Gary Krist: Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco

Gold turned a sleepy Mexican outpost into what we now know as San Francisco. In just a few short years, thousands of migrants from every part of the globe made the treacherous journey to California, seeking not just wealth but a chance to begin anew. 

Alexander P. Crittenden was one such pioneer who saw in San Francisco limitless opportunities for reinvention. Ever in debt and with a wife and 14 children to support, A.P. found that the city’s laissez faire attitudes suited him just fine—particularly when it came to his relationship with Laura Fair. Laura too had come to San Francisco seeking a clean slate, but A.P. and Laura soon began a years-long adulterous affair, with most San Franciscans happy to turn a blind eye. But as the city began to shed its rough-and-tumble past, and embrace the dictates of Victorian respectability, so too did Laura Fair. When A.P. once again broke his oft-repeated promise to divorce his wife and marry Laura, she decided to take fate into her own hands. Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, Laura Fair shot A.P. Crittenden point-blank in the chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined both myself and my daughter.”

Fair’s murder trial was covered by every news outlet in the country. One of the first to involve an insanity defense, the trial shone an early spotlight on controversial social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender—all topics of burning interest to Americans still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. Trespassers at the Golden Gate author Gary Krist introduces us to a full cast of characters—including a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently “feminine” clothing. Their stories, along with those of familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, bring to life San Francisco’s Gilded-Age society.