Fight of the Century and Flour Riots

By editor

Virginia City, Madison County, Montana

In 1863, a fellow named J. A. Nelson decided that Virginia City, Montana, was in dire need of a place "with a special view to the development of muscular talent." He built Leviathan Hall, a structure 28 feet wide and 100 feet long, meant to accommodate spectators and pugilists alike. It dominated Wallace Street like a prizefighter at a county fair--impressive, but doomed to a short life. By 1868, just five years later, Leviathan Hall was torn down, leaving behind stories that could fill volumes, if anyone cared to write them down. Fortunately, some of those stories remain, and they are worth retelling.

The first of these stories concerns what was called "The Fight of the Century," a boxing match held on January 2, 1865. Virginia City was a mining boomtown, flush with men who had little to do but drink, gamble, and occasionally thrash one another for sport. The combatants were Con Orem, a 29-year-old saloon owner, son of an Ohio blacksmith and a veteran prizefighter, and Hugh O’Neil, a 34-year-old Irishman known around town not for his mining skills but for his whiskey consumption and barroom brawling.

Tickets for the event were sold at all the respectable saloons in town. Reserved seats went for ten dollars--a small fortune at a time when a miner’s daily wage might be two or three dollars--and pit seats were five. The attraction was not just the boxing but the spectacle of two men matched to the bone, fighting for pride and prize money in a town where entertainment options were scarce and the nights long.

They fought for 185 rounds. Yes, you read that right--185 rounds. The rules of prizefighting then were not the three-minute rounds we know today but often rounds that ended only when a man was down. The fight dragged on for hours, a grueling display of stamina and pain. At the end of it all, O’Neil knocked Orem down. Referee Nelson, the hall’s builder and an experienced fighter himself, called the fight a draw. This decision did not please the crowd, who had invested their hard-earned money and hoped for a clear winner. The local newspaper, The Montana Post, remarked later with a hint of sarcasm, "The referee's verdict pleased no one but himself."

The fight was more than mere sport. It was a reflection of the tensions in a mining camp where men measured their worth in toughness as much as in gold dust. O’Neil and Orem represented not just individual ambition but the rough-and-tumble spirit of Virginia City at its peak.

But the story of Leviathan Hall and Virginia City in 1865 was not all fists and fury. The same year, the hall witnessed a very different kind of conflict--a flour riot born not of pride but of desperation.

Virginia City’s lifeblood was gold, but even gold could not buy the essentials if the essentials could not be brought in. In the winter of 1864-1865, heavy snowfalls and treacherous mountain passes cut off Virginia City from the rest of the world. The town was literally trapped behind walls of snow, its supply lines severed. Flour, a staple for feeding miners and their families, began to run low.

By March 1865, flour had reached a staggering $1.50 per pound in Virginia City. To put that in perspective, flour in the rest of the United States sold for around 7 cents per pound. The local prices were more than twenty times the national average, making basic sustenance a luxury few could afford. Storekeepers, caught between scarcity and greed, hoarded supplies or sold at inflated prices. Anxiety mounted among the townsfolk as the snow showed no signs of melting and the passes remained impassable.

Tensions finally boiled over. Sheriff Neil Howie, a man tasked with maintaining order, found himself in a strange alliance with the Vigilance Committee, a group of local citizens who took law enforcement into their own hands when they saw fit. Together, they supervised what became known as the first organized flour riot in Montana history.

On a chilly spring day in 1865, 438 men and women marched into the homes of Virginia City’s wealthier residents, demanding and confiscating all the flour they could find. The rioters were thorough. They searched Colonel Wilbur Fisk Sanders’ home twice. Sanders was a prominent figure--a lawyer, politician, and future U.S. attorney--and his wife, Harriet, was present during one of the searches. In a twist that reveals more than a touch of frontier cunning, the rioters also visited the house of Mary Sheehan. Her mother, anticipating trouble, had hidden their flour at the bottom of a bin of beans. The ruse worked; the flour stayed safe, but only barely.

The flour collected--over eighty sacks--was stacked in Leviathan Hall, which had been repurposed as a sort of warehouse for the town’s most precious commodity. From there, the flour was redistributed to residents, attempting to quell hunger and panic.

It’s worth noting that while flour was scarce and precious, starvation was not imminent. Beans were still plentiful, and beef was available in good supply. The miners had not yet reached the point where they would fight over every morsel, but the flour riot showed how close the community teetered on the edge.

The riot also revealed the fragile balance between private property and public necessity in a remote boomtown. Sheriff Howie and the Vigilance Committee did not oppose the flour confiscations outright--they supervised them. This suggests a tacit acceptance that, in times of crisis, the rules bend for the sake of survival.

Colonel Sanders, for his part, was a man of measured words. According to a letter he wrote later that year, "The necessities of the people must come before the profits of the few," a statement that underlined the complex social tensions in Virginia City and the West more broadly.

Leviathan Hall’s brief existence thus encompassed two episodes that reveal much about the character of Montana’s mining towns: the rough camaraderie and fierce competition of the prize ring, and the uneasy social contract enforced amid scarcity and hardship. The hall was gone by 1868, but its legacy is preserved in these stories, recorded in newspapers, personal letters, and the memories of those who lived through those peculiar years.

Virginia City, with its gold and grit, was never a place for gentlefolk or faint hearts. The Fight of the Century and the Flour Riots are chapters in a history written with fists, flour sacks, and the stubborn will of a community trying to survive in the wilds of the American West.

See also

• Fight of the Century and Flour Riots at Virginia City, Madison County
• Virginia City at Virginia City, Madison County
• Gold in Alder Gulch at Virginia City, Madison County