Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all the means by which civilized men keep record of their property transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace officer, and the defender of his own property. Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of every new-comer. 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." Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize, the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their "chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more unscrupulous than his fellows.