Plankton

It's ok, I guess.

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Trollheart

Oh man! I am honoured! I've worked so hard and... and.. and after all these long years, all the hard work... to be called "ok" is, is, is... excuse me, I think I have something in my eye....

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Trollheart

The Central Pacific Big Four: Men with a Dream

The Transcontinental Railroad was the amalgamation of three separate railroads: the Union Pacific, the Western Pacific and the Central Pacific. One of the first men to envision the idea of a transcontinental railroad was of course an engineer, and well versed in building railroads. He would become one of the leading figures in the attempt to cross America with slats of iron and sleepers of wood, but he would sadly not live to see the fruition of his life’s dream.


Theodore Judah (1825 - 1863)

To paraphrase Lyle Langley in The Simpsons episode “Marge vs the Monorail”, Judah would have been well qualified to have said “I’ve built railroads in New York, Sacramento and Marysville, and by gum it put them on the map!” He learned the trade from an early age, remembering the words of his father, a minister, that a life without a goal was a life wasted. He was certain he wanted to be an engineer, and also had taken a great interest in trains, but he wanted to ensure he left some sort of legacy behind, something that would mark his life as having meant something, and make his father proud. He surely succeeded, when, at age twenty-seven, he became a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the next year went on to head the construction of the Sacramento Valley Railroad as its Chief Engineer.

Its president, Charles Lincoln Wilson, recruited him and he left New York to travel to California, where he presented his initial survey and report. Problems dogged the start of the project though, including the election of a new president and the position of vice president going to one William Tecumseh Sherman, and it was not until a year later, 1855, that work began on the railroad. Funding ran out though, and the proposed line to Marysville terminated instead at Folsom. Nevertheless, the Sacramento Valley Railroad became the first incorporated railroad in America, and would later be part of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

In 1859 he was nominated by the California Pacific Railroad Convention to lobby Washington for the proposed Pacific Railroad, but rumblings in the south as America prepared to descend into one of its darkest chapters in recent history distracted Congress, and he got no traction. Sorry. In fact, he was so almost evangelical about his pet project, describing it, somewhat in the same vein as that sarcastic member of congress, but with absolute conviction and not a hint of humour, as a gateway to Heaven, he became something of a laughing-stock in California, where people began to refer to him as “Crazy Judah”, but he would have the last laugh, and show them who was crazy.

II: Climb Every Mountain: The Rocky Barrier to the Railroad

While the idea of a transcontinental railroad had been in its infancy at the time of the Klondike Rush, the discovery of gold in Nevada reignited interest in a faster way to get to the lodes, and Judah was rehired by the Sacramento Valley to extend the railroad he had helped build, so that it now stretched from Folsom, its previous terminus, through the Sierra Mountains north of Lake Tahoe and on to the Nevada goldmines. It was while working on this that the engineer considered the major problem facing him concerning building what would become the Central Pacific Railroad, a route through those forbidding mountains.

Judah’s experience in grading (the levelling of road before track could be laid), bridge-building and his almost supernatural knowledge of terrain - he could tell almost at a glance which ground was suitable for carrying rails and which was not - led him to go against popular belief that the best route for the railroad was across the flat Iowa plains to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, then following the Platte River through the Rocky Mountains to the Great Salt Lake. Rails would then carry on westward from here towards the Sierras. This was to roughly parallel the Oregon and California Trails, which had been used for centuries.

But Judah found a shorter path through the Donner Pass and down the Truckee River to the Nevada mines. His plan was not without problems - the path he proposed entailed the rails (and the trains that would use them) climbing steep gradients and having to have massive (and expensive) tunnels bored into the bones of the mountains. Expensive, and dangerous work. In addition to this, construction would have to deal with massive snowfalls that would plunge down from the tops of the Sierras and threatened to bury them. Tapping private investors for the venture, Judah formed the Central Pacific Railroad Company in 1860, which did not impress Sacramento Valley Railroad, who fired him.

The Big Four: Making tracks for progress

Finding funds was not easy, and most of the wealthy San Francisco bankers laughed at him, as had Congress some years previous, but he managed to interest four other men, and these became the Central Pacific Big Four: they were Leland Stanford, future governor of California, wealthy hardware merchant Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, who had made his fortune in the gold rush, but not panhandling or mining: he had set up a shop to supply the miners and had quickly become rich off their labours. Coincidentally, it seems he lived as a child in the same district as Judah in Troy, New York, although there is no evidence the two men ever met.

The Big Four, in addition to the funding they brought to Judah’s fledgling enterprise, had political clout, having only recently formed the California Republican Party, who had had an early and landslide success with the election of their candidate, some guy called Lincoln, to the presidency. At last, “Crazy Judah” was in a position to make people listen; he had the ear (and fat wallets) of four very influential Republicans, who also had a more or less direct line to that of the President, and could smooth the way for any legislation pertaining to the building, and funding, of their new railroad venture.

With the secession of the southern states and the outbreak of the Civil War, the need for a reliable mode of transportation for troops, weapons and supplies became more urgent and the project was quickly greenlit, though in a time of war such things as material, fuel, even labour were scarce, as every resource the Union had was being poured into trying to win the war. Critics were loud in their dismissal of the idea, citing such problems as the winter snows high in the Donner Pass, the difficulty of transporting machinery around Cape Horn to Sacramento, the unlikelihood of the track being able to support the carriages and predictions they would sink into the ground, and an overall doubt that such an enterprise could manage any sort of profit at all for its investors.

Initially, it seemed some at least of these fears were well grounded, when Judah returned from his survey of the Donner Pass and glumly announced that he had seriously underestimated the cost of building the thing. The distance was longer than expected - 140 miles instead of 114 - and would require boring tunnels through three miles of solid granite, and he now estimated that his original budget would go over by fifty percent. This is not news any investor wants to hear, especially before the first hammer is even lifted, and in the face of so much opposition and lack of belief in the project.

Then, of course, there were, inevitably, the rivals. In the wake of the war, other companies had sprung up, eager to take advantage of the generous government grants, and controlled mostly by big San Francisco interests like Pacific Steamship Line and Well Fargo, all hostile to the Central Pacific Railroad and eager to crush it before it had a chance to get going. However when one of the Big Four, or The Associates, as they preferred to call themselves, was elected governor of San Francisco, he was able to appoint Judah to the House and Senate Railroad Committees, giving him the power to lobby in favour of his railroad project. Much bribery of course went on, and Judah even managed to sway one of their competitors, the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad, striking a deal which removed their opposition to the CPRR’s bid.

Charles Crocker (1822 - 1888)

Born, as noted already, in Troy, New York, Crocker’s family moved to Indiana when he was fourteen, and he quickly became independent, proving a diligent worker and an intelligent man, the sort of entrepreneur America would turn out in droves around this time. He took advantage of the gold rush of 1849 to set up his own business, again as already mentioned, selling tools and hardware items to the miners who came to California in search of gold. While most of them went home poor, (or more likely, stayed where they were, unable to afford passage home) Crocker made huge profits and was able to answer the call when Theodore Judah asked for investors in his new Central Pacific Railroad. He set up Charles Crocker & Co., a subsidiary of the company dedicated to getting the railroad built, and he spent over two million dollars on snow ploughs to clear the tracks of snow, but the ice derailed both figuratively his efforts and literally his ploughs. Learning from his mistakes, like all good entrepreneurs, he had snow sheds constructed to protect the rails through the Sierra Nevadas from snow in the harsh winters. These stretched for sixty-five kilometres.


Leland Stanford (1824 - 1893)

Another native of New York, Stanford was called to the bar in 1848, whereupon he moved to Wisconsin. Here he was nominated as the city’s district attorney, and in 1852 gold fever took him and he headed to California, where, rather like Charles Crocker, he resisted the pull of actual gold mining and instead opened a hardware store, making his fortune that way. He returned to New York in 1855 but was bored by the sedate pace of life there, a world away from the hurly-burly frontier life in California, and he moved back there, to Sacramento, the next year. Having invested in Judah’s Central Pacific Railroad, he was elected its president in 1861.

With the others of the Big Four, Stanford acquired control of the Southern Pacific and became its president too. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1859 but was triumphant in 1861, becoming the state’s first Republican governor. The first Central Pacific train was named in his honour.


Collis P. Huntington (1821 - 1900)

The only one of the Big Four, or five if you include Judah, not to have been born in New York, Huntington was a native of Connecticut, and was also the only one of them all to see the twentieth century. Like the others, he too made his money in the gold rush, but through commerce in a venture he set up with Mark Hopkins, who would join him as the last of the Big Four. He would in fact in time oust Leland Stanford from the presidency, and was well known for providing generous bribes and kickbacks to politicians and businessmen, earning himself the title of “the most hated man in railroad”. He would, however, also be credited with many projects to educate black children and adults after the end of the Civil War.


Mark Hopkins (1813 - 1878)

Hopkins arrived in California in 1849, just as the gold rush reached its height, and established a store in Placerville, but had little luck with that and relocated to Sacramento. It was, however, after meeting Collis P. Huntington that he had real success, the two men becoming fast friends and partners, a relationship they took to the formation of Theodore Judah’s Central Pacific Railroad, of which Hopkins became treasurer. His opinion was highly prized by Huntington, and he was trusted as a true and decent man. He was the eldest of the Big Four, and perhaps appropriately died while aboard a company train in 1878.

Before war broke out, southern congressmen had lobbied to have the railroad cross the Mississippi at Memphis, and then turn west through the southwestern territories, running through Texas and New Mexico, hoping that the new towns which were expected to spring up along the route would all be southern towns, and thus in favour, as was all of the south, of slavery. At the outset of the war though, all southern representatives had abandoned the capitol, and therefore there was nobody to oppose the route favoured by what were now the Union states, which was Judah’s proposed route, and which now got the green light. Naturally, construction was delayed due to the war, but a decision had been made, which in Washington is saying a lot.

The Pacific Railroad Acts

Congress passed a series of acts in 1862, unencumbered by opposition from the south, promoting the construction of the transcontinental railroad, otherwise known as the Pacific Railroad, and authorising funds through the issuing of government bonds and land grants to railroad companies. The whole thing proceeded under the auspices of the War Department, and the original rather long-winded act was titled An Act to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the Pacific ocean, and to secure to the government the use of the same for postal, military, and other purposes. Right. The two companies to benefit from these bonds and grants, and thereby establish a monopoly on rail travel in the USA, were the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads. We’ll be looking into the Union Pacific later; right now we’re concerned with the other one.

The companies were granted contiguous right of way for their railroads throughout the United States, including all public land within thirty metres on either side of the track. They were given government authority to construct their railroads between the eastern side of the Missouri River, at Council Bluffs, Iowa and the navigable waters of the Sacramento River, thirty-year bonds which would guarantee a loan payment to them for each section of track as it was completed, in return for a lien on the section, to be returned when the loans fell due and were paid.

From 1850 to 1871 the railroads were granted the sum total of land bigger in area than the great state of Texas, approximately 175 million acres, and were allowed, under the terms of the Railroad Acts, to sell some of that land to incoming settlers, who paid a handsome price for land close to the railways, desiring the convenience of nearby transport for cattle and/or goods. It was clear that though the railroad would eventually be a huge moneyspinner, it might take months or even years before the investors began to see appreciable profit, and so they took every opportunity to make cash for themselves, including double-dealing, controlling the contracts tendered for the various subsidiary projects, and keeping wages down despite the dangerous, often fatal nature of the labour.

They also built largely superfluous sections of railroad, building where their partner in the venture, Union Pacific, were also laying track, knowing that their sections would not be used as this was to be one integrated network, but determined to be paid, as they were, per mile of track, whether it was used or not. The passing of the Homestead Acts, as detailed in a previous article, encouraged settlers to head west, and ensured the newly-formed railroad would not be short of customers, thereby swelling their profits even more.

Having been scandalised by the money-grabbing and deceitful tactics of his investors (at one point, their mapmakers showed the Sierra Mountains to be twenty-three miles east of where they were, just so they could get the bonus for building on mountainous terrain, when in fact the land there was flat and even) and realising that they shared his dream but only for what they could get out of it, enriching themselves as much as possible, Theodore Judah decided to buy out the Big Four, and assume control of the project. He made the trip back to New York to raise the necessary capital, but tragedy struck when he contracted yellow fever and died at the age of thirty-eight. The irony is that he had to go, as Asa Whitney had complained of twenty years ago, via Panama to get back to New York, and it is believed it was while crossing the Isthmus of Panama that he fell victim to the disease which claimed his life shortly after he arrived back in the city of his birth. Had Congress listened to the likes of Whitney and Henry Carver earlier, the transcontinental railroad might already have been in service by that time, and he would not have needed to have gone near Panama.

He was, of course, never forgotten, having a street in San Francisco named after him, and memorial plaques installed in Folsom and Sacramento. Schools bore his name, and naturally, one of the first of the CPRR’s locomotives was named in his honour. Most impressive of all, his name was given to a high mountain adjacent to Donner’s Pass, which he had originally surveyed and which became part of the route for the Central Pacific railroad. Mount Judah stands over 8,000 feet high, towering over Placer County, as indeed Judah himself loomed large over the dream of a transcontinental railroad that would link up all of America.

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Plankton

You really deserve a raise too. Here you go:

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Trollheart

Is this the new, much-mooted platform from Windows?

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Plankton

They're kicking it off as the new sole project.

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Trollheart

Hold your tongue man! You're such a heel. And other shoe-related puns.

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DianneW

COBBLERS...Very British...see here Trolleybookends, below....Just loving your 'Journal' on the American History...



Just watched this as well...I'll leave it as a link..and it's in Cobbs Lane...haha
https://youtu.be/rO1YAx4QW1I

Was going to post a Shoe Tongue Joke then saw this Video....on a roll here..
https://youtu.be/FqSkD_A5Ee8

but then...


A tongue LOCK...how does that work then....

I will leave you in peace man..silence is golden, right............................

Trollheart

For the Badge: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Law Enforcement in the Old West

(Note: For this section I am indebted to Candy Mouton and her Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West from 1840 - 1900, which is full of information, profiles and anecdotes.)

I: They Were the Law: The Men Who Kept the Peace

I know by now that if you’ve stuck with me this far you’re already sick of being told how wrong, wrong, wrong Hollywood got it, but if that’s the way you’re feelin’ pardner, I done got some more bad news a-for yer. Basically, you would have to realise that like just about every era, Hollywood writers, producers and directors let you see what they wanted you to see. The truth might have been shoe-horned in there somewhere, but chances were it would be mighty hard to find if you were to go take a looksee. In the parlance of the times, you could done send a whole goddamn posse after that there critter and still ride home empty. It’s not surprising though: when the reality of the Old West was people ekeing out a living, or trying to survive another day in a harsh and hostile country, who the hell wanted to go to the movies and see that? If there were rarely gunfights, horse rustlers, desperadoes riding into, out of or through town, banks and trains being robbed a rare occurrence, where’s the fun in that?

So western movies didn't quite make it up, but let’s say they exaggerated a little, stretching the truth almost to breaking point in the name of entertainment, and in so doing set in motion a train of events that has forever made us see a very specific view of the American West. It’s not necessarily all wrong, but most of it is. One thing that they got pretty much everything wrong on - for obvious and deliberate reasons, of course - were the profiles of the men who set out to do what few men dared in such a lawless and wild time, which was to keep the peace, lay down the law and protect their town. Let’s see if we can extract the reality from the fantasy, shall we? Ah come on! Saddle up, son: it’ll be fun.

Maybe.


Here’s a question for you: what do beavers have to do with American law? No, not those kind! The animals, the ones who build dams, you know, the guys with the flat paddle-like tails and big teeth, beloved of cartoonists for chewing down mighty trees in a few bites. Yeah, like yer man above. Well apparently the first ever law used in the Old West was called “The Law of the Beaver”, and was a set of rules and regulations set up by the fur traders, to protect their commerce. These laws were English-made, but a relatively quick search does not yield any information, so I can’t tell you what they were exactly. It’s not all that important, as by the time the West began to open up, as we’ve already touched on in the piece on frontiersmen, this kind of trade was already sliding into something of a decline, so the only reason the Law of the Beaver is mentioned here is to show that it was the first proper legal framework in the west. And because it's funny. Yes, it is.

It was pretty soon superseded by borderlands law, and here we run into those jolly people who live mostly near a lake of salt and think the secret to a happy marriage is to have more than one wife. Yup, it’s the religion that gave us - or inflicted upon us, depending on your point of view regarding the pop music of the 1970s - the Osmonds. It seems the Mormons were literally a law unto themselves. Within the limits of Utah, they did what they liked and bowed to no county, state or federal agency. Utah was at the time a theocracy, and the Word of God took very much precedence over the word of Man.

There was of course vigilante justice. There has been vigilante justice all the way back to the Bible, and recently a type of vigilantism - no justice appended, you might note - was attempted on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington. But in places where there was no real law at the time, men did indeed take that law into their own hands, leading to such things as posse and necktie parties, as justice was meted out at the barrel of a gun or the end of a rope, without going through all that tedious nonsense of trial or establishing guilt. We'll be taking a look at this a bit further on.

There was military law too. If you lived near a fort or barracks, and committed a crime you would most likely come under the jurisdiction of the army, You might be held in a military jail awaiting transport to the proper authorities, or if you were a soldier your case may have been decided by a military court, and they would be the ones to mete out the sentence. If there was a sheriff or marshal in the town in which, or near which the fort was built, soldiers from the garrison might be seconded to help him in rounding up criminals, holding trials or keeping the peace. If a soldier broke the law, even in a town where there existed law already in the shape of a marshal, deputy, sheriff or other law officer, his case would be handled by the army. If the sheriff or other law enforcement officer arrested a trooper he would most likely be handed over to the officer in charge of the fort. Where a sheriff or other peace officer existed though, military law would not apply to civilians, except perhaps in military matters (like maybe if they stole from the garrison or were found to be spies or something).

Cowboys riding on cattle drives were like sailors at sea, completely under the absolute authority of the foreman or cattle boss, at least while on the range. Just like the power a captain enjoyed aboard his ship, this was secondary to that of a sheriff or marshal if the cowboys rode into a town and there committed any crime. Miners had their own harsh system of judgement too, and this did not bode well for anyone not of a pale skin pigment. Spanish-Americans (although they had a greater claim to nativity than did the white settlers), Chilean, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, all were considered as foreigners, and almost none of the laws set down by the miners assisted them or gave them any protection. Men unable to speak (due to the language barrier) to defend themselves were given no interpreters, no chance and no quarter. Most of the miners’ laws related to claims and claim-jumping, and some of their provisions were adopted by the US Government.

Anyone with the most basic knowledge of a western movie will know there were different types of law enforcement in the Old West. We’re all familiar with the sheriff, who, along with his deputy/ies would keep the peace in a town, usually having been an ordinary guy elected by the people. Many western movies have as part of their theme a man - usually a stranger - riding into a town which has been having difficulties with bad guys and has lost its sheriff(s), either through their deaths at the hands of aforesaid bad guys or their dramatically throwing the tin star in the dust, effectively resigning their post before they end up being dead at the hands of the aforesaid bad guys. It seems to me unlikely this could generally happen. I’m not saying it didn’t happen - life, and the law, was after all quite fluid in the Old West, and men and indeed towns had to be adaptable - but the usual idea was for the sheriff to be elected.

You’ve probably seen and maybe even participated in the election of a mayor, and it looks like the election of the sheriff would have been the same. Candidates put themselves forward, folks voted, and a sheriff was elected. So it seems unlikely the town or county would just hand the badge to anyone who they thought fit the bill. For one thing, people seldom agree, and the idea of a whole bunch of townsfolk nodding and saying “He’s the man” seems, well, far-fetched at best. There may very well, of course, have been times when desperate measures were required, but as a general rule I would say not. The sheriff was elected, and if he for some reason ditched or was otherwise unable to do his job, well, that was what a deputy was for. So there would have been a reasonably reliable chain of command already in force, making it highly unlikely the town would ever find itself in the position of needing a sheriff post-haste and having no candidates, or subordinates at least.

The top law enforcement officer though, against whom nobody would dare speak a word or try to assert his regional authority, was the US Marshal. Now so far as I know, this guy was different from the marshal who often seemed to be interchangeable with the town sheriff, but I’ll check. This fella was appointed by no less a personage than the President himself (with the approval of Congress), and had wide-ranging powers and jurisdiction almost everywhere. The position was so coveted that at one point in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1882 there were over fifty applicants for the one job. The Judiciary Act, 1789, sets out the role of the US Marshal:

And be it further enacted, That a marshal shall be appointed in and for each district for a term of four years, but shall be removable from office at pleasure, whose duty it shall be to attend the district and circuit courts when sitting therein, and also the Supreme Court in the district in which that court shall sit. And to execute throughout the district, all lawful precepts directed to him, and issued under the authority of the United States, and he shall have the power to command all necessary assistance in the execution of his duty, and to appoint as shall be occasion, one or more deputies.

Which would then indicate there was to be a US Marshal for each state, or territory as they were known then. I’m not sure if the authority of a marshal in say Wyoming was good in Colorado, but I would imagine the marshal there would be ready to help him out if, let’s say, he was chasing a fugitive from his territory who had crossed into that of his colleague. Although appointed by the President, marshals were typically patronised and kept in office by district judges, and weren’t even paid a proper salary until 1896, which shows how much the position was respected, even if only paid by fee, as it was in 1882, in our example above. Marshals were allowed to swear in posses to make up a hunting party for a fugitive (we’ll find out later how a posse was made legal, and how many unofficial ones there were, also whether a sheriff had the same authority when it came to them, as Hollywood would have us believe) and to make people deputies on the spot if needed, or even to second them from other law enforcement agencies.

As opposed to the sheriff, who was a local city or town or county official, marshals were employees of the federal government, and many had cut their teeth in the Civil War and were well able to handle themselves, however like most jobs that sound glamorous and exciting, the life of a marshal could be almost summed up in one word, that one most hated by all cops: paperwork. Marshals had many duties, including prisoner transfer, hire of staff for courts, disbursement of funds, serving subpoenas, summonses and warrants, and even renting the courtrooms and the jails.

But of course there were times when they could drag themselves away from the desk and the mountain of papers, and several well-known figures in the West were marshals, including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Generally speaking, their deeds have not been embellished - that much - by the movies, and we will be looking at their careers individually later on in this section. Perhaps less glamorously though, marshals were also required - until the repeal of the law in 1864 - to assist in the return of slaves fled from southern states and were also used to break up strikes, usually by violence and intimidation. They could, and did, ride long distances when word came to them of a fugitive over whom they would have jurisdiction (an escaped bank robber who had plundered one of the banks in their territory, maybe, or someone who had shot someone in their state and evaded justice) turning up in another and being reported to them as being there.

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Trollheart

Wanted: Dead or Alive

It’s interesting to note that there was a very good reason why this condition was often appended to notices seeking the apprehension of fugitives from justice. Like I said, up almost to the turn of the century marshals worked for a fee, and in general this turned out to be about two dollars per head per captive, which they would be paid upon returning with the prisoner(s). But unless the wanted notice had stipulated “dead or alive”, should they bring in any of the criminals dead, they would not be paid. This probably showed how desperate states were to catch, or have killed, certain desperate characters: a marshal who knew he was not getting anything for a dead man would be mighty careful to ensure he arrived back at the jail in one piece and breathing, even if he may have had a chance to shoot him. If it was a “dead or alive” situation, on the other hand, well, prisoners are a lot less trouble when they’re dead, I expect, so this might be why it was never “alive or dead”, so that the first thing in a posse’s mind was, kill the bastard: hell, you’ll still get paid the two dollars, so why bother bringing him in alive? A sort of early form of subliminal messaging, perhaps, or a tacit approval of terminate with extreme prejudice?

As a representative of the US Government, a marshal could also try criminals if there was no judge present. As we’ll see a little further on, judges did not live in towns, but travelled around (perhaps the origin of the circuit court? Perhaps not; we’ll find out) and served a wide area, so the chances of there being a judge in town at the right time was, let’s say slim. In that case, the marshal could deputise witnesses, hire a place as a courtroom (maybe a schoolhouse, saloon, house, I don’t know: I’m learning this as I’m writing it and some of this is guesswork, to be confirmed or corrected later) and act as the judge in the case, dispensing justice to his prisoners. Whether that included hanging I don’t know, but I would think not. If the offence was that severe, maybe the prisoner(s) would have to be taken to wherever the judge was sitting. The case I read about involved a marshal fining thieves, so I expect he had some latitude but not unlimited powers. He was, after all, an officer of the law and not above it.

You probably have heard in movies the word marshal and sheriff being used to more or less describe the same official, and the guy referred to had nothing to do with the tough lawmen we just spoke about. Called town marshals, these were in fact a step below the sheriff, who was usually responsible for the entire county, whereas this marshal, as you might have guessed from his title, took care of the town he was in and no more. Mostly he was a sort of functionary: collecting fees and taxes, maintaining the town jail, running health, fire and sanitation checks, keeping records and offering evidence at court hearings.

And then, there were the Rangers.

Most will have heard of the Texas Rangers, but Arizona and New Mexico had them too. These were kind of the top guns of law enforcement, at least in the southeast, where their powers were vast and where justice meted out by them could be swift and often brutal. As Captain Burt Mossman of the Arizona Rangers put it:

If they come along easy, everything will be all right. If they don't,
well, I guess we can make pretty short work of them. I know most
of them and the life those fellows are leading in the mesquite shrub
to keep out of reach of the law is a dog's life. They ought to thank
me for giving them a chance to come in and take their medicine.
Some of them will object, of course. They'll probably try a little
gunplay as a bluff, but I shoot fairly well myself, and the boys who
back me up are handy enough with their guns. Any rustler who
wants to yank on the rope and kick up trouble will find he's up
against it.

Sounds like something out of a cowboy movie, but no, that’s an actual quote. Shows how tough and determined these men were. Even today, Texas Rangers still operate in that state and are feared as the oil state’s most indefatigable lawmen. Nevertheless, one of their first and most famous captains, John “Rip” Ford, who later went on to the US Senate and served as the mayor of Brownsville, had a slightly different view of his force:

A large proportion ... were unmarried. A few of them drank intoxicating liquors. Still, it was a company of sober and brave men. They knew their duty and they did it. While in a town they made no braggadocio demonstration. They did not gallop through the streets, shoot, and yell. They had a specie of moral discipline which developed moral courage. They did right because it was right.

Cold Justice: Law in the Frozen North

Look at the size of Alaska. Just look at it. And now figure in that around the time of the Klondyke Gold Rush (1896) the entire territory had one judge, one marshal and ten deputies to enforce law. Further north, in Canada, the Yukon, there were the Mounties, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but as miners and speculators teemed across Alaska in search of gold, keeping law and order in that cold wilderness required firm and often deadly action.

When there weren’t enough law enforcement officers to cover a case, bounty hunters might be used to supplement the force, and also detectives. Although the idea of a detective was quite new in the world during the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America the Pinkerton Detective Agency was set up and became known for their dogged, unflagging pursuit of criminals. They also provided security on trains against robberies, often taking would-be bandits by surprise, as the Pinkertons wore no uniform and could easily blend into the crowd, passing for passengers.

Hang ‘em High: Lynchings and Vigilante Justice

We spoke briefly about vigilantes before, and to be honest, the two words don’t go very well together, as vigilantes, usually at the head of a mob, seldom wanted justice but revenge. To these people, the laws either protected the criminal when they should have dealt out swift justice to him instead, or just didn’t allow the wheels of justice to turn quickly enough. When this happened, tempers boiled over, patience snapped and hotheads led fuming crowds to jailhouses or in pursuit of men who were seen to have evaded justice. The usual end of such a journey for the accused was kicking his heels in the air while he dangled from a rope.

I should clearly make the distinction here between vigilante justice and lynch mobs. The former did allow a semblance of trial, with the prisoner’s crimes read to him and even a defence allowed, whereas with lynch mobs it was a straight, direct path to the hanging tree, with none of that annoying due process getting in the way. Lynchings were not sanctioned by law, but some territories turned a blind eye if feelings were running high enough. However lynch mobs had no real authority, other than their own, and were sometimes subsequently prosecuted for taking the law into their own hands, whereas vigilantes had often tacit, unspoken approval from the town or city authorities.

In vigilante justice, the mob’s rule might be more easily accepted, or acceded to, as these were clearly the prevalent feelings and few sheriffs or marshals would dare to go against the general mood of the town. They also might unofficially see them as a blessing in disguise, so to speak. For one thing, these folks had most likely only carried out the sentence the guy was going to get anyway, and in the process had saved the courts and therefore the government money.

One place vigilante justice began to come really into its own was along the route of the transcontinental railroad. As towns began to spring up along the line, there was no formal authority and so men would band together to keep law and order, using a variant of the old miners’ law to prosecute those who had sinned against the town, mine or railroad.

In terms of lynch mob justice, here’s a story (two really, but linked) that really illustrates the phrase “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. A man accused of killing two lawmen, Charley Burris, was being transported to jail from Laramie to Rawlins, was taken from the train when it stopped in Carbon and a confession demanded of him. He refused, so they hung him from a telegraph pole. One year later another killer, “Big Nose” George Parrot took the same trip for the same crime and was stopped - perhaps by the same mob - in the same station. He too was asked to confess, but whether he had heard of Burris’s fate or not, he took the option to make a clean breast of it, and was allowed to continue on to Rawlins, where he was sentenced to be hanged. But when he tried to escape, a mob (again, maybe the same one: maybe they had followed him for the trial to make sure he didn’t retract his confession?) dragged him from the jail and hanged him. So no matter what he did, George Parrot’s destiny lay at the end of a rope. Maybe he would have been better just getting it over with at Carbon.

On that occasion it seems the mob either overpowered the sheriff and his deputies, who were holding Parrot, or else the law officers were powerless to - or reluctant to stop them. However on occasion lynch justice was openly approved by the federal marshals. Candy Mouton tells us of another interesting example when, in Aurora, Nevada in 1864, the hanging of six men accused of killing thirty settlers went ahead under the watchful eye of the US Marshal, Bob Howland, despite the governor being alerted to the illegal lynching by a concerned citizen. The marshal reported back to the governor that it was “All quiet in Aurora. Four men to be hanged in fifteen minutes.”

There were also what was known as range detectives. These men were employed by the railroad, stagecoach companies and cattle barons to protect their interests, with deadly force if need be. You might be surprised to learn that legendary gunfighter William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, was a range detective himself. He worked for the Regulators, who kept the interests of rancher John Henry Tunstall as their top priority. Range detectives were highly paid for the time - sometimes clearing as much as 150 or 200 dollars a month (this in a time when, remember, the bounty on a live outlaw was two dollars and hotel rooms asked a few cents for a night’s board), and had to be good fighters. The deadlier the reputation, the less likely anyone would mess with them, though Billy’s rep did not stop the Lincoln County War from breaking out, but that’s another story, for another time.

Range detectives worked first and only for their employers, If they got into trouble with local or even federal law enforcement while carrying out the orders of their bosses, they relied on those bosses to smooth things out for them with the authorities, whether with bribes, threats or via their connections in high places. Pat Garret was also a range detective, as was Tom Horn.

Justice on Tour: Judges in the Old West

As I correctly surmised earlier, the phrase circuit court comes from the time of the Old West, when judges were basically of no fixed abode, almost like itinerant pedlars dispensing justice and punishment, or perhaps innocence and freedom, as they travelled across their territory. Each judge was responsible for a large area, as already mentioned, and this meant he was constantly on the move, going from town to town and city to city, a real case of bringing Mohammed to the mountain. A judge would arrive in a town or district, hear all the cases that had built up over the length of time since he had been there last (excepting, I assume, any which had been dealt with by the expedient of summary justice, by vigilantes or by lynch mobs, or that the sheriff or marshal could deal with himself) and then travel on to the next town. If a crime was committed the next day, tough: you’d have to wait till he managed to fit you into his schedule again, and that could be months, months you would spend most likely in the county jail awaiting the chance to have your trial.

Not only that, but while as a defendant you had the right to be tried by a jury of your peers, given the short amount of time His Honour would likely be in town before ridin’ on into the sunset of justice, the chances of cobbling together twelve good men and true (or even twelve all right men who might occasionally play fast and loose with the truth) were slim, and what happened then? I really don’t know. Whether the trial then got delayed until a jury could be assembled (and if that meant not before the judge left town you might end up back in a cell to await his later pleasure) or whether it went ahead with what they had, or even without a jury, isn’t related in what I read. However it does appear that up until 1889 all a judge’s decisions were final, as there was no official appeal procedure, but after that the way was clear for convicted felons to appeal their sentence to the US Supreme Court, and thus I guess began the often ludicrous back-and-forth that attends trials even today, particularly in the case of the death penalty.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018