TRESPASSERS AT THE GOLDEN GATE

A tale of mad love, murder, and the rough-and-tumble mores of early San Francisco.

Krist, known for histories that hang on crimes and catastrophes, here turns to the booming Gold Rush era in San Francisco. His protagonist is the somewhat hapless Alexander Parker Crittenden, who, after graduating from West Point and deciding that army life wasn’t for him, drifted west to California and, in an inspired moment, immediately won a seat in the new state legislature by a walloping 258 votes. He accomplished little apart from writing a law “banning court testimony by persons of African or Native American descent involving a white defendant.” That he’d left a young wife and six children behind didn’t cramp his freewheeling bachelor ways. Eventually they reunited, and he made and lost fortunes as a lawyer and speculator for the next two decades. He also acquired a lover along the way who, for reasons that Krist explores, did him in. Of her trial, Krist writes, clergy sermonized, editorialists chided, and civic leaders urged that “for a city eagerly trying to establish its name as a mature, orderly, and law-­abiding place, the kind of violence and depravity exemplified by Laura Fair’s crime demanded the severest punishment.” Into this courtroom procedural, with its wealth of juicy revelations (not least that one of Crittenden’s sons was also smitten by Fair), Krist brings in other storylines that touch on racial justice and injustice, Victorian-era ideas of propriety and impropriety, and the effects of a boom-and-bust economy on the people who flocked to San Francisco to seek fortunes and often to reinvent themselves. A bonus is the presence of Mark Twain, who wove Fair’s murder trial into his 1873 novel The Gilded Age, several years after; as a newspaper breathlessly reported, he had been seen walking down a city street under the influence of “Hasheesh.”

A lively, richly detailed social history that ably brings together many narrative strands.