How Wild Was Nathan Harrison’s Old West: Unsolved Murders and Mayhem in late 19th and early 20th Century San Diego County

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "On the Centennial of his Passing: San Diego County Pioneer Nathan "Nate" Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Harrison’s time in Southern California was bookended by two of the region’s most famous unsolved murders. In 1868, San Diego County pioneer and former sea captain Joseph Smith was killed at his Palomar Mountain home. In 1907, English storekeeper and skilled ethnographer Philip Sparkman was murdered at his store at the base of the mountain. Both men were killed under nefarious circumstances, and much debate ensued regarding the identity of their assailants. Smith and Sparkman were friends of Nathan Harrison’s; Harrison was a member of the posse that avenged Smith’s death, and Sparkman’s store was on land once homesteaded by Harrison. This paper examines these violent crimes and many others in the contemporary region and places them in the context of Harrison’s evolution from person to myth to legend. His individual apotheotic transformation was inseparable from the emergence and celebration of widespread stories of Southern California’s Wild West.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• On the Centennial of his Passing: San Diego County Pioneer Nathan "Nate" Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 403