Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California

Notes

109 Notes prologue: race and homicide 1. Confession of José Luís Osuna, 2, July 31, 1878, Justice Court, San Bernardo Township, San Diego County, San Diego Historical Society Research Archives, hereinafter sdhsra. 2. Ibid., 1. 3. San Diego Union, December 28, 1878. 4.Testimony of Samuel Temple, 2, People v. Samuel Temple, Justice Court, San Jacinto Township, San Diego County, sdhsra. 5. As quoted in Phil Brigandi and John W. Robinson,“The Killing of Juan Diego: From Murder to Mythology,” Journal of San Diego History 40 (Winter/Spring 1994): 4. 6. George Wharton James, Through Ramona’s Country (Boston: Little, Brown, 1909), 134. 7. Ibid., 135. 8. Decision of Justice of the Peace S. V. Tripp, March 31, 1883, 8, People v. Samuel Temple, Justice Court, San Jacinto Township, San Diego County, sdhsra; Brigandi and Robinson,“The Killing of Juan Diego,”1–24; James, Through Ramona’s Country, 78–82, 132–39, 142–44, and 153–66. 9. In November 1878, Temple was questioned by a coroner’s jury about the circumstances of Refugio Baca, an Indian, hanged in San Jacinto township. Temple claimed that“we found him hanging to a cotton wood tree.”Two years after the Juan Diego shooting, Temple was arrested for shooting Gus Purty. Although accused of assault with a deadly weapon, he was not charged. See the Testimony of Samuel Temple, body of Refugio Baca, November 1878, Coroner’s inquests, San Diego County; People v. Samuel Temple, 1885, Justice Court, San Jacinto Township, San Diego County; and Peace Bond, People v. Samuel Temple, February 12, 1886, Justice Court, San Jacinto Township, San Diego County, sdhsra. 10. Clare V. McKanna Jr., Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West, 1880– 1920 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 4–5. Statistical data from both Calaveras and Tuolumne Counties support this earlier study. 11. Donald Black, The Behavior of Law (NewYork: Academic Press, 1976), 21. 12. Ibid., 51. 13. Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth -Century Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 58. See also Lane,“Urban Homicide in the Nineteenth Century: Some Lessons for the Twenti- 110 Notes eth,”in James A. Inciardi and Charles E. Faupel, eds., History and Crime: Implications for Criminal Justice Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), 91–109; Robert H.Tillman,“The Prosecution of Homicide in Sacramento County, 1853–1900,” Southern California Quarterly 68 (Summer 1986): 167–81; and Lawrence M. Friedman and Robert V. Percival, The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870– 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 17 and 166–69. 14. For a critique of San Francisco vigilantism, see the appendix in Robert M. Senkewicz, Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). For the most authoritative assessment of California vigilante action, see David A. Johnson,“Vigilance and the Law: The Moral Authority of Popular Justice in the Far West,” American Quarterly 33 (Winter 1981): 558–86. See also Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1975); and Robert W. Blew,“Vigilantism in Los Angeles, 1835– 1874,”Southern California Quarterly 44 (January 1972): 11–30. 15. The practice of carrying concealed weapons in California virtually assured high homicide rates. Prosecutors, judges, and juries accepted this behavior and in many cases refused to prosecute or convict local citizens accused of murder. Consequently, there are a significant number of cases with no indictments. See Philip D. Jordan’s essay“The Wearing of Weapons in the Western Country,”in Frontier Law and Order (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 1–22; and Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a general discussion on frontier violence, see James Shields and Leonard Weinberg,“ReactiveViolence and the American Frontier: A Contemporary Evaluation,”Western Political Science Quarterly (January 1974): 86–101; Joe B. Franz,“The Frontier Tradition: An Invitation to Violence,”in Hugh David Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1969); and Gary L. Roberts,“Violence and the Frontier Tradition,”in Forrest R. Blackburn, ed., Kansas and the West (Topeka: Kansas Historical Society, 1976), 97–111. 16. A comparison of the final data indicated that legal authorities indicted in 59 percent of the cases. In other words, a reliance on indictments would have overlooked 41 percent of the homicides. This is not...