en about him for two days, but thinking, at last, that the
regulators did not mean to carry their threats into effect, he dismissed
them. He has taken refuge with his friends, the Aikin family, who live, I
believe, in Jefferson Grove, in the same county, and who, it is said, have
also received notice to quit.

Letter VIII.

Examples of Lynch Law.

Princeton, Illinois, _July 2, 1841._

In my last letter I mentioned that the regulators in Ogle county, on Rock
River, in this state, had pulled down the house of one Bridge, living at
Washington Grove, a well-known confederate of the horse-thieves and
coiners with which this region is infested.

Horse-thieves are numerous in this part of the country. A great number of
horses are bred here; you see large herds of them feeding in the open
prairies, and at this season of the year every full-grown mare has a colt
running by her side. Most of the thefts are committed early in the spring,
when the grass begins to shoot, and the horses are turned out on the
prairie, and the thieves, having had little or no employment during the
winter, are needy; or else in the autumn, when the animals are kept near
the dwellings of their owners to be fed with Indian corn and are in
excellent order. The thieves select the best from the drove, and these are
passed from one station to another till they arrive at some distant market
where they are sold. It is said that they have their regular lines of
communication from Wisconsin to St. Louis, and from the Wabash to the
Mississippi. In Ogle county they seem to have been bolder than elsewhere,
and more successful, notwithstanding the notoriety of their crimes, in
avoiding punishment. The impossibility of punishing them by process of
law, the burning of the court-house at Oregon City last April, and the
threats of deadly vengeance thrown out by them against such as should
attempt to bring them to justice, led to the formation of a company of
citizens, "regulators" they call themselves, who resolved to take the law
into their own hands and drive the felons from the neighborhood. This is
not the first instance of the kind which has happened in Illinois. Some
twenty years since the southern counties contained a gang of
horse-thieves, so numerous and well-organized as to defy punishment by
legal means, and they were expelled by the same method which is now
adopted in Ogle county.

I have just learned, since I wrote the last sentence, that t