Читать книгу Vigilante Days and Ways. The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho онлайн

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Winters are nowhere more dreary than among the miners. Frost and snow bring their labors to an end, and for three or four months they either remain in their camps in a state of listless inactivity, or seek for occupation and enjoyment in the excesses of the nearest populous settlement. Hundreds of them actually squander during the season of winter all that they have obtained by the most severe toil during the rest of the year. With the terrible example before him, he must be a man of resolute will who can long refrain from embracing vice in all its forms.

Gambling becomes a favorite occupation, and whiskey a common beverage. The society of abandoned women lures him on, until every moral, social, and virtuous resolution is broken down, and the experience of a few months of such a life wholly unfits him for a return to his earlier pursuits. This is the experience of three-fourths of the young men who seek for fortune among the gold mines. Most of this class who had been occupied in placer digging during the summer and fall, at the first approach of cold forsook their mines, and crowded into Lewiston to spend the winter, bringing with them the hard earnings of their toil. Following in their wake came the professional gamblers and sports, and, mingling with the common mass, were the wretches who had reached the lowest depths of human depravity. A letter from one of the early settlers of Lewiston, written at the time, says: “Late in 1862 a large number congregated here to pass the winter. About seventy-five per cent of these were cut-throats, robbers, gamblers, and escaped convicts. Honest men were in a fearful minority, and dared not lisp of the arrest and punishment of criminals; the villains had their own way in everything.”