Books by Richard H Dillon

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the American Merchant Marine went into a terrible and tragic decline, and sailors were forced to serve under conditions that were little better than serfdom. Seamen were exploited in wholesale fashion, disfranchised of almost all their civil and human rights, and brutally punished for even minor offenses. Successful skippers had turned into slave drivers, cracking down on the sailors, sometimes even murdering their "hands." Though captains were legally prohibited from flogging their crews, they did not hesitate to wield belaying pins, marlin spikes, or their bare fists. The seamen's lot became so horrible in this period that entire crews frequently jumped ship when a vessel came into port. One result of this was that new crews had to be kidnaped, crimped, or shanghaied from the unsuspecting populace of the ports. These "impressed" or "hobo" crews were still further conspired against. They often had their wages stolen from them; they were poorly fed and clothed. Their lives became "hell afloat and purgatory ashore." In this way what had been our "first and finest employ" in colonial days was turned into a disreputable profession-one that was classed with criminals and prostitutes. Richard H. Dillon, author of Embarcadero, gives us a frightful picture of the seamen's lot in this tragic era. He describes in detail daily life aboard those hell-ships which set records in the passage from Frisco to China, but on whose decks fresh blood of the crew was found every day of the voyage. One of the most infamous of all these vessels was the Challenge whose skipper, Captain Robert H. ("Murderin' Bob" or "Bully") Waterman, was eventually put on trial in San Francisco for murder, theft, unjust assault, brutality, and thirteen other crimes against his crew. Dillon offers a complete picture of Waterman and reveals all the details of his famous trial and punishment. He also provides a series of portraits of other captains who rivaled "Bully" in their brutality and sadism, and describes how they in their turn were brought to justice. Dillon writes of those who attempted to defend seamen when they were most forgotten by the public conscience. Such men as the Reverend Lyman Beecher of Boston; Samuel C. Damon, the seamen's beloved chaplain at Honolulu; the Frisco street preacher, "Father" William Taylor, and-most outstanding of them all- Andrew Furuseth, the seamen's "Emancipator." In this book Richard Dillon brilliantly recreates the action-packed drama of the American seaman's escape from serfdom. Readers who enjoyed the author's earlier chronicle of true seafaring adventures, Embarcadero, will like Dillon's second book even more.

The Hudson's Bay Fur Company route to California was the fur trappers' and traders' road in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s from Fort Vancouver (now in Washington State) to San Francisco and beyond. Does "road" mean a six-lane paved freeway to you? Turn the calendar back and ponder a path that was rough, stony, precipitous, ill-marked, and full of perils at every turn: disease, famine, attacking Indians and worse. In quest chiefly of beaver and sea otters, men were lured from Quebec and Montreal, St. Louis and Lake Superior, Hudson Bay and Winnipeg, Taos and Santa Fe and Hawaii. Wherever they came from, they became the handful of wide-wandering mountain men who took part in California's first boom-the trade in furs. Until publication of this book, there had been little documentation of the trail. Such giants of the route as Jedediah Smith and Peter Skene Ogden have come down in history. But the leaders on the trail made indifferent reporters at best and their followers-an ethnic crazy quilt of Englishmen, Scots, Irish, French-Canadians, Mexicans, black Americans, Iroquois, Abenaki, half-breeds, and kanakas from Hawaii -were lucky if they could write their names. The explorations, the discoveries, the incredible hardships, the adventures, and the occasional humor-which lit up the treks like sunshine after a heavy rain-all interweave to make this towering tale. Unlike some of our nation's historic trails which have since been obliterated or are largely untraveled, the fur men's rugged route was only a beginning. A few short years later it was dotted with pack trains, then with wagons, and later with Concord stagecoaches. By 1887 it was the roadbed for the railway which still links Oregon and California. Today, closely paralleling the Southern Pacific right-of-way, Highway 5 carries trucks and trailers north and south with an ease the mountain men of 150 years ago would have envied.