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LETTER XII.

 

Deer Valley—Lynch Law—Vigilance Committees—The Silver Spruce—Taste and Abstinence—The Whisky Fiend—Smartness—Turkey Creek Canyon—The Indian Problem—Public Rascality—Friendly Meetings—The Way to the Golden City—A rising Settlement—Clear Creek Canyon—Staging—Swearing—A Mountain Town.

 

Deer Valley, November.

To-night I am in a beautiful place like a Dutch farm—large, warm, bright, clean, with abundance of clean food, and a clean, cold little bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for two free-tongued, noisy Irish-women, who keep a miners' boarding-house in South Park, and are going to winter quarters in a freight-waggon, are telling the most fearful stories of violence, vigilance committees, Lynch law, and "stringing," that I ever heard. It turns one's blood cold only to think that where I travel in perfect security, only a short time ago men were being shot like skunks. At the mining towns up above this nobody is thought anything of who has not killed a man—ie. in a certain set. These women had a boarder, only fifteen, who thought he could not be anything till he had shot somebody, and they gave an absurd account of the