The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to which my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an instance of the development of an English community under the most inauspicious circumstances, that the whole time which I spent in the city itself I devoted to hearing the tale from those who knew the actors. Not only is the history of the two Vigilance Committees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado as to the operation of the claim-clubs; and the stories, taken together, form a typical picture of the rise of a New English country. The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on luckless California the idle, the reckless, the vagabonds first of Polynesia, then of all the world. Street fighting, public gaming, masked balls given by unknown women and paid for nobody knew how, but attended by governor, supervisors, and alcalde--all these were minor matters by the side of the general undefined ruffianism of the place. Before the end of 1849, San Francisco presented on a gigantic scale much the same appearance that Helena in Montana wears in 1866. Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the best of the bad flocking off to the mines, while the worst among the villains--those who lacked energy as well as moral sense--remained in the city, to raise by thieving or in the gambling-booth the “pile” that they were too indolent to earn by pick and pan. Hundreds of “emancipists” from Sydney, “old lags” from Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of England, still further trained and confirmed in vice and crime by the experiences of Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, rushed to San Francisco to continue a career which the vigilance of the police made hopeless in Tasmania and New South Wales. The floating vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon gathered to a spot where there were not only men to fleece, but men who, being fleeced, could pay. The police were necessarily few, for, appoint a man to-day, and to-morrow he was gone to the placers with some new friend; those who could be prevailed upon to remain a fortnight in the force were accessible to bribes from the men they were set to watch. They themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to the continual change of place among the criminals, which prevented the slightest knowledge of their characters and haunts. The Australian jail-birds formed a quarter known as “Sydney Town,” which soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten years before--the Alsatia of the Pacific. In spite of daily murders, not a single criminal was hanged.