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The Barbary Coast:
An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld by
Herbert Asbury
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- Paperback: 336 pages ; Dimensions (in
inches): 0.84 x 8.54 x 6.28
- Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press; ISBN:
1560254084; (September 2002)
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Book Description
"The history of the Barbary
Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the
precious yellow metal hadn’t been discovered ... the development of San
Francisco’s underworld in all likelihood would have been indistinguishable
from that of any other large American city.
Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of
gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians,
and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique
criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more
viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour,
than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent.
" The Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury’s classic
chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which
the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild.
From all over the world practitioners of every vice
stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran
all day including Sundays.
From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered
girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to
only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes
achieved anything close to parity in their populations.)
This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts,
tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter’s Mill until the
last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.
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Author |
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Herbert Asbury
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