The Barbary Coast ─ An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld

Herbert Asbury's classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco - a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes achieved anything close to parity in their populations.) This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruptions, from the eureka at Sutter's Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.