In the fall of 1853, a miner known as Muntz knifed and fatally wounded Baltimore Jack over a game of cards in Forest City. Muntz was taken to Downieville and held upstairs in the Craycroft Building for want of a jail. The next day, a Forest City mob armed with great clubs, knives, and revolvers and yelling like demons attempted to take and hang him. A shot rang out, and Thaddeus Purdy, Sierra County’s first District Attorney, fell with a bullet to his brain. He died on a table in the saloon, the victim of a friend handling the hammer of his revolver when it slipped through his fingers. The astonished crowd slunk away, and Muntz was acquitted on the grounds of self defense.