Gordon Young

“ When a miner sold a claim the verbal conveyance was sufficient, for men were honest and their word was good.
Theft was punished more readily and as severely as murder, for property could not defend itself ”

“ Large numbers of miners sought the phantom of the mother lode, refusing to stay long in any of the diggings, but pushed off where Indians were most dangerous and nature most bleak, searching for what they believed would be the source of all this scattered gold, and believing that if they found it they would find gold in chunks. ”

“ The negro went; and, to the amazement of the river miners who soon hurried up after him, there was gold on that remote hilltop.
Each camp made its own laws, regulating the size of the claims and the amount of work needful to hold possession. The discoverer was always given first choice—being the discoverer he usually had already taken it—and sometimes two or more claims. A pick or shovel left on a claim was an inviolable symbol of authority. Men were whipped for moving such tools, hanged for stealing them. ”

“ Almost the same day that men began carrying gold over the trails, bandits appeared; it was one thing to catch native horsemen who knew the country, and another to seize suspected fellow miners; and the camps themselves were for a long time kept free of thieves, largely because men were honest, but partly because punishment was inflicted with the same liberal off-hand manner that characterized everything Californian. Sometimes the most trivial incidents would determine whether a man was to be whipped or hanged ”

“ Sometimes men would tramp miles just to look at a woman and hear her voice. At other times procurers who brought in lewd women to a camp would have to depart simply because the miners would not go near them. For the most part they were extravagantly gallant toward all women, yet one of the biggest camps by popular vote hanged a pretty Mexican girl who had killed a man that broke into her room. The miners that clamored for her death drove off the men that protested; they ran one doctor out of camp and struck down other men who argued against them. ”

“ These miners were mostly Americans; Americans then were mostly Anglo-Saxons; and, though in every camp there was almost certainly a sprinkling of educated men, with what appears to have been an unconscious racial impulse they all, for a time, reverted to the manner of the Saxon folk-meet. Anybody might call a meeting; and anybody who swung a pick, as in ancient times any who bore a spear, whether sixteen or sixty, might lift his voice and cast his vote. The minority made no protest.
If a man was accused of crime, sometimes a jury was selected, a judge appointed ”

“ But—and this is important—there is reason to believe that most of what has been recorded as humor in their meetings and trials was unconscious, and appeared as humor only to people who now know, and then knew, more of courts and law formality than those grim earnest men, who, as free Americans, talked as they pleased in any meeting. ”

“ It seemed that there was no moderation, no shading, in their qualities or fortune; men who got sick, got well quickly, died or slunk off to cities; men were lucky or wretched—and store-keepers gave such bountiful credit to strangers that no man went hungry ”

“ In such moments of wrathful contempt for any sort of justice, they might kill the bystander who denounced the punishment as an outrage; but mostly there was an honest effort at justice, though the mountain life, so very like a throwback to robust barbarism, made them contemptuous of other people's lives and of their own. A married man was hanged for horse-stealing ”