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

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Pinkham had been an adventurer ever since the discovery of gold in California. He was among the first of that great army of fortune-seekers which braved the perils of an overland trip to that distant El Dorado in 1849. If, before he left his New England home, no blight had fallen upon his moral nature, it is certain that soon after his arrival in the land of gold his character took the form which it ever afterwards wore, of a gambler and desperado. In this there was nothing strange, as he was but one victim in a catastrophe that wrecked the characters of thousands. The estimate is small, which places at one-half the number of the early Pacific gold-seekers, those who fell victims to the moral ruin of life in the mining camp. It was the fruitful nursery of all those desperate men, who, after years of bloody experience, expiated their crimes upon the impromptu scaffolds of the Vigilantes, or in some of the violent brawls which their own recklessness had excited. Pinkham’s pursuits in California were those of the professional gambler. At one time he kept a common dance-house in Marysville. It is fair, in the absence of facts, to presume that his life in the Golden State was a preparatory foreground for the one which followed in the mountains of Washington Territory. He was among the first, in 1862, who were lured to that Territory by the reports of extensive gold discoveries. Among the desperate, reckless, and motley crowd that assembled at Florence immediately after the discovery of the mines, was Pinkham, with his faro boards and monte cards, “giving the boys a chance for a tussle with the tiger and the leopard.” It was not long until he became a central figure in the camp. The wild, undisciplined, pleasure-seeking population, attracted by the outspoken boldness and self-assertion of the man, quietly submitted to the influence which such characteristics always command. And no man better understood his power over his followers, or exercised it more warily, than Pinkham. The reputation which he enjoyed, of being a bold, chivalric, fearless man, ready for any emergency, however desperate, gained for him the favor of every reckless adventurer who shared in his general views of the race.