Can You Get Vigilante to Shoot Again as Witch

Vigilante Justice, 1851

In many areas of the burgeoning Due west, the absenteeism of established institutions of police force and order led the local community to literally take the law into its own hands and dispense justice through Vigilante Committees.

San Francisco vigilantes
hang a murderer,
Dec 1852

In San Francisco, for example, the news of the discovery of aureate to its n depleted its police force while simultaneously triggering an explosion in its population. (see The California Gold Rush, 1849) The resulting increment in criminal offense and violence prompted the establishment of a Vigilante Committee to maintain constabulary and order. The Commission was fabricated up of 600 local volunteers, most of whom were prominent members of the business community. During its commencement yr (1851), the Commission hanged four law breakers, whipped one, deported xx and released 41 after trial. Equally a issue, fierce crime was reduced in the city. The Commission was disbanded inside a year after its creation. It was revived five years later on and disbanded the aforementioned yr.

The remoteness of mining camps, ofttimes in politically unorganized territories, put them beyond the reach of the law. In this unruly environment, volunteers formed Committees of Vigilance that established basic rules of conduct and assured at least a minimum level of guild. The community thus entrusted the Vigilante Committee with the combined responsibilities of estimate, jury and executioner.

Mrs. Louise Clappe was the married woman of a md and lived in the mining expanse known as Indian Bar that bordered the Feather River in Northern California. In the menstruation from 1851 to 1852 she wrote a number of letters to her sis in Massachusetts describing her experience. These letters were originally published in Pioneer Magazine (1854-55) then as a book in 1922. A copy of this book resides in the Library of Congress.

In a letter written on December 14, 1851, Louise describes how the mining community established its ain form of police and order:

"The facts in this deplorable instance are every bit follows. Concluding fall, two men were arrested past their partners on suspicion of having stolen from them eighteen hundred dollars in gold-dust. The evidence was not sufficient to convict them, and they were acquitted. They were tried earlier a meeting of the miners, every bit at that time the police force did not even pretend to wave its scepter over this place.

The prosecutors still believed them guilty, and fancied that the gold was hidden in a coyote-hole nigh the camp from which information technology had been taken. They therefore watched the place narrowly while the suspected men remained on the Bar. They made no discoveries, withal, and shortly later the trial the acquitted persons left the mountains for Marysville.

A few weeks ago, one of these men returned, and has spent nearly of the time since his arrival in loafing nearly the unlike barrooms upon the river. He is said to have been constantly intoxicated. As soon as the losers of the gold heard of his render, they bethought themselves of the coyote-hole, and placed about its entrance some brushwood and stones in such a manner that no one could go into it without disturbing the organization of them. In the mean while the thief settled at Rich Bar, and pretended that he was in search of some gravel-basis for mining purposes.

A few mornings agone he returned to his boarding-place, which he had left some 60 minutes earlier, with a spade in his manus, and, as he laid it down, carelessly observed that he had been out prospecting. The losers of the gold went, immediately after breakfast, every bit they had been in the addiction of doing, to meet if all was correct at the coyote-hole. On this fatal twenty-four hours they saw that the entrance had been disturbed, and going in, they found upon the footing a money-chugalug which had obviously merely been cut open. Armed with this evidence of guilt, they confronted the suspected person and sternly defendant him of having the aureate in his possession. Singularly plenty, he did not attempt a denial, only said that if they would not bring him to a trial (which of class they promised) he would give it up immediately. He and so informed them that they would notice it below the blankets of his bunk, as those queer shelves on which miners sleep, ranged one above some other somewhat like the berths of a ship, are generally called. There, sure enough, were six hundred dollars of the missing money, and the unfortunate wretch alleged that his partner had taken the remainder to the States.

A mining campsite

By this time the exciting news had spread all over the Bar. A meeting of the miners was immediately convened, the unhappy man taken into custody, a jury chosen, and a estimate, lawyer, etc., appointed. Whether the men who had but regained a portion of their missing property made whatever objections to the proceedings which followed, I know not. If they had done so, withal, information technology would take made no difference, as the people had taken the matter entirely out of their hands.

At i o'clock, and so rapidly was the trial conducted, the estimate charged the jury, and gently insinuated that they could do no less than to bring in with their verdict of guilty a sentence of death! Possibly you know that when a trial is conducted without the majesty of the law, the jury are (sic) compelled to decide not only upon the guilt of the prisoner, simply the style of his penalisation also. Later a few minutes' absence, the twelve men, who had consented to brunt their souls with a responsibleness so fearful, returned, and the foreman handed to the judge a paper, from which he read the will of the people, equally follows: That William Dark-brown, bedevilled of stealing, etc., should, in one hour from that time, be hung by the neck until he was dead.

Past the persuasions of some men more mildly disposed, they granted him a respite of three hours to prepare for his sudden entrance into eternity. He employed the time in writing, in his native language (he is a Swede), to some friends in Stockholm. God help them when that fatal post shall arrive, for, no incertitude, he also, although a criminal, was fondly garnered in many a loving heart.

He had exhibited, during the trial, the utmost recklessness and nonchalance, had drank many times in the course of the day, and when the rope was placed about his neck, was evidently much intoxicated. All at once, however, he seemed startled into a consciousness of the awful reality of his position, and requested a few moments for prayer.

The execution was conducted past the jury, and was performed by throwing the cord, one terminate of which was fastened to the neck of the prisoner, across the limb of a tree standing outside of the Rich Bar graveyard, when all who felt disposed to engage in so revolting a chore lifted the poor wretch from the footing in the nearly bad-mannered manner possible. The whole matter, indeed, was a slice of cruel butchery, though that was non intentional, merely arose from the ignorance of those who made the preparations. In truth, life was only crushed out of him by hauling the writhing body up and down, several times in succession, by the rope, which was wound round a large bough of his green-leaved gallows. Almost everybody was surprised at the severity of the sentence, and many, with their hands on the cord, did not believe even and so that it would be carried into upshot, simply idea that at the concluding moment the jury would release the prisoner and substitute a milder penalty.

A vigilante courtroom
in a mining camp

Information technology is said that the oversupply generally seemed to feel the solemnity of the occasion, simply many of the drunkards, who form a large part of the customs on these confined, laughed and shouted as if it were a spectacle got upwardly for their particular entertainment. A icky specimen of intoxicated humanity, struck with ane of those luminous ideas peculiar to his class, staggered upward to the victim, who was praying at the moment, and, crowding a muddy rag into his almost unconscious mitt, in a voice cleaved by a drunken hiccough, tearfully implored him to take his "hankercher," and if he were innocent (the man had not denied his guilt since outset accused), to drop it as soon as he was drawn up into the air, but if guilty, not to let it fall on any account.

The body of the criminal was allowed to hang for some hours after the execution. It had commenced storming in the earlier office of the evening, and when those whose business concern it was to inter the remains arrived at the spot, they constitute them enwrapped in a soft white shroud of feathery snow-flakes, as if pitying nature had tried to hide from the offended face of Heaven the vicious deed which her mountain-children had committed."

References:
Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith, The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52, ed. past Thomas C. Russell (1922); Davis, William C. and Joseph Rosa (eds.), The West (1994); Grafton, John, The American Due west in the Nineteenth Century (1992).

How To Cite This Article:
"Vigilante Justice, 1851" EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2006).

The author of this business relationship, Louise Clappe, and her husband moved to San Francisco where he prepare his medical practice and she became a school teacher. She died in 1906.

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Source: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/vigilante.htm

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