Tag Archives: California writing

Hellacious California Indeed

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Historian and scholar Gary Noy’s new book “Hellacious California: Tales of Rascality, Revelry, Dissipation, and Depravity, and the Birth of the Golden State” is now out and available for sale locally and online. Published by Heyday Books in collaboration with Sierra College Press, this 256-page book provides a rare collection of cultural references, customs, and the roiling times in California’s Gold Rush era.

Painstakingly researched and full of quips and tales as told in the late 1800’s, Noy provides a real taste of California life during the Gold Rush. For those enamored with history of the West, it is a must read.

Nevada City and Nevada County have many mentions, alongside many Sierra towns. So, whether you are perhaps wanting a few more tales about Lola Montez, Lotta Crabtree or snappy quotes from Mark Twain, look no further. Want to know the real story of Grizzly Adams or badger fighting? Here’s your book.

Sexual mores and charlatans as well as the protocol for duels, knife fights, and real mining claims are discussed in the terms of the day. Descriptions like “tableaux vivants” or a “piece of recklessness” hint at colorful language like hornswogglers, honey-foglers and humbugs in Noys’ well-organized, entertaining read.

The Source section of the book is a treasure trove for those inclined to dig still deeper in the mines of California’s colorful history, with many sources cited for each chapter.

Noy concludes after describing a great diamond hoax “This humbug was but one shard in the distinctive mosaic that was California in the nineteenth century. It was a heaven where fantasies could come true in an instant but also a hell where dreams could be unraveled in a long con.”

Get The Book

“Hellacious California: Tales of Rascality, Revelry, Dissipation, and Depravity, and the Birth of the Golden State” is available at The Bookseller in Grass Valley, both in the store and curbside pick-up as well as at Harmony Books in Nevada City. Watch for author readings and events at Nevada County Historical Society and The Bookseller as well as other regional readings, including Auburn Rotary, El Dorado County Library South Shore Branch, and Sacramento—COVID-19 allowing. Purchase online at heydaybooks.com.  Paperback, 5.5” x 8.5”, 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1-59714-499-5, retails for $18. Event listings at http://www.garynoy.com/events.html

About Hellacious California

“Premier historian Gary Noy has created the finest and most entertaining compilation ever of stories documenting ‘the best bad things’ of nineteenth-century California.… Never before has this been so well told and supported by such a vast array of primary sources.”―Gary Kurutz, Director Emeritus, California History Room and Special Collections, California State Library

About Gary Noy

For those not familiar with Gary Noy, his long career includes teaching history at Sierra College from 1987 until 2012. He founded the Sierra College Center for Sierra Nevada Studies and served as its director until his retirement. garynoy.com

Previous titles by Gary Noy include Sierra Stories: Tales of Dreamers, Schemers, Bigots, and Rogues (Heyday, 2014), which won the Gold Medal for Best Regional Nonfiction from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, The Illuminated Landscape: A Sierra Nevada Anthology (Heyday, 2010), which he coedited, and Distant Horizon: Documents from the 19th Century American West (University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Why We Write

18 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in environment, literature, travel, Uncategorized, writers and writing

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There are so many reasons to write and each writer seems to have a handful that they return to. For me, much of writing is about capturing the moment—sights, scents, emotions and thoughts.

I like Mary Oliver’s short directive, which could be for writing as well as living:

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

This last week I found a scrap of writing from some years back and was reminded not only of the experience, but why I write.

My Summer with Edward
Began June 2009, completed by accident September 2018

I read out loud to Olivia in hushed tones from Edward Abbey, so as not to wake Ernie, asleep in the next room. We stood, leaning against the wall on cool white tile in the Albuquerque Hyatt bathroom late at night. I crouched and read aloud the opening of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of the morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in sparseness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness.

This quote seemed as if it was written to describe our day, walking through intense stillness, taking in petroglyphs among sage and tumbleweed. The grey quiet of what seemed a barren land came to life in surreal plant shapes and patches of brilliant color as our eyes adapted to the desert’s subtle grey tones. It was June, and a rain two days before our arrival had brought out a spectacular display of cactus flowers. For me it was the beginning of a summer with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire in my daypack, sallying forth to the south and west, to rivers and mountains. Words, reflections, page corners damp from the verdescent Yuba River, worn from the edges of Granite Chief boulders, used as temporary reading tables; this book covered the miles with me, changed me, opened my heart wider to the blue skies.

I’m not sure how I lived so long with ever finding Edward Abbey, whose sensibility of the outdoors so suits my own spirit. A great lover of freedom, a questioning anti-government, somewhat misanthropic fellow and a writer of keen ability; Abbey proved a fine trail mate thoroughly able to inhabit whatever rock I perched on while reading an essay.

The first time I encountered Abbey was in Outside magazine’s collection of essays. His piece The Last Porkchop remains in my mind as the most eloquent expression of what is at stake in America’s wilds and the forces that are taunting the wild into oblivion.

I realize today, I must re-read this essay, as we are much further down a dark road than in years past.

Still, it always good to be outdoors, to seek the wild and to remember dear friends and Edward Abbey.