New York City Enormities - The Broken Leg on Broadway.

We flatter ourselves that, as a people, we are fond of horses. We are also fond of saying that we are a humane people. Are we? Let us lookt a little into the matter, and see whether each of us, disavowing to himself any part in the great inhumanity of the day, does not judge of public sentiment by his own generous impulses. "I love the noble creatures," says one of this class; "I would rather suffer myself, than treat them with cruelty. No reprobation can be too strong for those who daily torture some of them to death, and every man I know feels exactly as I do." It is hard to press a charge against a whole population in the face of individual disclaimers such as these, and perhaps, in charity, it should be modified into one of carelessness, or indifference to the horrible brutality Broadway daily witnesses, leaving it to each one to decide for himself, how much less culpable than the crime itself is the indifference to it in others.

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, December 9, 1865.

Butte, Montana, October 1889 - P. M. Mathews, A Minneapolis millionaire, visits an opium joint and is carried out feet first. 

P. W. Matthews, a millionaire contractor of Minneapolis. Minn., went to Butte. Mont., last June to direct the building of a railroad. Since he has lived there he has spent lots of money and lived a high life. One day recently he and his chief bookkeeper, L. C. Kreck, went to an opium joint kept by a Chinaman named Ah Chung, to "hit the pipe." It was their first venture of this kind, and twelve pipes were prepared for them, but at this point Kreck weakened, and concluded not to indulge his curiosity. Matthews, who had been drinking, swore he would smoke the twelve pipes himself. This he did, and then sank into a stupor, from which he never recovered, having died from opium poisoning. Ah Chung and his wife have been arrested for murder.

Reprinted from The Natoinal Police Gazette, October 12, 1889