FLORENCE
Florence was now the established headquarters of the robbers. Its
isolated location, its distance from the seat of government, its
mountain surroundings, and, more than all, its utter destitution of
power to enforce law and order, gave it peculiar fitness as a base for
the criminal and bloody operations of the desperate gang which infested
it. At all hours of the day and night some of them were to be seen at
the two saloons kept by Cherokee Bob and Cyrus Skinner. When one company
disappeared another took its place, and at no time were there less than
twenty or thirty of these desperadoes at one or both of their haunts,
plotting and contriving deeds of plunder and robbery which involved the
hard earnings, possibly the lives, of many of the fortunate miners of
the vicinity. The crowd from both East and West had arrived. The town
was full of gold hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
every newcomer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
garment and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
The gambling shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons—beheld for the first time by
many of these fortune-seekers—lured them on step by step, until many of
them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit, for lives
of shameful and criminal indulgence.
The condition of society thus produced was fatal to all attempts at
organization, either for protection or good order. Wholly unrestrained
by fear or conscience, the robbers carried on their operations in the
full blaze of mid-day. Affrays were of daily occurrence, and robberies
took place in the public streets. Charley Harper, the acknowledged
chief, stained with the darkest crimes, walked the streets with the
boldness and confidence of one who glories in his iniquity. Peaceable,
honest, well-meaning citizens, completely overawed, were fortunate to
escape insult or abuse, as they passed to and fro in pursuit of their
occupations. Woe to the unfortunate miner who entered the town if it
were known or believed that there was any treasure on his person! If not
robbed on the spot, or lured into a hurdy-gurdy saloon, or cheated at a
gambling table, he was waylaid by disguised ruffians on his return to
his camp, and by threats and violence, or when these failed, by death
itself, relieved of his hard-bought earnings. For one of these sufferers
to recognize and expose any of his assailants was simply to insure death
at his hands the first convenient opportunity.
One of these side exploits was marked by features of peculiar atrocity.
An aged, eccentric German miner, who lived alone in a little cabin three
miles from town, was supposed to have a considerable amount of gold dust
concealed in his dwelling. One morning, early in August, a neighbor
discovered that the house had been violently entered. The door was
broken and scattered in pieces. Entering, he beheld the mangled corpse
of the old man lying amid a general wreck of bedding, boxes, and trunks.
The remains of a recent fire in a corner bore evidence of the failure of
the design of the robbers to conceal their crime by a general
conflagration. The miners were exasperated at an act of such wanton and
unprovoked barbarity. A coroner’s jury was summoned and such an inquest
held as men in fear of their lives dared to venture. The verdict, as
might have been anticipated, was “murdered by some person or persons
unknown.” Here the affair has rested ever since.
Acts of violence and bloodshed were not infrequent among the robbers
themselves. Soon after the murder of the German, a company of them, who
had been gambling all night at one of the saloons, broke up in a quarrel
at sunrise. Before they reached the street, a revolver in the hands of
Brockie was discharged, killing instantly one of the departing brawlers.
The murderer surrendered himself to a justice of the peace, and escaped
upon the singular plea that the shot was accidental and did not hit the
person he intended to kill. One of the jury, in a letter to a friend
wrote: “The verdict gave universal satisfaction, the feeling over the
homicide among good citizens being that Brockie had done a good thing.
If he had killed two of the ruffians instead of one, and then hung
himself, good men would have been better pleased.”
Hickey, the intended victim, was one of the worst men in the band. The
year following this occurrence, in a fit of anger induced by
intoxication, at a store in Placerville, he made a desperate assault
upon a peaceable, inoffensive individual who was known by the name of
“Snapping Andy.” Hurriedly snatching a pickhandle from a barrel, Andy,
by two or three well-directed blows, brought his career of crime and
infamy to a bloody close.
For some reason, probably to place him beyond the reach of the friends
of the murdered robber, Brockie was assigned to a new position.
Ostensibly to establish a ferry at the mouth of White Bird Creek, a few
miles from town, but really for the purpose of furnishing a convenient
rendezvous for his companions, he took up his abode there. It was on the
line of travel between Florence and a gold discovery reputed to have
been made on a tributary of the Boise River.
About the middle of September, Arthur Chapman, son of the
surveyor-general of Oregon, while waiting for ferriage, was brutally
assaulted by Brockie, who rushed towards him with pistol and knife,
swearing that he would “shoot him as full of holes as a sieve, and then
cut him into sausage meat.” With an axe which he seized upon the
instant, Chapman clove his skull to the chin. Brockie fell dead in his
tracks, another witness to the fulfilment of that terrible denunciation,
“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Chapman
was acquitted.
It will not be deemed out of place to record here the desperate fortune
of one Matt Bledsoe, who became notorious as an independent freebooter,
and killed several persons in the valley of the Upper Sacramento and
Upper Willamette. His bloody character preceded his arrival at Florence
in the Fall of 1861. He acknowledged no allegiance to any band, and
avowed as a ruling principle that he would “as soon kill a man as eat
his breakfast.” While engaged in a game of cards with a miner at a
ranche on White Bird Creek in October, 1861, he provoked an altercation,
but the miner being armed, he did not, as was usual with him, follow it
up by an attack. The next morning, while the miner was going to the
creek, Bledsoe shot and killed him. Mounting his horse he rode rapidly
to Walla Walla, surrendered to the authorities, asked for a trial, and
on his own statement that he “had killed a man in self-defence,” was
acquitted.
A leap forward in his history to twelve o’clock of a cold winter night
of 1865 finds this same villain in company with another, each with a
courtesan beside him, seated at a table in an oyster saloon in Portland.
Some angry words between the women soon involved the men in a quarrel,
which Bledsoe brought to a speedy termination by a fatal blow upon the
head of his antagonist. He was immediately arrested, tried, convicted of
manslaughter, and sentenced to the penitentiary for a long term of
years. During the following Fall he escaped, was rearrested, and after
trial, returned to prison to serve out a prolonged sentence.
Perhaps in the early history of no part of our country were greater
difficulties overcome in moving from one place to another than in the
mining districts of Oregon and Idaho. Essentially a mountain region, and
in all portions of it away from the narrow valleys formed by the streams
filled with the remains of extensive volcanic action, its surface,
besides being broken into deep cañons, lofty ridges, inaccessible
precipices, impassable streams, and impenetrable lava beds, was also
covered everywhere with the sharp points and fissured hummocks which
were cast out during a long and active period of primeval eruption.
There were no natural roads in any direction. The trail of the Indian
was full of obstacles, often indirect and generally impracticable. To
travel with vehicles of any sort was absolutely impossible. The
pack-animal was the only available resource for transportation. The
miner would bind all his earthly gear on the back of a mule or a burro
and grapple with obstructions as they appeared, cutting his way through
forests almost interminable, and exposing himself to dangers as trying
to his fortitude as to his ingenuity. The merchant who wished to
transport goods, the saloon-keeper who had liquors and billiard tables,
the hotel-keeper whose furniture was necessary, all had to employ
pack-animals as the only means of transportation from the towns on the
Columbia to the mining camps of the interior. The owner of a train of
pack-animals was always certain of profitable employment. His life was
precarious, his subsistence poor, his responsibilities enormous. He
threaded the most dangerous passes, and incurred the most fearful
risks,—for all of which he received adequate compensation.
The pack train was always a lively feature in the gigantic mountain
scenery of Oregon and Idaho. A train of fifty or one hundred animals,
composed about equally of mules and burros, each heavily laden, the
experienced animal in the lead picking the way for those in the rear
amid the rocks, escarpments, and precipices of a lofty mountain side,
was a spectacle of thrilling interest. At times, the least mis-step
would have precipitated some unfortunate animal hundreds of feet down
the steep declivity, dashing him to pieces on the rocks below.
Fortunately the cautious and sure tread of these faithful creatures
rendered such an accident of very rare occurrence, though to the person
who for the first time beheld them in motion the feeling was ever
present that they could not escape it. The arrival of one of these large
trains in a mining camp produced greater excitement among the
inhabitants than any other event, and the calculations upon their
departure from the Columbia River and their appearance in the interior
towns were made and anticipated with nearly as much certainty as if they
were governed by a published time-table.
The confidence of the owner of a train of pack-animals in their sagacity
and sure-footedness relieved him of all fear of accident by travel, but
he could never feel as well assured against the attacks of robbers. All
the men in charge of a train were well armed and in momentary
expectation of a surprise. Frequently on the return trips they were
entrusted by merchants with large amounts of gold dust. Opportunities of
this character seldom escaped the vigilance of the robbers,—and any
defect in the police of the departing train insured an attack upon it in
some of the difficult passes on its route to the river.
The packer of a train belonging to Neil McClinchey, a well-known
mercantile operator of the Upper Columbia, in October, 1862, when four
days out from Florence, on his return to Walla Walla, was stopped by a
masked party of which Harper was supposed to be the leader, and for want
of sufficient force robbed of fourteen pounds of gold. As he gave the
treasure into the hands of the assailants, the villain who took it said
in a consoling tone, “That’s sensible. If every man was as reasonable as
you things would go along smoother.”
Shortly after this robbery, Joseph and John Berry were returning to the
river with their train. They had gone but forty miles from Florence,
when they were confronted by three men in masks, who, with levelled
pistols, commanded them to throw up their hands. Seeing that resistance
was useless they obeyed, and were relieved of eleven hundred dollars.
The packers recognized the voices of David English and William
Peoples,—and the third one was afterwards ascertained to be Nelson
Scott. The victims returned with all possible expedition to Lewiston,
where the report of their loss excited the most intense indignation.