Stinson and Ray went to their fate alternately swearing and whining.Some of the ruffians faced death boldly.More than one himself jumped from the ladder or kicked from under him the box which was the only foothold between him and eternity.Boone Helm was as hardened as any of them.This man was a cannibal and murderer.He seems to have had no better nature whatever.His last words as he sprang off were "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" Another man remarked calmly that he cared no more for hanging than for drinking a glass of water.But each after his own fashion met the end foreordained for him by his own lack of compassion; and of compassion he received none at the hands of the men who had resolved that the law should be established and should remain forever.
There was an instant improvement in the social life of Virginia City, Bannack, and the adjoining camps as soon as it was understood that the Vigilantes were afoot.Langford, who undoubtedly knew intimately of the activities of this organization, makes no apology for the acts of the Vigilantes, although they did not have back of them the color of the actual law.He says:
"The retribution dispensed to these daring freebooters in no respect exceeded the demands of absolute justice....There was no other remedy.Practically the citizens had no law, but if law had existed it could not have afforded adequate redress.This was proven by the feeling of security consequent upon the destruction of the band.When the robbers were dead the people felt safe, not for themselves alone but for their pursuits and their property.They could travel without fear.They had reasonable assurance of safety in the transmission of money to the States and in the arrival of property over the unguarded route from Salt Lake.The crack of pistols had ceased, and they could walk the streets without constant exposure to danger.There was an omnipresent spirit of protection, akin to that omnipresent spirit of law which pervaded older and more civilized communities....Young men who had learned to believe that the roughs were destined to rule and who, under the influence of that faith, were fast drifting into crime shrunk appalled before the thorough work of the Vigilantes.Fear, more potent than conscience, forced even the worst of men to observe the requirements of society, and a feeling of comparative security among all classes was the result."Naturally it was not the case that all the bad men were thus exterminated.From time to time there appeared vividly in the midst of these surroundings additional figures of solitary desperadoes, each to have his list of victims, and each himself to fall before the weapons of his enemies or to meet the justice of the law or the sterner meed of the Vigilantes.It would not be wholly pleasant to read even the names of a long list of these;perhaps it will be sufficient to select one, the notorious Joseph Slade, one of the "picturesque" characters of whom a great deal of inaccurate and puerile history has been written.The truth about Slade is that he was a good man at first, faithful in the discharge of his duties as an agent of the stage company.Needing at times to use violence lawfully, he then began to use it unlawfully.He drank and soon went from bad to worse.At length his outrages became so numerous that the men of the community took him out and hanged him.His fate taught many others the risk of going too far in defiance of law and decency.
What has been true regarding the camps of Florence, Bannack, and Virginia City, had been true in part in earlier camps and was to be repeated perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to come.The Black Hills gold rush, for instance, which came after the railroad but before the Indians were entirely cleared away, made a certain wild history of its own.We had our Deadwood stage line then, and our Deadwood City with all its wild life of drinking, gambling, and shooting--the place where more than one notorious bad man lost his life, and some capable officers of the peace shared their fate.To describe in detail the life of this stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is perhaps not needful here.The main thing is that the great quartz lodes of the Black Hills support in the end a steady, thrifty, and law-abiding population.
All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now rise great cities where recently were scattered only mining-camps scarce fit to be called units of any social compact.
It was but yesterday that these men fought and drank and dug their own graves in their own sluices.At the city of Helena, on the site of Last Chance Gulch, one recalls that not so long ago citizens could show with a certain contemporary pride the old dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It marked a spot which might be called a focus of the old frontier.Around it, and in the country immediately adjoining, was fought out the great battle whose issue could not be doubted--that between the new and the old days; between law and order and individual lawlessness;between the school and the saloon; between the home and the dance-hall; between society united and resolved and the individual reverted to worse than savagery.
