Lawless Towns

• New settlements and towns were popping up all over America. Often there were no policemen or judges in a town. This caused many problems and earned the area the name 'The Wild West'.
• • Lots of Chinese migrants entered California during the 1852 famine.
• • Slavery was not abolished in the USA until 1865 and many African people were still kept as slaves in America.
• • Plains Indians were the indigenous population of America, but they were being forced into reservations.
• • Between 1870 and 1900, 7 million migrants came to America from Northern Europe (Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia) and 3 million migrants came from Southern Europe (places like Italy).
• • There was huge diversity in America.
• • In New York, between the 1830s and 1850s, the Forty Thieves of Five Points and the Bowery Boys of lower Manhattan were notorious gangs. The gangs were involved in violence, fighting, gambling, the sale of alcohol, and prostitution.
• • The population of California grew to 380,000 people by 1858. San Francisco was its largest town at the time. The Gold Rush was unsuccessful for most migrants. They were now stuck on the West Coast, away from their families, with no jobs and no money. These are the perfect conditions for gangs to recruit people into a criminal life.
• • The homicide (murder) records for San Francisco show suspected murderers as the Hounds (who were an anti-foreign migrant gang) and the Chileans (who were migrants from Latin America).
• • Local police forces were very small.
• • In response, citizens set up 'vigilance groups', which became known as vigilantes. These people would hunt down and punish suspects without the legal system.
• • Miners' courts were created in mining camps. Here, a group of fellow miners who judge cases and claims.
• • Settlers could set up remote farms in locations all across the Great Plains.
• • Mining communities could well be in very remote areas.
• • This meant that there could be no way of enforcing the law within communities or with criminals trying to attack these communities.