The Vultures on Steilacoom's Streets

Gambling in public has for several months been carried on to a fearful extent in this portion of our Territory. In the palmy days of the ephemeral city of Whatcom, hordes of gamblers from California flocked there, spread their tricks, and pursued an uninterrupted career of midday plundering of the unsuspecting. When Whatcom's day was over, this bad stock were obliged to seek a new field of operations, and as a natural consequence it fell to the lot of Steilacoom, being the most considerable place on the Sound, to be visited by some of these vultures.

Had any one asked us whether a faro bank would be permitted to be opened in Steilacoom, we should have unhesitatingly replied No, with a clear conviction that we were expressing the sentiments of the people in this vicinity. What are the facts? Public gambling, for some weeks past, has been carried on here with as much publicity as the vending of merchandise. The games have been patronized, and the pockets of their customers have been depleted hundreds, and we might say thousands, of dollars. Our statutes contain the most stringent enactments against this infatuating and monstrous vice, and the voice of the community, if tested, would be declared against it, yet not an arrest or an attempt at an arrest has been made.

We have been silent on this subject, and loath to notice it in our columns, in the hope that an example would be made of some one of the guilty parties and the thing stopped; but we see no signs of the vice being eradicated from our midst by any such means. We, as a public journalist, shall perform our duty by denouncing this moral and social evil, and call upon the executive and the judiciary and the citizens generally to see to it that our laws are not trampled underfoot, so that our town become not a by-word and reproach.