Hellacious California!
Tales of Rascality, Depravity! and the Birth of the Golden State

Gary Noy, 2020 223 pages
The title was enough to attract the Heirloom book reviewing staff. It sounds like a collection of fun stories but it’s not. It’s really more a social history of some of the more colorful elements of 19th Century California rather than a few discreet stories.

The title was attractive but that’s not the only requirement to enter the list of books reviewed by the Heirloom. Books have to be at least tangentially related to Donner Summit and that’s getting harder after more than one hundred books reviews (and more than a dozen video reviews).

So, the first order of business was eligibility for the Heirloom and serendipity took care of that factor in the very first story. The first chapter is about games of chance and the very first example is about Augustinus Josephus Fey, the inventor of the slot machine. Augustinus’ grandson, Marshall, lives in Reno where he is an author and emigrant trails expert. We’ve reviewed a couple of his books in the Heirloom (check out the indices) and he’s written a couple of articles for the Heirloom (check out the article indices for those too). The Mobile Historical Research Team (MHRT) accompanied him on his 90th birthday wish to paint the emigrant trail marker at the top of Coldstream Pass. We should note too that Marshall was instrumental in saving a number of emigrant markers from being removed by “new” research.

So, there was the connection. The book review team could review Hellacious… and that’s good because it’s a fun book. The title is irresistible, Hellacious being a combination of astonishing and appalling according to Noy.

The book is divided into a number of chapters on general topics with clever titles. For example the chapter covering violence is titled, “Demanding Satisfaction, Frogstickers, and the Slogging Fraternity: Dueling, knife Fights, Fisticuffs, and Animal Baiting.” It must have taken hours to come with the title. A typical book of this type would then follow with a couple of stories, pages long. Noy follows with the social history from newspapers and contemporaneous books, and a lot of little stories and examples to show the state of society. He talks about shanghaiing, criminals’ careers, criminal acts, beatings, shootings, knifings, murders, the infamous, criminal organizations, the vigilance committee, duels and dueling, settling scores, prize fighting, and animal baiting. It’s a rich litany of examples showing how violent California and what the residents did for entertainment. Each chapter is just as rich.

Another chapter sub-topics are gluttony, the various aspects of eating in 19th Century California including harvesting sea bird eggs in the Farollones. The details are wonderful. For example, about harvested sea bird eggs, “… the eggs, when fresh, have no distinctive odor, but when they get to be serval days old, they develop a noticeably fishy smell and taste. The yoke is deep red, and the white remains clear and gelatinous…. This unappetizing meal looks like a bloody eyeball surrounded by a slimy halo… but a fresh egg is a fresh egg. And customers craved them.”

Noy effectively uses lots of quotes from magazines, books, and newspapers to illustrate his stories. For example, he quotes Hinton Rowan Helper, who wrote Land of Gold…, many times. One quote describing a gold seeker’s cooking habits says, “His cooking utensils consist of a frying-pan and a pot, neither of which, except in rare instances, is ever washed. The pot is mostly used for boiling pork and beans, and the old scum and scales that accumulate on the inside from one ebullition serve as seasoning to the next…. [The miner] will probably keep a bottle of molasses, which may be seen by the side of the frying-pan, unstopped, and containing an amount of flies and ants nearly equal to that of the saccharine juice.” T

here is a wonderful quote from the Daily Alta California (1/6/51) about theater behavior: crying babies, patrons in shirt sleeves, catcalling, laughing during dramatic scenes and chewing tobacco:

“ the odious, nauseous, abominable habit of creating Aral seas of ‘ambier’,"' that villainous spittal crushed from the foul weed by masticating grinders as constant in their milling as an over-shot water wheel, and squirted from discolored lips, which seem made only to act as a spouting horn for the emission of a nasty semi-liquid which would disgust the very herd of swine that swallowed the devils…”

Eliza Farnham (1856) is quoted, “at that period in the history of San Francisco, it was so rare to see a female, that those whose misfortune is was to be obliged to be abroad felt themselves uncomfortably stared at. Doorways filled instantly and little island in the street were thronged with them who seemed to gather in a moment, and who remained immovable till the spectacle passed from their incredulous gaze.” Or another quote by contemporaries about women says, “We remember that day, when a woman walking along the streets of San Francisco was more of a sight than an elephant or giraffe would be today.” (Theodore Barry and Benjamin Patten , 1856)

Then there’s a descriptive quote about eating habits in public establishments, “… the ‘savage’ approach of the diner in seven memorable words: ‘Dab, dab, peck, peck, grunt, growl, snort!’”

Beyond the stories there are lots of interesting facts such as, “by the mid-nineteenth century, Northern California was the most ethnically and socially diverse spot on Earth…” 1

The end of the book has an extensive bibliography so you can go off exploring California social history more in depth. In that regard it’s clear Noy did an amazing amount of reading gathering his stories.