A first-hand account of frontier vigilantism that recounts the pursuit, trial, capture, and execution of an organized band of road agents, while profiling many alleged robbers and desperadoes. Interwoven with these episodes are sketches of mining-camp life, describing social conditions, widespread vice, and the fragile exercise of law in newly settled regions. The narrator explains the formation and actions of vigilance committees as responses to violence and theft, arguing their necessity and fairness, and contrasts the camp’s rough, precarious order with more settled communities to explain why extralegal measures arose.