aggravated cases it was death. Even after the state government had been
organized, indeed, the law for a short while permitted a jury to
prescribe the death penalty for grand larceny, and, in fact, several
notorious thieves were legally executed.

The testimony of all observers is that the camps were surprisingly
orderly, that crime was infrequent, and that its punishment, though
swift and certain, leaned to mercy rather than rigor. Bayard Taylor, for
example, who was in the mines in '50 and '51, writes: "In a region five
hundred miles long, inhabited by a hundred thousand people, who had
neither locks, bolts, regular laws of government, military or civil
protection, there was as much security to life and property as in any
state of the Union."

As these "miners' courts" were allowed after the organization of the
state to retain jurisdiction in all questions that concerned the
appropriation of claims, the miners but slowly appreciated that they had
been shorn of their criminal jurisdiction. But that they did come to
recognize that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new," is, in
fact, shown by the very incident on which Harte based his of a lynching.

Spite of the autobiographic method that leads the casual reader to think
that Harte was intimately connected with this early pioneer life and
derived the material for his sketches from personal observation and
experience, his is, in truth, only hearsay evidence. The heroic age was
with Iram and all his rose ere he landed in 1854, a lad of eighteen.
With no especial equipment for battling with the world, he had to turn
his hand to many things, and naturally tried mining. But finding the
returns incommensurate with the labor, he soon gave it up and sought
more congenial occupations, mainly in the towns of the valleys and the
seacoast. Before he was twenty-three, he had been school-teacher,
express-messenger, deputy tax-collector, and druggist's assistant; and
had risen from "printer's devil" to assistant editor of a country
newspaper. In 1859 he was back in San Francisco, utilizing the trade he
had picked up, as a compositor on The Golden Era. To this he contributed
poems and local sketches that soon led to his appointment as assistant
editor. His writings made him friends, one of whom, Thomas Starr King,
in 1864, obtained for him the position of secretary to the
superintendent of the Mint. His duties were not arduous, and his rooms
became the resort of his literar