Eternity Street

The history of western violence has a long and esteemed bibliography, to which John Mack Faragher has made a remarkable addition with Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles. Prior scholars have debated the violence mostly of post–Civil War settlements, the cattle towns of Kansas, or the mining camps and ranges of the Southwest. And yet, few of those places could have been more terrifying than Los Angeles County in the 1850s. Its population of about six thousand suffered more than a hundred felonious homicides in the five-year period after statehood, a murder rate fifty times higher than New York’s. The incongruity of a glistening, sunswept coast plagued by violence, an Eden drenched in blood, puzzled contemporaries long before it attracted scholars. As Faragher notes, what we call LA noir seems to have been present before it was invented. Faragher finds causes for the era’s brutality in prior colonialism, as violence deployed against Native people engulfed their conquerors. A remote province with a predominantly male society and weak institutions, Mexican California was dominated by “honor culture” that was inflamed by Indian war and rapid economic growth. Neophytes forced from the missions turned on one another, and itinerant Mexican vaqueros and other laborers brought feuds and criminal passions to the small town. The first recorded lynching in Los Angeles occurred well before the American conquest, in 1836. Its perpetrators sought to stem a wave of murders. They failed. Despite a slowing of population growth, violent crime appears to have more than tripled over the next decade, and nine Californios (and more Indians) were killed. By the time war erupted with Americans, Los Angeles was so renowned for crime that one Mexican official rechristened it “the city of demons.”

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