In my view the moral of this history is a good one. The brave and faithful conduct of the Vigilantes furnishes an example of American character, from a point of view entirely new. We know what our countrymen were capable of doing when exposed to Indian massacre. We have read history after history recording the sufferings of early pioneers in the East, South, and West, but what they would do when surrounded by robbers and assassins, who were in all civil aspects like themselves, it has remained for the first settlers of the northwestern mines to tell. And that they did their work well, and showed in every act a love for law, order, and for the moral and social virtues in which they had been educated, and a regard for our free institutions, no one can doubt who rightly appreciates the motives which actuated them.
A people who had not been reared to respect law and order, and to regard the privileges which flow from a free government as greater than all others, in the regulation of society, would have been restrained by fear from any such united and thorough effort as that which in Montana actually scourged crime out of existence, and secured to an unorganized community all the immunities and blessings of good government. The terror which popular justice inspired in the criminal population has never been forgotten. To this day crime has been less frequent in occurrence in Montana than in any other of the new Territories, and no banded criminals have made that Territory an abiding place.
Although not the first exhibition of Vigilante justice, the one I here record was the most thorough and severe, and stands as an example for all new settlements that in the future may be similarly afflicted, for it was not until driven to it both by the frequent and unremitting villainies of the ruffians, and by the necessities of a condition for which there was no law in existence, that the people resorted to measures of their own, and made and enforced laws suited to the exigency. But enough! If the history fails to remove the prejudices of my readers, nothing I can say will do so. It speaks for itself, and though there are a few of its later occurrences I would gladly blot, there is nothing in its early transactions, nothing in the design it unfolds, nothing in the results which have followed, that on a similar occasion I would not wish to see reproduced.