and punished lawbreakers.  Naturally theft was considered a more serious crime than it is in ordinary communities.  As there were no jails or jailors, flogging and expulsion were the usual punishment, but in aggravated cases it was death.  Even after the state government had been organized, indeed, the law for a short while permitted a jury to prescribe the death penalty for grand larceny, and, in fact, several notorious thieves were legally executed.

The testimony of all observers is that the camps were surprisingly orderly, that crime was infrequent, and that its punishment, though swift and certain, leaned to mercy rather than rigor.  Bayard Taylor, for example, who was in the mines in ’50 and ’51, writes:  “In a region five hundred miles long, inhabited by a hundred thousand people, who had neither locks, bolts, regular laws of government, military or civil protection, there was as much security to life and property as in any state of the Union.”

As these “miners’ courts” were allowed after the organization of the state to retain jurisdiction in all questions that concerned the appropriation of claims,the miners but slowly appreciated that they had been shorn of their criminal jurisdiction.  But that they did come to recognize that “the old order changeth, yielding place to new,” is, in fact, shown by the very incident on which Harte based his of a lynching.

Spite of the autobiographic method that leads the casual reader to think that Harte was intimately connected with this early pioneer life and derived the material for his sketches from personal observation and experience, his is, in truth, only hearsay evidence.  The heroic age was with Iram and all his rose ere he landed in 1854, a lad of eighteen.  With no especial equipment for battling with the world, he had to turn his hand to many things, and naturally tried mining.  But finding the returns incommensurate with the labor, he soon gave it up and sought more congenial occupations, mainly in the towns of the valleys and the seacoast.  Before he was twenty-three, he had been school-teacher, express-messenger, deputy tax-collector, and druggist’s assistant; and had risen from “printer’s devil” to assistant editor of a country newspaper.  In 1859 he was back in San Francisco, utilizing the trade he had picked up, as a compositor on The Golden Era.  To this he contributed poems and local sketches that soon led to his appointment as assistant editor.  His writings made him friends, one of whom, Thomas Starr King, in 1864, obtained for him the position of secretary to the superintendent of the Mint.  His duties were not arduous, and his rooms became the resort of his literary associates and of men from “the diggings,” whose mines, like the meadows of Concord, yielded a two-fold crop:  gold-dust for the superintendent to turn into bullion, and stories for his young secretary later to turn into literature.  By 1868 his reputation was so great that when Mr. A. Roman established The Overland Monthly, he was made its first editor.