more
likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting
for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more
swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which
did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to
oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town
was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons--beheld for the first time by
many of these fortune-seekers--lured them on step by step, until many of
them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives
of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus
produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for
protection or good order."

Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to
see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize,
the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and
boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its
unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in
American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of
miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at
their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their
"chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own
position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more
unscrupulous than his fellows.

Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the
mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal
confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these
banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt,
committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and
often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his
own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family,
missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that
day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously
vanished.

These robbers