You’ve all heard the old saying there’s nothing new under the sun, right? Well here in the Central Valley, that’s certainly the case. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots, we go back to look at Fresno’s earliest days…and the issue of crime and violence.
You’ve seen the Hollywood stereotype of the lawless frontier town of the old west. While that image is largely fiction, Fresno in the 1870s came very close. Early Fresno resident George Bernhard wrote that when trains would arrive at Sycamore, today known as Herndon, the conductor would give passengers a warning. “Fresno is the next town…you had better get your guns ready.”
Violence was a fact of life in early Fresno. The Fresno Weekly Expositor newspaper said in the 1870s, it was common to see men going to religious and social gatherings with guns in their holsters. Bernhard wrote that in the early days, a shooting before breakfast and another before dinner was not uncommon.
Famed train robbers Sontag and Evans and the Dalton Gang were regulars in Fresno. Evans famously escaped from the Fresno County Jail, while the Daltons hid out in the foothills east of Fresno, on what today is known as Dalton Mountain.
Likewise, racist mobs like the Ku Klux Klan were also active in Fresno from the town’s earliest days. In 1874, seven men dressed in Klan outfits beat a man, running him out of town. Even murders were common. In 1890, the Fresno Expositor celebrated the fact that only 11 people had been murdered in the county that year – when the county’s population was just over 30,000.
