Yankee Sullivan’s character is notorious.  He was a professional prize-fighter — ready to try conclusions in the fistic ring with any in the world; but he feared a pistol or a knife as an ordinary man would fear a blow from his powerful arm.  He had helped Mulligan and Casey in some of their election operations, and for that he was arrested.  There was no charge of any other nature than this and his fighting quality to warrant his arrest.  His courage or spirit broke down while confined in the close cell, and one morning his lifeless body was found stiff in the cell.  He had opened a vein in his arm and bled to death.  The rumor at the time was — and it is still believed — that he was driven to the deed by the remark made by one of the Vigilance guards outside the cell, but spoken in tone calculated for Sullivan to hear it, that he was to be hanged the next morning.  To escape the ignominy of such a death, he anticipated it by his own hand.

Martin Gallagher and Billy Carr were boatmen, and active in party manipulations in the interest of Mr. Broderick in the First Ward.  They were tough men to handle in a fight, and usually forced their own way in anything they undertook.  With Mulligan they often sat as delegates in city, county and State conventions of the Democracy — together with several other of their associates and kind, who are still more or less prominent in city politics — some of them Democrats, some Republicans.  Bill Lewis was sent out of the country none too soon.  He was a great, powerful, terrorizing fellow, desperate and unscrupulous, and one to beware of.  He took active part in politics, and was terrible in a “scrimmage.  Of his redeeming, traits I never obtained information.  Doubtless he had some.  Unlest it was on account of Woolley Kearney’s facial configuration, I have never been able to divine why the Committee banished him.  He was the homeliest, ugliess looking mortal I ever saw.  Had the Committee compelled him to go as the Veiled Prophet, with a gunny sack instead of silver veil, there would have been at least the essence of justice in their action.  His battered, flattened, twisted, gnarled nose, was at every point of the compass, and more hideous at every turn.  Why he didn’t blow it off when he blowed it, blow’d if any could conjecture.  His eyes were squinted, his mouth a monstrous curiosity.  Every feature seemed in revolt at that nose.  It would have struck awe to the spirit of an Ogre, Woolley was no doubt ready and willing to do any crooked deed, but none who knew him would employ him on any mission in which skill and fidelity were required.  His banishment had, perhaps, a good effect upon the unborn generation, whose parents had not then entered the matrimonial state.  Whatever other purpose it subserved, except to show to other communities the “latest novelty” from California, is the unfathomable conundrum.  John Crowe was a noisy, blatant, meddlesome fellow, the keeper of a livery stable on Kearny street, and a fierce denouncer of