Lady at the O.K. Corral Read Online Free

vying with Civil War coverage, and with exciting letters from transplanted New Yorkers who had made their way to San Francisco. The West loomed large in the imagination of all Americans and must have been particularly irresistible for immigrant Jews who had come searching for the promised land of economic opportunity, social mobility, and political power, and had not found it in New York. Now San Francisco beckoned to them as a remarkable Jewish success story.
    San Francisco sprang up as a child of the 1849 gold rush. When the output of California gold, so extraordinary in the early years, began to decline, San Francisco thrived because of its harbor and geography, evolving quickly from a village of shanties and wood-frame buildings to a metropolis with a diversified economy that could support a large workforce of skilled and unskilled laborers. San Francisco became the home of an affluent and influential Jewish community, which included retail businesses founded by Levi Strauss and Solomon Gump, as well as the founders of the Wells Fargo Bank and Lazard Frères. Although smaller in absolute numbers than the New York Jewish community, San Francisco boasted a similarly glittering cast of entrepreneurs in retailing and manufacturing, bankers and stockbrokers, and represented a wider range of Jewish economic interests, from fur trading in Alaska to wheat farming, sugar mills, and vineyards.
    With arrivals from England, Australia, Holland, and Russia, as well as the large representation from Germany and Prussia, Jews created a vibrant cultural and religious life within the city, and constructed a sturdy social safety net for those less fortunate, including orphan asylums and services for the elderly. There were five Jewish newspapers, and Jews were active in political life, electing merchant Abraham Labatt as alderman for the new city of San Francisco in 1851. Considerable chest-thumping proclaimed San Franciscan Jews to be the most prominent and prosperous group of Jews in the world, so integrated into San Francisco’s commercial life that steamer service—the city’s vital link to the rest of the world—was suspended on the Jewish high holidays. An enthusiastic editorial in the Daily Alta California lauded Jews for being true Californians, and congratulated the non-Jewish Californians, since “no other part of the world can instance a similar act of liberality.”
    With this encouraging track record of tolerance, plus a temperate climate and booming economy, San Francisco had much to offer an immigrant Jewish family. Hyman Marcus had achieved only modest success as a baker, and he and Sophia were ready to leave the filth and the grinding poverty of Five Points. They had already made the far more difficult decision to leave Europe; the second leg of their family voyage at least would not require another new language and a new continent. It was not uncommon for young and energetic immigrant families to make multiple moves. In fact, rate wars between rival railroads and steamship companies made it actually cheaper for some families to move than to pay the rent.
    The Marcus family made the bold choice to continue west across a continent that was still decades away from regular train service. Together with some 40,000 other people who would travel to California in the late 1860s, they arrived in San Francisco in time to be counted for the 1870 census. While Sophia Lewis’s obituary would later identify her as a California pioneer who sailed around the Horn, the family most likely crossed the Isthmus of Panama, which replaced the dangerous eight-week-long all-sea voyage to become the major artery connecting the East Coast to California and the primary route for transporting gold, mail, news, and packages. Adult passengers watched the scantily dressed Panamanian natives through the train windows, marveled at the rain forests, and exclaimed at the deep canyons and unfamiliar flora and fauna.
    Once the