Vigilantes in Montana

By editor

Near Virginia City, Madison County, Montana, October 2024

The document was written on December 23, 1863, in a mining camp in the mountains of what was then Idaho Territory, by men who had decided that the law was not coming and that they would have to provide it themselves. It read, in part: "We the undersigned uniting ourselves in a party for laudable purpos of arresting thievs & murderers & recovering stolen property do pledge ourselves upon our scared honor each to all others & solemnly swear that we will reveal no secrets, violate no laws of right & never desert each other or or standards of justice so help us God as witness our hand & seal this 23 of December AD 1863."

The spelling was imperfect. The grammar was imperfect. The punctuation was imperfect. But the intent was clear enough, and the men who signed it were serious. Within three weeks, they had hanged five men in Virginia City on a single day.

The story of the Montana Vigilantes is one of the most thoroughly documented episodes in the history of the American West, and also one of the most contested. Thomas Dimsdale, the editor of the Montana Post and a man who was present for much of what he described, published his account in 1866 under the title "The Vigilantes of Montana," and it became the standard version of events. Dimsdale's book is a work of advocacy as much as history. He believed the Vigilantes were right, and he said so at length, and the facts he marshaled in support of that belief were selected accordingly. The other side of the story, the side of the men who were hanged, was not written down by anyone who survived to write it.

What is not contested is the situation that produced the Vigilantes. In March of 1863, Congress divided the Washington Territory and created Idaho Territory, a region of 325,000 square miles that included what is now Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. The federal government was preoccupied with the Civil War, and Congress had adjourned without appropriating money for the new territory or providing it with any civil or criminal laws. The gold rush to Bannack and Alder Gulch brought thousands of people into this legal vacuum in the summer and fall of 1863. They came with their gold and their disputes and their grievances, and there was no court to hear the disputes and no sheriff with any authority to address the grievances, and the men who saw an opportunity in this situation were not slow to take it.

The road agents, as they were called, operated along the routes between the mining camps, robbing the coaches and the pack trains that carried gold out of the mountains. They were organized, which is what made them dangerous. Their leader, it was later claimed, was Henry Plummer, the elected sheriff of Bannack, who used his position to learn which coaches were carrying gold and to warn his men when to strike. Whether Plummer was actually the leader of the road agents or simply a convenient target for the Vigilantes' suspicion has been debated by historians ever since. What is certain is that he was hanged on January 10, 1864, on the gallows he had built himself in his capacity as sheriff.

The trial of George Ives in December of 1863 was the event that precipitated the formation of the Vigilance Committee. Ives was accused of murdering Nicholas Tiebolt, a young Dutch immigrant who had been sent to retrieve a mule and was found dead in the snow. The trial was held outdoors in Nevada City, with a jury of twenty-four men and several hundred spectators. Wilbur Fisk Sanders, a young lawyer who had come to Montana with his uncle Sidney Edgerton, prosecuted the case. Ives was found guilty and hanged the same evening. Two days after the hanging, two dozen men signed the oath that would become the founding document of the Vigilance Committee of Virginia City and Alder Gulch.

The bylaws of the committee were as direct as the oath. They established a hierarchy of captains and lieutenants, a procedure for investigating accusations and arresting suspects, and a single permissible punishment. "The only punishment that shall be inflicted by this Committee is death." There was no provision for imprisonment, no provision for exile, no provision for a second chance. The men who wrote the bylaws had thought about the problem of enforcement in a country without jails or courts, and they had arrived at the only solution that required neither.

James Williams was the Captain of the Vigilantes, the man who led the operations in the field. He was not a lawyer or a politician or a man of any particular social standing. He was a miner who had decided that the road agents had to be stopped and that he was the man to stop them. In the winter of 1863 and 1864, he led the capture and hanging of twenty-four suspected road agents, riding through the mountains in weather that killed horses and frostbit fingers, sleeping in the snow, eating whatever was available. The marker at Discovery-Ellingsen Park lists his name alongside Paris Pfouts, the committee's president and later the mayor of Virginia City, and Wilbur Fisk Sanders, its legal counsel and later the first United States Senator from Montana. Williams is the one who did the riding.

The five men hanged in Virginia City on January 14, 1864, were George Lane, Frank Parish, Hayes Lyons, Jack Gallagher, and Boone Helm. Lane was a cobbler. Parish was a gambler. Lyons had been a deputy sheriff. Gallagher was a saloon keeper. Helm was a man with a violent history that stretched back to Texas. They were hanged from the ridgepole of an unfinished building on the main street of Virginia City, in front of a crowd that included most of the town's population. The hangings were conducted with a certain procedural formality. Each man was given the opportunity to speak. Boone Helm, who had survived a winter in the mountains by eating the flesh of a dead companion, used his opportunity to shout "Every man for his principles! Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" and then he was hanged.

The Vigilance Committee continued to operate after the formal establishment of Montana Territory in May of 1864. Governor Sidney Edgerton, who had lobbied Congress to create the territory by bringing gold dust and nuggets to Washington to demonstrate the wealth of the region, settled in Bannack and called for the rule of law. Chief Justice Hezekiah Hosmer convened a grand jury in December of 1864 and charged them to indict the Vigilantes for murder if they acted again. The notice was printed in the Montana Post on December 10, 1864. The Vigilantes stopped for a while.

They did not stop permanently. Vigilantism spread north to Helena in 1865 and continued into the 1870s. By April of 1870, the two movements had targeted fifty-seven men and carried out fifty-seven hangings. Granville Stuart organized a third group in central and eastern Montana in 1884, called Stuart's Stranglers, which targeted cattle rustlers with the same efficiency and the same disregard for legal process. The warning sign "3-7-77," which the Vigilantes posted on the doors of men they wanted to leave town, was still being used in Helena in 1879. Its meaning has never been officially explained. In 1917, a sign bearing those numbers was found on the body of Frank Little, a labor organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World who was taken from his boardinghouse in Butte and hanged from a railroad trestle by men who were never identified.

The marker at Discovery-Ellingsen Park stands near the site of the Alder Gulch gold discovery, in the park that commemorates the beginning of the rush that brought the Vigilantes into existence. It lists the names of the men who were hanged and the dates they were hanged, and it quotes the oath and the bylaws, and it tells the story of how a territory without laws produced men who decided to make their own. Whether those men were heroes or murderers or something in between is a question that the marker leaves to the reader, which is the appropriate place to leave it.

See also

• Vigilantes in Montana near Virginia City, Madison County (Montana Heritage Commission and Montana History Foundation, erected 2022)
• Bannack near Dillon, Beaverhead County -- Montana's first territorial capital and the site of Henry Plummer's execution
• Bannack Historical District near Dillon, Beaverhead County -- the ghost town and NRHP district
• Thomas Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana (1866) -- the primary contemporary account, available in full at the Montana Memory Project