During the earliest days of the period which would later become the Wild West, law and order was primitive and pragmatic. One of the most violent territories during that time was California, specifically the Northern Counties of San Diego, which was undergoing a boom in population caused by the Gold Rush. Since law enforcement were very small and couldn't keep the peace in the whole territory, and peace was mostly handled by the U.S. Marshals who were seldom relied upon since they have to enforce the law in other states, justice was commonly handled by vigilantes rather than court trials.
In 1878, a sudden rise in criminality happened in San Diego, which resulted in one of the biggest acts of vigilantism in the state. In the town of Julian, an Indian named Juan La Cruz was jailed for attacking a woman and her child while he was “crazed with drink.” As he was kept inside the detention cell during the night, a group of townsfolk gathered, besieged the jail and demanded for Juan. When the guard refused, he was stealthily ambushed by a crowd member, and his head was covered with a sack and knocked out. The next morning, the body of Juan La Cruz was discovered hanging in the woods nearby. Juan was not the only one who was lynched that year in San Diego. In July, another criminal named Refugio Baca murdered a rancher named William Palmerston. When the sheriff locked him up in a cell, the crowd again gathered, this time wearing masked and carrying shotguns, rifles and pistols. 20-30 masked men stormed the jail, overpowered the guards, and hanged Baca in a cottonwood tree. Later that year, another desperado named Jose Laguna, was tracked down and pursued by unknown parties. Instead of locking him up in jail, the people decided to just hang him in his room. The lynching was so well-done, that it tricked the coroner into ruling Jose's murder as "suicide".
The vigilantes in San Diego, especially those who committed the lynching of Refugio Baca, became the earliest account of "masked vigilantes" in history, predating the more famous Bald Knobbers (another masked vigilante gang) by half a decade. As the first of such vigilantes, the San Diego Vigilantes would later inspire fictional masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman, basically giving birth to the modern costumed superhero.
Battle vs. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (by Killermoves)[]
TBW
Expert's Opinion[]
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (alongside their fellow bandits) one this battle even though they were outnumbered because of their superior weapons and overall better experience. The vigilantes were brutal but the bandits were professionals who had fought, escaped and defeated others who proved to be superior threats than the vigilantes.