I offer these remarks, not in vindication of all the acts of the Vigilantes, but of so many of them as were necessary to establish the safety and protection of the people. The reader will find among the later acts of some of the individuals claiming to have exercised the authority of the Vigilantes, some executions of which he cannot approve. For these persons I can offer no apology. Many of these were worse men than those they executed. Some were hasty and inconsiderate, and while firm in the belief they were doing right, actually committed grievous offences. Unhappily for the Vigilantes, the acts of these men have been recalled to justify an opinion abroad, prejudicial to the Vigilante organization. Nothing could be more unjust. The early Vigilantes were the best and most intelligent men in the mining regions. They saw and felt that, in the absence of all law, they must become a “law unto themselves,” or submit to the bloody code of the banditti by which they were surrounded, and which were increasing in numbers more rapidly than themselves. Each man among them realized from the first the great delicacy and care necessary in the management of a society which assumed the right to condemn to death a fellow-man, and they now refer to the history of all those men who suffered death by their decree as affording ample justification for the severity of their acts. What else could they do? How else were their own lives and property, and the lives and property of the great body of peaceable miners in the placers to be preserved? What other protection was there for a country entirely destitute of law?
Let those who would condemn these men try to realize how they would act under similar circumstances, and they will soon find everything to approve and nothing to condemn in the transactions of the early Vigilantes. I have endeavored to narrate nothing but facts, and these will enable every reader to judge correctly of the merits of each case.
I would fain believe that this history, bloody as it is, will prove both interesting and instructive. In all that concerns crime of the blackest dye on the one hand, and love for law and order on the other, it stands without a parallel in the annals of any people. Nowhere else, nor at any former period since men became civilized, have murder and robbery and social vice presented an organized front, and offered an open contest for supremacy to a large civilized community. Their works for centuries have been done by stealth, in darkness, and as far away from society as possible. I cannot now remember the instance, within the past three hundred years, when the history of any country records the fact that the criminal element of an entire community, numbering thousands, was believed to be greater than the peaceful element. Yet it was so here. And when the Vigilantes of Montana entered upon their work, they did not know how soon they might have to encounter a force numerically greater than their own.