The King and Queen of Malibu by David K. Randall

“For as long as the place had had a name, the City of Angels had been little more than a backwater on the edge of anarchy. An 1850 census found no newspaper, college, library, public school, or Protestant church in the county. Two-thirds of its citizens could neither read nor write. What they could do, however, was kill. ‘There is no brighter sun, no milder climate, no more equable temperature, no scenes more picturesque, no greener valleys, no fairer plains in the wide world, than those you may now look upon,’ wrote the Los Angeles Star in 1853. ‘There is no country where nature is more lavish of her exuberant fullness; and yet with all our natural beauties and advantages, there is no country where human life is of so little account. Men hack one another to pieces with pistols and other cutlery, as if God’s image were of no more worth than the life of one of the two or three thousand ownerless dogs that prowl about our streets and make night hideous.’”
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“Few of the ships steaming north along the coast toward the Golden Gate made landfall in Southern California, leaving it a place so long marooned from the outside world that men seemed to forget that such a thing as laws existed. Over the course of 1850 and 1851, the murder rate in the city of Los Angeles spiked to 124 deaths per 10,000 inhabitants, the highest recorded in American history. Hunting other men turned into a sport itself. An amazed—and frightened—J. Ross Browne, writing for Harper’s, recalled, ‘You would sit at the breakfast table of the Queen of the Angels [hotel] and hear the question of going out to shoot men as commonly discussed as would be duck shooting in any other country. At dinner the question would be, 'Well, how many did they shoot today? Who was hanged.’”

-David K. Randall