The book presents a memoir-like chronicle of crime and community response in early Rocky Mountain mining country, documenting rampant robberies, murders, and the vice of boom camps alongside efforts by settlers to organize vigilance committees, impromptu courts, and executions to restore safety. It combines episodic accounts of raids, trials, pursuits, and notable incidents with portraits of frontier life, mining discoveries, and transport hazards, and it weighs the practical necessity and moral ambiguities of extralegal punishment while tracing how communities struggled to replace lawlessness with order.