By Old Hoppy Feb 21, 2010 in Gunfighters, Lawmen, Old West Justice | 0 Comments
Arguably, the toughest lawman in Idaho in the latter days of the Old West may have been “Rube” Robbins.
Robbins, actual name Orlando Robbins, came to the Boise Basin gold fields about a year after the rush started there. He was in his mid-20s and looking for adventure. Adventure found Rube — or he found it? — in 1864 when he became deputy sheriff in Boise. The small town of Boise and the surrounding region was polarized between the North and South as the Civil War ragged to a close, mostly to the East.
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By Old Hoppy Sep 5, 2008 in Old West Justice | 0 Comments
It’s very likely today that you can travel to graveyards throughout the Old West and find aging tombstones that have the message “died by the hands of the V.C.” carved into them. Perhaps you’ve seen them in your travels throughout the West if you’ve had an interest in genealogy and inspecting family burial plots.
I discovered just today, reading in Winfred Blevins’ “Dictionary of the American West” (I’ve mentioned the book before), that those tombstone messages carry an ominous history lesson. According to Blevins, the “V.C.” stands for “Vigilance Committee”: groups we have come to know as “vigilantes” — those people who took it upon themselves to hunt down the “bad guys,” and dispense the vigilantes’ version of justice — whether that was a shooting or hanging.
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