The biographer of Montana’s vigilantes Frederick Allen names his book for an incident in 1883, which was long after the peak of their activities. That year the editor of Montana’s Helena Daily Herald noted a crime in Utah where a black man killed a marshall and was arrested before a crowd stormed the jail and hanged him. The aghast editor called it mob law more suitable for savages than civilised society. However, he said, “We do not object so much to a decent, orderly lynching when there is a particular atrocity…and there can be no mistake as to the criminal”. As Allen notes, the editor drew a distinction between mob violence and “decent, orderly lynching” which in Montana, even in 1883, represented a belief that vigilantism was an indispensable tool of justice. Vigilantism remains part of Montana’s mythmaking, honoured in names of high school sports teams, theatre companies and in the “3-7-77” symbol, the mysterious numbers posted on doors of those the vigilantes marked out for rough justice.
Vigilantism began in Montana during its 1860s gold rushes following the template laid down by San Francisco’s rush a decade earlier. In 1851 Californian law and order was in its infancy and San Francisco citizens set up a “Committee of Vigilance”, a one-hundred strong civilian army led by merchant elites. It kept order, lynched suspected criminals and ran scruffy individuals out of town, most of whom were guilty only of having a foreign accent. A later committee cracked down on the city government which was run by Irish Democrats. Their actions were open and widely applauded. A rare voice of objection was William Tecumseh Sherman, who resigned as head of the marginalised state militia, after calling vigilantes irresponsible and “armed with absolute power”. The committee died down after 1856 but its lessons were absorbed in another rush a decade later.
At the outbreak of civil war, the name “Montana” did not yet exist and barely a hundred white people lived in that rugged area beyond the Rockies eking out a living trading furs in the Dakota Territory. That changed in 1862 when gold was discovered at what became Bannack City. Within weeks, miners flocked from across the west and built log shacks on the main street. Most were armed and violence was confined to the saloons. In March 1863, Congress created the Idaho Territory gathering the modern states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming into one territory larger than Texas. A man of dubious past and familiar with the Californian goldrush, Henry Plummer, was elected Bannack’s first sheriff but he disappeared soon afterwards to woo a woman he eventually married. Plummer left control with a few dangerous deputies just as miners discovered an even bigger gold find 70 miles east of Bannack. A string of unruly new townships grew at Alder Gulch, the largest at Virginia City where gold dust was the medium of economic exchange. They had to go to Bannack for supplies and the isolated journey offered opportunities for “road agents” to rob newly wealthy miners. There were rumours that Plummer’s deputies were involved.
Plummer returned to Bannack in July 1863 with his new wife and extended his sheriff authority to Alder Gulch. His wife did not last long and left abruptly in September. Coming the other way was the new chief justice of Idaho Territory, former Ohio Congressman Sidney Edgerton, and his family, including 29-year-old nephew and lawyer Wilbur Fisk Sanders. Their destination was Idaho’s capital Lewiston the other side of the Bitterroot Mountains but with the weather turning cold Edgerton decided to stop at Bannack for the winter. He made no effort to establish authority, claiming there was no-one to administer the oath of office. He spent the colder months setting up home for his family and left law enforcement to sheriff Plummer. Locals noticed Plummer was always around when goldrich travellers were leaving the region but was never eager to arrest those who lay in wait in the ranges. Late that year talk began of forming a vigilance committee, especially among those who lived through California’s rush. Edgerton and nephew Sanders were more concerned with carving a new territory independent of Idaho east of the Bitterroots.
On December 19 a posse arrested a villainous character named George Ives for the murder of a young boy and held a public trial in Virginia City. Sanders agreed to act as prosecutor. Several testified that Ives was involved in road agent activities but there was little to tie him to the boy’s death apart from one accomplice who testified against him. Sanders hoped the weight of evidence of other crimes would be enough to convict. The night before the verdict, a group of men invited Sanders to a meeting to discuss how to enforce the sentence and agreed Ives would be strung up that same day. So it proved a day later when Ives was found guilty, though the 24-man jury was not unanimous. The judge immediately condemned Ives to death and ordered a gallows to be rigged up. Ives made a sympathetic speech from the gallows, causing some to have second thoughts, before someone shouted “ask him how long he gave the (boy)”. This reminder of Ives’s crime restored the crowd’s resolve and he was hanged while shouting “I am innocent”.
Plummer was not involved in the trial and waited anxiously in Bannack, suspecting he might be next. But the newly formed committee in Virginia City dealt with Ives’s accomplices first. The only suitable punishment, they decided, using capital for emphasis, was, “DEATH”. Shopkeeper and freemason Paris Pfouts was elected Vigilance Committee president and 50 men joined the ranks with San Francisco veterans drafting up by-laws. Their first killings were on January 4, 1864 when a posse tracked down two men and hanged them. One of them confessed his crimes and said he was part of a two-dozen-strong gang led by Plummer. The posse went to Bannack and swore in several deputies. Sanders led a party to arrest Plummer and his deputy. They wasted no time on trials. “You are to be hanged,” Sanders told Plummer. When the deputy offered to confess, Plummer stopped him, saying “We’ve done enough already to send us to hell.” Plummer asked for a “good drop” and died a few minutes later. There was a more grisly killing a day later when Mexican Jose “the Greaser” Pizanthia was bombed out of his house, nd his charred remains riddled with bullets. He was one of 10 vigilante victims in the first week and they were just getting started. Chief Justice Edgerton watched on mute.
Later that month Edgerton went east to Washington to lobby for a new territory. He praised the vigilantes for cleaning up the mining camps and blamed Plummer’s gang for the violence and crimes. Most impressive for Congress was the gold he sew into his clothes. With the need for new tax revenues, there was solid sentiment in favour of a new territory. The bill to create the territory reached Congress on March 17 and a delegation asked Abraham Lincoln to appoint Edgerton its first governor. Congressman James Ashley liked the Latin word “Montana” meaning mountainous. He proposed it for the Idaho Territory a year earlier but was outvoted by those who erroneously believed Idaho was an Indian word. Senator Charles Sumner preferred a “good Indian name” but could not provide one when asked. After a delay while Congress denied voting rights to blacks, Lincoln signed Montana into law on May 26 and appointed Edgerton as governor a few weeks later.
Edgerton set up his capital at Bannack though Alder Gulch now had more people. After Edgerton visited the bigger centre he was reminded of the real power when the Vigilantes posted a notice threatening “summary punishment” for those violating public order. Montana Post‘s editor Thomas Dimsdale approvingly noted that citizens had the right to “exterminate a class of men who were a scourge and a curse”. However, some killings in late 1864 did attract protest.
It seemed change might be coming when Lincoln appointed Hezekiah Hosmer as Edgerton’s chief justice. Hosmer summoned a grand jury and put the vigilantes on notice declaring, “let us inflict no more midnight executions”. Edgerton held the territory’s first election but insisted that delegates take the Iron Clad Oath to swear they had never taken arms against the United States, an oath former Confederates could not take. Edgerton refused to admit them to the legislature. That first legislature ended in impasse as neither Democrat nor Republicans could agree on voting apportionment. Allen said Edgerton’s “partisan ferocity” ensured a long-lasting rift in territorial politics. The Vigilance Committee remained intact as a shadow government and was boosted when Paris Pfouts was elected mayor of Virginia City.
The fragile armistice with Hosmer lasted until June 1865. A year earlier there had been another major gold find at Last Chance Gulch, giving birth to the town of Helena. It did not take long for former Alder Gulch men to set up a vigilance committee there and Helena’s notorious “hanging tree” was inaugurated after a people’s court convicted a man for shooting dead another man in a saloon. Congressman Ashley was visiting the territory he named at the time, but did not object to this summary punishment.
By mid 1865 Montana’s gold production was second only to California and its cities were increasingly cosmopolitan. Edgerton wanted to head back east but was awaiting a territorial secretary who could stand in for him while absent. On August 4, president Andrew Johnson filled that position with Irishman Thomas Francis Meagher. As Allen wrote, this choice “added quite a pungent flavour to the spicy soup of Montana politics.” Meagher was a Union Democrat general who angered his Irish-American base by supporting Lincoln in 1864 and was now seeking a post-war future out west. As Meagher arrived in Bannack, Vigilantes stepped up activities in Virginia City and Helena. Dimsdale applauded their “hempen solutions” to the problem of robbers and pickpockets. The Vigilance Committees were not mobs, Dimsdale claimed, but were helping people “feel secure in their lives.” Edgerton went east, leaving Meagher as “the Acting One” in charge, supported by chief justice Hosmer and new justice Lyman Munson, with the legislature in abeyance. Allen claimed this state of affairs suited Meagher’s “vanity and appetite for power”.
Montana Democrats convinced Meagher to change his mind and he called the legislature to meet in March 1866. This angered Republicans Hosmer and Munson who threatened to declare its acts null and void. Unsurprisingly, the Vigilantes got involved. In November 1865 a drifter named James Daniels killed a man in a drunken brawl at a Helena saloon. At trial in Virginia City Munson sentenced Daniels to three years (not three months as Allen claimed in his book) and Daniels’ Irish Democrat friends convinced Meagher to pardon him. Munson claimed that Meagher exceeded his powers and ordered Daniels’ re-arrest. Meanwhile Daniels returned to Helena where he threatened witnesses who testified against him. On March 2, 1866 vigilantes seized Daniels and strung him up on Helena’s Hanging Tree with his reprieve still in his pocket. Though there was a meeting of indignant citizens a few days later, the hanging was not an issue at Meagher’s legislature a few days later. One letter writer to the Post said bickering between Republicans and Democrats would not overthrow the power of the people. Vigilantes were Montana’s real rulers, the writer implied. They brazenly crossed territorial boundaries, going as far as Denver to kill one man implicated in a Montana stagecoach robbery, while another was killed in Salt Lake City.
Dimsdale wrote the first history of the Vigilantes and sung their praises in the Post until his death in 1866. The replacement editor, Henry Blake, was elected a committee member within two weeks after displaying he was “of good moral character”. Montana’s first congressman Sam McLean told Washington that the territory could not enforce law and order without the “vigilante system of condemnation and execution”, a statement producing no disagreement in Congress. It took Montana’s lawyers to force the justices to repeat their insistence on the primacy of the courts. In August Hosmer made a carefully-worded statement praising the vigilantes and saying they would agree to disband on their own authority. Once again, the vigilantes went inactive, but did not disband.
By year’s end, posters went up in Helena that “crime had run riot” and offenders would again be “summarily dealt with”. In early 1867 the Senate heard that Montana was in “a state of anarchy” referring to the feuding in the legislature not in the streets. Congress backed judges and overturned Meagher’s 1866 legislative actions. Meagher died mysteriously in July 1867, falling off a Missouri steamboat. While some supporters claimed Vigilantes murdered Meagher, Allen could find no evidence to support that. The Vigilantes had internal problems, when the killing of a man named Rosenbaum upset some members who wrote a letter to the Post saying “you shall not drive and hang whom you please”. Pfouts returned east that year saying that different men now controlled the committee and were less well respected.
Yet Montana continued to rely on extra-legal justice. In 1870 the killing of Chinese man Ah Chow led to heated public debate. He was strung up on Helena’s Hanging Tree with a note “Beware! The Vigilantes still live!” but when one of the killers then claimed a bounty for killing Ah Chow it offended local sensibilities and he was threatened by a group signed as “200 Anti-Vigilantes”. Previously sympathetic newspapers chimed in, calling it “an advertisement of anarchy”. The last straw came three months later when a large crowd, including children, was photographed at a Helena “necktie party” near two men strung up on the Hanging Tree. Allen said that while there was no formal announcement, the publicity embarrassed the committee into suspending activities. These were the last of 57 lynchings that Allen recorded between 1864 and 1870. Political stability arrived with moderate Republican governor Benjamin Potts who worked well with Democrats. Montana’s first penitentiary was built in 1871. The end of the gold rush five years later contributed to the calming of the territory.
Occasional crimes would inspire calls for the return of vigilante justice and the sign 3-7-77 started appearing on fences and walls. Allen said it was an ultimatum to get out of town using a $3 ticket on the 7am stagecoach by order of a secret committee of 77. While lynching continued in remote settlements, there were no more summary executions in Helena. The work of earlier vigilantes remained a warm memory. In 1956 Montana Highway Patrol added respectability to vigilante legend putting 3-7-77 on their shoulder patches and car door shields. “We chose the symbol to keep alive the memory of the first people’s police force,” said one police officer. The Vigilantes remain honoured in modern Montana. But as Allen notes, “we might do well to acknowledge the excesses and inherent abuse of power carried out by men who for too many years refused to bow to the police and courts and rule of law.”
Woolly Days 