Living conditions in San Fransico during the Gold Rush

These images do not appear in the book but help to clarify the role of "frontier justice" in early California. In this first drawing, one sees the interior of a San Francisco rooming house shortly after statehood. Many of the city's early inhabitants lived in substandard housing and one can easily understand why tempers ran high, and whiskey could take a day's wages faster than a game of Faro. In the first years of statehood robbery was a capital offense and justice was swift, but as the state matured, new courthouses and jails sprang up in county after county.