Commonwealth Network
This small-time political hack from Pennsylvania became the subject of nineteenth century California's most infamous manhunt after his friend, Supervisor James Casey, shot newspaper editor James King of William. The Vigilantes charged that MacGowan had supplied Casey with the gun the politician had used to kill the journalist. MacGowan slipped out of the city disguised as a Mexican, made his way down to Southern California, and hid out in the mountains around Santa Barbara until friends could retrieve him for safekeeping in Vigilante-free Sacramento. Following his acquittal as accessory to murder, MacGowan published a magazine which exposed the sexual and other excesses of the Vigilantes. When he went up to Canada to take part in the Fraser gold strike, former Vigilantes tried to capture him again. Canadian authorities found themselves intervening in a bloody feud that historians now call "MacGowan's War". During the Civil War, this northerner fought for the South. Afterwards he wandered the west, stopping for short times in nearly every notorious mining town including Tombstone. He returned to San Francisco and finally died of old age.