Long John having turned States’ evidence was set free, and we believe that he still remains in the Territory.
One thing was conclusively shown to all who witnessed the trial of Ives. If every Road Agent cost as much labor, time and money for his conviction, the efforts of the citizens would have, practically, failed altogether. Some shorter, surer, and at least equally equitable method of procedure was to be found. The necessity for this, and the trial of its efficiency when it was adopted, form the ground-work of this history.
CHAPTER XV.
THE FORMATION OF THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE.
The land wants such
As dare with vigor execute the laws,
Her festered members must be lanced and tented;
He’s a bad surgeon that for pity spares
The part corrupted till the gangrene spread,
And all the body perish; he that is merciful
Unto the bad is cruel to the good.
Those who have merely read the account given in these pages of the execution of Ives, can never fully appreciate the intense popular excitement that prevailed throughout the Territory during the stormy and critical period, or the imminent peril to which the principal actors in the drama were exposed. As an instance of the desire for murder and revenge that animated the roughs, it may be stated that Col. Sanders was quietly reading in John Creighton’s store, on the night of the execution of Ives, when a desperado named Harvey Meade—the individual who planned the seizure of a Federal vessel at San Francisco—walked into the room, with his revolver stuck into the band of his pants, in front, and walking up to the Colonel, commenced abusing him and called him a ——, etc. Col. Sanders not having been constituted with a view to the exhibition of fear, continued his reading, quietly slipping his hand out of his pocket in which lay a Derringer, and dropping it into his coat pocket, cocked his revolver as a preparative for a little shooting. Raising his eyes to the intruder, he observed, “Harvey, I should feel hurt if some men said this; but from such a dog as you, it is not worth noticing.” A Doctor who was present laid his hand on a pick handle, and an “affair” seemed imminent; but John Creighton quietly walked up to the man and said, “You have to get out of here—quick!” All men fond of shooting, otherwise than in self-defense, unless they take their victim at an advantage, never care to push matters to extremities, and Meade quietly walked off—foiled. He admitted, afterwards, to Sanders, that he had intended to kill him; but he professed a recent and not unaccountable change of sentiment.
All the prominent friends of justice were dogged, threatened and watched by the roughs; but their day was passing away, and the dawn of a better state of things was even then enlivening the gloom which overspread society like a funeral pall.
Two sister towns—Virginia and Nevada—claim the honor of taking the first steps towards the formation of a Vigilance Committee. The truth is, that five men in Virginia and one in Nevada commenced simultaneously to take the initiative in the matter. Two days had not elapsed before their efforts were united, and when once a beginning had been made, the ramifications of the league of safety and order extended, in a week or two, all over the Territory, and, on the 14th day of January, 1864, the COUP DE GRACE was given to the power of the band by the execution of five of the chief villains, in Virginia City. The details of the rapid and masterly operations which occupied the few weeks immediately succeeding the execution of Ives, will appear in the following chapters.
The reasons why the organizations was so generally approved and so numerously and powerfully supported, were such as appealed to the sympathies of all men, who had anything to lose, or who thought their lives safer under the dominion of a body which, upon the whole, it must be admitted, has from the first acted with a wisdom, a justice and a vigor never surpassed on this continent, and rarely, if ever, equalled. Merchants, miners, mechanics and professional men, alike, joined in the movement, until, within an incredibly short space of time, the Road Agents and their friends were in a state of constant and well grounded fear, lest any remarks they might make confidentially to an acquaintance might be addressed to one who was a member of the much dreaded Committee.
The inhabitants of Virginia had especial cause to seek for vengeance upon the head of the blood-thirsty marauders who had, in addition to the atrocities previously recounted, planned and arranged the murder and robbery of as popular a man as ever struck the Territory—one whose praise was in all men’s mouths, and who had left them, in the previous Fall, with the intention of returning to solicit their suffrages, as well as those of the people of Lewiston and Western Idaho, as their Delegate to Congress. His address, in the form of a circular, is still to be seen in the possession of a citizen of Nevada.
Lloyd Magruder, to whom the above remarks have special reference, was a merchant of Lewiston, Idaho. He combined in his character so many good and even noble qualities, that he was one of the most generally esteemed and beloved men in the Territory, and no single act of villainy ever committed in the far West was more deeply felt, or provoked a stronger desire for retaliation upon the heads of the guilty perpetrators, than the murder and robbery of himself and party, on their journey homeward.