tioned" courts were created by the Vigilance Committees of California in the days following the gold rush of 1849. These courts have won for themselves a special, and I believe more or less permanent, place in history as the most determined expression of the best elements of society in society's natural inclination to protect itself against predatory lawlessness when constituted law was absent or was failing to function.

It is the indisputable right of a community to defend itself against physical attack, as it is the constitutional right of the individual to defend himself similarly. No other brief need ever be written for the vigilance committees of our frontier days than this: We had to have justice, there was no means of getting it from the outside, so we administered justice. That spirit is the signature of their acts. California had three distinct vigilante movements, those of 1849, 1851, and 1856. Let me picture very briefly the last of

these three law-and-order uprisals, without going into the stern conditions preceding it.

California in 1856 had a certified government. At the head of it were a legislature, a governor, and a Supreme Court. This government was completely incapacitated by corrupt politics and did not function for the protection of communities. The people of San Francisco had grown weary of court sessions that ground out no justice; murder after murder went unpunished, crime after crime against property was being committed in high places and low. This evil situation had given to the law-cherishing element of the city-merchants, bankers, business and professional men-a disgust for the very name "law."

They decided to defy the rank decisions of the Supreme Court and the gross orders of the governor. Here and there, they gathered suddenly, and hanged out of hand some notorious criminal whom the

authorities were protecting. Being brave and earnest men, they naturally wore none of the masks. They were willing to be known and to be responsible for their acts.

My friend and client, William T. Coleman, the leading merchant of the city and one of the finest characters of his day, together with men of similar community

The outgrowth of this revolt of decency against criminality was the great Vigilance Committee of 1856. The instant impulse back of its formation was the murder of a San Francisco editor.

There appeared in the streets of San Francisco twenty-four companies of armed men, about fifty to the company.

standing, headed this command for order. They opened enlistment books, and no man could sign who was not a reputable and determined citizen. They took none of the rabble. The committee planted six cannon in front of a building they had rented as headquarters. They placed swivel-guns atop the structure, and equip

ped the place as a barracks with abundant bedding, supplies, and ammunition. On the roof they anchored a big triangle to be struck as an alarm for immediate assembling at headquarters. They halted before no responsibility. They seized in the harbor coastwise schooners loaded with arms which, they had reason to believe, had been sent against them by the governor. They ran down and captured known criminals, tried them in orderly fashion, and, if convicted, publicly hanged them from a beam protruding from a headquarters window in the presence of their own military and curious crowds. They swept San Francisco as clean of crime as a city in such frontier circumstances ever has been made.

The committee's membership included the city's best and most influential citizens without regard to politics. It had at its disposal unlimited means subscribed by the members. "Its quarters were open day and night, always ready for swift action." It had its departmental subcommittees and boards, and none of its drastic actions was taken without formal consideration. Its executive committee had thirty-three members, and its two-thirds vote was required for the death sentence. This committee had a prosecuting attorney, and no prisoner was tried without benefit of counsel assigned to him for defense. The organization put upon the streets a police force accurately detailed, and had its own sheriff with deputies.

When the day arrived that San Francisco was cleansed of crimes and freed of criminals (many of whom, of course, had slipped away under cover to safer places), the committee with its hundreds of members formally marched in column through the town, its artillery accompanying; and as the procession broke ranks and mingled with the crowds the word was passed from lip to lip that the committee of vigilance was "fully prepared to reassemble and resume duty whenever necessary."

Though this year, 1856, recorded in California the last appearance of a vigilance committee operating as such, it by no means witnessed the dissolution of the vigilante spirit. Not only did its memory continue to reside as a restraining force over the evil impulses of our "farthest West" communities, but the substantial

citizens who had led it into a just revolt against constituted law continued to operate individually, as a protective influence. In 1879 and 1880 San Francisco was terrified by the followers of Dennis Kearney, known as "the Sand Lot Orator." At that time my father had been appointed by the governor to be chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners of the city. His associates on the board were William Alvord, president of the Bank of California, and Richard Tobin, president of the Hibernia Bank. The office was no sinecure. My father was a West Point officer who had served with distinction in the Mexican War, and he was a speaker of the first California Assembly and the first collector of customs at San Francisco. He with Mr. Alvord and Mr. Tobin now took a determined stand for preservation of law and order in San Francisco. Toughs and thugs were threatening to break loose again.

One day Mr. William T. Coleman invited Kearney to meet him in the Grand Hotel in Market Street. This is the story of the meeting as Mr. Coleman told it to me:

"I said to him, 'Kearney, you know that I am a man of my word. It is a good thing for you to know, if you don't know it, that I was the head of one of the vigilance committees of the early days and took a hand in hanging a lot of damned scoundrels. Now, I wish to warn you: If you undertake to carry out the threat that you and your gang have made to do away with the lives and homes of some of the city's capitalists on Nob Hill, at the first outbreak I shall seize your person and hang you on the lamp-post you see outside this window.""

Mr. Coleman was never the sort of man who depends entirely upon enforcement of the law through legal processes, though California never had a stancher friend of enforcement of honest law in honest hands. What he told Dennis Kearney in the Grand Hotel had its immediate effect. There were no capitalists murdered and no Nob Hill homes blown up.

The historic stampedes to the Yukon and the Klondike reached full tide in the winter of 1897-98. Literally every

class of person, from the gold-fevered drygoods clerk to the experienced investor in new mines, and including of course the male and female scum from California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and far points, "went in." To control this heterogeneous mass of fortune-hungerers there was a mere handful of Northwest Mounted Police. They were stationed along the passes and among the scattered

camps. Yet there was comparatively little lawless disorder on the British Columbia side. It was British soil, and the scarlet coat of one of the "Mounted" meant, and was intended and known to mean, that in him was present that intangible, traditional, unhesitant, fair but unfoolable force, British law. It came to be characteristic of Skagway on the American side, where the long journey

into the gold country really commenced, that after leaving that town one packed one's revolver away; there was little likelihood that it would be wanted on the road. The duties of the Mounted Police at this period were varied and very heavy. They had to keep order and enforce the law among many nationalities and more temperaments. They were the customs officers in the snowy passes. They handled the incoming and outgoing mail, and ran a dog-team mail service between the Yukon and the wilderness interior. They were the mining recorders and the arbitrators of claims. They played the rôle of guide, philosopher, and friend to every struggling packer and bewildered cheechako (tenderfoot) demanding or imploring help in a time and place where every other fellow needed a friend. Atop this little pack of endless jobs was the equally endless business of turning back at the border or arresting and jailing an army of illicit whiskey-runners, any one of whom would have given an eye to get in.

Down-trail at Skagway, American side, the notorious bloviator and gun-toter, "Soapy" Smith, with his gang held the town in a carnival of terror. It lasted until "Soapy" was shot to death in the street by a member of the Skagway Reform Committee, which differed scarcely at all from the vigilance committees of earlier days.

But not all of the crimes of pillage and of blood were staged on the American side; a number went onto the police books of the "Mounted" from Canadian camps isolated beyond the physical powers of their small force to patrol in that wide, wild jungle of storm and snow. An officer of that force tells the fate of two men caught robbing a cache, or emergency store of supplies, on the trail between icy, deadly Chilkoot Summit and Sheep Camp, American side.

"Into Sheep Camp I descended," he reports, "in the usual manner, shooting straight down to the bottom on a snowslide. My heavy furs protected me from injury. When I thus 'arrived' it was to find a miners' meeting being held to dispose of the cache thieves. The sentiment was strong for lynching. I endeavored to remonstrate; but I was only one police officer, and, moreover, it was not British VOL. LXXVII.-10

territory. The miners brushed my protests aside and started with their victims up the trail to a point where a big sprucetree stood outlined on an overhang of cliff. While my back was turned I heard a loud report. One of the prisoners had drawn a pistol, overlooked in searching him, and fired at his executioners-elect. He was instantly shot to death, his body riddled. The crowd seemed to feel something of the horror of the tragedy, and wavered. I ventured another remonstrance against going on with the lynching.

"We all went back down the trail and another meeting was held. The verdict reached and carried out was this: The prisoner should have his hands securely bound behind him. Around his neck should be hung a board inscribed 'This is a Thief-Pass him along!' and thus he should be turned adrift to stumble back through the snows to the coast, or perish. What became of the poor devil I never learned."

From time to time after 1897 the handful of the "Mounted" covering the entire wilderness of the Yukon, including the Klondike, was increased, until by November 30, 1902, their total was two hundred and ninety officers and men. But the N. W. M. P. in issuing those Lilliputian statistics failed to note down the most important figure: Added to those two hundred and ninety were all the armies and unlimited resources of Great Britain and her colonies-viz., the British uniform, which made of each of them an army in himself.

Is it necessary for me to explain, here, that I am not an Anglomaniac? I scarcely think so. But I will say to my fellow Americans that unless we get together and work together to establish in our country a reign of respect for law approximating that which exists everywhere under the British flag, we not only shall become merely respectable instead of forceful in the family of nations, but we shall invite into our fabric that social disintegration preceding anarchy.

The most interesting, resourceful, and courageous detective I ever dealt with was Charles A. Siringo of the Pinkertons. And here I am reminded of what a Wash