From the Bookshelves: Eternity Street: Violece and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher

Eternity Street: Violece and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher (W.W. Norton & Co., 2017)

Los Angeles is a city founded on blood. Once a small Mexican pueblo teeming with Californios, Indians, and Americans, all armed with Bowie knives and Colt revolvers, it was among the most murderous locales in the Californian frontier. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, “a vivid, disturbing portrait of early Los Angeles” (Publishers Weekly), John Mack Faragher weaves a riveting narrative of murder and mayhem, featuring a cast of colorful characters vying for their piece of the city. These include a newspaper editor advocating for lynch laws to enact a crude manner of racial justice and a mob of Latinos preparing to ransack a county jail and murder a Texan outlaw. In this “groundbreaking” (True West) look at American history, Faragher shows us how the City of Angels went from a lawless outpost to the sprawling metropolis it is today.

The author, John Mack Faragher, discusses the book on this podcast.  Faragher makes it clear that that immigration is central to the story of Los Angeles, with Anglos and Blacks migrating to frontier LA when it was part of Mexico and interacting with Mexican and Indian peoples  living there, to be joined later in the 1800s by Chinese immigrants.  

KJ