Telling California Stories

Telling California Stories David Igler (bio) John Mack Faragher, California: An American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. ix + 466 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $28.50. Assembling a history of California presents the narrative challenge of an overabundance of stories. Forget Hollywood with its longtime penchant for excavating the lurid past or its recent descent into remakes of remakes and plots driven by the sale of plastic action figures. Also forget advertisers, who have created and regurgitated versions of the California Dream since the 16th century, when Garci Rodríquez de Montalvo's novel Adventures of Esplandian placed California on the literary map as an island located off the western coast of North America. An island solely inhabited by gold-clad Amazons? The story sold well to Spanish adventurers, at least to those who could read. The challenge for historians who seek narrative coherence—as John Mack Faragher does in California: An American History—is one of selection and equilibrium. How to choose among the infinite number of Indigenous creation stories, or settler narratives, or shifty political schemes? How to achieve some balance between the region's violent and exclusionary past and its moments of human charity? Raised in the storied lands of southern California, Faragher has spent most of his scholarly life writing about topics situated well east of the Golden State. His monographs Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979), Sugar Creek (1986) and A Great and Noble Scheme (2005) explored settler groups in motion and others temporarily fixed in place, while his biography Daniel Boone (1993) examined one of the nation's most written-about and mythologized citizens. With historian Robert Hine, Faragher authored two of the best synthetic accounts of the American West. In 2016, he returned to his southern California roots with Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, which is among the most dark, brutal, and gripping histories written about any American city.1 It kept me reading late into the night in the same way a noir-mystery by Jo Nesbø or Kate Atkinson does. In short, John Mack Faragher knows how to tell a compelling story—one steeped in decades of his own archival research and a sense of place. A quick glance at the table of contents suggests California: An American History represents an odd assemblage of the state's past. It runs to over 440 [End Page 108] pages and contains 40 chapters, with titles like "What Happened to My Chickens?" and "My Little Sister's Heart in My Hands." Though delineating a state obsessed with its modern incarnation and rapid expansion in the 20th century, Faragher refuses to hit the year 1900 until two-thirds of the way into the book. For those of us unenthused by the overriding historical focus on modern California, we applaud Faragher's temporal bias for the deep past: the subduction zones and tectonics that formed this place, the Native stories that offered a multiplicity of beginnings, the many encounters between struggling voyagers and coastal communities, the enduring legacies of Spanish and Mexican settler colonialism, and the stepped-up chaos that ensued when U.S. citizens arrived en masse during the gold rush. What followed the gold rush (and continued into the twentieth century) included state-sponsored slaughter, exclusion, incorporation, and fleeting efforts by some individuals to challenge the reigning powers. If "the lights went on all at once" with the gold rush, as the state's great chronicler Carey McWilliams claimed, the "blaze" illuminated the countless jarring episodes and many of the unfulfilled expectations to come.2 For a place with such a tortuous past stretching back over 10,000 years of human habitation, what are Faragher's through lines? "Human diversity is the foundation of California's history," he writes, although this truism hardly scratches the surface of the region's social history (p. 5). Faragher's focus on Indigenous diversity and persistence (despite every effort on the part of settlers at eradication) represents one of his most effective central themes. The book opens in a Konkow village and ends with present-day tensions over returning ancestral lands to Native groups. In between these terminal points...