Historian John Mack Faragher (A Great and Noble Scheme) has spent his career writing about frontiers in general and the American West specifically. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, he considers the structure and culture of violence in frontier society, how violence reproduces and polices itself in an "honor culture," and the slow development of an official justice system in Los Angeles in the mid-19th century. The result is a fascinating look at how official justice competed with vigilantism as southern California moved from Mexican to U.S. control.
Drawing on a combination of official records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal papers, memoirs and autobiographies, Faragher tells stories of murder, retaliation, domestic violence, racism and greed. At the same time, he never loses sight of the larger history of the region. He offers detailed accounts of individual conflicts, and then sets them within greater contexts of southern Californian conquest--first by Mexico and then the United States--the Texas rebellion, the American Civil War and the gold rush of 1848.
Faragher's Los Angeles is a frontier outpost with no white-hatted heroes and plenty of ethnic conflict. Native Americans newly freed from control of the missions, native angeleños, African American slaves and freedmen, North American adventurers, and the United States Army and Navy compete for resources, political control and women, with blades, guns and lances. (At one point, the Army and Navy came close to armed conflict with each other.) Eternity Street is an ugly story, beautifully told. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins