In the days of Forty-Nine.”
Mrs. Trotter informed me that this procession of men bearing the coffin, had marched to and fro between the two ridges in a state of drunken revelry for a period of five hours; some singing one, some another verse, producing an utter confusion of sound, and so excited as to be utterly unable to preserve a straight line. At one of their halts near the coach, Johnson, who was at the moment one of the bearers, discovered that his own overcoat covered the body.
“—— if they haven’t laid him out in my blue overcoat!” he exclaimed, and loosening his hold of the handle, he raised the body, removed the coat, and put it on his own back. The march was then resumed, and amid singing, shouts, and laughter, the body was borne to a low ridge and buried.
Supper being soon announced, my English fellow-traveller did not appear at the table. He was perfectly appalled at the scene he had witnessed.
“Is this,” he inquired, with much earnestness, “the usual way funerals are conducted in this wild country? We never have such proceedings in England, you know. If the better class of people do such things, the country must be pretty rough. I didn’t know but they’d take me next, and I hadn’t any appetite.”
I assured him that our lives were perfectly safe; but it was not until we reached the next eating station, that hunger seemed to conquer his fears, and he was fully reassured.
CHAPTER LI
RETROSPECTION
In the former chapters of this history, we have seen that the people of Montana did not adopt the Vigilante code until a crisis had arrived when the question of supremacy between them and an organized band of robbers and murderers could be decided only by a trial of strength. When that time came, the prompt and decisive measures adopted by the Vigilantes brought peace and security to the people. If any of the murderous band of marauders remained in the Territory, fear of punishment kept them quiet. Occasionally indeed a man would be murdered in some of the desolate cañons while returning to the States, but whenever this occurred the offenders were generally hunted down and summarily executed.
When the executive and judicial officers appointed by the government arrived in the Territory in the Autumn of 1864, they found the mining camps in the enjoyment of a repose which was broken only by the varied recreations which an unorganized society necessarily adopts to pass away the hours unemployed in the mines. The people had perfect confidence in the code of the Vigilantes, and many of them scouted the idea of there being any better law for their protection. They had made up their minds to punish all lawbreakers, and there were many who did not hesitate to declare to the newly arrived officers, that while the courts might be called upon in the settlement of civil cases, the people wanted no other laws in dealing with horse-thieves, robbers, and murderers, than the ones they themselves had made. This feeling, though not so general as was claimed for it, was quite prevalent at that time among the miners. As soon, however, as they found the courts adequate to their necessities, they readily conformed to the laws and their administration after the manner prescribed by the government, and the Vigilante rule gradually disappeared. In several extreme cases they anticipated by immediate action the slower processes of law, but this occurred only when the offence was of a very aggravated character.
Some of the leading newspapers of the nation, and the people of many of the older communities where the hand of the law was strong, and sufficient for the protection of all, have denounced the action of the Vigilantes as cruel, barbarous, and criminal; but none of them have had the perspicacity to discover any milder or more efficacious substitute,—though apologies and excuses for the murderers have been numerous and persistent. The facts narrated in these volumes are a sufficient reply to these hastily formed opinions. The measures adopted were strictly defensive, and those who resorted to them knew full well that when the federal courts should be organized, they themselves would in turn be held accountable before the law for any unwarrantable exercise of power in applying them. The necessity of the hour was their justification. Too much credit can never be awarded to the brave and noble men who put them in force. They checked the emigration into Montana of a large criminal population, and thereby prevented the complete extermination of its peace-loving people, and its abandonment by those who have since demonstrated, by a development of its varied resources, its capacity for becoming an immense industrial State of the Union. They opened up the way for an increasing tide of emigration from the East, to this new and delightful portion of our country. They sought mainly to protect every man in the enjoyment of his own, and to afford every citizen equal opportunity to seek for and obtain the hoarded wealth of the unexplored mountains and gulches in the richest portion of the continent. They made laws for a country without law, and executed them with a vigor suited to every exigency.