The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1882-02-04
A Western view of Judge Lynch.

Meditating upon two-line TELEGRAM
in the morning newspaper that tells how
the Vigilance Committee of Dead Man's
Gulch has lynched the notorious outlaw,
Smith, for the murder of the highly re-
spectacle barkeeper, Brown, the East
ern man thanks his stars that he does
not live in Dead Mans Gulch. where
outrages of this sort are tolerated
he passes with a sigh of satisfaction to
the detailed account of the hanging. by
due process of law, of another Smith,
who killed another barkeeper in Boston,
or New York or Philadelphia.
There is. it is true, some ground for
the belief firmly entertained by the ma
jority of Eastern people, that the frontier
that fugitive region which twenty
years ago was marked by the Missouri,
and that is now westward or the Rocky
Mountains-is alive with trucculent ruff
fans, whose knives are always loosened
in their sheaths, and whose revolvers are
always full cooked, who ''hold up in
nocent travellers, and, not content with
mere robbery, never consider their work
complete without murder. But the very
important modifying fact is lost sight of
that, for every genuine single desperate
on the frontier, there are several hun
bred men who are not desperadoes, and
who, for their own good, are determined
that peace and order shall be preserved.
In point of fact, on ''the lawless
frontier" this orderly, peaceloying
class is largely in the ascendant; and it
is this class that does the lynching. The
Vigilance Committee of Dead Man S
Gulch is the community-as yet unor-
ganized-acting directly for itself, with
out any reference of the work to depu-
ties at all. 1t recognizes the facts that
a crime has been committed, and that,
as a measure of communal self-defence,
the criminal must be punished; and
without circumlocution' acts upon the
just appreciation of the situation by
catching the criminal and hanging or
shooting him out of band. The condi-
tons under which society exists at the
Gulch would render any effective treat
ment of the case other than this sum-
mary one exceedingly difficult; not to
say impossible In an isolated mining
camp, the inhabitants of which continu-
ally are changing, and rarely have any
thing in common but strong desire to
get rich quickly, there cannot possibly
be set up the complicated machinery, or
anything approaching to it, which in
more stable communities guards public
safety and morals, and, when these are
infringed, executes the appointed penal
lo,us Tho oloh a,d Ao1,, l,f ,>o,,,,lo +;o,, -,
itself suffices to prevent or delay arrange
ment of this sort. A still stronger OBJ
stacle, looking at the matter from the
standpoint of the camp, is that the
scheme which includes a constable, a
warden, a judge and sheriff, and that
necessitates trial by jury, is too
much of bother and takes too much
time. In the opinion of the camp,
it does not pay to waste
two OF three days in doing job of JUS
tice that ''the committee can attend to
satisfactorily in twenty minutes. And,
even supposing the existence of camp
willing to provide itself with all the func-
tionaries necessary to discharge the stat
ute law-though the supposition certainly
is not tenable-the difficulty immediate
ly would arise that officers could not be
found to fill worthily the several offices.
1t is general rule in mining that the
best men in camp are the most success
full miners; and the complimentary rule
is equally general that the least success
full miners are the worst men-the lazy
and worthless ''tailings" of the camp,
out of which its vicious element is formed.
There are exceptions to both of these rules
but they are few. When a man is wash
ing out an UPSTREAM full of dust day
as the best men did at California Gulch,
Colorado, in 1856-it is pretty certain
that he is not going to fritter away his
time as a policeman or a Judge, or by
sitting on jury. 1t follows, therefore,
that, if these offices are to be filed, they
must be filled by drafts from the class
that cannot or that will not make mining
pay-from which class the camp crimi-
mails also come. Howsoever well the plan
of setting thief to catch a thief may
work in other places, in a mining-camp
it does not work at all. The thief and
his captor simply join forces, and the in
jury to the community is corresponding
ly increased.-Cor. Philadelphia Aneri-
can.