e it, and
laughing at the protests of the minority of the population, which was
placed in the hard strait of being in that country and unable to get out
without being robbed. It was the intention to seize the property of
every man who was there and who was not accepted as a member of the
gang.

One killing after another occurred on the trails, and man after man was
lost and never traced. Assaults were made upon many men who escaped, but
no criminal could be located, and, indeed, there was no law by which any
of them could be brought to book. The express riders were fired upon and
robbed and the pack trains looted. No man expected to cross the mountain
trails without meeting some of the robbers, and, when he did meet them,
he expected to be killed if he made resistance, for they outnumbered the
parties they attacked in nearly all instances. The outlaws were now
indeed about three times as numerous as those not in sympathy with them.

Rendered desperate by this state of affairs, a few resolute citizens who
wanted law and order found each other out at last and organized into a
vigilance committee, remembering the success of the Vigilantes of
California, whose work was still recent history. Plummer himself was
among the first to join this embryonic vigilante movement, as was the
case in so many other similar movements in other parts of the West,
where the criminal joined the law-loving in order to find out what the
latter intended to do. His address was such as to disarm completely all
suspicion, and he had full knowledge of facts which enabled him to
murder for vengeance as well as for gain.

After Oro Fino was worked out as a placer field, the prospectors located
other grounds east of the Salmon River range, at Elk City and Florence,
and soon Lewiston was forsaken, all the population trooping off over the
mountains to the new fields. This broke up the vigilante movement in its
infancy, and gave Plummer a longer lease of life for his plans. All
those who had joined the vigilante movement were marked men. One after
another they were murdered, none knew by whom, or why. Masked robbers
were seen every day along the trails leading between one remote mining
camp and another, but no one suspected Henry Plummer, who was serving
well in his double role.

Meantime, additional placer grounds had been discovered a hundred and
fifty miles south of Florence, on the Boise river, and some valuable
strikes were also made far to the no