‘People love westerns worldwide. There's something fantasy-like about
an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the
elements. It's a simpler time. There's no organized laws and stuff.’
Clint Eastwood
Our route took us south, towards the no organized laws and stuff. We passed through purple flowers, and Twin Bridges. There was the Blue Anchor Bar, and a mural of the Twin Rivers Fishing Co. Lewis & Clark fished here.
Outside the Ruby Valley Gun Club was a big truck with a gun rack and a bumper sticker. I hunt with a Labrador retriever. Which may have partially explained the three deer carcasses on the side of the road, beyond the ‘Happy Trails’ sign, dead as a can of corned beef. Some trails are happy ones, Others are blue. It's the way you ride the trail that counts, Here's a happy one for you.
Visitors fall in love with Montana in the summer. Snow can fall any month and usually will. Eighty per cent per move away within five years of purchase. Some of the ones that stay may be found in the taverns, like the Sump Saloon and the Stockman’s Bar in Sheridan, Heart of Ruby Valley…this community supports our troops, and Chick’s Bar in Alder. In May 1863, a group of prospectors, heading towards the Yellowstone River, were forced to retreat to Bannack by a party of Crow warriors. Their return would change their lives, and the course of American and World history, when Bill Fairweather, joking he might find ‘something to buy a little tobacco with,’ stuck a pick into the ground near Alder Creek.
Robyn and I followed the ‘This way’ sign out of town, and the Vigilante Trail towards Virginia City. Miles of silence and emptiness, in all directions, eventually arrived at a two-storied log roadhouse, with hitching posts and a veranda and balcony around the back.
“Robber’s Roost.” I said. “The hangout of the Innocents.”
“Who were they?” Asked Robyn.
“Montana’s most notorious criminal outlaw gang.” I said. “During the height of their activity during the gold rush of the 1860s, there were over a hundred of them, and as many men were killed resisting their holdups. Watchmen in the mining camps and gambling dens would tip off the Innocents about gold shipments, but it was its leader that made the gang most unusual.”
“What about him?” Robyn asked.
“Henry Plummer.” I said. “He was the sheriff.”
“Were they ever caught?” Asked Robyn. The first westerns had four standard scenes- a bar, a stagecoach, a holdup and a chase.
“Oh, that was coming.” I said. “In spades.”
A big-bellied motorcycle couple parked their bike in front of the next marker. Ghost mansions of sunburned wood, surmounted by cupolas and widow’s walks and weathervanes, were surrounded by sage, and the wagons and railroad ties and the steam machinery which extracted the gold ore that made their wealthy widows possible. The chapel between Nevada City and Virginia City was closed. Cowboy Church Services.
Most of the story of Virginia City occurred within one year. On May 14 1863, just after Bill Fairweather’s discovery of ‘something to buy a little tobacco with,’ in Bannack, Henry Plummer was made its sheriff. Henry had come out from Maine to the goldfields of California, eleven years earlier, at the age of nineteen. He did well. Within two years he owned a mine, a ranch, and a bakery, and within three, was the sheriff and city manager of his town, and had lost an election as the Democratic nominee to the State legislature. In 1857, he shot the husband of a woman he was having an affair with, and was sentenced to ten years in San Quentin. However, he was pardoned after serving only two because, like Doc Holiday, he was suffering from tuberculosis, and because of his ‘good character and civic performance.’ Two years later, he shot William Riley, a San Quentin escapee, while trying to make a citizen’s arrest. The killing was accepted as justified, but Plummer was advised to leave the state. After he cut down another man in a gunfight in Washington Territory, Henry decided to get out of the violent towns of the gold rush, and return to Maine. He got as far as the dock for the Fort Benton steamer on the Missouri River, when he was offered a job by James Vail, to protect his family from Indian attacks at the mission station in Sun River, Montana. Plummer accepted, as did Jack Cleveland, a horse dealer who had known Henry in California. Unfortunately, both men fell in love with Vail’s sister-in-law, Electa Bryan, at the mission. Fortunately, she accepted Plummer’s proposal of marriage. Unfortunately, Cleveland forced Henry into a gunfight in a crowded saloon in Bannack, and was killed. Fortunately, the residents not only deemed it an act of self-defence, they elected him sheriff. Or maybe it was unfortunate.
On June 16 1863, another township was formed a mile south of where Bill Fairweather’s pickaxe had landed. It was initially called Verina, after Varina Howell Davis, the first and only First Lady of the Confederacy. The Civil War was raging and, despite the fact that the town was in Union territory, the local resident loyalty was thoroughly confederate. A territorial officer from Connecticut objected to the name registration, and recorded it instead, as Virginia City, not making total sense, since Virginia had seceded, still a Dixie city in a Yankee territory. Within weeks Virginia City was a gold frontier boomtown, bereft of law enforcement, and full of saloons and uneducated fortune-hunters wearing firearms as standard attire.
The first Episcopal communion service in Virginia City welcomed Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans to the Lord's Table. Thomas J. Dinsdale, late of Oxford, was being paid two dollars per child a week for teaching school, before he found better employment as editor of the Montana Post. By contrast, in Virginia City alone, $600,000 worth of gold was being extracted every week. In today's dollars, that was the equivalent of $30,000,000 per week or $1.5 billion a year, all of which was threatening to go to the Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln, to ensure that this new wealth would flow instead into Federal coffers, immediately removed the gold towns from the old Dakota Territory, and into the newly formed Idaho Territory, consisting of the present states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, with its capital at Lewiston. He appointed W. W. Wallace as the Governor and his friend, and one of the founders of the Republican Party, Sidney Edgerton, as Chief Justice.
It was still a lawless free-for-all, and Henry Plummer was earning his pay, and possibly more. The only court system available for the residents of Virginia City were the informal miners' courts, limited to the resolution of small disputes, and not set up for major crimes. The fiasco of a trial of the perpetrators of the murder of J.W. Dillingham was typical of the time. Like the dentistry, it was held outside, more because of the fact that every resident took part, than the ambient light. In the end all three defendants were released. The first, Charley Forbes, was freed after a sentimental speech he made about his mother. The other two, Buck Stinson and Haze Lyons, were convicted and sentenced to be executed. However, at what would be a very public hanging, friends of Stinson and Lyons convinced the crowd to vote again. Two attempts at counting were made. In the first, those voting ‘hang’ were to walk uphill, while those voting ‘no hang’ were to walk downhill. This method was rejected for reasons that are still not clear. The next attempt had four men form two gates and the gathered citizenry would cast their vote by either walking through the 'hang' gate or the 'no hang' gate. The condemned mens’ friends simply walked through the 'no hang' gate repeatedly, casting enough multiple fraudulent votes that enabled the two murderers to walk free. People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don’t care.
Thomas J. Dinsdale, late of Oxford, paid two dollars per child a week for teaching school, wrote: Another powerful incentive to wrong-doing is the absolute nulity of the civil law in such cases. No matter what may be the proof, if the criminal is well liked in the community 'Not Guilty' is almost certain to be the verdict, despite the efforts of the judge and prosecutor.
Robyn and I walked by the marker of the hanging that made Montana. Site of trial and hanging of George Homer Ives December 21, 1863 - Most extraordinary trial in history. This one was also held outside, for three winter days. George Ives was a bold and brutal member of the Innocents, and had killed a young German immigrant named Nicholas Tbolt.
But there had been a new development since Dillingham’s murderers had been freed. In late December, while Sheriff Plummer was away, a group of local residents spawned the formation of a secret Vigilance Committee, with an established set of ‘regulations and byelaws.’ It was a Neighbourhood Watch, with guns and ropes. The founders consisted of Unit commander Sergeant James Williams, Field commander James Liberty Fisk, Nick Wall, Wilbur Fisk Sanders, Alvin V. Brookie, John Nye, a sadistic executioner named John X. Beidler (who delighted in strangling rather than hanging his victims), and Paris Pfouts, an anomalous secessionist Freemason, who later became Mayor of Virginia City.
Before long, the Montana Vigilantes had more than one thousand members, almost all of them Republican Mason Unionists. Almost all of their victims were non-Mason, Democrat Secessionists. Confederate conspiracy theorists still charge that the Vigilantes were formed more for the purpose of diverting gold to the Union cause, than for establishing justice. Virginia City gold won the war for the North.
The Committee called their enemies ‘villains,’ and galvanized the population by inventing the myth of the ‘road agent,’ the hypothesis that a ‘secret society’ of thieves, tipped off by townspeople in league with them, waylaid unsuspecting travellers, miners and transporters of gold and supplies, murdered them, and made off with their property.
While the vigilantism was still in its initial stages, Clubfoot George Lane, a former horse thief reformed as a boot-maker at Dance and Stuart’s store in Virginia City, concerned about the increasingly arbitrary manipulation of what was passing for justice in Virginia City, rode off to Bannack to inform Sheriff Plummer of the George Ives trial, aiming to convince Henry that Ives deserved a civilian tribunal.
But while the sheriff was still away, the Vigilantes hung Ives, and two of Plummer’s deputies arrested Lane as ‘a road agent, thief, and an accessory to numerous robberies and murders on the highway.’
“If you hang me.” Said Clubfoot George. “You will hang an innocent man.” But the Vigilante Committee found him guilty anyway, and sentenced him to death. Lane appealed to his employer at the boot store to confirm his innocence. Dance said he couldn’t vouch for his other activities.
“Well, then.” Asked Lane. “Will you pray with me?”
“Willingly, George.” Said Dance. “Most willingly.” And suiting the action to the word, dropped upon his knees and, with George and Gallagher kneeling beside him, offered up a fervent petition in behalf of the doomed men. As Clubfoot George was led out to the gallows, he turned to a friend who had come to see him executed.
‘Good-bye, old fellow.” Said Lane. “I’m gone.” And without waiting for the box to be removed, he leaped from it, and died with hardly a struggle… perfectly cool and collected... thought no more of hanging than the ordinary man would of eating his breakfast. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Boot Hill cemetery, with the other executed men, and 'fellers that pulled their triggers without aiming.'
The Montana Vigilantes summarily executed people using, as the sole evidence, the testimony of others facing their own imminent executions. At one point the Committee assembled a force of over 500 men, and sealed off Virginia City in order to catch gang members. Over the next month, the movement degenerated into a campaign of terror that still haunts the state. The vigilante committee arrested and passed sentences, from execution to flogging to banishment. Twenty-four men were hanged, some in the basement of Joe Griffith's general store, the last having done nothing more than express an opinion that several of those hanged previously had been innocent.
Before one man was hanged, he told the crowd that sheriff Henry Plummer was the ringleader. Suspicions had already been raised, when two residents who had been held up claimed that they had recognized him during the robberies, and when another had confronted him about the danger of the roads, Henry had offered to return some of his money. Plummer was arrested, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to bribe his captors.
The gallows on which Henry was hanged had been built by his own request during a previous case. On January 10, 1864, over five thousand people assembled to watch him and the other alleged gang members meet the rope. He was hanged without the drop, and the noose placed behind the head, not to the side, which would have broken his neck and caused an instantaneous death. With his preexistent tuberculosis, he likely died from a slow and agonizing suffocation. The two youngest members of the Innocents were spared, one sent back to Bannack to tell the rest of the gang to leave, and the other to Lewiston, to do the same. There were river steamers there, that could take then to the Oregon coast, at Astoria. Whether the historical revisionists and the Freemason conspiracists like it or not, the large gang robberies of gold shipments ended with the deaths of Plummer and the others.
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