and quick result resolution of problems that was really remarkable. One thing I learned in writing this book that I've spent a lot of time in the 19th century talking about and writing about these things is I thought forever that the center of violence in mid 19th century America was New York City with the gangs of New York, the Five Points region and so forth until I read some groundbreaking research, recent research by historian. I hope I pronounced his last name correctly. His name was Eric Moncanon, I believe. And he did a study of violence in mid 19th century America and found that without question, the most violent place, the murder capital of United States was Southern California. It was Los Angeles specifically, far greater than New York. And so there was a lot of this rapidity and an urgency and immediacy that played itself out in the day-to-day activities of Californians in the 19th century. It leads to something that is really quite unique, I think, in examining the American West in that California in the 19th century because everything changed so rapidly really didn't establish any traditions because people were here for a short time or they moved or they changed their outlook or their profession. Real traditions really didn't establish themselves. And there's a historian by the name of James Gregory who I've quoted in the book, wrote a fabulous essay called The Shaping of California. If you please indulge me, I'm gonna read from the book here. He wrote this. He said, continuous repopulation is the critical drama of California's history and the source of some of its unique cultural claims. Wave after wave of newcomers from an ever-changing list of places that have remade California again and again over the years, each time adding something new, even while they allow the state to retain its most paradoxical tradition, their tradition of change. So of all the traditions that California had, it changed. One of the characteristics as well was the response to all of this by institutions, by the government. And one of the things that the 19th century showed was that there was a pattern. Whatever the vice was, drinking and gambling, say we'll use that as an example, there was outrage. In the beginning of California as a state, there were some of the first earliest legislation was restrictions and prohibitions on gambling in which the legislation said, we disapprove of these excesses and vices and we are gonna pass legislation to regulate and prohibit it and then comes the end of the pattern which is they were ignored. They paid no attention to it, but they addressed it. So you have constantly in California this dichotomy between change and addressing it and not doing anything and rapid change and urgency and immediacy and intensity that characterized 19th century California. And that's what this book here, Volatius California focuses on, how these vices impacted the development of the state and how it demonstrates the fact that there is constant change, a transition, almost constantly roiling transition between addressing something and not addressing it, between changing something and not changing thing a very complicated world that sets the stage for events to come in our present day world. That leads me to the title of the book which is Helatius California and why did I choose the word Helatius for the title? Well, if you've heard the word Helatius, you're probably like I was when I started this process. When you hear the word Helatius, you think of something terrible like there was a Helatius car accident. But in reality, and this is the reason I chose the word Helatius for the title, Helatius has two meanings depending on how you use it. Helatius can mean something astonishing or awe-inspiring or it can mean something appalling and destructive or it can mean both at the same time depending on how it's used. Let me give you some examples. This duality perfectly reflects, I think, the fact that California in the 19th century did stuff that was impressive, but it also did things that were disconcerting and troubling, sometimes at the same time, it was very complicated nature of the state. And so, just to give you a couple of quick examples, the nature of Helatius. I'm sure you've all encountered at some time or another one of those hailstorms that sweeps across Northern California, particularly if you live in the foothills or the Sierra Nevada, which they got those big old hailstones, bigger than golf balls that sweep across the landscape. Well, if you look at that hailstorm in one way, you look at that and say that is astonishing, amazing demonstration of the power and majesty of nature. But you look at the same hailstorm and you can say, that hailstorm was dangerous, knocking down tree limbs and cracking windows and breaking car windshields. It's just destructive and damaging and terrible. That's Helatius, a Helatius hailstorm. But you can also look at it and say, that was an astonishing hailstorm that was very destructive, both at the same time simultaneously. That's Helatius. And California demonstrated that, that it had this mix constantly, that was good and bad, light and dark, impactful and destructive, remarkable and horrifying, sometimes all at the same time. And what the book does is it looks at some of the events and devices and how this played out. Let me give you two more examples. This is more in tune with the way I wrote the book through storytelling. Two more examples of Helatius. And for both of these, we need to go into the time machine. And the first one, we go back to November 21st, 1897. And there we see in the San Francisco Call newspaper, an article written by a man named Isaac Coggin. Now the name Isaac Coggin may not mean anything to you. He was a San Franciscan. But my guess is that you may have been, probably have been, to the venue he's responsible for. If you go to Golden Gate Park, there is the big, beautiful bandshell outside, bandshell for outside concerts in the middle of the park. Well, Isaac Coggin in the 1890s was the general manager and conductor of the Golden Gate Park Band. Back when outdoor concerts were incredibly popular. And when he took over, the structure for the concerts was kind of this rude wooden structure, but they became more popular than money was allocated to build this big, beautiful bandshell structure that is still there today. So Isaac Coggin was a well-respected, well-known figure in San Francisco society. But on November 21st, 1897, a newspaper article appeared in the San Francisco Call newspaper. Excuse me just a minute. Oh, I got a little frog in my throat. And in this article in the San Francisco Call newspaper, respected newspaper, Isaac Coggin tells the story of something that happened to him at Lake Tahoe 30 years earlier. And it was very much a surprise to people who knew Coggin. And what Coggin relates is that when he was a young man in the 1860s, he worked as an agricultural laborer at Lake Tahoe and he had a day off. So he decided to go hunting along the shoreline of Lake Tahoe and he took his favorite dog and he was hiking along the shoreline of Lake Tahoe when all of a sudden his dog sniffed and turned and started running. And just parenthetically, the dog was running very fast. They did not find the dog for three days. And when they found it, it was cowering under a porch of a cabin. Well, Coggin quickly found out why the dog had run off because as he stood on the shore of Lake Tahoe, he looked up the hillside away from the lake and he heard this crashing banging noise and trees were falling over and boulders were rolling by him and splashing into the lake. He didn't know what it was. Was it an earthquake, a landslide? He had no idea. But Coggin decided that the safest place for him to be was up in a tree. So he climbs 20 feet up into a pine tree and there he looks up the hill. He looks up the hill and he sees the trees and the crashing noise and emerging from the forest comes this creature. And Coggin describes this long creature with a black skin with a red belly that's like a serpent with a long, skinny neck and a head on top of this long, skinny neck. And as it crashes through the trees and the rocks and passes by Coggin, remember he's 20 feet up in the tree, the head of the creature passes by five feet above him. And Coggin says the head of the creature is 14 feet wide. The eyes are bigger, it's the biggest serving platters. The neck is 14 feet across and he estimates the humpy bumpy body of this to be 600 feet long. And then he watches as the creature, the serpent rumbles down to the lake and enters into the water and swims out into the lake and disappears. Coggin in this article says there were nine other eyewitnesses to this. Well, we hear this today and we think this guy is just nuts. But this was at a time when in the 1890s, it had been 40 years since Yosemite had been, Yosemite Valley had been opened up for tourism and still the estimates are that more than half of Californians did not believe a place like Yosemite existed. This was only four years after a giant sequoia was cut down in 1893 to go to the Chicago World's Fair to demonstrate to people back east that there were trees that big, they didn't believe that. And it was a time period in which in San Francisco in particular in the 1890s, a very popular event, I guess you'd call it was something called spirit photography where it was widely believed that you could photograph the ghosts of dead relatives. So maybe a large creature 600 feet long living in Lake Tahoe was not so far out of the ordinary. That's astonishing, that's elacious. That's part of the mix of California. Those of you who are familiar with Lake Tahoe lore know the story of Tahoe Tessie, which is supposedly a Loch Ness-like monster that lives in the lake. This may have been, Coggin's story may have been a building on that or may have been the origin of that story. So that's the astonishing part of hellacious and there's stories like that in California where people are impressed by the wonders that California has. But then there's the other part of the equation. And for this, we need to hop in the time machine and go back to 1855 to the North Fork of the American River. And there, it's in the Gold Rush period, there are prospectors wandering along the North Fork which goes through Auburn. And they're wandering along the shore of the river bank of the North Fork looking for a place to dig into gold pan. And this group of half a dozen placer miners come across a river bank that's collapsed. And so they think it's a good place to dig up this already loosened dirt to do some gold panning. And they start digging away the dirt when all of a sudden they see a flash of red. And they're taken aback and they dig a little bit more and they see more red. And then finally, as they move away the dirt, the arm of a body falls out of the river bank of a young man wearing a red flannel shirt. And they remove the body and according to, and they don't know this young man, there's no identification. And according to the accounts of this event, the miners say nothing. It becomes eerily silent. And they take the body and they lovingly take it up the river bank away from the river and they bury it and they form a kind of rudimentary coffin. And then they bury the young man. They say absolutely nothing. And then they move on. And recounting this event later, one of the individuals, one of the miners said, we said nothing because we were so moved by the fact that this young man, his family would never know what happened to him. His friends would never know what happened to him. And as soon as we walked away, no one would ever know where his grave was. And to us, it was so deeply moving because we knew that, but for the grace of God, that could be us. Well, that's salacious too. That's part of the mix. This light and dark, remarkable and horrifying, impactful world that California found itself in. And it played itself out through the vices, through indulgence and also rejection, through anything goes, not worrying about the consequences, to trying to regulate and prohibit it and oftentimes failing. 19th century California wasn't all frivolity and dancing and Barbary Coast excesses and gold rush, what I call your Pate Your Wagon Syndrome, everybody's happy and is almost comical. It was a mix. It was very much reflective of human emotions and it was so intense. Everything happened so rapidly. Now I changed a little bit what I wanted to talk about tonight because of the events as Laura mentioned in her introduction, the events of yesterday. In Washington D.C. As I watched that in horrors, I think we all did. I couldn't help it, I've written lots of books about the 19th century, a lot of the time my head is spent in the 19th century. I couldn't help but think about events that took place back in the 19th century that had some similarities to this. I am not one of those people who believes that history repeats itself. Human emotion and human nature doesn't change much but the circumstances always do and so it's never the same. But I do subscribe to a philosophy that's attributed to, falsely attributed to Mark Twain and he supposedly said actually to someone else that are not quite sure who said that history doesn't repeat itself but on occasions it does rhyme. It sounds similar, it looks similar but it's not exactly the same. And as I watched the events yesterday, I thought in the 19th century there was the assault on the Capitol building in 1814 by the British when they burnt the Capitol building down. I thought of 1855 when there was violence on the floor of the Senate, when Charles Sumner was beaten on the floor of the Senate about the fact that guns were drawn in a political debate on the House of Representatives floor in the 1830s and as I watched the reaction to events yesterday, I saw and still see it today, the immediacy and the urgency and the intensity of the response in American life to the events of what happened in Washington DC yesterday. And I thought to myself, that's got to be the same kind of intensity and emotional urgency that you saw throughout the 19th century California experience where people want immediate action, they're emotional, they're passionate, it's similar I think. And so as I thought about this, I thought in the time we have remaining, I thought I would just share with you, take some of the important issues of today and some of the parallels that took place in 19th century California. Today, I think the three major issues that face us are election disputes and violence, whole issue of racial reckoning and the pandemic. Well, let's start with election disputes and violence. We saw the outgrowth of that yesterday. Well, on November 2nd, 1852, it was election day in the United States, presidential election year, Franklin Pierce was elected president that year. In Sacramento, a fire broke out and it probably was an accident, but at the time the belief was that the fire was set by individuals who were unhappy with the results of the presidential election, who thought the election was corrupt and probably influenced by outsiders, probably foreign interference. Sound familiar? Well, the results of this in Sacramento was there were six dead, there were 2,500 buildings destroyed, 2,500 buildings destroyed, and in today's money, in excess of $500 billion, 500, half a billion dollars worth the property damage. So there's a similarity. When it comes to racial reckoning, we are of course seeing the aftermath of the George Floyd death. Well, in California, there was a racial reckoning as well. In the 1850s, the black population of California were heavily restricted. There was no slavery in California, but there was major discrimination and in particular, one thing that the African-American population of California hated was the fact that blacks were not allowed to testify against whites in court. So this led to a series of what at the time were called the colored conventions in California, three of them, to discuss legal remedies for injustices and discrimination against African-Americans in California with the focus on this testimony issue. And one of the delegates from Nevada County, the county where I was born, born in Grass Valley, one of the delegates to the first convention said this. He said, it is with pride I say we are resolved to let them see that all we want is an equal chance and open field and a fair fight. We intend to disprove the allegation that we are inferior to them. These are words that could be said today. The end result of this was that the testimony ban was not lifted. An assembly bill was introduced in soon afterwards, assembly bill 339, which was called an act to restrict and prevent the immigration and residence in the state of Negroes and mulattoes. That was the title of the bill. And under the proposed law, blacks who visited California had to register entry into the state and they were restricted in their entry and blacks who lived in California had to carry a registration certificate proving their residence. And if they did not have their certificate, they could go to prison. This was not compulsory for any other group in the state and other groups like the Chinese and native Californians were also heavily discriminated against. Only the blacks were targeted in this way. And the law didn't pass for technical reasons, but for black Californians, it was so disgusting that this was even being considered that ultimately 15% of California's black population migrated to Britain, so these accused had some similarities to today's world too. And then the pandemic, of course, I must say that when I wrote this book, if I had had a crystal ball, I would have entered something, written something about pandemics. But I literally, on the day I received what used to be called Gallyproofs, the PDF, the printout of what the book looks like, literally on the day I got it was the day they were starting to have restrictions on lockdowns in California over COVID-19. So I couldn't do it. But there was a pandemic that impacted California as well. In the mid-1850s, specifically 1850 itself, there was a cholera pandemic. And the cholera pandemic was part of, we're into almost the end of year one of the COVID pandemic. This cholera pandemic in the mid-19th century, part of three waves of the cholera epidemic in the 19th century, this particular wave lasted 30 years. And in 1850, roughly 10% of California's population died in the cholera pandemic. And it hit very hard, it lasted at its height about 30 days. Including in Sacramento, there were 17 doctors who died from cholera, which was virtually all of the medical corps in Sacramento in 1850. There's a monument to them in the old Sacramento Historic Cemetery. It was about 1200 people. But the population of California in 1850, this was before everybody was here for the California Gold Rush, was about 100,000. So if we had the same percentage of our population die today, it would be about 400,000 people. The cholera pandemic in 1850 saw widespread denial of the fact that it was impacting them and the aggressive promotion of bogus cures of quackery, which has some similarities to what is happening with us today. There are parallels. It's not exactly the same, but there are similarities. And what I tell my students when I teach history is that the goal, the ideal goal of history is to learn from it, that hopefully we won't make the mistakes in the future. But the sad reality is that oftentimes we don't learn from it. And it's a testament to what I think is important, which is to get as much information as you possibly can to learn as much of the history of the past so that you have a database that you can draw upon that's if issues affect us, hellacious issues affect us in the future. We have a response, something we can draw upon to make informed decisions. This 19th century California was a remarkable time period, very complicated with all of these different aspects impacting the direction of California life. And I'd like to leave you with something from the book that I think demonstrates this dichotomous nature of California in the 19th century as reflected in its entertainment's advices and so forth. This is a story from 1859. I'm just gonna read it from the book and let me set the stage a little bit. In 1859 in San Francisco, there was a tourist attraction by the name of the Mountaineer Museum. And it was run by a man named John Adams who was a migrant from Massachusetts. He was a shoemaker by trade but he had become an animal collector, hunter and trapper. And he went by the name, this is a name I'm sure you've heard, he called himself Grizzly Adams. And he had this museum in downtown San Francisco on what became the Barbary Coast and there he displayed all kinds of wild animals. He had bears of all kinds including a grizzly bear named Samson. He had elk and eagles and African lions and tigers. He had mountain lions. And he was especially proud, his advertisements emphasize this. He also had an enormous hog. Well, at the same time of this, and he's always, Adams was trying to promote his museum all the time. Well, at the same time this was taking place, one of the most popular sports athletic endeavors of the time period is something that doesn't exist anymore. It's called pedestrianism. And pedestrianism was walking races and it took various forms but the most famous of these were marathon walking races in which a group of men who would walk until all of them dropped out but except one it was akin to the marathon dancing of the Great Depression. And the great proponent, the great superstar of California pedestrians was a man named James Kennevin. He called himself Uncle Jimmy Kennevin and he was lionized for his gumption and his perseverance in this pedestrianism activity. There was actually a biography that was written about him that sold well called the Life and Adventures of James Kennevin Champion Pedestrian of the World. And so it was proposed by Kennevin to Adams to work together to promote Kennevin and Grizzly Adams Museum. So let me read this to you. This is from the book. In 1859, in a moment that perfectly encapsulates the intersection of the eccentric and extraordinary in old California entertainment, Uncle Jimmy Kennevin proposed staging a public spectacle in association with Grizzly Adams. Kennevin suggested that Adams put him in a cage with a live and unrestrained mountain lion and bear and the cage would then be paraded through the streets of San Francisco to promote Adams Mountain near museum. In return, Uncle Jimmy, who was at that point essentially destitute would receive handsome compensation for the deed. Grizzly Adams wholeheartedly agreed to the promotion and with this quote unquote piece of recklessness as it was called in the Life and Adventures of James Kennevin Champion Pedestrian of the World, Uncle Jimmy quote accomplished much to his own pecuniary assistance and to Adams delight. At the conclusion of the stunt and only a few seconds after Kennevin left the cage, the bear attacked one of Adams handlers and tore off the man's right arm. There you have it. The astonishing and horrifying all at once, Palacios, California. That was the nature of the world that California found itself in 19th century and which impacts us to this day. Thank you. Thank you, Gary for that wonderful introduction to your very, very, very rich and colorful book. I'll just start off to ask you first of all about the book cover. And do we know more about, I mean, California, the great promoters and advertisers of everything from the simplest to the most extravagant. Do we know anything about this gregarious gal on the cover? This is a very bold advertisement, isn't it? Very unique. This is, yes, this was when we were, I was looking for images for the book. I came across this and the wonderful designer of the cover, Ashley Ingram from Hay Day, said this would be perfect one because it kind of has the sass and the fire that you're talking about in the book. The interesting thing about this image is that the title of it is Young Man Smoking a Cigar. Young Man. And it's clearly a woman. And the belief is, I think it's a theatrical photograph. That this was an actress and it was quite common in those days for men to play women and women to play men in theatrical productions. And that's what I think this is. But in terms of kind of the attitude that was part of the world in 19th century Cal, I think it's just a perfect image for it. But that's all we know. There was nothing other than the fact that it was identified as a man. All right, well, we're gonna go on to some of our questions from the audience. Pam's gonna read out the questions. Here we go. We have a question from Andrew Ogus. Two, we asked two questions. The first one is, is there evidence of gay relationships in the freer days of early California? And the answer is yes. You have to kind of read between the lines that when you read the stories, there will be references to what were essentially gay partners. But they will couch it in such a way that it's veiled and kind of coded, but you get an idea that this was actually a gay relationship. And you find this a lot in diaries, in particular during the Gold Rush days. I was able to, and I wrote my Gold Rush book to have access to the state library to letters and diaries that hadn't been looked at for decades. And there are references to these kinds of things as well. There's also evidence, and I present this in the book too, that there were relationships across the board in illegal activities like prostitution too, that were also involved in the gay community or were gender variant in some way. And so it was, it's there, but you really have to look and you kind of have to understand the code to get the reference. It's not explicit, explicitly mentioned. The second question is, were the divorce laws more liberal here than elsewhere? Yes, the answer is yes. Not in the beginning, but as time went on, the divorce laws became the most liberal in the United States. And in particular, what's interesting about the actual statistics is that at least three quarters of all the divorce actions were introduced by women. And marriages were quick, courtships were quick, but women had a greater degree of control over their marital destiny than in other places. Other places in the United States during this time period, divorce was a two-part process. You had to get permission to pursue a divorce action first and then do the divorce action. And in many cases, women were denied even the first step. So California made it easier to get divorces. And in many respects, it was because of the nature of the California society and that women were relatively rare and that relationships started quickly and ended quickly. So yes, absolutely much more liberal. The next question's from Colleen Casey. When the cholera epidemic occurred in 1850, did people wear masks in social distance or what did they do to limit exposure? Yeah, that's nothing like today. The responses were, let me preface this by saying, when all this happened, when all the COVID stuff happened, I looked at, because I knew of the cholera pandemic, I looked at the reaction to communities to the arrival of the cholera epidemic because they know it was common. And you look at, and most of this happened in November of 1850, you look at the newspapers in October in Sacramento, for instance, and they will say, well, there's reports of cholera in San Francisco, but it's not gonna hit us. It's not gonna come to us. And then there's cholera a week later in Stockton. Oh, but it's not gonna come to Sacramento. And then the next thing you know, the Sacramento Union newspaper, for instance, is publishing daily what's called the Mortality Report, listing everybody that's died in Sacramento that day and every single one of them says cholera. And 10 days earlier, there were no cases and they were not at all fearful of it. Major denial. The response to it was, there were advertisements galore during this time period for elixirs and potions that you could take to cure cholera. Most of them were just repurposed. They were patent medicines had been around to treat diarrhea, for instance, that were sold as cholera pandemic cures. And probably the worst of all of the responses was in Sacramento, in which cholera is a water-based disease. In Sacramento, they came to, some entrepreneurs came to the conclusion that the problem was people weren't drinking water that was natural enough. The water was what was bringing the cholera to them. And so they went down to the river, Sacramento River and just dunked barrels in the river and sold the water as quote unquote, Sacramento Strait. And that was sold as a cure for cholera and it actually was a delivery system for it. But in terms of the kinds of things we see today, there was nothing quite like that. Another question from Carol Verberg. Considering how reluctant people were in the 19th century to record any details about vice for publication, how did you track down this info? Well, I have to disagree a little bit. It depends on who you look for. There are lots of people who kept diaries that were almost daily records of various vices, gambling and drinking, particularly drinking. There was one man named Alfred Doughton who kept a diary for 50 years and virtually every day he listed how much alcohol he drank. And he actually invented different terms for being drunk. He called it being tight or being bamboozled in different names like that. There are records of people who kept records of gambling and vice and there are commercial records of prostitution. They're there. And finding them has become increasingly easier. When I first started doing this stuff 20-something years ago, you had to go find the actual documents and nothing was digitized today because things are digitized, you can find them much easier. And a great resource, if you're gonna do any research on this, I wanna recommend is the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which was run by UC Riverside, I think it is, that's all searchable and has newspapers from the mid-19th century all the way up to today as a great research tool. And it's much easier today, but the material's there. And a lot of people were reluctant, you're correct in your question, people were reluctant, but you can still find it. And it's fascinating to see the extent that people would go to indulge their vices. I have a question from Eric Craig Moody. Is there evidence of people moving to California to get a quote, California divorce unquote? And during the 50s of the 20th century, there were Nevada divorces. Was there was something similar going on in the 19th century with California? Well, I must confess, I'm not familiar with the term Nevada divorce, but that's the answer to your first question, which is people coming to California to get divorced. Yes, it happened. There were young men who had married prior to the Gold Rush and came to California during the Gold Rush and then never returned to California, back from California, never really intended to. And divorces were processed rather quickly in that regard. And then women, because of the liberal divorce laws, California divorces really were unique in that respect. And really could be categorized as California divorces, but certainly there are people who came here for a variety of reasons, and certainly one of them was to marry and to divorce as well. I have a couple of questions. Gary, I wanted to find out more about, I was intrigued by all the description of the Fandangos, and I was wondering if there was more influence, what kind of influence the California's culture had on the general popular culture? Yeah, the California's is really kind of the sad story of what happened, one of the sad stories that happened in 19th century, the negative side of the hellacious formula. And the California's culture very much influenced the early American period, as it's called, which is from the early 1840s, in which the Fandangos, the dances, the social events were oftentimes a mixture of the California culture and the Americano, norte Americanos, they're called, coming together and sharing their different cultures. That happened quite frequently. And the Fandangos, the dances, definitely absolutely impacted the California Gold Rush period. There are references galore to Fandangos in the California Gold Rush period, but also the culture of the Californians in terms of cattle raising, of horse culture, in terms of early standards of gambling. For instance, the Californios were significant in the development of these, quote unquote, recreations, I guess you'd call them. And the culture continued to have an impact and still does up until this day. But politically and in social status, the Californios took a major hit in 19th century California. And particularly in political status did not really recover for a long time after that. I have also another question about, for your research, do you have a favorite politician that comes to mind in terms of their impact on the California, the state of California or politics or culture? Was there someone that really stood out that you really, that you just relished writing about? That's a great question. It's hard for me to use the word favorite because the whole tenor of this book was kind of the bad stuff. But there was one political event that has some real resonance today and I have it in the book in which there was a duel that took place between a newspaper editor and a politician in Sacramento. And the newspaper editor was named Gilbert. And the politician was named Denver and he was a state official. And Gilbert had written an editorial about the governor at the time, Governor Bigler and Denver didn't like it. And so he insulted the newspaper editor. One thing led to another typical 19th century California thing led to a duel. And outside of Sacramento, they had a duel with rifles. That was very common, pistols, rifles, rifle dueling. And most duels in the 19th century neither side wanted to shoot each other. It was just a test of honor. But the newspaper editor was very angry about this and insisted upon it being a serious duel. And Denver, the politician, killed the newspaper editor. He was never arrested. It was just part of how dueling worked in those days, the code of dueling. This is where the politician part comes. That's all preface to what I'm gonna talk. Now, Denver became an increasingly prominent politician and some years after this duel, he was chosen as the governor of Nebraska Territory. And out of Nebraska Territory was carved out Colorado Territory. And when Colorado became a state, this governor of Colorado Territory, they named the state capital after him. His name is James Denver. And Denver, Colorado is named after a politician who killed a newspaper editor in Sacramento in a duel. So those are the kinds of things that 19, just another quick one. It wasn't until, since I had talked about Lake Tahoe earlier, Lake Tahoe was not known as Lake Tahoe officially until 1945. Prior to that, it officially was known as Lake Bigler. And it was named after a, I think of the third governor of California, John Bigler, who I rescued some people in a snowstorm on the positive side and on the negative side. He was also an alcoholic and pretty corrupt. But Lake Tahoe was named Lake Bigler until 1945 when they finally changed the name to Lake Tahoe. That's, there's political shenanigans involved there too. There's one last question. It's from Gary Craig Moody. How has COVID impacted the post-publication activities of your book, book tours and things like that? Well, it had just eliminated it completely. I've, for my other books, I figured it out once. I think I've done 300 and something presentations on my other books over the years, including Mechanics Institute. And for books like mine, you really have to go out and meet the public and people want to meet you in historical societies and so forth. That's how you get the word out. That all ended. I had to go and every one of them got canceled. This, the one tonight is the first one that I've had, including Zoom presentations, were canceled because in many cases, the groups were not proficient with Zoom. And so those got canceled. This is the first one that I've done since June and since COVID hit. It's tremendous impact. And I miss it. I miss it a lot. The coolest part of doing this is greeting people and talking to people and hearing their stories because I learned so much from them that everybody's got a story in their local community that I just find fascinating. And so it's, I miss it, but it absolutely made your impact. Gary, could you repeat the name of that resource you mentioned, the California Digital. Is this a website or is it a, what is the name of it again? It's the California Digital Newspaper Collection. And it is a website. You go to it and it's all searchable. You put in anything, you know, for instance, if you want to see the actual article of the serpent that Isaac Coggin has, just write Lake Tahoe Serpent and it'll come up. And you can see the images and you can see the description. It's great and you can, it'll cut and paste it for you. It'll put it into text for you. It's a wonderful resource. And I use it all the time. I have a friend of mine who's writing a book about one of the Clatchies and who owns the Sacramento Bee, uses this all the time. Great resource, California Digital Newspaper Collection. It's cdnc.unr.edu, is that correct? That's it. Okay, excellent. Wonderful. Well, that's a great resource for anyone else who's doing any writing on California history or topics thereof. We're so pleased, Gary, to have you back and also to promote your fabulous book. It's written, as you said, it's storytelling, it's sassy, it's detailed, it's a great read. So everyone really encouraged you to purchase a book online, either at alexanderbook.com or at your local, through your local book vendors and just enjoy this wonderful reflection and description of our California history and also how there's so many parallels today. So once again, Gary, we all wish you all the best. Everyone be in good health, stay safe and we look forward to seeing you at our next programs. Check our website and we will greet you again. So good night, everyone. We'll just open for a minute to say our goodbyes. Thank you and happy new year. Everyone can unmute and just say goodbye if they want. Thank you very much. Good night, everyone. Thank you. You're awesome. Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great we live in. Thank you. Good to see everyone. You did it. Bye-bye. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and close the doors. Thank you so much, Gary. I definitely am going to look at that website. And so long. Thank you. Thank you.