Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California. By Clare V. McKanna Jr. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. xii, 148 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-87417-515-1.)

Abstract

As readers of Mark Twain have always known, California mining camps and cattle towns rivaled, in microcosm, the mayhem committed by “the gangs of New York.” Today, historians are empirically redefining the contours of this subject. A student of the intersection of violent crime, the criminal justice system, and race in the American West, Clare V. McKanna Jr. has provided us with a valuable book on nineteenth-century California comparable to the work of Roger Lane on eastern cities. Supplementing criminal indictments with coroners' inquests, court and prison records, and newspaper accounts, McKanna offers a case study of the experience of Indians, Chinese, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites with criminal homicide in seven gold camp, Central Valley, and coastal counties. It is significant that his approach documents as homicides seldom-prosecuted police shootings and lynchings (p. 6). McKanna's findings confirm conventional wisdom in some respects while challenging it in others. In nineteenth-century California, racial and class disparities in the criminal justice system disadvantaged minorities and also “marginal whites” in terms of disproportionately high indictment and conviction rates, poor legal representation, and more severe punishment for homicide (p. 108). There were, however, significant group variations. Stigmatized as “diggers,” California Indian defendants—37 percent of the time accused of killing white victims—had the highest interracial homicide rate (p. 14). They were convicted 80 percent of the time and sentenced to death or life imprisonment 49 percent of the time (p. 39). In contrast, 93.5 percent of the victims of Chinese accused of murder were other Chinese (p. 33). Chinese defendants rarely used interpreters to make incriminating pretrial statements and infrequently “copped a plea,” and they sometimes also benefited from good legal counsel hired by benevolent societies or tongs (pp. 50–51). As a result, they had their cases dismissed or were acquitted 60 percent of the time (p. 49). The Hispanic experience was somewhat intermediate. While Indian killers often struck out at white society in inebriated rage and Chinese murderers pursued blood feuds, Hispanic killers typically were motivated by a felt need to vindicate “the Hispanic machismo code of honor” (p. 56).