author
James O'Meara
1825–1903
A sharp-tongued 19th-century journalist and historian of the American West, this writer moved from New York to Gold Rush California before becoming a prominent newspaper editor in Oregon. His books revisit the rough politics and vigilante justice of early San Francisco with the eye of someone who lived through the era.
1 Audiobook
The Vigilance Committee of 1856
by James O'Meara
About the author
Born in Williamsburg, New York, in June 1825, he sailed around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1849 during the Gold Rush. After a short time in mining, he returned to newspaper work, drawing on earlier experience at the New York Herald and later editing the San Francisco Herald.
He moved to Oregon in 1857 and became known as an editor of several important newspapers there, including the Oregon Sentinel, the Democratic Standard, the States Rights Democrat, and the Portland Bulletin. Contemporary records describe him as a forceful political journalist, especially active in Democratic and pro-Southern newspaper circles in the decades around the Civil War.
He is also remembered for books on California's turbulent early politics, including Broderick and Gwin and The Vigilance Committee of 1856. Those works helped preserve firsthand-style accounts of power struggles, public violence, and political life in the young American West. He died in January 1903.