It is stated on good authority, that soon after the first appearance of Schiller’s drama of “The Robbers” a number of young men, charmed with the character of Charles De Moor, formed a band and went to the forests of Bohemia to engage in brigand life. I have no fear that such will be the influence of this volume. It deals in facts. Robber life as delineated by the vivid fancy of Schiller, and robber life as it existed in our mining regions, were as widely separated as fiction and truth. No one can read this record of events, and escape the conviction that an honest, laborious, and well-meaning life, whether successful or not, is preferable to all the temporary enjoyments of a life of recklessness and crime. The truth of the adage that “Crime carries with it its own punishment” has never received a more powerful vindication than at the tribunals erected by the people of the northwest mines for their protection. No sadder commentary could have stained our civilization than to permit the numerous and bloody crimes committed in the early history of this portion of our country to go unwhipped of justice. And the fact that they were promptly and thoroughly dealt with stands among the earliest and noblest characteristics of a people which derived their ideas of right and of self-protection from that spirit of the law that flows spontaneously from our free institutions. The people bore with crime until punishment became a duty and neglect a crime. Then, at infinite hazard of failure, they entered upon the work of purgation with a strong hand—and in the briefest possible time established the supremacy of law. The robbers and murderers of the mining regions, so long defiant of the claims of peace and safety, were made to hold the gibbet in greater terror there than in any other portion of our country.

Up to this time, fear of punishment had exercised no restraining influence on the conduct of men who had organized murder and robbery into a steady pursuit. They hesitated at no atrocity necessary to accomplish their guilty designs. Murder with them was resorted to as the most available means of concealing robbery, and the two crimes were generally coincident. The country, filled with caÑons, gulches, and mountain passes, was especially adapted to their purposes, and the unpeopled distances between mining camps afforded ample opportunity for carrying them into execution. Pack trains and companies, stage coaches and express messengers, were as much exposed as the solitary traveller, and often selected as objects of attack. Miners, who had spent months of hard labor in the placers in the accumulation of a few hundreds of dollars, were never heard of after they left the mines to return to their distant homes. Men were daily and nightly robbed and murdered in the camps. There was no limit to this system of organized brigandage.

When not engaged in robbery, this criminal population followed other disreputable pursuits. Gambling and licentiousness were the most conspicuous features of every mining camp, and both were but other species of robbery. Worthless women taken from the stews of cities plied their vocation in open day, and their bagnios were the lures where many men were entrapped for robbery and slaughter. Dance-houses sprung up as if by enchantment, and every one who sought an evening’s recreation in them was in some way relieved of the money he took there. Many good men who dared to give expression to the feelings of horror and disgust which these exhibitions inspired, were shot down by some member of the gang on the first opportunity. For a long time these acts were unnoticed, for the reason that the friends of law and order supposed the power of evil to be in the ascendant. Encouraged by this impunity the ruffian power increased in audacity, and gave utterance to threats against all that portion of the community which did not belong to its organization. An issue involving the destruction of the good or bad element actually existed at the time that the people entered upon the work of punishment.

I offer these remarks, not in vindication of all the acts of the Vigilantes, but of so many of them as were necessary to establish the safety and protection of the people. The reader will find among the later acts of some of the individuals claiming to have exercised the authority of the Vigilantes, some executions of which he cannot approve. For these persons I can offer no apology. Many of these were worse men than those they executed. Some were hasty and inconsiderate, and while firm in the belief they were doing right, actually committed grievous offences. Unhappily for the Vigilantes, the acts of these men have been recalled to justify an opinion abroad, prejudicial to the Vigilante organization. Nothing could be more unjust. The early Vigilantes were the best and most intelligent men in the mining regions. They saw and felt that, in the absence of all law, they must become a “law unto themselves,” or submit to the bloody code of the banditti by which they were surrounded, and which were increasing in numbers more rapidly than themselves. Each man among them realized from the first the great delicacy and care necessary in the management of a society which assumed the right to condemn to death a fellow-man, and they now refer to the history of all those men who suffered death by their decree as affording ample justification for the severity of their acts. What else could they do? How else were their own lives and property, and the lives and property of the great body of peaceable miners in the placers to be preserved? What other protection was there for a country entirely destitute of law?

Let those who would condemn these men try to realize how they would act under similar circumstances, and they will soon find everything to approve and nothing to condemn in the transactions of the early Vigilantes. I have endeavored to narrate nothing but facts, and these will enable every reader to judge correctly of the merits of each case.

I would fain believe that this history, bloody as it is, will prove both interesting and instructive. In all that concerns crime of the blackest dye on the one hand, and love for law and order on the other, it stands without a parallel in the annals of any people. Nowhere else, nor at any former period since men became civilized, have murder and robbery and social vice presented an organized front, and offered an open contest for supremacy to a large civilized community. Their works for centuries have been done by stealth, in darkness, and as far away from society as possible. I cannot now remember the instance, within the past three hundred years, when the history of any country records the fact that the criminal element of an entire community, numbering thousands, was believed to be greater than the peaceful element. Yet it was so here. And when the Vigilantes of Montana entered upon their work, they did not know how soon they might have to encounter a force numerically greater than their own.

In my view the moral of this history is a good one. The brave and faithful conduct of the Vigilantes furnishes an example of American character, from a point of view entirely new. We know what our countrymen were capable of doing when exposed to Indian massacre. We have read history after history recording the sufferings of early pioneers in the East, South, and West, but what they would do when surrounded by robbers and assassins, who were in all civil aspects like themselves, it has remained for the first settlers of the northwestern mines to tell. And that they did their work well, and showed in every act a love for law, order, and for the moral and social virtues in which they had been educated, and a regard for our free institutions, no one can doubt who rightly appreciates the motives which actuated them.

A people who had not been reared to respect law and order, and to regard the privileges which flow from a free government as greater than all others, in the regulation of society, would have been restrained by fear from any such united and thorough effort as that which in Montana actually scourged crime out of existence, and secured to an unorganized community all the immunities and blessings of good government. The terror which popular justice inspired in the criminal population has never been forgotten. To this day crime has been less frequent in occurrence in Montana than in any other of the new Territories, and no banded criminals have made that Territory an abiding place.

Although not the first exhibition of Vigilante justice, the one I here record was the most thorough and severe, and stands as an example for all new settlements that in the future may be similarly afflicted, for it was not until driven to it both by the frequent and unremitting villainies of the ruffians, and by the necessities of a condition for which there was no law in existence, that the people resorted to measures of their own, and made and enforced laws suited to the exigency. But enough! If the history fails to remove the prejudices of my readers, nothing I can say will do so. It speaks for itself, and though there are a few of its later occurrences I would gladly blot, there is nothing in its early transactions, nothing in the design it unfolds, nothing in the results which have followed, that on a similar occasion I would not wish to see reproduced.