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Collection: Books and Periodicals
Three Years in California by John D. Borthwick (1857)(LoC) (423 pages)
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Page: of 423
228 THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE OF 51.
influential citizens, and which had the cordial approval,
and the active support, of nearly the entire population
of the city.
The first action of the Committee was to take two
men out of gaol who had already been convicted of
murder and robbery, but for the execution of whose
sentence the experience of the past afforded no guarantee. These two men, when taken out of the gaol,
were driven in a coach and four at full gallop through
the town, and in half an hour they were swinging
from the beams projecting over the windows of the
store which was used as the committee-rooms.
The Committee, during their reign, hanged four
or five men, all of whom, by their own confessions,
deserved hanging half-a-dozen times over. Their
confessions disclosed a most extensive and wealthy
organisation of villany, in which several men of comparatively respectable position were implicated. These
were the projectors and designers of elaborate schemes
of wholesale robbery, which the more practical members of the profession executed under their superintendence; and in the possession of some of these men
there were found exact plans of the stores of many of
the wealthiest merchants, along with programmes of
robberies to come off.
The operations of the Committee were not confined
to hanging alone ; their object was to purge the city
of the whole herd of malefactors which infested it.
Most of them, however, were panic-struck at the first
alarm of Lynch law, and fled to the mines; but many