Samuel Adams Drake. The Young Vigilantes: A Story of California Life in the Fifties (1904) 284 pp. Illustrated by L.J. Bridgman.
In the 1850s, young Walter Seabury, a runaway orphan in Boston, rescues the daughter of a wealthy merchant from drowning and is given a job in the merchant’s firm. When he is framed for embezzlement by one of the other employees, a clerk named Ramon Ingersoll, who then absconds to California with the money, Walter decides that the only way he can clear his name is to bring the embezzler to justice and return the money. Walter and his friend Bill, an old sailor, ship out of Boston to New York, on to Panama where they cross the Isthmus overland, and then catch a ship to San Francisco. They soon run across Ramon, who is a habitual gambler, and force him to confess his crimes by threatening to turn him over to the Committee of Vigilance.
Setting: Boston; San Francisco
Baird & Greenwood 690