The air was so still and clear that the voices rose to us with startling distinctness, and when a head appeared from a distant pit, and its owner vociferated, “How are you, Frank?� I thought at first he meant me, and was on the point of replying, “Well and hearty, thank him. How was he?�
Small patches of garden surrounded the village, which bore so palpably the stamp of cheerfulness and happy industry, that I was disappointed on learning that its name was “Murderer’s Bar;� though the appellation was justly conferred in memory of a brutal murder that had been committed amongst its earliest settlers.
Had all the diggings been named in accordance with the circumstances that ushered them individually into public notice, there would be more Murderer’s Bars than the traveller would well know what to do with, unless they were numerically arranged like the John Smiths in the muster-roll of a marching regiment.
The name is unpleasantly candid; there are plenty of “diggings� that can record their tales of blood much more forcibly than Murderer’s Bar, but under such peaceful titles as “Diamond Springs,� or “Happy Valley,� they bring no shudder to the traveller. So that we learn another thing at the diggings, which is, that it is ridiculous to be a Publican and make a clean breast of it to every stranger, when such great immunity is gained under the garb of the Pharisee.
One would ask how it is that Murderer’s Bar, despite its name, is a peaceable village, where each man’s wealth, in the shape of ten feet square of soil, is virtuously respected by his neighbour; it is not because there is enough for all, for every paying claim has long ago been appropriated, and the next comer must go further on. There is a justice of the peace (up to his arms in the river just at present), and there is a constable (who has been “prospecting� a bag of earth from the hill, and been rewarded with a gold flake of the value of three cents); these two, one would suppose, could scarcely control two or three hundred men, with rude passions and quick tempers, each of whom, as you observe, carries his revolver even while at work. But these armed, rough-looking fellows themselves elected their judge and constable, and stand, ever ready, as “specials,� to support them.
If a man wanted a pickaxe or a shovel, and thought to help himself to one of those that lie about at all times at Murderer’s Bar, he would find it inconvenient if discovered; for, as there is no extenuating clause of hunger or misery in the diggings, theft is held to be a great crime; in all probability the offender would be whipped at the tree; and this brings us again to the perplexing subject of Lynch law as relating to the miners.
I venture to say that it will puzzle the theorist to determine how far the roving population of the mining regions in California have been justified in taking measures to eject the bad and worthless from among them; for all rules and precedents fall before the strong argument of self-preservation. When Christian and his shipmates landed at Pitcairn’s Island and made laws for the regulation of their small colony (happily little needed) they acted as much upon the principle of Lynch law as did the miners; for these latter were equally without the reach of the laws under which they had been born. Where, after all, was the great difference in the first trial by jury and the Lynch execution among a colony of men living far from civilisation? Was the peace of a community of honest men to be disturbed by crime and bloodshed, unpunished, when, from circumstances, the law of their country was unable to protect them? These and similar questions would form the basis of the argument in defence of Lynch law in the mountains.
On the other hand, the opponent would point to the fearful instances on record of men being hurried to eternity without preparation—victims to the overwrought feelings of an excited mob. The defence of self-constituted law is untenable, yet there are instances in which small communities have seemed to me justified in enforcing, by the only means at their command, the order so necessary in such a state of society as that of the mountain gorges of California.
But when we see this law “subverting law� in a city like San Francisco, then we are forced sweepingly to condemn, once and for all, all that bears the name of Lynch, and we feel loth to admit that in any case the end can ever justify the means. Still it is a question, taken from first to last, that one may split straws on, when we see how peacefully Murderer’s Bar progresses, not under the execution, but under the fear of Lynch law. In most mining villages public indignation has been confined to ordering men to “leave the camp� in twenty-four hours, or otherwise take the consequences; and after being thus warned, the nefarious digger invariably “slopes.�
The mining population have been allowed to constitute their own laws relative to the appointment of “claims,� and it is astonishing how well this system works. Had the Legislature, in ignorance of the miner’s wants, interfered and decided that a man should have so much, and no more, of the soil to work on, all would have been anarchy and confusion.