No two men filled a broader space in the early history of the Florence mines than Pinkham and Patterson. Their personal characteristics gave them a widespread notoriety, and a sort of local popularity, which each enjoyed in his separate sphere. They were both leaders, after their own fashion, in the heterogeneous society in which they moved, and he was deemed a bold man who would gainsay their opinions, or resist their enterprises.
They were both gamblers, and lived the free and easy life of that pursuit; a pursuit which, in a new mining camp, next to that of absolute ruffianism, enabled its votaries to exercise a power as unlimited as it is generally lawless and insurrectionary. Indeed, there it is the master vice, which gives life and support to all the other vices, and that surrounds and hedges them in.
The order of influences which govern and direct the social element of a mining camp in its infancy is exactly the reverse of those which govern and direct the social element of an Eastern village. The clergyman, the church, and the various little associations growing out of it, which make the society of our New England villages so delightful, and, at the same time, so disciplinary and instructive, are superseded in a new mining community by the gambling saloon, cheap whiskey, frail women, and all the evils necessarily flowing from such polluted combinations. In the one case, religion and morality stand in the foreground, protected by the spirit of wise and inflexible laws; in the other, the rifle, the pistol, and the bowie-knife are flourished by reckless men, whose noblest inspirations are excited by liquor and debauchery. While all that is good and true and pure in society is brought into unceasing action in the one case, all that is vile and false and polluted reigns supreme in the other. We look to the one condition of society for all great and good examples of humanity, and to the other for such as are of an opposite character.
If we are to credit the early history of New England, Miles Standish was a central character of Puritanic chivalry and fidelity. The people had faith in his Christian character, and entire confidence in his strong arm and fertility of expedients in the hour of danger. Some such sentiment, qualified by the wide difference in the moral character of the two men, attached the mining community of Florence to Pinkham. He was a bold, outspoken, truthful, self-reliant man, without a particle of braggadocio or bluster, careful always to say what he meant, and to do what he said. Fear was a stranger to him, and desperate chances never found him without desperate means.