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Kevin Starr:

Gold Rush California was primarily a man’s world, at least until the mid-1850s; and, yes, it could be wild, free, unconstrained, exuberant. Such a vision of the Gold Rush as festival shivaree, as high jinks in the Mother Lode, can be found as early as the first humorists to cover the event … This interpretation of the Gold Rush as a fun-filled and affirmative adventure survived through numerous celebrations …

There is something to be said for this interpretation, even when it is qualified. The Gold Rush did constitute a collective psychic release—a sense of youth, heightened expectations, freedom from constraints of all kinds—in the Argonaut generation of young men, and the smaller number of women, who came to El Dorado in search of the Golden Fleece.

Kevin Starr, in the very next paragraph:

As historian John Boessenecker has demonstrated, the murder rate in the mines was horrendous—an annual rate of 506.6 homicides per 100,000 population in Sonora, for example, in 1850–51, which is fifty times the national homicide rate of 1999. Outside the Mother Lode it could be even more dangerous. As historian (and former San Francisco deputy police chief) Kevin Mullen has documented, San Francisco averaged a homicide rate of 49 per 100,000 between 1849 and 1856, six times the 1997 homicide rate of that city. Los Angeles County, meanwhile, saw forty-four murders between July 1850 and October 1851, which translates to an annual rate of 414 homicides per 100,000. Between September 1850 and September 1851, the homicide rate in the city of Los Angeles and its suburbs spiked off the graph at 1,240 per 100,000, which remains the all-time high homicide rate in the annals of American murder. If California ever had anything resembling the Wild West—meaning cowboys and shoot-outs—it was Los Angeles County in the early 1850s; until, that is, the formation in 1853 of the Los Angeles Rangers, a permanent posse that would in the course of one year capture and execute more than twenty alleged miscreants. Between 1849 and 1853, Boessenecker estimates, there were more than two hundred lynchings in the Mother Lode. As courts and a criminal justice system began to assert themselves, that number fell to one hundred throughout the state between 1853 and 1857. Still, lynching remained an option in California down through the nineteenth century. The last old-fashioned Gold Rush–style lynching—that of five men in Modoc County—occurred as late as May 1901.

wild, free, unconstrained, exuberant

With the conspicuous exception of Josiah Royce, most nineteenth-century historians considered lynch law a tragic necessity, given the feebleness of legal institutions in the first years of the Gold Rush. To bolster their assessment, they pointed to the fact that most lynchings involved hearings before an elected tribunal, which heard evidence and pronounced sentence and hence possessed an element of legitimacy, indeed represented a resurgence of Anglo-Saxon legal traditions. Contemporary historians, however, combing through surviving records, have noted the disproportionate number of Hispanics being lynched and tend to link lynch law with larger patterns of race-based antagonism.

a collective psychic release