The casualty list showed two dead, a dozen serious injuries and the final demise of the old notion that rural communities are geographically insulated from city trouble. Angels Camp was a major goad to the development of the mutual-assistance concept, a police version of mobile warfare, which meant that any town or hamlet in California, no matter how isolated, could summon help from nearby police jurisdictions in case of emergency. There is no official list of these emergencies, but if there were, any rumor of a Hell’s Angels visitation would be right at the top.
15
The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
— Saul Alinsky
To squelch any possibility of the Angels roaring drunkenly out of camp during the night, Baxter and the Highway Patrol announced a ten P.M. curfew. At that time, anyone in camp would have to stay, and nobody else could come in. This was made official just after dark. The deputies were still trying to be friendly and they assured the Angels that the curfew was as much for their protection as anything else. They kept talking about bunches of townspeople, coming through the woods with deer rifles. To forestall this, the police set up a command post at the point where the Willow Cove trail joined the highway.
Meanwhile, a mountain of six-packs was piling up in the middle of camp. This was in addition to the original twenty-two cases in my car. By the time it got dark the car was half empty, so I put the rest of the beer in the back seat and locked my own gear in the trunk. I decided that any symbolic alienation I might incur by securing my valuables was worth the risk of having them all lost — which they probably would have been, for it was not long before the camp became like an animal pen. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times showed up the next day and said it looked like Dante’s Inferno. But he arrived about noon, when most of the outlaws were calm and stupefied from the ravages of the previous night. If the midday lull seemed that awful, the bonfire scenes might have permanently damaged his mind.
Or perhaps not, for the ten-o’clock curfew had a drastic effect on the action. By driving all the fringe elements out of camp, it forced the Angels to fall back on their own entertainment resources. Most of those who left were girls; they had seemed to be enjoying things until the deputies announced that they would either leave by the deadline or stay all night. The implications were not pleasant — at ten the law was going to pull out, seal off the area and let the orgy begin.
All afternoon the scene had been brightened by six or ten carloads of young girls from places like Fresno and Modesto and Merced who had somehow got wind of the gathering and apparently wanted to make a real party of it. It never occurred to the Angels that they would not stay the night — or the whole weekend, for that matter — so it came as a bad shock when they left. The three nurses who’d picked up Larry, Pete and Puff earlier in the day made a brave decision to stay — but then, at the last moment, they fled. Man, I can’t stand it, said one Angel as he watched the last of the cars lurch off down the trail. All that fine pussy, just wasted. That wiggy little thing with the red shoes was all mine! We were groovin! How could she just split?
It was a rotten show by almost any standards. Here were all these high-bottomed wenches in stretch pants and sleeveless blouses half unbuttoned. . . beehive hairdos and blue-lidded eyes. . . ripe, ignorant little bodies talking horny all afternoon ( Oh, Beth, don’t these bikes just drive you kinda wild? ). Yeah, baby, wild for the open road. . . and off they went, like nuns hearing the whistle, while the grief-stricken Angels just stood there and watched. Many had left their own women behind, fearing trouble, but now that the trouble was dissipated, there was not going to be any strange ginch either.