By Patrick Hoge
Bee Staff Writer
Published Jan. 18, 1998

Punishment for criminal behavior during the chaos of California's Gold Rush was not always just, but it was quick.

The miners who poured into the Sierra canyons by the thousands had little time for courts, juries or lawyers.

Instead, justice was dispensed by "Judge Lynch" -- in the form of mobs that held impromptu trials and meted out immediate punishment, often whipping, hanging or banishment.

In Dry Creek and other mining sites, criminal justice was apt to be a no-frills affair, with the judges sometimes fueled by hard liquor.

"I think we should have more of that today, instead of all the appeals and everything," Ruby DeCair, the current owner of the Hangman's Tree bar in Placerville, said with a laugh.

DeCair's bar was built over the stump of an enormous oak where one of the first and most famous of the Gold Rush hangings took place in 1849.

From a noose on the bar's second story dangles a lifelike dummy -- a mustachioed roustabout with a plaid shirt, a single suspender, work pants and pointy boots.

There are numerous versions of what happened, but it is widely agreed that two or three men were charged with robbery and then hanged in a hay field behind the Jackass Inn at the intersection of Coloma and Main streets.

James K. Polk

The suspects were tried and convicted by an assembly of miners -- some sodden with liquor -- who had elected a judge and jury.

Thenceforth, Dry Diggins became known far and wide as Hangtown.

But other than the fact that several men were hanged at the same time, the case was quite typical of how miners handled crime.

"The suspect was removed to the place where the crime was committed and tried by local citizens, who were generally pretty plowed," said Tom Hickey, president of the Folsom Prison Museum.

Such ad hoc "justice" reflected the political vacuum that existed in California after Mexico lost the region to the United States, which was itself edging toward the Civil War.

Congress, busy debating whether California should be a free or slave state, neglected to establish a territorial government before statehood in 1850. The region was administered by the U.S. Army, but practically speaking, formal law enforcement was largely nonexistent.

"The society they had placed a very high value in justice being meted out on a very quick basis," said Gordon Bakken, author of the book "Practicing Law in Frontier California."

"There was an imperative to maintain order. That's how the pioneers believed law would be respected," said Bakken, a professor at California State University, Fullerton.

During the early days of the Gold Rush, there was little crime. Gold was plentiful, as was space.

Report of Col. Richard Bames Mason, Aug. 17, 1848 (Approx. 378K)

"In early '48, everyone thought there was plenty of gold for everyone," said Michael Trinklein, who has produced a documentary about the Gold Rush for public television. "Miners could leave their claim and their tools unguarded overnight and find everything untouched in the morning."

By 1849, however, the rivers and streams were crowded, and the easy gold was mostly gone.

Men from around the world, who traveled for half a year in life-threatening conditions to get to California, were bitterly let down. Some killed over claims. And some turned to stealing, which became such a problem that in 1851 the state Legislature passed a bill that allowed the death penalty for stealing property worth more than $100.

Even without the disappointments, however, the demographic makeup of the miners almost guaranteed trouble, wrote David Courtwright, a University of North Florida history professor, in an article for American Heritage magazine. Many of them were young, wild and adventurous.

Many an armed miner lost his hard-earned gold dust to professional gamblers in saloons where liquor flowed freely.

"The result was a steady stream of unpremeditated homicides, most of which arose from personal disputes and occurred in or near drinking establishments," Courtwright wrote.

During one period, a killing occurred every weekend for 17 straight weeks in Mokelumne Hill in Amador County.

By contrast, the rates of robbery and burglary in mining camps were equal to or lower than cities on the East Coast, according to Courtwright. Gun-toting citizens apparently deterred property crime.

In their judicial proceedings, the miners usually emulated the British common law model with which Anglo-Saxon pioneers were familiar. It was a model that valued private property and individual rights of white citizens of the United States.

American Indian, Chinese, Hawaiian, Mexican, Spanish and South American people did not enjoy the same protections and were often victims.

Even after statehood, confidence in formal legal processes remained low.

In Sacramento in 1850, for example, a mob overwhelmed the city's first marshal and some sheriff's deputies and smashed in the door of the jail at Second and J streets to get at a gambler who had shot a merchant. The merchant had been trying to break up a fistfight.

After a quick trial, the crowd hanged the gambler from an oak tree on Sixth Street between K and L streets.

In Nevada City in April 1851, a butcher shop was robbed of gold dust and three men were arrested and put in jail. A crowd refused to allow the suspects to be taken to Marysville, then the county seat, and instead held a two-day trial and convicted the men. All three suspects were publicly whipped. One died as a result.

In July, Sacramentans formed a citizens vigilance committee that hanged a man who had been convicted of robbery but granted a reprieve by the governor. Similar committees remained active in Jackson and Mokelumne Hill until about 1856.

That same year an 8,000-member vigilance committee in San Francisco hanged 10 men, and refused to disband despite repeated threats of armed conflict with the federal government.

Gradually, however, government officials established a functioning judicial system in the state.

The rough-and-tumble world of the frontier, meanwhile, moved inland to Nevada, and then to Bodie, a high-desert gold town above Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra.

Isolated and freezing cold at 8,400 feet, Bodie grew to 10,000 people by the 1870s and gained a reputation as one of the most lawless mining towns in the West.

Indeed, the daily newspaper ran a column called "Last Night's Killings."

Such was the case until the gold ran out.