The people of San Francisco bore with her trifling and misdoings, until patience ceased to be a virtue, and then, rising in their might, ousted the old lady by violence, and installed Dame Vigilance for the time being in her place. This made things lively for the crowds of evil-doers who had made the name of San Francisco a by-word and a reproach, and the moral atmosphere was so purified by the storm that, when the old dame came sneaking back and resumed her place in the temple, she could see more clearly.
Up in the mountains it was hard to get a first-class lawyer to accept a position so low down as even a County Judgeship, and as for the Justices of the Peace—well, some of them were from rather indifferent stock, to say the least. "Old Tuolumne" was the great county of the "Southern Mines." Placer gold was found on nearly every hillside, and on the banks and in the bed of every stream, while every "bar" on her rivers, the Tuolumne and Stanislaus, was a thriving village or mining camp, where miners' stores and gambling tables abounded. Whisky was as free as water, and a fight and a man for breakfast was a part of the daily programme. Society became organized, and courts were established in Tuolumne county earlier than in most of the counties of the State; and, if the machinery worked a little rough at the start, it is hardly to be wondered at, considering the incongruous materials of which it was composed, and the hurried manner in which it was knocked together.
Among the first Justices of the Peace appointed
