The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery
were occupied by murdered men. So everybody
said, so everybody believed, and so they will always
say and believe. The reason why there was so
much slaughtering done, was, that in a new mining
district the rough element predominates, and a person
is not respected until he has “killed his man.”
That was the very expression used.
If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire
if he was capable, honest, industrious, but—had
he killed his man? If he had not, he gravitated
to his natural and proper position, that of a man of
small consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his
reception was graduated according to the number of
his dead. It was tedious work struggling up
to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but
when a man came with the blood of half a dozen men
on his soul, his worth was recognized at once and
his acquaintance sought.
In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the
banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and
the saloon keeper, occupied the same level in society,
and it was the highest. The cheapest and easiest
way to become an influential man and be looked up
to by the community at large, was to stand behind
a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whisky.
I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade
higher rank than any other member of society.
His opinion had weight. It was his privilege
to say how the elections should go. No great
movement could succeed without the countenance and
direction of the saloon-keepers. It was a high
favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to serve
in the legislature or the board of aldermen.
Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors
of the law, or the army and navy as to the dignity
of proprietorship in a saloon.
To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.
Hence the reader will not be surprised to learn that
more than one man was killed in Nevada under hardly
the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the slayer
to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense
of being held in indifferent repute by his associates.
I knew two youths who tried to “kill their
men” for no other reason—and got killed
themselves for their pains. “There goes
the man that killed Bill Adams” was higher praise
and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people
than any other speech that admiring lips could utter.
The men who murdered Virginia’s original twenty-six
cemetery-occupants were never punished. Why?
Because Alfred the Great, when he invented trial
by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to
secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware
that in the nineteenth century the condition of things
would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from
the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency,
it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency
