Choose Your Weapon - by Christopher Burchfield (Paperback)

About the Book

"Choose Your Weapon: The Duel in California, 1847-1861" provides a complete, graphic portrait of 75 notable duels between California's leading politicians and newspaper men during and after the Gold Rush era.

Book Synopsis

In Gold Rush-era California, gunfighters weren't outlaws or desperadoes -- they were were prominent journalists, legislators, governors, and judges. Choose Your Weapon brings to life a now-forgotten time, when California was a raw new state with politics as violent as any banana republic. This was the Golden Age of dueling, when prominent citizens would settle their political and personal disputes with gunfire, according to the venerable law of the code duello. Choose Your Weapon documents every notable duel to have occurred in California, from the arrival of U.S. dueling culture with the first American settlers to the end of dueling's popularity on the eve of the Civil War.

In the heyday of dueling culture, men from all walks of life, from politicians to manual laborers, fought formal duels. Duels could be triggered by political battles to shape state government--or they could be fought over a woman or a personal slight. Braggarts often proved to be cowards on the field of honor, and many a quiet and peaceable man could shoot with deadly accuracy when reputation was at stake. For the California gentlemen of the 1850s, honor or dishonor--and life or death--could be decided with a single shot.

Review Quotes

"Choose Your Weapon: The Duel in California brings to life an era in which conflicts in early California were settled by duels, and documents every major duel that occurred in the state. As chapters follow the beginnings and evolution of the duel in this state, using historical archives and newspaper accounts, historian Christopher Burchfield defines and provides a powerful saga of the duel's place in not just settling disputes, but acting as a legitimate legal process and forum for decision making. Anyone interested in California's early history and the specter of the duel will find this book absorbing and intriguing, bringing together many disparate pieces of information." --California Bookwatch

"Not the least valuable of this book's contributions to a reader's learning is the careful detailing of the political realities and interactions of the period. While the language is objective and sometimes sympathetic or amused, its descriptions of bribery, unscrupulous maneuvers, entrapment, and even unbridled rage are put forward clearly. Illustrations range from early and surprisingly crisp photography to portraiture-fine windows into an era so recently influential to our modern culture and yet so alien. Aiding this perspective is the writer's attempt to follow duelists (those who survived) in their later escapades. Unsurprisingly, many of those found violent or alcoholic ends. I will treasure this on my research shelf." --David Lloyd Sutton, San Francisco Book Review

"Burchfield draws upon his exhaustively detailed personal research to create a seminal and unique work of historical scholarship that is truly extraordinary. Informed and informative, Choose Your Weapon is unreservedly recommended." --Able Greenspan, MBR Bookwatch