Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/198



URING a residence of eleven years in California, dating from the year 1846 to 1857, I had some strange and rude experiences, and was the witness of some remarkable scenes. Not the least extraordinary of these dramas of real life, was one in which an innocent man narrowly escaped execution upon the gallows, simply because he had the misfortune to closely resemble a guilty man.

In the early Spring of 1851, the city of San Francisco was thrown into a great state of excitement, one morning, upon its residents reading the detailed account of a bold robbery which had been committed, with the accompaniment of a brutal assault, on the previous evening. About six o'clock in the evening, when his clerks had gone to dinner, Charles Jansen, the proprietor of a wholesale "dry goods" establishment, on Montgomery street, was alone in his counting-room, when two men entered the door. Addressing him some common-place remark, one approached him, and, with a bar of iron, felled him to the floor, while the other proceeded to open the safe; and in a few minutes both had escaped, carrying with them several thousand dollars in coin and gold dust. Upon the return of his clerks, Jansen was found lying senseless and bleeding on the floor. He was removed to his residence, and the next morning had so far rallied as to be able to make a tolerably clear statement of the occurrence, and to give a description of the two men who had attacked him; and upon the strength of this latter, two men, supposed to be the guilty parties, were arrested on the following day, just as they were stepping on a steamboat bound up the Sacramento.

The occurrence created a great excitement in San Francisco. Robberies and murders were, at that time, by no means unfrequent, and it was known that an organized gang, composed in great part of escaped Australian convicts, was borrowed among the sand-hills of the neighborhood, and most of the nightly burglaries and out- rages were attributed to its members. This gang was under the leadership of one James Stuart, a desperate scoundrel, whose name was a terror throughout the entire State; and many crimes had been fixed upon him, and, among others, the murder of the sheriff of Yuba County. By his great skill and finesse, however, Stuart had always succeeded in eluding the search of both the regularly-constituted police, and the sharper, more lynx-eyed detectives of the Vigilance Committee.