| Practically every man in
the new gold-fields was aware of the existence of a secret band of
well-organized ruffians and robbers. The general feeling was one of
extreme uneasiness. There were plenty of men who had taken out of the
ground considerable quantities of gold, and who would have been glad
to get back to the East with their little fortunes, but they dared not
start. Time after time the express coach, the solitary rider, the
unguarded wagon-train, were held up and robbed, usually with the
concomitant of murder. When the miners did start out from one camp to
another they took all manner of precautions to conceal their gold
dust. We are told that on one occasion one party bored a hole in the
end of the wagon tongue with an auger and filled it full of gold dust,
thus escaping observation! The robbers learned to know the express
agents, and always had advice of every large shipment of gold. It was
almost useless to undertake to conceal anything from them; and
resistance was met with death. Such a reign of terror, such an
organized system of highway robbery, such a light valuing of human
life, has been seldom found in any other time or place.
There were, as we have seen, good men
in these camps -- although the best of them probably let down the
standards of living somewhat after their arrival there; but the
trouble was that the good men did not know one another, had no
organization, and scarcely dared at first to attempt one. On the other
hand, the robbers' organization was complete and kept its secrets as
the grave; indeed, many and many a lonesome grave held secrets none
ever was to know. How many men went out from Eastern States and
disappeared, their fate always to remain a mystery, is a part of the
untold story of the mining frontier.
There are known to have been a hundred and
two men killed by
Plummer
and his gang; how many were murdered without their fate ever being
discovered can not be told.
Plummer
was the leader of the band, but, arch-hypocrite that he was, he
managed to keep his own connection with it a secret. His position as
sheriff gave him many advantages. He posed as being a silver-mine
expert, among other things, and often would be called out to "expert"
some new mine. That usually meant that he left town in order to commit
some desperate robbery. The boldest outrages always required
Plummer
as the leader. Sometimes he would go away on the pretense of following
some fugitive from justice. His horse, the fleetest in the country,
often was found, laboring and sweating, at the rear of his house. That
meant that
Plummer
had been away on some secret errand of his own. He was suspected many
times, but nothing could be fastened upon him; or there lacked
sufficient boldness and sufficient organization on the part of the
law-and-order men to undertake his punishment.
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We are not concerned with
repeating thrilling tales, bloody almost beyond belief, and indicative of
an incomprehensible depravity in human nature, so much as we are with the
causes and effects of this wild civilization which raged here quite alone
in the midst of one of the wildest of the western mountain regions. It
will best serve our purpose to retain in mind the twofold character of
this population, and to remember that the frontier caught to itself not
only ruffians and desperadoes, men undaunted by any risk, but also men
possessed of a yet steadier personal courage and hardihood. There were men
rough, coarse, brutal, murderous; but against them were other men
self-reliant, stern, just, and resolved upon fair play.
That was indeed the touchstone of the
entire civilization which followed upon the heels of these scenes of
violence. It was fair play which really animated the great
Montana
Vigilante
movement and which eventually cleaned up the merciless gang of
Henry
Plummer and his associates. The centers of civilization were far
removed. The courts were powerless. In some cases even the machinery of
the law was in the hands of these ruffians. But so violent were their
deeds, so brutal, so murderous, so unfair, that slowly the indignation of
the good men arose to the white-hot point of open resentment and of swift
retribution. What the good men of the frontier loved most of all was
justice. They now enforced justice in the only way left open to them. They
did this as
California earlier had done; and they did it so well that there was
small need to repeat the lesson.
The actual extermination of the
Henry
Plummer band occurred rather promptly when the
Vigilantes
once got under way. One of the band by the name of Red Yager, in company
with yet another by the name of Brown, had been concerned in the murder of
Lloyd Magruder, a merchant of the Territory. The capture of these two
followed closely upon the hanging of George Ives, also accused of more
than one murder. Ives was an example of the degrading influence of the
mines. He was a decent young man until he left his home in Wisconsin. He
was in
California from 1857 to 1858. When he appeared in
Idaho
he seemed to have thrown off all restraint and to have become a common
rowdy and desperado. It is said of him that "few men of his age ever had
been guilty of so many fiendish crimes."
Yager and Brown, knowing the fate which
Ives had met, gave up hope when they fell into the hands of the newly
organized
Vigilantes.
Brown was hanged; so was Yager; but Yager, before his death, made a full
confession which put the
Vigilantes in
possession of information they had never yet been able to secure.*
* Langford gives these names disclosed by
Yager as follows: "Henry
Plummer was chief of the band; Bill Bunton, stool pigeon and second
in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster; Cyrus
Skinner, fence, spy, and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Hayes Lyons, telegraph
man and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph man and roadster; Ned Ray,
council-room keeper at
Bannack
City; George Ives, Stephen Marshland, Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter,
Whiskey Bill (Graves), Johnny Cooper, Buck Stinson, Mexican Franks Bob
Zachary, Boone Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy Terwiliger, Gad Moore
were roadsters." Practically all these were executed by the
Vigilantes,
with many others, and eventually the band of
outlaws was entirely broken up.
Much has been written and much romanced
about the conduct of these desperadoes when they met their fate. Some of
them were brave and some proved cowards at the last. For a time,
Plummer
begged abjectly, his eyes streaming with tears. Suddenly he was smitten
with remorse as the whole picture of his past life appeared before him. He
promised everything, begged everything, if only life might be spared him
-- asked his captors to cut off his ears, to cut out his tongue, then
strip him naked and banish him. At the very last, however, he seems to
have become composed. Stinson and Ray went to their fate alternately
swearing and whining. Some of the ruffians faced death boldly. More than
one himself jumped from the ladder or kicked from under him the box which
was the only foothold between him and eternity. Boone Helm was as hardened
as any of them. This man was a cannibal and murderer. He seems to have had
no better nature whatever. His last words as he sprang off were "Hurrah
for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" Another man remarked calmly that he cared no
more for hanging than for drinking a glass of water. But each after his
own fashion met the end foreordained for him by his own lack of
compassion; and of compassion he received none at the hands of the men who
had resolved that the law should be established and should remain forever.
There was an instant improvement in the
social life of
Virginia
City,
Bannack, and
the adjoining camps as soon as it was understood that the
Vigilantes
were afoot. Langford, who undoubtedly knew intimately of the activities of
this organization, makes no apology for the acts of the
Vigilantes,
although they did not have back of them the color of the actual law. He
says:
"The retribution dispensed to these daring freebooters in no respect
exceeded the demands of absolute justice.... There was no other remedy.
Practically the citizens had no law, but if law had existed it could not
have afforded adequate redress. This was proven by the feeling of security
consequent upon the destruction of the band. When the robbers were dead
the people felt safe, not for themselves alone but for their pursuits and
their property. They could travel without fear. They had reasonable
assurance of safety in the transmission of money to the States and in the
arrival of property over the unguarded route from Salt Lake. The crack of
pistols had ceased, and they could walk the streets without constant
exposure to danger. There was an omnipresent spirit of protection, akin to
that omnipresent spirit of law which pervaded older and more civilized
communities....Young men who had learned to believe that the roughs were
destined to rule and who, under the influence of that faith, were fast
drifting into crime shrunk appalled before the thorough work of the
Vigilantes.
Fear, more potent than conscience, forced even the worst of men to observe
the requirements of society, and a feeling of comparative security among
all classes was the result."
Naturally it was not the case that all the
bad men were thus exterminated. From time to time there appeared vividly
in the midst of these surroundings additional figures of solitary
desperadoes, each to have his list of victims, and each himself to fall
before the weapons of his enemies or to meet the justice of the law or the
sterner need of the
Vigilantes.
It would not be wholly pleasant to read even the names of a long list of
these; perhaps it will be sufficient to select one, the notorious
Joseph
Slade, one of the "picturesque" characters of whom a great deal of
inaccurate and puerile history has been written. The truth about
Slade is
that he was a good man at first, faithful in the discharge of his duties
as an agent of the stage company. Needing at times to use violence
lawfully, he then began to use it unlawfully. He drank and soon went from
bad to worse. At length his outrages became so numerous that the men of
the community took him out and hanged him. His fate taught many others the
risk of going too far in defiance of law and decency.
What has been true regarding the camps of
Florence,
Bannack, and
Virginia
City, had been true in part in earlier camps and
was to be repeated perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to
come. The
Black Hills gold rush, for
instance, which came after the railroad but before the
Indians
were entirely cleared away, made a certain wild history of its own. We had
our
Deadwood
stage line then, and our
Deadwood
City with all its wild life of drinking, gambling, and shooting -- the
place where more than one notorious bad man lost his life, and some
capable officers of the peace shared their fate. To describe in detail the
life of this stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is perhaps not
needful here. The main thing is that the great quartz lodes of the
Black Hills support in the
end a steady, thrifty, and law-abiding population.
All
over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now rise
great cities where recently were scattered only mining-camps scarce fit to
be called units of any social compact. It was but yesterday that these men
fought and drank and dug their own graves in their own sluices. At the
city of Helena, on the site of Last Chance Gulch, one recalls that not so
long ago citizens could show with a certain contemporary pride the old
dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It marked a spot which might be
called a focus of the old frontier. Around it, and in the country
immediately adjoining, was fought out the great battle whose issue could
not be doubted -- that between the new and the old days; between law and
order and individual lawlessness; between the school and the saloon;
between the home and the dance-hall; between society united and resolved
and the individual reverted to worse than savagery.
Compiled and edited by
Kathy Weiser/Legends
of America, August, 2005.
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