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HUMORS OF PLAINS TRAVEL.

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hours with reading or whist or the music of violin and flute. By day the road was lively. Many emigrant women rode saddle horses, though most were in ox-wagons. All seemed to enjoy the trip, though each invariably apologized for her untidy looks. We saw one bloomer who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds driving oxen while her husband slept soundly in their wagon. Another leviathan from New Hampshire would have satisfied the great Julius; for he weighed three hundred and fifty, he was fat, he was sleek-headed and he slept o' nights.

There were many fresh graves, and upon one secluded island of the Platte were found the bloody remains of a little girl with broken skull. It was difficult to surmise the motive for the murder of the poor child.

One wagon drawn by six cows bore the charcoal label: 'FAMILY EXPRESS; MILK FOR SALE.' Many displayed the sign: 'OLD BOURBON WHISKY SOLD HERE!'

tion were:

'I am off for the Peak; are you?'

Among other quaint inscrip

'Good bye friends; I am bound to try the Peak.'

"The eleventh commandment: Mind your own business.'

'Ho for California.'

Oregon or death!'

We cooked our own meals of coffee, biscuit and pork, upon the open prairie with buffalo chips for fuel. In our evening camp an ex-clergyman might be seen devoting himself to the supper, a Boston steel engraver and an old California miner greasing the wagon, while a Missouri railway contractor and an Ohio lawyer watched the grazing mules.

At last we felt the invigorating breath of the pines, and saw the shining crests of the Mother Mountains. On the tenth of June, twenty-three days out, we reached Denver. Here Knox and my. self spent the summer as correspondents, also editing the Golden City Weekly Mountaineer, by way of recreation.

Denver was uncomfortably crowded; so we built a little frame house in the midst of a prairie-dog-town, commanding a superb view of the mountain scenery, probably more grand than that looked upon from any other town in the world.

Colorado Territory was not yet organized. The whole gold

290 OUR PIONEERS AND SELF GOVERNMENT. [1860. region, nominally within the limits of Kansas, but separated from all her farming population by the vast desert, contained no law, no courts, no authorities. There had been two or three abortive constitutional conventions, and delegates sent to Washington in the vain attempt to secure a Territorial organization. One of these would-be Congressmen was a brilliant example of the ver nacular of his native Kentucky. In an earnest public discussion he thus appealed to his auditors:

'Why gentlemen, are you awar whar you are?'

Many wished the nascent State named Pike's Peak-quite as convenient an appellation as Rhode Island. But, in due time it was called Colorado, after the great river thus named by Spanish explorers from the red earth along its banks.

Our pioneers enforce order and the right of the majority to rule, instinctively as water runs down hill. Lord Brougham said that all the bloodshed and rebellions of Great Britain, had been simply to establish the principle that every question of life, liberty or property must be submitted to twelve unbiased men. Our own frontiers recognize this right. Establish a thousand American settlers in the Himalayas, and in one month they would have all needful laws in operation, with life and property quite as well protected as in the city of New York.

The Denver people were a law unto themselves. Whenever a grave crime had been committed, an informal court was organized, some leading citizen placed upon the bench, and a jury made up of substantial merchants and mechanics. The prisoner was tried, allowed counsel, and if guilty sentenced to be hanged within one or two days.

These courts were as alert as the pioneer circuit judge in the early days of Iowa. His honor, accompanied by sheriff and clerk, meeting a horse-thief on a public road, held his court upon the spot, tried and convicted the criminal, and sent him to the penitentiary for five years.

The week after our arrival, a murderer was thus condemed and executed. A few days later, another was tried. The jury found him guilty. The judge asked the prisoner if he had any reason to offer why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. He replied:

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AN ILLUSTRATION OF LYNCH LAW.

'I have nothing to say.'

291

Then the judge submitted the question to the four or five hundred spectators:

'Gentlemen, you who believe this verdict is just will say Aye.' The answer was an overwhelming roar of affirmatives. 'Contrary-minded will say No.'

One solitary negative came up from the crowd. With immovable, serenity, the prisoner heard the question of his life or death. submitted to the assembly, like a resolution or a point of order. He was sentenced to die on the following morning; and remanded to the custody of the volunteer officers. But that night he eluded the guards and decamped, stealing a wagon and a pair of mules to facilitate his traveling. He was never caught; but the indignant people came very near hanging the officers on bare suspicion that they connived at his escape.

In June an Arapahoe war party went out for wool and came back shorn. After destroying a defenseless village of Ute women and children, they were quietly smoking their pipes in camp, when

292

GORDON'S CAPTURE, TRIAL AND DEATH. [1860.

Ute warriors swooped down upon them, killed six and wounded thirty more. In New Mexico, twenty-one Arapahoes started in pursuit of the same ugly enemies. While they were supping in camp the Utes suddenly closed in upon them, killing and scalping every one. Two weeks later a party of whites discovered the ghastly corpses with morsels of meat still between their lips.

A desperado named James Gordon, killed a harmless German and then fled eastward. He took refuge in Fort Lupton, a ranch a few miles north of Denver. A party of pursuers had surrounded the fort, when Gordon rode out upon a fleet horse and dashed away. A shower of bullets whizzed about him, but he made good his escape. Officers appointed by a meeting of citizens, tracked the murderer seventeen hundred miles, and captured him in southern Kansas near the Indian Territory. They took him to Leavenworth where the United States district court at once set him at liberty, on a writ of habeas corpus. The large German population of Leavenworth gathered in a determined mob, and three times had a rope around Gordon's neck. But his pursuers and the Leavenworth officers resisted the bloodthirsty assailants. Every shred of clothing was torn from the poor wretch, and he begged the guards to give him up or kill him at once. At last, after an express agreement that he should be returned to the mountains for trial, the mob dispersed. Middaugh, the leading officer from Denver took him back to that city in irons.

Gordon was only twenty-three, and when sober, intelligent and well-behaved. But while intoxicated he had already killed three or four men. He had been specially kind to his aged father and mother. He was tried and convicted in a citizens' court; guarded for a week by armed sentinels against rescue from his friends, and finally executed. No court in the world could have acted with more fairness and firmness. All the expenses of the three-thousand-mile pursuit were defrayed by voluntary contributions.

As in all new mining regions there was an irrepressible conflict between the industrious sterling citizens, and the desperadoes, strengthened by their sympathizers of wealth and position, who formed the connecting link between villainy and respectability. The Rocky Mountain News offended the scoundrels by some comments upon a wanton murder. While the editor, William M.

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Byers, sat in his office conversing with three pacific strangers from the East, four gamblers rushed in with cocked revolvers and abusive epithets, dragged Byers to a drinking saloon where, only through the strategy of a friend, was he saved from death. After his escape, the enraged gamblers rode back to the News office and fired several bullets into it.

The establishment was always in a state of armed neutrality. Printers and editors were moving arsenals, with revolvers at their belts and shot-guns standing beside their cases and desks. The typos returned the fire, killing one of the assailants. By this time half a dozen armed citizens reached the scene and chased the flying gamblers through the streets. One of the latter named Steele, galloping along Blake street, met Thomas W. Pollock whose horse was also upon a full run. Neither checked his speed. Both fired at the same instant. Pollock was unhurt; Steele fell dead with a charge of buckshot in his brain. Another of the gamblers was captured and barely escaped hanging. By a close vote in a popular assembly, he was permitted to leave the country. The pure air of plains and mountains gives the system unexampled power of resistance to disease and wounds. United States troops at Bent's trading-post, two hundred miles southeast of Denver, captured a number of Kiowa Indians. Afterward ordered eastward, they left the prisoners in Bent's charge, but the wily savages soon escaped. Then Bent dispatched Mark Ralfe, a young Frenchman, down the Arkansas to inform the commanding officer. After Ralfe had ridden forty miles, the Kiowas fell upon him, shooting him in three places, and stabbing him in four. Believing him dead, they took his scalp with a dull knife, leaving no hair whatever except a little lock above each ear. After they had gone he recovered consciousness, and with no nourishment except water, walked back to the fort. In a few months he was well again.

In July,

In Colorado City, Pat Devlin crowned his career (see page 126,) by an affray in which he received six heavy slugs in vital organs, yet survived almost three weeks.

How delicate yet marvelous the human organism, which a rap upon the temple or a prick from a needle may destroy, and which yet survives wounds that would kill a buffalo or a grizzly bear!