vigilantes were required to perform no further executions; law and order reigned, and the foundation was thus laid for the well-regulated and prosperous Walla Walla city of today.
During the summer of '63 Mr. Stockman was at Florence, Idaho, at that time the center of a new and rich mineral strike. Hither also flocked the thugs and desperados from their winter haunts and among them were many from Walla Walla. Like most of the mining camps of the time, the lawless element exacted deference to their sway. The men of upright character found it necessary to exercise constant care lest, inadvertently, they should seem to mix with the disreputables and thereby open the way for the cultivation of a tooclose acquaintance.
In the town was maintained a large bunk house which was made to serve also as a gambling den, and was therefore the natural rendezvous of the vicious. Very early one morning a man stepped into the building and asked in a loud voice: "Is 'California Jim' here?" From one of the bunks in the long row stretching along the side of the building, that worthy arose on his elbow and allowed that he was the party for whom the enquiry was made. Without waste of ceremony, the morning visitor opened up a pistol fusilade which raked the bunk, and when he had done Jim had gone to his long home.
A dance hall which ran on full time was one of the popular resorts for those who infested the camp for the purpose of filching from the miners. At an hour of the night when honest men sleep, "Cherokee" Bob, the desperado known in Walla Walla, and a man by the name of Williams, both habitues of the dance hall, engaged in an altercation in which a dance hall girl figured as a cause. It was an interesting scrap from an abstract point of view. Each had acquired considerable renown in the accuracy and rapidity of his gunnery, and had the fight resulted in the counting out of both the depletion in the personnel of the town would have been generally pleasing. But "Cherokee" Bob made an irreparable error in the execution of his manual of arms, his sensitive trigger finger going
