Trespassers at the Golden Gate - A True Account of Love, Murder and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco by Gary Krist instant download

Trespassers at the Golden Gate - A True Account of Love, Murder and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco by Gary Krist instant download

Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair for the murder of her lover, A. P. Crittenden, made headlines nationwide. As bestselling author Gary Krist reveals, the operatic facts of the case—a woman strung along for years by a two-timing man, killing him in an alleged fit of madness—challenged an American populace still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. The trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender, while jolting the still-adolescent metropolis of 1870s San Francisco, a city eager to shed its rough-and-tumble Gold Rush-era reputation.

Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings readers inside the untamed frontier town, a place where—for a brief period—otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. Readers meet a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently “feminine” clothing—as well as familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, who become swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair.

Krist, who previously brought New Orleans to vivid life in Empire of Sin and Chicago in City of Scoundrels, recounts this astonishing story and its surprisingly modern echoes in a rollicking narrative that probes what it all meant—both for a nation still scarred by war and for a city eager for the world stage.