Sanders House

By editor

Virginia City, Madison County, Montana, June 1867

The house on the hill above Wallace Street was not much to look at. A Carpenter Gothic cottage, they called it -- two stories of milled lumber with a pointed gable and a porch that suggested civilization without quite achieving it. In a town where most men slept in tents or in the back of the saloon they had just robbed, the Sanders house was a statement. Whether it was a statement of confidence or of stubbornness depended on who you asked.

Wilbur Fisk Sanders moved his family into the cottage in the spring of 1867. He had been in Montana Territory for four years by then, long enough to have prosecuted the most consequential murder trial in the territory's short history, helped organize the most efficient extrajudicial killing organization in the American West, and watched the capital move from Bannack to Virginia City without him being elected to anything. He was thirty-three years old, a lawyer from Ohio by way of New York, the nephew of Sidney Edgerton, who had been Montana's first territorial governor and had since gone back east and left Sanders to manage the consequences.

The cottage was reportedly the oldest frame building in Montana. That distinction was not as grand as it sounds. Frame buildings were rare in 1867 because glass windows were rare, and because the men who might have built them were too busy digging gold out of Alder Gulch to bother with architecture. Sanders had the windows. He had the lumber. He had, by the standards of Virginia City in 1867, a home.

What he had done to earn it was a matter of record, though the record was not entirely comfortable to examine.

On December 19, 1863, Sanders stood in an open field at Nevada City, a mile down the gulch from Virginia City, and prosecuted George Ives for the murder of Nicholas Tbalt, a young Dutch immigrant who had been shot in the head and left in the sagebrush. The trial was conducted outdoors, in the December cold, before a jury of twenty-four miners who had been selected by popular vote from a crowd of several hundred. There was no courthouse. There was no judge in the territorial sense. There was a man named Don Byam who presided, and there was Sanders, who argued the case for the prosecution with a ferocity that surprised even the men who had asked him to do it.

Thomas Dimsdale, who watched the trial and later wrote the first account of the vigilante era, described Sanders as "a young man of fine legal attainments and undoubted courage." The courage was the more relevant quality that week. The road agents, as the organized gang of thieves and murderers operating out of Bannack and Virginia City were known, had made their displeasure with the proceedings clear. Sanders was warned. He prosecuted anyway.

Ives was convicted on December 21, 1863, and hanged that same evening from a beam of an unfinished building, with a dry goods box for a scaffold. He asked Sanders, as the sentence was read, to give him time to write to his mother. Sanders declined. The rope went around Ives's neck, the box was kicked away, and the vigilante era in Montana began.

Two days later, on December 23, 1863, twenty-four men gathered in a cabin in Bannack and signed an oath. The document read, in the original spelling: "We, the undersigned, uniting ourselves in a party for the laudable purpos of arresting thieves & murderers & recovering stolen property, do pledge ourselves upon our sacred honor, each to all others, & solemnly swear that we will reveal no secrets, violate no laws of right & never desert each other or our standard of justice, so help us God." Sanders was among the signatories. The Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch was in business.

Over the next three months, the committee hanged twenty-two men, including Henry Plummer, the sheriff of Bannack, who had been running the road agents from inside the law. The hangings were conducted without trials, without juries, and without the formality that Sanders had insisted on at the Ives proceeding. The committee had decided that the Ives trial had been too slow, too public, and too dangerous. They would not make that mistake again.

Sanders spent the next several years watching the territory he had helped pacify try to organize itself into something resembling a government. He moved his practice to Helena when the capital moved there in 1875, and he built a second house there, an Italianate residence that was considerably grander than the Virginia City cottage. He argued cases before the territorial supreme court. He helped found the Montana Bar Association. He ran for territorial delegate to Congress and lost. He ran again and lost again. The voters of Montana were not, in the 1870s and early 1880s, inclined to send the man who had helped hang their neighbors to Washington.

He got there eventually. When Montana achieved statehood in 1889, the new state legislature appointed two U.S. Senators. Sanders was one of them. He served from 1890 to 1893, a single term, and did not seek reelection. He was fifty-six years old and had been in Montana for thirty years. He had seen the gold rush and the vigilantes and the territorial period and statehood, and he had been present at the creation of most of it. He died in Helena on July 7, 1905, at the age of seventy-one.

The cottage in Virginia City outlasted him. It outlasted most of what was built in those years. The frame buildings of Alder Gulch were not built to last -- they were built to be useful while the gold held out, and when the gold ran out, most of them were torn down or burned or simply fell apart. The Sanders house stood because someone kept it up. Four families lived in it over the years. It served, at various points, as a residence, a law office, and what one account describes as Montana's first courtroom, though the Ives trial itself was conducted in a field.

The house is still there. The pointed gable, the porch, the glass windows that were remarkable in 1867 -- all of it still there, on the hill above Wallace Street, in a town that has been a ghost town and a tourist attraction and a state historic site and several other things that Sanders would not have recognized. He would have recognized the house.

He built it to last. In Virginia City in 1867, that was an act of faith.

See also

• Sanders House at Virginia City, Madison County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2017)
• Vigilantes in Montana at Virginia City, Madison County -- the Vigilance Committee oath and the twenty-two hangings
• Bannack at Dillon, Beaverhead County -- where the road agents operated and where Henry Plummer was sheriff