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Wanted!

"$200 Reward! For information that will lead to the arrest and conviction of the two fiends, who on the 9th day of June, 1903, assaulted and outraged the person of Mary Silva, a school girl, aged 14 years, about two miles from Orinda Park, near the San Pablo creek."

"$100 Reward. Taken from in front of 2280 Green Street, San Francisco, during the night of Wednesday, May 9, 1907: One Stevens-Duryea Four Cylinder 20 H.-P. Automobile."

"A piece of new, very small, cotton, rope about six feet long with a noose in one end was found under Cordes' head. The rope belonged to the murderer and as it was covered with blood and hair from Cordes' whiskers it is supposed it was used to choke him and compell him to tell where his money was."

California in 1900 was very different than it is today, and the wanted posters, circulars, and cards from that period represent the people and the lives they lived. Taken separately, most wanted announcements are not spectacular, but once you start reading them, they paint marvelous snapshots of the suspects, the law enforcement officers, their values, and ethics of the society and culture at that time.

The intent of this book is to show how incredibly interesting wanted ephemera can be as well as to entertain the reader. I have also categorized and created a hierarchy in an attempt to assign relative values to the individual wanted and reward items. Items will have a letter category followed by a numerical value.