In my last letter I mentioned that the regulators in Ogle county, on Rock
River, in this state, had pulled down the house of one Bridge, living at
Washington Grove, a well-known confederate of the horse-thieves and
coiners with which this region is infested.
Horse-thieves are numerous in this part of the country. A great number of
horses are bred here; you see large herds of them feeding in the open
prairies, and at this season of the year every full-grown mare has a colt
running by her side. Most of the thefts are committed early in the spring,
when the grass begins to shoot, and the horses are turned out on the
prairie, and the thieves, having had little or no employment during the
winter, are needy; or else in the autumn, when the animals are kept near
the dwellings of their owners to be fed with Indian corn and are in
excellent order. The thieves select the best from the drove, and these are
passed from one station to another till they arrive at some distant market
where they are sold. It is said that they have their regular lines of
communication from Wisconsin to St. Louis, and from the Wabash to the
Mississippi. In Ogle county they seem to have been bolder than elsewhere,
and more successful, notwithstanding the notoriety of their crimes, in
avoiding punishment. The impossibility of punishing them by process of
law, the burning of the court-house at Oregon City last April, and the
threats of deadly vengeance thrown out by them against such as should
attempt to bring them to justice, led to the formation of a company of
citizens, "regulators" they call themselves, who resolved to take the law
into their own hands and drive the felons from the neighborhood. This is
not the first instance of the kind which has happened in Illinois. Some
twenty years since the southern counties contained a gang of
horse-thieves, so numerous and well-organized as to defy punishment by
legal means, and they were expelled by the same method which is now
adopted in Ogle county.
I have just learned, since I wrote the last sentence, that the society of
regulators includes, not only the county of Ogle, but those of De Kalb and
Winnebago, where the depredations of the horse-thieves and the perfect
impunity with which they manage to exercise their calling, have exhausted
the patience of the inhabitants. In those counties, as well as in Ogle,
their patrons live at some of the finest groves, where they own large
farms. Ten or twenty stolen horses will be brought to one of these places
of a night, and before sunrise the desperadoes employed to take them are
again mounted and on their way to some other station. In breaking up
these haunts, the regulators, I understand, have proceeded with some of
the formalities commonly used in administering justice. The accused party
has been allowed to make his defense, and witnesses have been examined,
both for and against him.
These proceedings, however, have lately suffered a most tragical
interruption. Not long after Bridge's house was pulled down, two men,
mounted and carrying rifles, called at the dwelling of a Mr Campbell,
living at Whiterock Grove, in Ogle county, who belonged to the company of
regulators, and who had acted as the messenger to convey to Bridge the
order to leave the county. Meeting Mrs. Campbell without the house, they
told her that they wished to speak to her husband. Campbell made his
appearance at the door and immediately both the men fired. He fell
mortally wounded and lived but a few minutes. "You have killed my
husband," said Mrs. Campbell to one of the murderers whose name was
Driscoll. Upon this they rode off at full speed.
As soon as the event was known the whole country was roused, and every man
who was not an associate of the horse-thieves, shouldered his rifle to go
in pursuit of the murderers. They apprehended the father of Driscoll, a
man nearly seventy years of age, and one of his sons, William Driscoll,
the former a reputed horse-thief, and the latter, a man who had hitherto
borne a tolerably fair character, and subjected them to a separate
examination. The father was wary in his answers, and put on the appearance
of perfect innocence, but William Driscoll was greatly agitated, and
confessed that he, with his father and others, had planned the murder of
Campbell, and that David Driscoll, his brother, together with another
associate, was employed to execute it. The father and son were then
sentenced to death; they were bound and made to kneel; about fifty men
took aim at each, and, in three hours from the time they were taken, they
were dead men. A pit was dug on the spot where they fell, in the midst of
a prairie near their dwelling; their corpses, pierced with bullet-holes in
every part, were thrown in, and the earth was heaped over them.
The pursuit of David Driscoll and the fellow who was with him when
Campbell was killed, is still going on with great activity. More than a
hundred men are traversing the country in different directions, determined
that no lurking-place shall hide them. In the mean time various persons
who have the reputation of being confederates of horse-thieves, not only
in Ogle county, but in the adjoining ones, even in this, have received
notice from the regulators that they cannot be allowed to remain in this
part of the state. Several suspicious-looking men, supposed to be
fugitives from Ogle county, have been seen, within a few days past,
lurking in the woods not far from this place. One of them who was seen the
day before yesterday evidently thought himself pursued and slunk from
sight; he was followed, but escaped in the thickets leaving a bundle of
clothing behind him.