Gunfights and general lawlessness were common in the frontier cities of the American West, and no city saw more violence than Los Angeles in the 1850s. In Reminiscences of a Ranger, Horace Bell reports that "midnight raids and open day robbery and assassinations of defenseless or unsuspecting Americans were of almost daily occurrence" in southern California. To combat this lawlessness, in 1853 the citizens of Los Angeles formed a volunteer mounted police force known as the Los Angeles Rangers to keep the peace within the city and to hunt bandits and murderers in the surrounding region. The life of a mounted ranger appealed to Horace Bell, a civilian who later became an attorney and ran a newspaper. As John Boessenecker says in his introduction, Bell's memoir is a history of early Los Angeles. With a sharp eye for detail, Bell sketches numerous pioneers, politicians, military figures, and outlaws, and he vividly describes riots and shootouts in the city streets and campaigns against Indians and bandits.