In the run-up to the American Civil War, vigilantism became a common phenomenon in the new West, with ad hoc mining tribunals giving way to permanent committees intent on policing the rapidly urbanising cities of the California gold fields. The earliest example of this organised, violent activism in the region came in the form of San Francisco’s Vigilance Committee, which operated during the summer of 1851. This study argues that this iteration of the Vigilance Committee, despite being an important milestone in Western antebellum vigilantism, has been misrepresented and mischaracterised by its earliest documenters. A preoccupation with legacy, and chiefly an attempt to establish a sympathetic, celebratory one, resulted in the Committee’s story being reconstructed for that purpose. The first two chapters of this thesis outline and explore realities of two core arguments of that reconstruction: first, the reality of the supposed crime wave that justified the Committee’s formation; second, that the Committee was efficient, effective, and uncorrupted. This feeds into a third chapter that argues the Committee’s historical value in spite of its superfluous formation and questionable utility. By positioning the vigilantes’ story within a nascent antebellum trend of vigilantism as activism in the West, this study holds that the Committee’s curious story never needed embellishment or justification to be an important turning point in San Franciscan, Californian, and pre-Civil War history.