Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

The merchant Williams had hired a few private gunmen to pro­tect his lakefront investment; the rest were volunteer toughs who’d been waiting all day for a fight with a bunch of hairy city boys who wore chains for belts and stank of human grease. I remembered the mood of the Angels up on the mountain and I expected at any moment to hear the first of the bikes coming down the hill into town. The scene had all the makings of a king-hell brawl, and except for the pistols it looked pretty even.

Just then the door of the phone booth opened behind me, and Mohr stepped out. He looked curiously at the mob, then raised his camera and took a picture of them. He did it as casually as any press photographer covering an American Legion picnic. Then he straddled his bike, kicked it to life and roared up the hill toward the roadblock.

Burr-head seemed confused and I took the opportunity to stroll off toward my car. Nobody said anything and I didn’t look back, but at any instant I expected to be whacked on the kidneys with a big stick. Despite the press credentials, both Mohr and I had been firmly identified with the outlaws. We were city boys, intruders, and under these circumstances the only neutrals were the tourists, who were easily identifiable. On my way out of town I wondered if anybody in Bass Lake might take one of my aspen-leaf checks for a fluorescent Hawaiian beach suit and some stylish sandals.

The scene at the roadblock was surprisingly peaceful. The bikes were again parked along both sides of the highway, and Barger was talking to the sheriff. With them was the chief forest ranger for the area, who was explaining cheerfully that another campsite had been set aside for the Angels. . . Willow Cove, about two miles down the main road and right on the edge of the lake. It sounded too good to be true, but Barger signaled his people to follow the rangers’ jeep and check it out. The strange procession moved slowly down the highway, then veered into the pines on a narrow jeep trail that led to the campsite.

There were no complaints this time. Willow Cove lacked only a free beer machine to make it perfect. A dozen of the Angels leaped off their bikes and rushed into the lake fully clothed. I parked under a tree and got out to look around. We were on a small peninsula jutting into Bass Lake and cut off from the highway by a half mile of pine forest. It was an idyllic kind of set­ting and a very unlikely place to be put aside for an orgy. But it was, and the outlaws set about occupying it like a victorious army. Sheriff Baxter and the head ranger explained to Barger that there were only two conditions on their use of the site: (1) that they would leave it as clean and unlittered as they found it and (2) that they would keep to themselves and not menace the camp­grounds on the other side of the lake, which were full of tourists. Sonny agreed, and the weekend’s first crisis was over. The outlaw clan, which now numbered about two hundred, was agree­ably settled in a private kingdom, with nothing of substance to bitch about. Beyond that, the Maximum Angel was committed to the task of keeping his people under control. It was an unnatural situation for Barger to find himself in. Instead of spending the weekend rallying his boozy legion from one piece of unfriendly turf to another, beset at all times by a cruel authority wearing guns and badges, he now found his people in a pleasant cul-de-sac. . . a state of rare equality with the rest of humanity, which they could only disturb by committing some deliberate outrage — by violating an agreement that the Prez had honored with his word.

The transaction had been carried out in Hollywood Indian style. There was a childlike simplicity in the dialogue between Barger and the lawmen:

If you play straight with us, Sonny, we’ll play straight with you. We don’t want any trouble and we know you guys have as much right to camp on this lake as anybody else. But the minute you cause trouble for us or anyone else, we’re gonna come down on you hard, it’s gonna be powder valley for your whole gang.