Vigilante Days

"Our town is fast assuming the airs and customs of a 'fast town.'" wrote the town weekly, the Journal. "The frequency of rows, drunken broils &c, are fast becoming commensurate with the rapid growth of the place."

Elsewhere the editor lamented that "Last week, in way of local items, we recorded one shooting and one cutting affray," the latter being the standard phrase for a knife fight.

Barroom brawls and disputes over bets inevitably followed. Add some thefts and an occasional stabbing, and townsfolk were fed up enough to take stern measures of their own.

The big city to the south provided the blueprint of how to deal out freelance justice. Believing that ordinary citizens had the right to punish wrongdoers when officials failed to do so, San Franciscans had organized Vigilance Committees in 1851 and again in 1856. When Stephen Payran, who served as president of the 1851 committee, moved to Petaluma in 1853, he found a town that was warming up to the idea of citizen justice. Payran eventually held several official posts in the City of Petaluma and the County of Sonoma, including constable and coroner. (There's still a Payran Street north of downtown Petaluma.)

Not that official law was entirely absent. Petaluma had its own a justice of the peace, and the county seat in Santa Rosa, 15 miles to the north, had a sheriff, courthouse and jail. But jailhouse security was lax. Buddies of jailbirds occasionally lobbed guns and files through the open windows to their friends inside, and it was fairly common practice to slip bribes to accommodating judges and jurors.

Even more to the point, a rough-and-ready ethos still held sway. As local amateur historian Dr. W.C. Shipley explained in his memoirs, "In those days we did not suffer from an overplus of sapheaded sobsisters who love to weep and wail over some degenerate criminal." Accused murderers were in danger of hanging without benefit of trial. Or, as the town Journal said of an 1857 lynching nearby Bodega Port, the accused killer was "disposed of after the most economical manner of executing summary justice."

Graham was tried for manslaughter and acquited -- not a rare outcome. At that time people were more likely to be convicted for larceny than for murder -- the result, perhaps, of a certain frontier code. A thief was universally despised as a low-down snake, but a killer might be excused for defending his property or his honor.

Disputes ending in violence were often judged on the merits of the dispute rather than on any laws against murder or assault. Or as Shipley put it, "Most of the population was imbued with the frontier doctrine that a man should kill his own snakes." The fact that the victim deserved what he got was considered a passable defense for the three M's: mayhem, manslaughter and murder.

For lesser outrages, offenders might be clothed in hot tar with a flourish of feathers. Angry citizens gave dentist George Johnson the tar and feather treatment on Petaluma's Main Street for "attempting to commit violence upon the person of a widowed lady from San Francisco," according to the July 17, 1857, Petaluma Journal. He was then escorted to jail. Dr. Johnson's ordeal was written up under the headline "LYNCHED," a word that apparently applied to other forms of justice besides the extreme of hanging.

Newspapers of the mid-1800's didn't strive for objectivity, and they usually left that pesky mitigating word "alleged" out of their reckoning. "Of Johnson's guilt, little or no doubt can be entertained," wrote Henry Weston, editor of the Journal. "The only apology we can offer for the lawless manner of inflicting punishment adopted by our citizens is, the boasts of Johnson that he could and would whip his way through the entire town. . . . While we feel free to deplore the occurrence of this act of violence, in our usually law-abiding and orderly village, we nevertheless have no sympathy for the victim."

There wasn't much sympathy for incorrigible trespassers, either. Harrison Mecham, a pioneer who came to the area in 1853, owned 10,000 acres of Roblar Rancho north of town. Mecham packed a pistol when he patroled his ranch on horseback, and when he encountered a trespasser he had warned repeatedly to keep off his land, Mecham shot him, apparently without repercussions.

"Could it be the work of Vigilantes, or had the man, tired of existence, committed suicide?" wondered the Journal. "...the name of the deceased, and the cause which led to this suspension, remains a mystery. Rumor, however, says it was a Mr. Ragman, and that the verdict of the crowd was 'that the said Ragman came to his death by cause of being suspended, by the neck to a rope attached thereunto, by some person or persons to ourselves best known.'"

Violence was not the only concern of vigilance groups; the town's constables could not keep pace with the theft of horses and cattle. Exasperated Petaluma ranchers met at the Liberty School House in April 1857 to form a citizens' association "for the detection of thieves and recovery of stolen property." Observing all the niceties, they elected a President (Dr. T.L. Barnes), installed officers and a board of directors, and approved a constitution and by-laws.

In the 1860's and 70's, with the growth of schools, streets, commerce and railroads, Petaluma life settled into a more respectable groove, but vigilante sympathies figured in one episode during the Civil War. Most Petalumans were staunchly behind the Union, but there was a small, vocal pocket of Confederate sympathizers, including prominent citizen Manville Doyle (who later founded Exchange Bank of Santa Rosa). In April 1864, the town's Baptist Church went so far as to disinvite its secessionist members -- including Doyle -- from the Congregation.

The last straw for Doyle was hearing the church bell rung to celebrate Union victories, because it was he who had acquired the bell in the first place. Back in 1858, Doyle and some fellow Baptists had traveled to San Francisco to look for a suitable bell, and in a San Francisco junkyard they found the very bell used by the Vigilance Committee of 1856 to announce its hangings. Doyle was so enthused about acquiring the bell that had rung out the news of those celebrated lynchings that he paid some of the $550 price from his own pocket. He even kicked in the money to ship the 1,015-pound bell by steamer up the Petaluma River.

At the end of April, 1864, Doyle and team of fellow Confederates, working in broad daylight, rigged up a block and tackle, lowered the bell onto a wagon, and carted it off to a warehouse at the foot of B Street, where they hid it under sacks of potatoes. A few days later they returned to padlock the church's front door and nail the windows shut.

This was the last straw for the opposing side. A crowd of several dozen Unionists draped a Union flag over a wagon and retrieved the bell, hoisting it back into the belfry. They then rang the bell repeatedly and belted out some Union songs.

Like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Petaluma's Vigilante Bell acquired an ugly crack, and the crack itself became a source of dispute. Did the bell crack the day its defenders hauled it back into the belfry and rang it victoriously, or (as one story goes) did Doyle climb up there one night and whack it with a hammer? Others say it cracked in grief a year later, when it rang out the news of President Lincoln's assassination.