Shortly before dusk on Nov. 3, 1870, Laura Fair approached Alexander Parker Crittenden as he sat with his wife and three of his children on El Capitan, a San Francisco-bound ferry. The newspapers described Fair as a mysterious woman who wore all black as if dressed in mourning. She had followed Crittenden onto the ferry. In fury, she shouted words to the effect that Crittenden had ruined her and her daughter. And then she shot him.
Fair was Crittenden’s mistress. He died two days later. She was arrested, tried in 1871, and pleaded emotional insanity, saying he had lied to her about his marital status, seduced her, and toyed with her feelings. Everyone knew Fair killed Crittenden. She even said as much: “I did it, and I don’t deny it.”
The jury found her guilty and sentenced her to be hanged. The prosecutors thought it was essential to make an example of Fair’s transgressions to show the world that San Francisco was no longer a bawdy, rough-edged frontier town. It no longer tolerated “deviations from social norms like Laura Fair’s.” Then, in 1872, after she appealed her case, the jury found her not guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity brought on by a painful menstrual cycle. Many doctors believed this to be the cause of female hysteria, which they thought induced her to commit murder.
Gary Krist retells this mostly forgotten story in his new book, Trespassers at the Golden Gate: a True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness In Gilded-Age San Francisco. An award-winning journalist and author of several novels and nine nonfiction books, Krist uses storytelling techniques as he describes the social and historical contexts of the murder as it plays out in this havoc-driven city on the bay. Krist does a good job weaving the Crittenden murder with tidbits of literary and social history. Readers will enjoy the literary morsels as well as historical references such as the building of the first transcontinental railroad. The narrative serves to emphasize the now-exotic time and place, which was populated by the likes of authors such as Mark Twain and Bret Harte, whose work and friendship form a subtopic of Krist’s book. Harte, Krist says, hoped to build up the literary tastes of the Pacific slope and worked as an editor for the Overland Monthly. His story, the “Luck of Roaring Camp,” although considered scandalous in the West, received mostly high praise in the East. The Atlantic Monthly offered to publish anything Harte wrote. Twain got his start in San Francisco, where many say he changed from Samuel Clemens to the name we know today.
The book has four sections covering California‘s social history, the personal lives of Crittenden and Fair, their knotty relationship, and his shocking death at her hands, as well as her two trials and their aftermath. Krist writes vividly and engagingly. He includes numerous excerpts from letters and newspaper articles, which add veracity and drama to his book. Crittenden and Fair were liars, but depending on the source, Crittenden was worse. He lied about being married. Then, when Fair learned that he was married, he promised that he would leave his wife, Clare, because he loved only Fair and never actually loved his wife. But he never did.
As Krist explains, the gold rush of 1849 may have brought prosperity to California, but it also brought chaos. The frontier settlement of San Francisco was especially fraught with turmoil. San Francisco teemed with diverse people from various countries, including Mexico, China, Malaysia, Chile, Hawaii, native Californians, and those from the southern and northern parts of the United States. The city was riven with conflict, especially between abolitionists and slaveholders.
Crittenden believed slave owners should be able to keep their slaves in California and sided with the Southern states during the Civil War. Several of his brothers fought for the Confederacy, with other family members joining the Union. One of his uncles served as a member of Congress. Fair was considered an “ungovernable woman” and was twice divorced and twice widowed. Her most recent husband, William Fair, purportedly committed suicide because of her extramarital affairs and her spendthrift ways. She had an infant daughter and an elderly mother to provide for. As Krist notes, Fair always wanted to be an actress and was acclaimed in her role as Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, the star of the play and, as Sheridan created her, an acknowledged adulteress and spendthrift.
Crittenden had 14 children (only eight lived to adulthood) and couldn’t provide for them until he left his family and moved to San Francisco, where he took a job as a lawyer and argued mining claims for his clients. He quickly learned that the streets were not paved with gold. Nor, in fact, were they paved with cobblestones. San Francisco lacked paving stones of any kind. Instead, tree branches were scattered over muddy sidewalks and roads. The branches made for perilous walking as the mud was sometimes two or three feet deep. Its streets were “littered with detritus, as if a twenty-four-hour street market had set up shop in a garbage dump.” Murder was common at the time in San Francisco, with one or two occurring every month, but they were usually committed by men. However, female perpetrators were rare.
There was also corruption, poverty, racism, and the excesses of the Gilded Age (a term coined by Twain). Crittenden described the city to his wife, Clara, as a regular Tower of Babel. It was all that and more.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.