Florence was now the established headquarters of the robbers. Its isolated location, its distance from the seat of government, its mountain surroundings, and, more than all, its utter destitution of power to enforce law and order, gave it peculiar fitness as a base for the criminal and bloody operations of the desperate gang which infested it. At all hours of the day and night some of them were to be seen at the two saloons kept by Cherokee Bob and Cyrus Skinner. When one company disappeared another took its place, and at no time were there less than twenty or thirty of these desperadoes at one or both of their haunts, plotting and contriving deeds of plunder and robbery which involved the hard earnings, possibly the lives, of many of the fortunate miners of the vicinity. The crowd from both East and West had arrived. The town was full of gold hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of every newcomer. 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. Wholly unrestrained by fear or conscience, the robbers carried on their operations in the full blaze of mid-day. Affrays were of daily occurrence, and robberies took place in the public streets. Charley Harper, the acknowledged chief, stained with the darkest crimes, walked the streets with the boldness and confidence of one who glories in his iniquity. Peaceable, honest, well-meaning citizens, completely overawed, were fortunate to escape insult or abuse, as they passed to and fro in pursuit of their occupations. Woe to the unfortunate miner who entered the town if it were known or believed that there was any treasure on his person! If not robbed on the spot, or lured into a hurdy-gurdy saloon, or cheated at a gambling table, he was waylaid by disguised ruffians on his return to his camp, and by threats and violence, or when these failed, by death itself, relieved of his hard-bought earnings. For one of these sufferers to recognize and expose any of his assailants was simply to insure death at his hands the first convenient opportunity.