Seventy portraits reprinted from their original glass-plate negatives of turn-of-the-20th-century prisoners are accompanied by the salty, subjective contemporary newspaper stories describing the crimes of which they were accused and convicted. These powerful photographs capture the character and pathos of the men of the post-Gold Rush West charged with desperate crimes: the theft of a pair of shoes, of a can of oysters, of a dog named "Booze"; and as cold-blooded as murder.