Geerusalem was a camp of many people of many waspish dispositions. The engrossing business of making money and spending it kept this isolated desert settlement steering a more or less wabbly, law-abiding course, for, like frontier camps the world over, it had its furious six-shooter forays, stealthy knifings, mob uprisings, its denizens of dive and den. These things were simply because civic unity was an unknown quality at the time, the population of the fly-by-night variety, and the county officials too busy serving the communities where the majority vote held forth to concern themselves with the “scattering returns.”
Established before the “blue-sky” law was written into the statute books of California, this metropolis of Soapweed Plains was the Mecca of the “wildcatter”—that thrifty, g
