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Ada Langworthy Collier (1843-ND) http://tinyurl.com/Colllier

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Rampant Vice

From "On the Edge of a New Land," 1844. Read Online Download PDF

Reader: Jessica Teeter

Mixing with a motley crew of miners and fortune-seekers, the women of the Gold Rush needed true grit and a strong will to thrive "on the edge of a new land."

Fiction writer Ada Langworthy Collier tells the story of Diana and her friend Hester, a miner's wife, who meet an violent mob about to kill a thief and gambler.

The prostrate victim. . . knew that, in the rude code of the mines, his offence was the one least easily overlooked; that Judge Lynch, with his sudden and terrible lash, kept the only court known here.

As he lay helpless among them, a slow curiosity shone in his eyes. He had come from one of the older settlements beyond the eastern shore of the river. Penniless and driven on by a fatal love of gambling—one of the rampant vices of a new country—he had stolen and sold a few hundred pounds of the mineral stored by thrifty Denny by the roadside, where it had been awaiting the arrival of the wagon which was to convey it to the smelter's furnace. He had tempted his own fate by remaining all night at the "Alley," as the gambling den was called—crazed by drink, and heedless of the discovery of his theft.

Collier's "On the Edge of a New Land" appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1884.