The poor wretch turned his face to the storm, and wandered through the darkness, sleet, and wind, despairingly, from cabin to cabin, in search of food and lodging. Every door was closed against him, and he was rudely and unpityingly told to “Be gone,” by all from whom he sought relief. At a distance of four miles from Florence he stopped at a late hour of the night at the door of a worthy man by the name of Neselrode. Jack answered frankly the old man’s questions. Neselrode admitted him, gave him supper, and a bed by his cabin fireside. A hired man was the only other occupant of the house.
At a later hour of the night, two men roused Mr. Neselrode, and demanded the person of Fat Jack. Neselrode, on being told that they had no authority, refused to surrender him to an irresponsible party, as to do so would be on his part a violation of the laws of hospitality. His refusal was followed by the instant discharge of two double-barrelled shotguns which riddled the door with buckshot, and stretched in death-throes both the kind-hearted host and his criminal guest. The one surviving man threw open the door, and bade the dastardly ruffians to enter, telling them the murderous effects of their shots. They availed themselves of the darkness to flee without recognition. None of the citizens of Florence were more indignant when told of this cruel assassination than the Vigilantes themselves. A meeting was held denouncing the perpetrators, and pledging the citizens to the adoption of every possible means for their early detection and punishment. Alas! the criminals remain to this day undiscovered. They belonged, doubtless, to that class of officious individuals, of whom there are many in the mining camps, who in point of moral character and actual integrity are but a single remove from the criminals themselves,—men who live a cheating, gambling, dissipated life, and seek a cover for their own iniquities by the energy and vindictiveness with which they pursue others accused of actual guilt. If the various protective societies which at one time and another have sprung up in the mining regions to preserve peace and good order are liable to any charge of wrong, it was their neglect to punish those men who used the organization to promote their own selfish purposes, and in the name of Vigilante justice committed crimes which on any principle of ethics were wholly indefensible. The fact that in some instances wrongs of this kind have occurred, only adds to the proof, that in all forms of society, whether governed by permanent or temporary laws, there are always a few who are adroit and cunning enough to escape merited punishment.
CHAPTER XII
PINKHAM AND PATTERSON
No two men filled a broader space in the early history of the Florence mines than Pinkham and Patterson. Their personal characteristics gave them a widespread notoriety, and a sort of local popularity, which each enjoyed in his separate sphere. They were both leaders, after their own fashion, in the heterogeneous society in which they moved, and he was deemed a bold man who would gainsay their opinions, or resist their enterprises.
They were both gamblers, and lived the free and easy life of that pursuit; a pursuit which, in a new mining camp, next to that of absolute ruffianism, enabled its votaries to exercise a power as unlimited as it is generally lawless and insurrectionary. Indeed, there it is the master vice, which gives life and support to all the other vices, and that surrounds and hedges them in.
The order of influences which govern and direct the social element of a mining camp in its infancy is exactly the reverse of those which govern and direct the social element of an Eastern village. The clergyman, the church, and the various little associations growing out of it, which make the society of our New England villages so delightful, and, at the same time, so disciplinary and instructive, are superseded in a new mining community by the gambling saloon, cheap whiskey, frail women, and all the evils necessarily flowing from such polluted combinations. In the one case, religion and morality stand in the foreground, protected by the spirit of wise and inflexible laws; in the other, the rifle, the pistol, and the bowie-knife are flourished by reckless men, whose noblest inspirations are excited by liquor and debauchery. While all that is good and true and pure in society is brought into unceasing action in the one case, all that is vile and false and polluted reigns supreme in the other. We look to the one condition of society for all great and good examples of humanity, and to the other for such as are of an opposite character.
If we are to credit the early history of New England, Miles Standish was a central character of Puritanic chivalry and fidelity. The people had faith in his Christian character, and entire confidence in his strong arm and fertility of expedients in the hour of danger. Some such sentiment, qualified by the wide difference in the moral character of the two men, attached the mining community of Florence to Pinkham. He was a bold, outspoken, truthful, self-reliant man, without a particle of braggadocio or bluster, careful always to say what he meant, and to do what he said. Fear was a stranger to him, and desperate chances never found him without desperate means.
Pinkham was a native of Maine, and physically a fine type of the stalwart New Englander. In stature he was more than six feet, and in weight upwards of two hundred pounds. To the agility of a mountain cat he added the quick, sharp eye of an Indian and the strength of a giant. Trained by years of frontier exposure, he was skilled in the ready use of all defensive weapons. When aroused, the habitual frown upon his brow gathered into a fierce scowl, and the steely gray eyes fairly blazed in their sockets. At such times he was dangerous, because it was his custom to settle all disputes with a word and a blow, and the blow always came first. The intensity of his nature could not brook altercation.
Pinkham had been an adventurer ever since the discovery of gold in California. He was among the first of that great army of fortune-seekers which braved the perils of an overland trip to that distant El Dorado in 1849. If, before he left his New England home, no blight had fallen upon his moral nature, it is certain that soon after his arrival in the land of gold his character took the form which it ever afterwards wore, of a gambler and desperado. In this there was nothing strange, as he was but one victim in a catastrophe that wrecked the characters of thousands. The estimate is small, which places at one-half the number of the early Pacific gold-seekers, those who fell victims to the moral ruin of life in the mining camp. It was the fruitful nursery of all those desperate men, who, after years of bloody experience, expiated their crimes upon the impromptu scaffolds of the Vigilantes, or in some of the violent brawls which their own recklessness had excited. Pinkham’s pursuits in California were those of the professional gambler. At one time he kept a common dance-house in Marysville. It is fair, in the absence of facts, to presume that his life in the Golden State was a preparatory foreground for the one which followed in the mountains of Washington Territory. He was among the first, in 1862, who were lured to that Territory by the reports of extensive gold discoveries. Among the desperate, reckless, and motley crowd that assembled at Florence immediately after the discovery of the mines, was Pinkham, with his faro boards and monte cards, “giving the boys a chance for a tussle with the tiger and the leopard.” It was not long until he became a central figure in the camp. The wild, undisciplined, pleasure-seeking population, attracted by the outspoken boldness and self-assertion of the man, quietly submitted to the influence which such characteristics always command. And no man better understood his power over his followers, or exercised it more warily, than Pinkham. The reputation which he enjoyed, of being a bold, chivalric, fearless man, ready for any emergency, however desperate, gained for him the favor of every reckless adventurer who shared in his general views of the race.
Unlike most of the gamblers and roughs, who for the most part sympathized with the Confederates, Pinkham was an intense Union man. He never lost an opportunity to proclaim his attachment for the Union cause, and denounced as traitors all who opposed it. No fear of personal injury restrained him in the utterance of his patriotic sentiments, and as he always avowed a readiness to fight for them, his opponents were careful to afford him no opportunity. At every election in Idaho City after the organization of the Territory, he was found at the polls surrounded by a set of plucky fellows armed to the teeth, ready at his command for any violent collisions with secessionists that the occasion might arouse. His tall form, rendered more conspicuous by the loud and inspiring voice with which, to the cries of “negro worshippers,” “abolitionists,” and “Lincoln hirelings,” he shouted back “secessionists,” “copperheads,” “rebels,” and “traitors,” was always the centre of a circle of men who would oppose force to force and return shot for shot.