THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE


It was May 14, 1856. I chanced to be standing at the northwest corner of
Washington and Montgomery Streets, watching the world go by. It was a
queer world: very much mixed, not a little fantastic in manner and
costume; just the kind of world to delight a boy, and no doubt I was
delighted.

"Bang!" It was a pistol-shot, and very near me--not thirty feet away. I
turned and saw a man stagger and fall to the pavement. Then the streets
began to grow dark with people hurrying toward the scene of the tragedy.
I fled in fright; I had had my fill of horrors. The pistol-shot was
familiar enough: it punctuated the hours of day and night out yonder.
But I had never witnessed a murder, and this was evidently one.

When I reached home I was dazed. On the witness stand, under oath, I
could have told nothing; but very shortly the whole town was aware that
James King--known as James King of William (i.e., William King was his
father)--the editor of the _Evening Bulletin_ had been shot in cold
blood by James Casey, a supervisor, the editor of a local journal, an
unprincipled politician, an ex-convict, and a man whose past had been
exposed and his present publicly denounced in the editorial columns of
the _Bulletin_.

This climax precipitated a general movement toward social and political
reform in San Francisco. It was James P. Casey, a graduate of the New
York state-prison at Sing Sing, who stuffed a ballot-box with tickets
bearing his own name upon them as candidate for supervisor, and as a
result of this stuffing declared himself elected. Casey was hurried off