Book unsatisfying
Quill Driver Books sent me a copy of one its latest books: "California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State" by David Kulczyk.
It is 35 short chapters of violent incidents in California history. Four of the chapters deal with things that happened in Mendocino County. Hmmm. 58 counties, more than 100 years of history, 35 chapters and four of them about things that happened here.
Anyway, the first three are incidents that happened in the wild and wooly late 1800s, three of them lynchings. The first of a Hispanic man who shot a man in the middle of a wedding celebration in Hopland. Apparently Jose Antonio Ygarra wanted to kill wedding guest William Granjean because Granjean was scheduled to testify against him in a horse rustling case. Ygarra was tracked down by wedding guests and hung from a live oak outside Hopland.
The second story is about Indian Charlie who was apparently found knifing a white woman along the side of the road near Walker Valley (I don't know where that was). A man, traveling coincidentally along the road scared Charlie off and a party of angry men went after him and found him that night and hung him from a tree and also shot many holes into him.
The third story was about a gang of no-goods living in the Little Lake area who were terrorizing the town and were finally jailed, but who threatened any townman who dared testify against them. The townmen took the law into their own hands and grabbed the three gangsters from the jail and hung them from a nearby bridge. An investigation into the matter from the local sheriff and DA fund no one able to identify any of the vigilantes.
The fourth story is a modern one well known to Ukiahans. It is the story of Ukiah Police Officer Marcus Young and cadet Julian Covella who faced Neal Allan Beckman in a shootout in the Wal-Mart parking lot in 2003. Young was shot five times including in his hand and Covella helped him unholster his gun and shoot Beckman as Beckman tried to pull the police shotgun out of Young's nearby patrol car.
All of these stories are told very briefly and there are a couple of small inaccuracies in them - like Little Lake being in Ukiah and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat being a Ukiah publication - that make we wonder how accurate other parts of the stories are.
Also, Mr. Kulczyk in some cases tends to make light of these stories which, while certainly interesting bits of the state's history, are also important testimony to the violent and often racist attitudes of the times.
For instance, in the first story he writes: "Jose Antonio Ygarra eliminated the witness who could put him away, but in doing so, he created an overwhelming social angst. As a result, Jose missed the party and attended the hangman's ball instead."
The title of the Marcus Young story was: "Eagle Scout Earns Merit Badge."
The bibliography cites 40 books, 21 periodicals or newspapers and a web site. It seems to me that Mr. Kulczyk has done not much more than look up these stories, pick out the ones that sort of fit his theme and reprint them in this slim volume. His general theme of California Justice is that contrary to Hollywood good-guys and bad-guys stories, "Sometimes it is difficult to tell the victims from the perpetrators."
But the book also includes not only the Marcus Young story, but the more famous stories of the 1968 Sirhan Sirhan assassination of Robert Kennedy and the shootings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978 where the good guys and bad guys are pretty clear cut.
Sorry, but I think Mr. Kulcyzk - a Sacramento based free lance writer - could have done better.