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Sierra Writers Conference, featuring Gary Noy, author of Hellacious California!


October 1, 2021 | 3:30 pm 4:30 pm

In 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California “can and does furnish the best bad things,” including “purer liquors … finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic]” than anywhere else in America. Lured by boons of gold and other exploitable resources, California’s settler population mushroomed under Mexican and early American control, and this period of rapid transformation gave rise to a freewheeling culture best epitomized by its entertainments.

Hellacious California! tours the rambunctious and occasionally appalling amusements of the Golden State: gambling, gun duels, knife fights, gracious dining and gluttony, prostitution, fandangos, cigars, con artistry, and the demon drink.  Come talk with historian Gary Noy, who will discuss a myriad of primary sources—many of which have never before been published—that he’s used to spin his true tall tales that are by turns humorous and horrifying.  

Register Here

About the Speaker

Gary Noy

Gary Noy

A Sierra Nevada native and current resident, Gary Noy has taught history at Sierra College from 1987 until the present. He founded the Sierra College Center for Sierra Nevada Studies and served as its director until 2012. His previous titles 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). Visit his website atgarynoy.com.


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