THE LAND OF GOLD. REALITY VERSUS FICTION

Octavo. Brick-red blind-stamped cloth. with gilt lettering to spine. Evidence of rebacking, with sections of original spine laid down. [i]-xii, [13]-300. 19 x 11.3 cm. Frontis illustration, from a sketch by "The King's Orphan", entitled: "Military Barracks of San Francisco", affixed to front pastedown. Light age-toning throughout. Pages supple. ".Previous to my departure for California, near and dear friends extracted from me a promise to communicate by letter, upon every convenient occasion, such intelligence as would give them a distinct idea of the truthfulness or falsehood of the many glowing descriptions and reputed vast wealth of California.This correspondence was never intended for the public eye, for the simple reason that the matter therein is set forth in a very plain manner, with more regard to truth than elegance of diction." ".A weary and rather unprofitable sojourn of three years in various parts of California, afforded me ample time and opportunity to become too thoroughly conversant with its rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame, its gold and its dross." (from Author's Preface) Helper was a rather odd duck who also wrote an extremely popular anti-slavery screed, but his outspoken anti-slavery stemmed more from a native white supremacist sensibility than any underlying moral outrage. "The book was "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It" Helper's deep opposition to slavery and the condition of Southern culture and the South's lack of economic progress, was one of the most effective criticisms of the South. Helper argued that the South's growth, prosperity, and cultural development were being held back by slavery. He deployed statistics from the census to show that land values, literacy levels, and manufacturing rates were considerably lower in the South than in the North." (Wikipedia) Friends and acquaintances, including the publisher of his book on the South, "A. B. Burdick, ."testified that Helper . avoided all contacts with Negroes, refusing even to patronize hotels or restaurants which employed Negroes in menial capacities. Another man who knew Helper before the war recalled that 'he has always been inflexibly opposed to all the relations and conditions which have kept the two races close together; and this . was one of the principal grounds of his opposition to slavery." (George M. Frederickson's Introduction to a 1968 reprinting of Helfer's Book). This quirky, reportedly "irascible" and radical proponent of racial purity, in a comically dangerous way, made his definite mark on history.It seems nearly impossible, but perhaps necessary, to grant this virulent racist certain credibility for his detailed descriptions of early San Francisco, although Helper's fundamental attitude is suffused with xenophobia and that which it wreaks -- hatred. "It is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America." In Chapter VII, The Chinese in California, the author writes "one Chinaman looks almost exactly like another," and he goes on to say that "No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-Americans . it is so with the Negroes in the South, it was so with the Indians in New England, and it will be so with the Chinese in California.".…