Smith
and McCall. The news swept like wildfire through the Mississippi
Valley and gave heart to the lovers of law and order. At one or two
other places some were shot, some were hanged, and now and then one
or two were sent to prison, and thus an end was put to organized
crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out the reign of
the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."

Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to
outlawry that the law itself could not control.

Chapter V

The Vigilantes of California--_The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the
World_--_History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods_.

The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there
may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849.
Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and
easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of
the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached
with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific
Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon
transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the
tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side
the temple of the law.

It was not thus in those early days of our Western history. The law was
left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of
wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains
and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold,
but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the
law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all
restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the
uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements,
the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced _pari-passu_ farther
and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the
development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left
behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of
the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the
settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to
itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent
of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as t