To the foregoing sketch of Murrell's life Mr. Alexander Hynds, historian of Tennessee, adds some facts and comments which will enable the reader more fully to make his own estimate as to this singular man:

"The central meeting place of Murrell's band was near an enormous cottonwood tree in Mississippi county, Arkansas. It was standing in 1890, and is perhaps still standing in the wilderness shortly above Memphis. His widely scattered bands had a system of signs and passwords. Murrell himself was married to the sister of one of his gang. He bought a good farm near Denmark, Madison county, Tennessee, where he lived as a plain farmer, while he conducted the most fearful schemes of rapine and murder from New Orleans up to Memphis, St. Louis and Cincinnati.

"Nature had done much for Murrell. He had a quick mind, a fine natural address and great adaptability; and he was as much at ease among the refined and cultured as with his own gang. He made a special study of criminal law, and knew something of medicine. He often palmed himself off as a preacher, and preached in large camp-meetings—and some were converted under his ministry! He often used his clerical garb in passing counterfeit money. With a clear head, cool, fine judgment, and a nature utterly without fear, moral or physical, his power over his men never waned. To them he was just, fair and amiable. He was a kind husband and brother, and a faithful friend. He took great pride in his position and in the operations of his gang. This conceit was the only weak spot in his nature, and led to his downfall.

"Stewart, who purports to be Murrell's biographer, made Murrell's acquaintance, pretended to join his gang, and playing on his vanity, attended a meeting of the gang at the rendezvous at the Big Cottonwood, and saw the meeting of the Grand Council. He had Murrell arrested, and he was tried, convicted and sent to the Tennessee penitentiary in 1834 for ten years. There he worked in the blacksmith shops, but by the time he got out, was broken down in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and an invalid, to live less than a year.

"Stewart's account holds inconsistencies and inaccuracies, such as that many men high in social and official life belonged to Murrell's gang, which his published lists do not show. He had perhaps 440 to 450 men, scattered from New Orleans to Cincinnati, but his downfall spread fear and distrust among them.

"At Vicksburg, on July 4, 1835, a drunken member of the gang threatened to attack the authorities, and was tarred and feathered. Others of the gang, or at least several well-known gamblers, collected and defied the citizens, and killed the good and brave Dr. Bodley. Five men were hung, Hullams, Dutch Bill, North, Smith and McCall. The news swept like wildfire through the Mississippi Valley and gave heart to the lovers of law and order. At one or two other places some were shot, some were hanged, and now and then one or two were sent to prison, and thus an end was put to organized crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out the reign of the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."

Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to outlawry that the law itself could not control.



Chapter V

The Vigilantes of California—The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the World—History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods.

The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849. Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side the temple of the law.

It was not thus in those early days of our Western history. The law was left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold, but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements, the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced pari-passu farther and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as though it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as the savage calls forth fire from the dry and sapless twigs of the wilderness.

In the gold country all ideas and principles were based upon new conditions. Precedents did not exist. Man had gone savage again, and it was the beginning. Yet this savage, willing to live as a savage in a land which was one vast encampment, was the Anglo-Saxon savage, and therefore carried with him that chief trait of the American character, the principle that what a man earns—not what he steals, but what he earns—is his and his alone. This principle sowed in ground forbidding and unpromising was the seed of the law out of which has sprung the growth of a mighty civilization fit to be called an empire of its own. The growth and development of law under such conditions offered phenomena not recorded in the history of any other land or time.

In the first place, and even while in transit, men organized for the purpose of self-protection, and in this necessary act law-abiding and criminal elements united. After arriving at the scenes of the gold fields, such organization was forgotten; even the parties that had banded together in the Eastern states as partners rarely kept together for a month after reaching the region where luck, hazard and opportunity, inextricably blended, appealed to each man to act for himself and with small reference to others. The first organizations of the mining camps were those of the criminal element. They were presently met by the organization of the law and order men. Hard upon the miners' law came the regularly organized legal machinery of the older states, modified by local conditions, and irretrievably blended with a politics more corrupt than any known before or since. Men were busy in picking up raw gold from the earth, and they paid small attention to courts and government. The law became an unbridled instrument of evil. Judges of the courts openly confiscated the property of their enemies, or sentenced them with no reference to the principles of justice, with as great disregard for life and liberty as was ever known in the Revolutionary days of France. Against this manner of government presently arose the organizations of the law-abiding, the justice-loving, and these took the law into their own stern hands. The executive officers of the law, the sheriffs and constables, were in league to kill and confiscate; and against these the new agency of the actual law made war, constituting themselves into an arm of essential government, and openly called themselves Vigilantes. In turn criminals used the cloak of the Vigilantes to cover their own deeds of lawlessness and violence. The Vigilantes purged themselves of the false members, and carried their own title of opprobrium, the "stranglers," with unconcern or pride. They grew in numbers, the love of justice their lodestone, until at one time they numbered more than five thousand in the city of San Francisco alone, and held that community in a grip of lawlessness, or law, as you shall choose to term it. They set at defiance the chief executive of the state, erected an armed castle of their own, seized upon the arms of the militia, defied the government of the United States and even the United States army! They were, as you shall choose to call them, criminals, or great and noble men. Seek as you may to-day, you will never know the full roster of their names, although they made no concealment of their identity; and no one, to this day, has ever been able to determine who took the first step in their organization. They began their labors in California at a time when there had been more than two thousand murders—five hundred in one year—and not five legal executions. Their task included the erection of a fit structure of the law, and, incidentally, the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere, or, at times, still despise and desecrate.

At first the average gold seeker concerned himself little with law, because he intended to make his fortune quickly and then hasten back East to his former home; yet, as early as the winter of 1849, there was elected a legislature which met at San Jose, a Senate of sixteen members and an Assembly of thirty-six. In this election the new American vote was in evidence. The miners had already tired of the semi-military phase of their government, and had met and adopted a state constitution. The legislature enacted one hundred and forty new laws in two months, and abolished all former laws; and then, satisfied with its labors, it left the enforcement of the laws, in the good old American fashion, to whomsoever might take an interest in the matter.[D] This is our custom even to-day. Our great cities of the East are practically all governed, so far as they are governed at all, by civic leagues, civic federations, citizens' leagues, business men's associations—all protests at non-enforcement of the law. This protest in '49 and on the Pacific coast took a sterner form.

[Footnote D: Tuthill: "History of California."]

At one time the city of San Francisco had three separate and distinct city councils, each claiming to be the only legal one. In spite of the new state organization, the law was much a matter of go as you please. Under such conditions it was no wonder that outlawry began to show its head in bold and well-organized forms. A party of ruffians, who called themselves the "Hounds," banded together to run all foreigners out of the rich camps, and to take their diggings over for themselves. A number of Chileans were beaten or shot, and their property was confiscated or destroyed. This was not in accordance with the saving grace of American justice, which devoted to a man that which he had earned. A counter organization was promptly formed, and the "Hounds" found themselves confronted with two hundred "special constables," each with a good rifle. A mass meeting sat as a court, and twenty of the "Hounds" were tried, ten of them receiving sentences that never were enforced, but which had the desired effect. So now, while far to the eastward the Congress was hotly arguing the question of the admission of California as a state, she was beginning to show an interest in law and justice when aroused thereto.

It was difficult material out of which to build a civilized community. The hardest population of the entire world was there; men savage or civilized by tradition, heathen or Christian once at least, but now all Californian. Wealth was the one common thing. The average daily return in the work of mining ranged from twenty to thirty dollars, and no man might tell when his fortune might be made by a blow of a pick. Some nuggets of gold weighing twenty-five pounds were discovered. In certain diggings men picked pure gold from the rock crevices with a spoon or a knife point. As to values, they were guessed at, the only currency being gold dust or nuggets. Prodigality was universal. All the gamblers of the world met in vulture concourse. There was little in the way of home; of women almost none. Life was as cheap as gold dust. Let those who liked bother about statehood and government and politics; the average man was too busy digging and spending gold to trouble over such matters. The most shameless men were those found in public office. Wealth and commerce waxed great, but law and civilization languished. The times were ripening for the growth of some system of law which would offer proper protection to life and property. The measure of this need may be seen from the figures of the production of gold. From 1848 to 1856 California produced between five hundred and six hundred million dollars in virgin gold. What wonder the courts were weak; and what wonder the Vigilantes became strong!

There were in California three distinct Vigilante movements, those of 1849, 1851, and 1856, the earliest applying rather to the outlying mining camps than to the city of San Francisco. In 1851, seeing that the courts made no attempt to punish criminals, a committee was formed which did much toward enforcing respect for the principles of justice, if not of law. On June 11 they hanged John Jenkins for robbing a store. A month later they hanged James Stuart for murdering a sheriff. In August of the same summer they took out of jail and hanged Whittaker and McKenzie, Australian ex-convicts, whom they had tried and sentenced, but who had been rescued by the officers of the law. Two weeks later this committee disbanded. They paid no attention to the many killings that were going on over land titles and the like, but confined themselves to punishing men who had committed intolerable crimes. Theft was as serious as murder, perhaps more so, in the creed of the time and place. The list of murders reached appalling dimensions. The times were sadly out of joint. The legislature was corrupt, graft was rampant—though then unknown by that name—and the entire social body was restless, discontented, and uneasy. Politics had become a fine art. The judiciary, lazy and corrupt, was held in contempt. The dockets of the courts were full, and little was done to clear them effectively. Criminals did as they liked and went unwhipped of justice. It was truly a day of violence and license.

Once more the sober and law-loving men of California sent abroad word, and again the Vigilantes assembled. In 1853 they hanged two Mexicans for horse stealing, and also a bartender who had shot a citizen near Shasta. At Jackson they hanged another Mexican for horse stealing, and at Volcano, in 1854, they hanged a man named Macy for stabbing an old and helpless man. In this instance vengeance was very swift, for the murderer was executed within half an hour after his deed. The haste caused certain criticism when, in the same month one Johnson was hanged for stabbing a man named Montgomery, at Iowa Hill, who later recovered. At Los Angeles three men were sentenced to death by the local court, but the Supreme Court issued a stay for two of them, Brown and Lee. The people asserted that all must die together, and the mayor of the city was of the same mind. The third man, Alvitre, was hanged legally on January 12, 1855. On that day the mayor resigned his office to join the Vigilantes. Brown was taken out of jail and hanged in spite of the decision of the Supreme Court. The people were out-running the law. That same month they hanged another murderer for killing the treasurer of Tuolumne county. In the following month they hanged three more cattle thieves in Contra Costa county, and followed this by hanging a horse thief in Oakland. A larger affair threatened in the following summer, when thirty-six Mexicans were arrested for killing a party of Americans. For a time it was proposed to hang all thirty-six, but sober counsel prevailed and only three were hanged; this after formal jury trial. Unknown bandits waylaid and killed Isaac B. Wall and T. S. Williamson of Monterey, and, that same month U. S. Marshal William H. Richardson was shot by Charles Cora in the streets of San Francisco. The people grumbled. There was no certainty that justice would ever reach these offenders. The reputation of the state was ruined, not by the acts of the Vigilantes, but by those of unscrupulous and unprincipled men in office and upon the bench. The government was run by gamblers, ruffians, and thugs. The good men of the state began to prepare for a general movement of purification and the installation of an actual law. The great Vigilante movement of 1856 was the result.

The immediate cause of this last organization was the murder of James King, editor of the Bulletin, by James P. Casey. Casey, after shooting King, was hurried off to jail by his own friends, and there was protected by a display of military force. King lingered for six days after he was shot, and the state of public opinion was ominous. Cora, who had killed Marshal Richardson, had never been punished, and there seemed no likelihood that Casey would be. The local press was divided. The religious papers, the Pacific and the Christian Advocate, both openly declared that Casey ought to be hanged. The clergy took up the matter sternly, and one minister of the Gospel, Rev. J. A. Benton, of Sacramento, gave utterance to this remarkable but well-grounded statement: "A people can be justified in recalling delegated power and resuming its exercise." Before we hasten to criticize sweepingly under the term "mob law" such work as this of the Vigilantes, it will be well for us to weigh that utterance, and to apply it to conditions of our own times; to-day is well-nigh as dangerous to American liberties as were the wilder days of California.

Now, summoned by some unknown command, armed men appeared in the streets of San Francisco, twenty-four companies in all, with perhaps fifty men in each company. The Vigilantes had organized again. They brought a cannon and placed it against the jail gate, and demanded that Casey be surrendered to them. There was no help for it, and Casey went away handcuffed, to face a court where political influence would mean nothing. An hour later the murderer Cora was taken from his cell, and was hastened away to join Casey in the headquarters building of the Vigilantes. A company of armed and silent men marched on each side of the carriage containing the prisoner. The two men were tried in formal session of the Committee, each having counsel, and all evidence being carefully weighed.

King died on May 20, 1856, and on May 22d was buried with popular honors, a long procession of citizens following the body to the cemetery. A popular subscription was started, and in a brief time over thirty thousand dollars was raised for the benefit of his widow and children. When the long procession filed back into the city, it was to witness, swinging from a beam projecting from a window of Committee headquarters, the bodies of Casey and Cora.

The Committee now arrested two more men, not for a capital crime, but for one which lay back of a long series of capital crimes—the stuffing of ballot-boxes and other election frauds. These men were Billy Mulligan and the prize-fighter known as Yankee Sullivan. Although advised that he would have a fair trial and that the death penalty would not be passed upon him, Yankee Sullivan committed suicide in his cell. The entire party of lawyers and judges were arrayed against the Committee, naturally enough. Judge Terry, of the Supreme Court, issued a writ of habeas corpus for Mulligan. The Committee ignored the sheriff who was sent to serve the writ. They cleared the streets in front of headquarters, established six cannon in front of their rooms, put loaded swivels on top of the roof and mounted a guard of a hundred riflemen. They brought bedding and provisions to their quarters, mounted a huge triangle on the roof for a signal to their men all over the city, arranged the interior of their rooms in the form of a court and, in short, set themselves up as the law, openly defying their own Supreme Court of the state. So far from being afraid of the vengeance of the law, they arrested two more men for election frauds, Chas. P. Duane and "Woolly" Kearney. All their prisoners were guarded in cells within the headquarters building.

The opposition to the Committee now organized in turn under the name of the "Law and Order Men," and held a public meeting. This was numerously attended by members of the Vigilante Committee, whose books were now open for enrollment. Not even the criticism of their own friends stayed these men in their resolution. They went even further. Governor Johnson issued a proclamation to them to disband and disperse. They paid no more attention to this than they had to Judge Terry's writ of habeas corpus. The governor threatened them with the militia, but it was not enough to frighten them. General Sherman resigned his command in the state militia, and counseled moderation at so dangerous a time. Many of the militia turned in their rifles to the Committee, which got other arms from vessels in the harbor, and from carelessly guarded armories. Halting at no responsibility, a band of the Committee even boarded a schooner which was carrying down a cargo of rifles from the governor to General Howard at San Francisco, and seized the entire lot. Shortly after this they confiscated a second shipment which the governor was sending down from Sacramento in the same way; thus seizing property of the federal government. If there was such a crime as high treason, they committed it, and did so openly and without hesitation. Governor Johnson contented himself with drawing up a statement of the situation, which was sent down to President Pierce at Washington, with the request that he instruct naval officers on the Pacific station to supply arms to the State of California, which had been despoiled by certain of its citizens. President Pierce turned over the matter to his attorney-general, Caleb Cushing, who rendered an opinion saying that Governor Johnson had not yet exhausted the state remedies, and that the United States government could not interfere.

Little remained for the Committee to do to show its resolution to act as the State pro tempore. That little it now proceeded to do by practically suspending the Supreme Court of California. In making an arrest of a witness wanted by the Committee, Sterling A. Hopkins, one of the policemen retained for work by the Committee, was stabbed in the throat by Judge Terry, of the Supreme Bench, who was very bitter against all members of the Committee. It was supposed that the wound would prove fatal, and at once the Committee sounded the call for general assembly. The city went into two hostile camps, Terry and his friend, Dr. Ashe, taking refuge in the armory where the "Law and Order" faction kept their arms. The members of the Vigilante Committee besieged this place, and presently took charge of Terry and Ashe, as prisoners. Then the scouts of the Committee went out after the arms of all the armories belonging to the governor and the "Law and Order" men who supported him, the lawyers and politicians who felt that their functions were being usurped. Two thousand rifles were taken, and the opposing party was left without arms. The entire state, so to speak, was now in the hands of the "Committee of Vigilance," a body of men, quiet, law-loving, law-enforcing, but of course technically traitors and criminals. The parallel of this situation has never existed elsewhere in American history.

Had Hopkins died the probability is that Judge Terry would have been hanged by the Committee, but fortunately he did not die. Terry lay a prisoner in the cell assigned him at the Committee's rooms for seven weeks, by which time Hopkins had recovered from the wound given him by Terry. The case became one of national interest, and tirades against "the Stranglers" were not lacking; but the Committee went on enrolling men. And it did not open its doors for its prisoners, although appeal was made to Congress in Terry's behalf—an appeal which was referred to the Committee on Judiciary, and so buried.

Terry was finally released, much to the regret of many of the Committee, who thought he should have been punished. The executive committee called together the board of delegates, and issued a statement showing that death and banishment were the only penalties optional with them. Death they could not inflict, because Hopkins had recovered; and banishment they thought impractical at that time, as it might prolong discussion indefinitely, and enforce a longer term in service than the Committee cared for. It was the earnest wish of all to disband at the first moment that they considered their state and city fit to take care of themselves, and the sacredness of the ballot-box again insured. To assure this latter fact, they had arrayed themselves against the federal government, as certainly they had against the state government.

The Committee now hanged two more murderers—Hetherington and Brace—the former a gambler from St. Louis, the latter a youth of New York parentage, twenty-one years of age, but hardened enough to curse volubly upon the scaffold. By the middle of August, 1856, they had no more prisoners in charge, and were ready to turn the city over to its own system of government. Their report, published in the following fall, showed they had hanged four men and banished many others, besides frightening out of the country a large criminal population that did not tarry for arrest and trial.

If opinion was divided to some extent in San Francisco, where those stirring deeds occurred, the sentiment of the outlying communities of California was almost a unit in favor of the Vigilantes, and their action received the sincere flattery of imitation, as half a score of criminals learned to their sorrow on impromptu scaffolds. There was no large general organization in any other community, however. After a time some of the banished men came back, and many damage suits were argued later in the courts; but small satisfaction came to those claimants, and few men who knew of the deeds of the "Committee of Vigilance" ever cared to discuss them. Indeed it was practically certain that any man who ever served on a Western vigilance committee finished his life with sealed lips. Had he ventured to talk of what he knew he would have met contempt or something harsher.

A political capital was made out of the situation in San Francisco. The "Committee of Vigilance" felt that it had now concluded its work and was ready to go back to civil life. On August 18, 1856, the Committee marched openly in review through the streets of the city, five thousand one hundred and thirty-seven men in line, with three companies of artillery, eighteen cannon, a company of dragoons, and a medical staff of forty odd physicians. There were in this body one hundred and fifty men who had served in the old Committee in 1851. After the parade the men halted, the assemblage broke up into companies, the companies into groups; and thus, quietly, with no vaunting of themselves and no concealment of their acts, there passed away one of the most singular and significant organizations of American citizens ever known. They did this with the quiet assertion that if their services were again needed, they would again assemble; and they printed a statement covering their actions in detail, showing to any fair-minded man that what they had done was indeed for the good of the whole community, which had been wronged by those whom it had elected to power, those who had set themselves up as masters where they had been chosen as servants.

The "Committee of Vigilance" of San Francisco was made up of men from all walks of life and all political parties. It had any amount of money at its command that it required, for its members were of the best and most influential citizens. It maintained, during its existence, quarters unique in their way, serving as arms-room, trial court, fortress, and prison. It was not a mob, but a grave and orderly band of men, and its deliberations were formal and exact, its labors being divided among proper sub-committees and boards. The quarters were kept open day and night, always ready for swift action, if necessary. It had an executive committee, which upon occasion conferred with a board of delegates composed of three men from each subdivision of the general body. The executive committee consisted of thirty-three members, and its decision was final; but it could not enforce a death penalty except on a two-thirds vote of those present. It had a prosecuting attorney, and it tried no prisoner without assigning to him competent counsel. It had also a police force, with a chief of police and a sheriff with several deputies. In short, it took over the government, and was indeed the government, municipal and state in one. Recent as was its life, its deeds to-day are well-nigh forgotten. Though opinion may be still divided in certain quarters, California need not be ashamed of this "Committee of Vigilance." She should be proud of it, for it was largely through its unthanked and dangerous safeguarding of the public interests that California gained her social system of to-day.

In all the history of American desperadoism and of the movements which have checked it, there is no page more worth study than this from the story of the great Golden State. The moral is a sane, clean, and strong one. The creed of the "Committee of Vigilance" is one which we might well learn to-day; and its practice would leave us with more dignity of character than we can claim, so long as we content ourselves merely with outcry and criticism, with sweeping accusation of our unfaithful public servants, and without seeing that they are punished. There is nothing but manhood and freedom and justice in the covenant of the Committee. That covenant all American citizens should be ready to sign and live up to: "We do bind ourselves each unto the other by a solemn oath to do and perform every just and lawful act for the maintenance of law and order, and to sustain the laws when faithfully and properly administered. But we are determined that no thief, burglar, incendiary, assassin, ballot-box stuffer or other disturber of the peace, shall escape punishment, either by quibbles of the law, the carelessness of the police or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice."

What a man earns, that is his—such was the lesson of California. Self-government is our right as a people—that is what the Vigilantes said. When the laws failed of execution, then it was the people's right to resume the power that they had delegated, or which had been usurped from them—that is their statement as quoted by one of the ablest of many historians of this movement. The people might withdraw authority when faithless servants used it to thwart justice—that was what the Vigilantes preached. It is good doctrine to-day.



Chapter VI

The Outlaw of the Mountains—The Gold Stampedes of the '60's—Armed Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps.

The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle for mining claims in California—one stampede after another, as this, that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities—was repeated all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.

The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society, divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost; of law there was none.

Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all the means by which civilized men keep record of their property transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace officer, and the defender of his own property.

Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin. The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons—beheld for the first time by many of these fortune-seekers—lured them on step by step, until many of them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for protection or good order."

Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize, the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their "chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more unscrupulous than his fellows.

Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt, committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family, missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously vanished.

These robbers had their confederates scattered in all ranks of life. Plummer himself was sheriff of his county, and had confederates in deputies or city marshals. This was a strange feature of this old desperadoism in the West—it paraded often in the guise of the law. We shall find further instances of this same phenomenon. Employes, friends, officials—there was none that one might trust. The organization of the robbers even extended to the stage lines, and a regular system of communication existed by which the allies advised each other when and where such and such a passenger was going, with such and such an amount of gold upon him. The holding up of the stage was something regularly expected, and the traveler who had any money or valuables drew a long breath when he reached a region where there was really a protecting law. Men were shot down in the streets on little or no provocation, and the murderer boasted of his crime and defied punishment. The dance-halls were run day and night. The drinking of whiskey, and, moreover, bad whiskey, was a thing universal. Vice was everywhere and virtue was not. Those few who had an aim and an ambition in life were long in the minority and, in the welter of a general license, they might not recognize each other and join hands. Murder and pillage ruled, until at length the spirit of law and order, born anew of necessity, grew and gained power as it did in most early communities of the West. How these things in time took place may best be seen by reference to the bloody biographies of some of the most reckless desperadoes ever seen in any land.



Chapter VII

Henry Plummer—A Northern Bad Man—The Head of the Robber Band in the Montana Mining Country—A Man of Brains and Ability, but a Cold-Blooded Murderer.

Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in a state of terror. Posing part of the time as an officer of the law, he was all the time the leader in the reign of lawlessness. He was always ready for combat, and he so relied upon his own skill that he would even give his antagonist the advantage—or just enough advantage to leave himself sure to kill him. His victims in duels of this sort were many, and, as to his victims in cold-blooded robbery, in which death wiped out the record, no one will ever know the list.

Plummer was born in Connecticut in 1837, and, until his departure as a young man for the West, he was all that might be expected of one brought up under the chastening influences of a New England home. He received a good education, and became a polished, affable, and gentlemanly appearing man. He was about five feet ten, possibly five feet eleven inches in height, and weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds, being rather slender in appearance. His face was handsome and his demeanor always frank and open, although he was quiet and did not often talk unless accosted. His voice was low and pleasant, and he had no bravado or swagger about him. His eye was light in color and singularly devoid of expression. Two features gave him a sinister look—his forehead, which was low and brutish, and his eye, which was cold and fish-like. His was a strong, well-keyed nervous organization. He was quick as a cat when in action, though apparently suave and easy in disposition. He was a good pistol shot, perhaps the best of all the desperadoes who infested Idaho and Montana at that time. Not even in his cups did he lose control of voice and eye and weapon. He was always ready—a cool, quiet, self-possessed, well-regulated killing machine.

At the date of Plummer's arrival in the mining country, the town of Lewiston, Idaho, was the emporium of a wide region then embraced under the name of Idaho Territory; the latter also including Montana at that time. Where his life had been spent previous to that is not known, but it is thought that he came over from California. Plummer set up as a gambler, and this gave him the key to the brotherhood of the bad. Gamblers usually stick together pretty closely, and institute a sort of free-masonry of their own; so that Plummer was not long in finding, among men of his own profession and their associates, a number of others whom he considered safe to take into his confidence. Every man accepted by Plummer was a murderer. He would have no weaklings. No one can tell how many victims his associates had had before they went into his alliance; but it is sure that novices in man-killing were not desired, nor any who had not been proved of nerve. Plummer soon had so many men that he set up a rendezvous at points on all the trails leading out from Lewiston to such mines as were producing any gold. One robbery followed another, until the band threw off all restraint and ran the towns as they liked, paying for what they took when they felt like it, and laughing at the protests of the minority of the population, which was placed in the hard strait of being in that country and unable to get out without being robbed. It was the intention to seize the property of every man who was there and who was not accepted as a member of the gang.

One killing after another occurred on the trails, and man after man was lost and never traced. Assaults were made upon many men who escaped, but no criminal could be located, and, indeed, there was no law by which any of them could be brought to book. The express riders were fired upon and robbed and the pack trains looted. No man expected to cross the mountain trails without meeting some of the robbers, and, when he did meet them, he expected to be killed if he made resistance, for they outnumbered the parties they attacked in nearly all instances. The outlaws were now indeed about three times as numerous as those not in sympathy with them.

Rendered desperate by this state of affairs, a few resolute citizens who wanted law and order found each other out at last and organized into a vigilance committee, remembering the success of the Vigilantes of California, whose work was still recent history. Plummer himself was among the first to join this embryonic vigilante movement, as was the case in so many other similar movements in other parts of the West, where the criminal joined the law-loving in order to find out what the latter intended to do. His address was such as to disarm completely all suspicion, and he had full knowledge of facts which enabled him to murder for vengeance as well as for gain.

After Oro Fino was worked out as a placer field, the prospectors located other grounds east of the Salmon River range, at Elk City and Florence, and soon Lewiston was forsaken, all the population trooping off over the mountains to the new fields. This broke up the vigilante movement in its infancy, and gave Plummer a longer lease of life for his plans. All those who had joined the vigilante movement were marked men. One after another they were murdered, none knew by whom, or why. Masked robbers were seen every day along the trails leading between one remote mining camp and another, but no one suspected Henry Plummer, who was serving well in his double role.

Meantime, additional placer grounds had been discovered a hundred and fifty miles south of Florence, on the Boise river, and some valuable strikes were also made far to the north, at the upper waters of the Beaverhead. All the towns to the westward were now abandoned, and the miners left Florence as madly as they had rushed to it from Oro Fino and Elk City. West Bannack and East Bannack were now all the cry. To these new points, as may be supposed, the organized band of robbers fled with the others. Plummer, who had tried Elk City, Deer Lodge, and other points, now appeared at Bannack.

One after another reports continued to come of placers discovered here and there in the upper Rockies. Among all these, the strikes on Gold Creek proved to be the most extensive and valuable. A few Eastern men, almost by accident, had found fair "pay" there, and returned to that locality when they found themselves unable to get across the snow-covered mountains to Florence. These few men at the Gold Creek diggings got large additions from expeditions made up in Denver and bound for Florence, who also were unable to get across the Salmon River mountains. Yet others came out in the summer of 1862, by way of the upper plains and the Missouri river, so that the accident of the season, so to speak, turned aside the traffic intended to reach Florence into quite another region. This fact, as events proved, had much to do with the later fate of Henry Plummer and his associates.

These Eastern men were different from those who had been schooled in the mines of the Pacific Slope. They still clung to law and order; and they did not propose to be robbed. The first news of the strikes brought over the advance guard of the roughs who had been running the other camps; and, as soon as these were unmasked by acts of their own, the little advance guard of civilization shot one of them, Arnett, and hung two others, Jernigan and Spillman. This was the real beginning of a permanent vigilante force in Montana. It afforded perhaps the only known instance of a man being buried with a six-shooter in one hand and a hand of cards in the other. Arnett was killed in a game of cards, and died with his death grip thus fixed.

The new diggings did not at first prove themselves, and the camp at Bannack, on Grasshopper Creek, was more prosperous. Henry Plummer, therefore, elected Bannack as his headquarters. Others of the loosely connected banditti began to drop into Bannack from other districts, and Plummer was soon surrounded by his clan and kin in crime. George Ives, Bill Mitchell, Charlie Reeves, Cy Skinner, and others began operations on the same lines which had so distinguished them at the earlier diggings, west of the range. In a few weeks Bannack was as bad as Lewiston or Florence had ever been. In fact, it became so bad that the Vigilantes began to show their teeth, although they confined their sentences to banishment. The black sheep and the white began now to be segregated.

Plummer, shrewd to see the drift of opinion, saw that he must now play his hand out to the finish, that he could not now reform. He accordingly laid his plans to kill Jack Crawford, who was chosen as miners' sheriff. Plummer undertook one expedient after another to draw Crawford into a quarrel, in which he knew he could kill him; for Plummer's speed with the pistol had been proved when he killed Jack Cleveland, one of his own best gun-fighters. Rumor ran that he was the best pistol shot in the Rockies and as bad a man as the worst. Plummer thought that Crawford suspected him of belonging to the bandits, and so doomed him. Crawford was wary, and defeated three separate attempts to waylay and kill him, besides avoiding several quarrels that were thrust upon him by Plummer or his men. Dick Phleger, a friend of Crawford, was also marked by Plummer, who challenged him to fight with pistols, as he frequently had challenged Crawford. Phleger was a braver man than Crawford, but he declined the duel. Plummer would have killed them both. He only wanted the appearance of an "even break," with the later plea of "self-defence," which has shielded so many bad men from punishment for murder.

Plummer now tried treachery, and told Crawford they would be friends. All the time he was hunting a chance to kill him. At length he held Crawford up in a restaurant, and stood waiting for him with a rifle. A friend handed Crawford a rifle, and the latter slipped up and took a shot from the corner of the house at Plummer, who was across the street. The ball struck Plummer's right arm and tore it to pieces. Crawford missed him with a second shot, and Plummer walked back to his own cabin. Here he had a long siege with his wound, refusing to allow his arm to be amputated, since he knew he might as well be dead as so crippled. He finally recovered, although the ball was never removed and the bone never knit. The ball lodged in his wrist and was found there after his death, worn smooth as silver by the action of the bones. Crawford escaped down the Missouri river, to which he fled at Fort Benton. He never came back to the country. Plummer went on practising with the six-shooter with his left hand, and became a very good left-hand shot. He knew that his only safety lay in his skill with weapons.

Plummer's physician was Dr. Glick, who operated under cover of a shotgun, and with the cheerful assurance that if he killed Plummer by accident, he himself would be killed. After that Glick dressed the wounds of more than one outlaw, but dared not tell of it. Plummer admitted to him at last that these were his men and told Glick he would kill him if he ever breathed a word of this confidence. So the knowledge of the existence of the banditti was known to one man for a long time.

As to Bannack, it was one of the wildest camps ever known in any land. Pistol fire was heard incessantly, and one victim after another was added to the list. George Ives, Johnny Cooper, George Carrhart, Hayes Lyons, Cy Skinner, and others of the toughs were now open associates of the leading spirit, Plummer. The condition of lawlessness and terror was such that all the decent men would have gone back to the States, but the same difficulties that had kept them from getting across to Florence now kept them from getting back East. The winter held them prisoners.

Henry Plummer was now elected sheriff for the Bannack mining district, to succeed Crawford, whom he had run out of the country. It seems very difficult to understand how this could have occurred; but it will serve to show the numerical strength of Plummer's party. The latter, now married, professed to have reformed. In reality, he was deeper in deviltry than ever in his life.

The diggings at Gold Creek and Bannack were now eclipsed by the sensational discoveries on the famous Alder Gulch, one of the phenomenal placers of the world, and the most productive ever known in America. The stampede was fast and furious to these new diggings. In ten days the gulch was staked out for twelve miles, and the cabins of the miners were occupied for all of that distance, and scattered over a long, low flat, whose vegetation was quickly swept away. The new camp that sprung up on one end of this bar was called Virginia City. It need not be said that among the first settlers there were the outlaws earlier mentioned, with several others: Jack Gallagher, Buck Stinson, Ned Ray, and others, these three named being "deputies" of "Sheriff" Plummer. A sort of court was formed for trying disputed mining claims. Charley Forbes was clerk of this court, and incidentally one of Plummer's band! This clerk and these deputies killed one Dillingham, whom they suspected of informing a friend of a robbery planned to make away with him on the trail from Bannack to Virginia City. They were "tried" by the court and freed. Hayes Lyons admitted privately that Plummer had told him to kill the informer Dillingham. The invariable plan of this bloodthirsty man was to destroy unfavorable testimony by means of death.

The unceasing flood of gold from the seemingly exhaustless gulch caused three or four more little camps or towns to spring up; but Virginia City now took the palm for frontier reputation in hardness. Ten millions in "dust" was washed out in one year. Every one had gold, sacks and cans of it. The wild license of the place was unspeakably vitiating. Fights with weapons were incessant. Rude dance halls and saloons were crowded with truculent, armed men in search of trouble. Churches and schools were unknown. Tents, log cabins, and brush shanties made the residences. "Hacks rattled to and fro between the several towns, freighted with drunken and rowdy humanity of both sexes. Citizens of acknowledged respectability often walked, more often perhaps rode side by side on horseback, with noted courtesans, in open day, through the crowded streets, and seemingly suffered no harm in reputation. Pistols flashed, bowie-knives flourished, oaths filled the air. This was indeed the reign of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with disgust and terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become part of it, and to forget that they had ever been aught else. Judges, lawyers, doctors, even clergymen, could not claim exemption."

This was in 1863. At that time, the nearest capitals were Olympia, on Puget Sound; Yankton, two thousand miles away; and Lewiston, seven hundred miles away. What machinery of the law was there to hinder Plummer and his men? What better field than this one, literally overflowing with gold, could they have asked for their operations? And what better chief than Plummer?

His next effort was to be appointed deputy United States marshal, and he received the indorsement of the leading men of Bannack. Plummer afterward tried several times to kill Nathaniel P. Langford, who caused his defeat, but was unsuccessful in getting the opportunity he sought.

From Bannack to Salt Lake City was about five hundred miles. Mails by this time came in from Salt Lake City, which was the supply point. If a man wanted to send out gold to his people in the States, it had to go over this long trail across the wild regions. There was no mail service, and no express office nearer than Salt Lake. Merchants sent out their funds by private messenger. Every such journey was a risk of death. Plummer had clerks in every institution that was making money, and these kept him posted as to the times when shipments of dust were about to be made; they also told him when any well-staked miner was going out to the States. Plummer's men were posted all along these mountain trails. No one will ever know how many men were killed in all on the Salt Lake trail.

There was a stage also between Bannack and Virginia City, and this was regarded as a legitimate and regular booty producer by the gang. Whenever a rich passenger took stage, a confederate at the place put a mark on the vehicle so that it could be read at the next stop. At this point there was sure to be others of the gang, who attended to further details. Sometimes two or three thousand dollars would be taken from a single passenger. A stage often carried fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in dust. Plummer knew when and where and how each stage was robbed, but in his capacity as sheriff covered up the traces of all his associates.

The robbers who did the work were usually masked, and although suspicions were rife and mutterings began to grow louder, there was no actual evidence against Plummer until one day he held up a young man by name of Tilden, who voiced his belief that he knew the man who had held him up. Further evidence was soon to follow. A pack-train, bound for Salt Lake, had no less than eighty thousand dollars in dust in its charge, and Plummer had sent out Dutch John and Steve Marshland to hold up the train. The freighters were too plucky, and both the bandits were wounded, and so marked, although for the time they escaped. George Ives also was recognized by one or two victims and began to be watched on account of his numerous open murders.

At length, the dead body of a young man named Tiebalt was found in a thicket near Alder Gulch, under circumstances showing a revolting murder. At last the slumbering spirit of the Vigilantes began to awaken. Two dozen men of the camp went out and arrested Long John, George Ives, Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill, Bob Zachary, and Johnny Cooper. These men were surprised in their camp, and among their long list of weapons were some that had been taken from men who had been robbed or murdered. These weapons were identified by friends. Old Tex was another man taken in charge, and George Hilderman yet another. All these men wanted a "jury trial," and wanted it at Virginia City, where Plummer would have official influence enough to get his associates released! The captors, however, were men from Nevada, the other leading camp in Alder Gulch, and they took their prisoners there.

At once a Plummer man hastened out on horseback to get the chief on the ground, riding all night across the mountains to Bannack to carry the news that the citizens had at last rebelled against anarchy, robbery, and murder. On the following morning, two thousand men had gathered at Nevada City, and had resolved to try the outlaws. As there was rivalry between Virginia and Nevada camps, a jury was made up of twenty-four men, twelve from each camp. The miners' court, most dread of all tribunals, was in session.

Some forms of the law were observed. Long John was allowed to turn state's evidence. He swore that George Ives had killed Tiebalt, and declared that he shot him while Tiebalt was on his knees praying, after he had been told that he must die. Then a rope was put around his neck and he was dragged to a place of concealment in the thicket where the body was found. Tiebalt was not dead while so dragged, for his hands were found full of grass and twigs which he had clutched. Ives was condemned to death, and the law and order men were strong enough to suppress the armed disturbance at once started by his friends, none of whom could realize that the patient citizens were at last taking the law into their own hands. A scaffold was improvised and Ives was hung,—the first of the Plummer gang to meet retribution. The others then in custody were allowed to go under milder sentences.

The Vigilantes now organized with vigor and determination. One bit of testimony was added to another, and one man now dared to voice his suspicions to another. Twenty-five determined men set out to secure others of the gang now known to have been united in this long brotherhood. Some of these men were now fleeing the country, warned by the fate of Ives; but the Vigilantes took Red Yager and Buck Stinson and Ned Ray, two of them Plummer's deputies, as well as another confederate named Brown. The party stopped at the Lorain Ranch, near a cottonwood grove, and tried their prisoners without going into town. Red Yager confessed in full before he was hung, and it was on his testimony that the whole secret league of robbers was exposed and eventually brought to justice. He gave the following list:

Henry Plummer was chief of the gang; 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; 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 Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy Terwilliger, Gad Moore, were roadsters.

The noose was now tightening around the neck of the outlaw, Henry Plummer, whose adroitness had so long stood him in good stead. The honest miners found that their sheriff was the leader of the outlaws! His doom was said then and there, with that of all these others.

A party of the Virginia City law and order men slipped over to Bannack, Henry Plummer's home. In a few hours the news had spread of what had happened at the other camps, and a branch organization of the Vigilantes was formed for Bannack. Stinson and Ray were now arrested, and then Plummer himself, the chief, the brains of all this long-secret band of marauders. He was surprised with his coat and arms off, and taken prisoner. A few moments later, he was facing a scaffold, where, as sheriff, he had lately hung a man. The law had no delays. No court could quibble here. Not all Plummer's wealth could save him now, nor all his intellect and cool audacity.

An agony of remorse and fear now came upon the outlaw chief. He fell upon his knees, called upon God to save him, begged, pleaded, wept like a child, declared that he was too wicked to die thus soon and unprepared. It was useless. The full proof of all his many crimes was laid before him.

Ray, writhing and cursing, was the first to be hanged. He got his finger under the rope around his neck and died hard, but died. Stinson, also cursing, went next. It was then time for Plummer, and those who had this work in hand felt compunction at hanging a man so able, so urbane and so commanding. None the less, he was told to prepare. He asked for time to pray, and was told to pray from the cross-beam. He said good-by to a friend or two, and asked his executioners to "give him a good drop." He seemed to fear suffering, he who had caused so much suffering. To oblige him, the men lifted his body high up and let it fall, and he died with little struggle.

To cut short a long story of bloody justice, it may be added that of the men named as guilty by Yager every one was arrested, tried, and hung by the Vigilantes. Plummer for some time must have dreaded detection, for he tried to cover up his guilt by writing back home to the States that he was in danger of being hanged on account of his Union sympathies. His family would not believe his guilt, and looked on him as a martyr. They sent out a brother and sister to look into the matter, but these too found proof which left them no chance to doubt. The whole ghastly revelation of a misspent life lay before them. Even Plummer's wife, whom he loved very much and who was a good woman, was at last convinced of what at first she could not believe. Plummer had been able to conceal from even his wife the least suspicion that he was not an honorable man. His wife was east in the States at the time of his death.

Plummer went under his true name. George Ives was a Wisconsin boy from near Racine. Both he and Plummer were twenty-seven years of age when killed, but they had compressed much evil into so short a span. Plummer himself was a master of men, a brave and cool spirit, an expert with weapons, and in all not a bad specimen of the bad man at his worst. He was a murderer, but after all was not enough a murderer. No outlaw of later years so closely resembled the great outlaw, John A. Murrell, as did Henry Plummer, but the latter differed in one regard:—he spared victims, who later arose to accuse him.

The frontier has produced few bloodier records than Plummer's. He was principal or accessory, as has been stated, in more than one hundred murders, not to mention innumerable robberies and thefts. His life was lived out in scenes typical of the early Western frontier. The madness of adventure in new wild fields, the lust of gold and its unparalleled abundance drove to crime men who might have been respected and of note in proper ranks of life and in other surroundings.



Chapter VIII

Boone Helm—A Murderer, Cannibal, and Robber—A Typical Specimen of Absolute Human Depravity.

Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast, if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way except the readiness to rob and kill. Boone Helm was bad, and nothing in the world could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for him no name but ruffian can fitly apply.

Helm was born in Kentucky, but his family moved to Missouri during his early youth, so that the boy was brought up on the borderland between civilization and the savage frontier; for this was about the time of the closing days of the old Santa Fe Trail, and the towns of Independence and Westport were still sending out their wagon trains to the far mountain regions. By the time Boone Helm was grown, and soon after his marriage, the great gold craze of California broke out, and he joined the rush westward. Already he was a murderer, and already he had a reputation as a quarrelsome and dangerous man. He was of powerful build and turbulent temper, delighting in nothing so much as feats of strength, skill, and hardihood. His community was glad to be rid of him, as was, indeed, any community in which he ever lived.

In the California diggings, Helm continued the line of life mapped out for him from birth. He met men of his own kidney there, and was ever ready for a duel with weapons. In this way he killed several men, no one knows how many; but this sort of thing was so common in the case of so many men in those days that little attention was paid to it. It must have been a very brutal murder which at length caused him to flee the Coast to escape the vengeance of the miners. He headed north and east, after a fashion of the times following the California boom, and was bound for the mountain placers in 1853, when he is recorded as appearing at the Dalles, Oregon. He and a half-dozen companions, whom he had picked up on the way, and most of whom were strangers to each other, now started out for Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to go from there to a point below Salt Lake City.

The beginning of the terrible mountain winter season caught these men somewhere west of the main range in eastern Oregon, in the depths of as rugged a mountain region as any of the West. They were on horseback, and so could carry small provisions; but in some way they pushed on deeper and deeper into the mountains, until they got to the Bannack river, where they were attacked by Indians and chased into a country none of them knew. At last they got over east as far as the Soda Springs on the Bear river, where they were on well-known ground. By this time, however, their horses had given out, and their food was exhausted. They killed their horses, made snowshoes with the hides, and sought to reach Fort Hall. The party was now reduced to one of those awful starving marches of the wilderness which are now and then chronicled in Western life. This meant that the weak must perish where they fell.

The strength of Helm and one of the others, Burton, enabled them to push on ahead, leaving their companions behind in the mountains. Almost within reach of Fort Hall, Burton gave out and was left behind in an abandoned cabin. Helm pushed on into the old stockade, but found it also abandoned for the winter season, and he could get no food there. He then went back to where he had left Burton, and, according to his own report, he was trying to get wood for a fire when he heard a pistol-shot and returned to find that Burton had killed himself. He stayed on at this spot, and, like a hyena, preyed upon the dead body of his companion. He ate one leg of the body, and then, wrapping up the other in a piece of old shirt, threw it across his shoulder and started on further east. He had, before this on the march, declared to the party that he had practiced cannibalism at an earlier time, and proposed to do so again if it became necessary on this trip across the mountains. His calm threat was now verified. Helm was found at last at an Indian camp by John W. Powell, who learned that he was as hard a character as he had ever run across. None the less, he took care of Helm, gave him food and clothes, and took him to the settlements around Salt Lake. Powell found that Helm had a bag containing over fourteen hundred dollars in coin, which he had carried across the divide with him through all his hardships. He would take no pay from Helm, and the latter never even thanked him for his kindness, but left him as soon as he reached the Mormon settlements.

Here the abandoned ruffian boasted of what he had done, and settled down for a brief time to the customary enjoyments of the rough when in town. He spent his money, hired out as a Danite, killed a couple of men whom the Mormons wanted removed, and soon got so bad that he had to leave. Once more he headed west to California, and once more he started back north from San Francisco, for reasons satisfactory to himself. While in California, as was later learned, he undertook to rob and kill a man at an outlying ranch, who had taken him in and befriended him when he was in need and in flight from vengeance. He showed no understanding of the feeling of gratitude, no matter what was done for him or how great was his own extremity.

In Oregon Helm went back to robbery as his customary means of support, and he killed several men at this time of his life, how many will never be known. In 1862, as the mountain placers were now beginning to draw the crowds of mining men, it was natural that Boone Helm should show up at Florence. Here he killed a man in cold blood, in treachery, while his enemy was not armed, and after their quarrel had been compromised. This victim was Dutch Fred, a man of reputation as a fighter, but he had never offended Helm, who killed him at the instigation of an enemy of his victim, and possibly for hire. He shot Fred while the latter stood looking him in the face, unarmed, and, missing him with the first shot, took deliberate aim with the second and murdered his man in cold blood.

This was pretty bad even for Florence, and he had to leave. That fall he turned up far to the north, on the Fraser river, in British Columbia. Here he was once more reduced to danger on a starving foot march in the wilderness, and here, once more, he was guilty of eating the body of his companion, whom he is supposed to have slain. He was sent back by the British authorities, and for a time was held at Portland, Oregon, for safe keeping. Later he was tried at Florence for killing Dutch Fred, but the witnesses had disappeared, and people had long ago lost interest in the crime by reason of others more recent. Helm escaped justice and was supposed to have gone to Texas; but he soon appeared in the several settlements which have been mentioned in the foregoing pages, and moved from one to the other. He killed many more men, how many in all was never known.

The courage and hardihood of Boone Helm were in evidence to the close of his life. Three men of the Vigilantes did the dangerous work of arresting him, and took him by closing in on him as he stood in the street talking. "If I'd had a chance," said he, "or if I had guessed what you all were up to, you'd never have taken me." He claimed not to know what was wanted of him when brought before the judges of the Vigilante court, and solemnly declared that he had never killed a man in all his life! They made him kiss the Bible and swear to this over again just to see to what lengths his perjured and depraved soul would go. He swore on the Bible with perfect calmness! His captors were not moved by this, and indeed Helm was little expectant that they would be. He called aside one of them whom he knew, declined a clergyman, and confessed to a murder or so in Missouri and in California, admitted that he had been imprisoned once or twice, but denied that he had been a road agent. He accused some of his warmest friends of the latter crime. Jack Gallegher, also under arrest, heard him thus incriminate himself and others of the gang and called him all the names in the calendar, telling him he ought to die.

"I have looked at death in all forms," said Helm, coolly, "and I am not afraid to die." He then asked for a glass of whiskey, as did a good many of these murderers when they were brought to the gallows. From that time on he was cool and unconcerned, and showed a finish worthy of one ambitious to be thought wholly bad.

There were six thousand men assembled in Virginia City to see the executions of these criminals, who were fast being rounded up and hung by the citizens. The place of execution was in a half-finished log building. The ropes were passed over the ridge-pole, and, as the front of the building was open, a full view was offered of the murderers as they stood on the boxes arranged for the drops. Boone Helm looked around at his friends placed for death, and told Jack Gallegher to "stop making such a fuss." "There's no use being afraid to die," said he; and indeed there probably never lived a man more actually devoid of all sense of fear. He valued neither the life of others nor his own. He saw that the end had come, and was careless about the rest. He had a sore finger, which was tied up, and this seemed to trouble him more than anything else. There was some delay about the confessions and the last offices of those who prayed for the condemned, and this seemed to irritate Boone Helm.

"For God's sake," said he, "if you're going to hang me, I want you to do it and get through with it. If not, I want you to tie up my finger for me."

"Give me that overcoat of yours, Jack," he said to Gallegher, as the latter was stripped for the noose.

"You won't need it now," replied Gallegher, who was dying blasphemous. About then, George Lane, one of the line of men about to be hung, jumped off his box on his own account. "There's one gone to hell," remarked Boone Helm, philosophically. Gallegher was hanged next, and as he struggled his former friend watched him calmly. "Kick away, old fellow," said Boone Helm. Then, as though suddenly resolved to end it, he commented, "My turn next. I'll be in hell with you in a minute!"

Boone Helm was a Confederate and a bitter one, and this seems to have remained with him to the last. "Every man for his principles!" he shouted. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" He sprang off the box; and so he finished, utterly hard and reckless to the last.



Chapter IX

Death Scenes of Desperadoes—How Bad Men Died—The Last Moments of Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold—Utterances of Terror, of Defiance, and of Cowardice.

There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves. "Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last was the test of actual or, as it were, of professional badness. One who admitted himself bad was willing to die with his boots on. Honest men were not, and more than one early Western man fatally shot had his friends take off his boots before he died, so that he might not go with the stain of desperadoism attached to his name.

Some bad men died unrepentant and defiant. Others broke down and wept and begged. A great oblivion enshrouds most of these utterances, for few Vigilante movements ever reached importance enough to permit those who participated to make publicly known their own participation in them. Indeed, no man ever concerned in a law and order execution ever liked to talk about it. Tradition, however, has preserved the exact utterances of many bad men. Report is preserved, in a general way, of many of the rustlers hung by the cattle men in the "regulator" movement in Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska in the late '70's. "Give me a chew of tobacco, folks," said one. "Meet you in hell, fellows," remarked others of these rustlers when the last moment arrived. "So-long, boys," was a not infrequent remark as the noose tightened. Many of these men were brave, and some of them were hung for what they considered no crime.

Henry Plummer, whose fate has been described in a previous chapter, was one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless, but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. On the whole, his end hardly left him enshrouded with much glamor of courage; although the latter term is relative in the bad man, who might be brave at one time and cowardly at another, as was often proved.



Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died full of profanity and curses, heaping upon their executioners all manner of abuse. They seemed to be animated by no understanding of a life hereafter, and were concerned only in their animal instinct to hold on to this one as long as they might. Yet Stinson, of a good Indiana family, was a bright and studious and well-read boy, of whom many good things had been predicted.

Dutch John, when faced with death, acted much as his chief, Henry Plummer, had done. He begged and pleaded, and asked for mutilation, disfigurement, anything, if only he might still live. But, like Plummer, at the very last moment he pulled together and died calmly. "How long will it take me to die?" he asked. "I have never seen anyone hanged." They told him it would be very short and that he would not suffer much, and this seemed to please him. Nearly all these desperadoes seemed to dread death by hanging. The Territory of Utah allowed a felon convicted under death penalty to choose the manner of his death, whether by hanging, beheading, or shooting; but no record remains of any prisoner who did not choose death by shooting. A curiosity as to the sensation of hanging was evinced in the words of several who were hung by Vigilantes.

In the largest hanging made in this Montana work, there were five men executed one after the other: Clubfoot George, Hayes Lyons, Jack Gallegher, Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, all known to be members of the Plummer gang. George and Parish at first declared that they were innocent—the first word of most of these men when they were apprehended. Parish died silent. George had spent some hours with a clergyman, and was apparently repentant. Just as he reached the box, he saw a friend peering through a crack in the wall. "Good-by, old fellow," he called out, and sprang to his own death without waiting for the box to be pulled from under his feet.

Hayes Lyons asked to see his mistress to say good-by to her before he died, but was refused. He kept on pleading for his life to the very last instant, after he had told the men to take his body to his mistress for burial. This woman was really the cause of Lyons' undoing. He had been warned, and would have left the country but for her. A woman was very often the cause of a desperado's apprehension.

Jack Gallegher in his last moments was, if possible, more repulsive even than Boone Helm. The latter was brave, but Gallegher was a coward, and spent his time in cursing his captors and pitying himself. He tried to be merry. "How do I look with a halter around my neck?" he asked facetiously of a bystander. He asked often for whiskey and this was given him. A moment later he said, "I want one more drink of whiskey before I die." This was when the noose was tight around his neck, and the men were disgusted with him for the remark. One remarked, "Give him the whiskey"; so the rope, which was passed over the beam above him and fastened to a side log of the building, was loosened to oblige him. "Slack off the rope, can't you," cried Gallegher, "and let a man have a parting drink." He bent his head down against the rope and drank a tumblerful of whiskey at a gulp. Then he called down curses on the men who were about him, and kept it up until they cut him short by jerking away the box from under his feet.

A peculiar instance of unconscious, but grim, humor was afforded at Gallegher's execution. Just as he was led to the box and ordered to climb up, he drew a pocket-knife and declared he would kill himself and not be hanged in public. A Vigilante covered him with a six-shooter. "Drop that, Jack," he exclaimed, "or I'll blow your head off." So Gallegher, having the choice of death between shooting, hanging or beheading, chose hanging after all! He was a coward.

Cy Skinner, when on the way to the scaffold, broke and ran, calling on his captors to shoot. They declined, and hanged him. Alex Carter, who was on the fatal line with Skinner in that lot, was disgusted with him for running. He asked for a smoke while the men were waiting, and died with a lie on his lips—"I am innocent." That is not an infrequent declaration of criminals at the last. The lie is only a blind clinging to the last possible means of escape, and is the same as the instinct for self-preservation, a crime swallowed up in guilt.

Johnny Cooper wanted a "good smoke" before he died, and was given it. Bob Zachary died without fear, and praying forgiveness on his executioners. Steve Marshland asked to be pardoned because of his youth. "You should have thought of that before," was the grim reply. He was adjudged old enough to die, as he had been old enough to kill.

George Shears was one of the gamest of the lot. He seemed indifferent about it all after his capture, and, when he was told that he was to be hanged, he remarked that he ought to be glad it was no worse. He was executed in the barn at a ranch where he was caught, and, conveniences being few, a ladder was used instead of a box or other drop. He was told to ascend the latter, and did so without the least hesitation or evidence of concern. "Gentlemen," said he, "I am not used to this business, never having been hung before. Shall I jump off or slide off?" They told him to "jump, of course," and he took this advice. "All right. Good-by!" he said, and sprang off with unconcern.

Whiskey Bill was not given much chance for last words. He was hung from horseback, the noose being dropped down from a tree to his neck as he sat on a horse behind one of the Vigilantes. "Good-by, Bill," was the remark of the latter, as he spurred his horse and left Bill hanging.

One of the most singular phenomena of these executions was that of Bill Hunter, who, while hanging by the neck, went through all the motions of drawing and firing his six-shooter six times. Whether the action was conscious or unconscious it is impossible to tell.

Bill Bunton resisted arrest and was pugnacious, of course declaring his innocence. At the last he showed great gameness. He was particular about the manner in which the knot of the rope was adjusted to his neck, seeming, as did many of these men, to dread any suffering while hanging. He asked if he might jump off the platform himself, and was told he might if he liked. "I care no more for hanging," he explained, "than I do for taking a drink of water, but I'd like to have my neck broken. I'd like to have a mountain three hundred feet high to jump off from. Now, I'll give you the time: One—two—three. Here goes!"



Chapter X

Joseph A. Slade—A Man with a Newspaper Reputation—Bad, but Not as Bad as Painted—Hero of the Overland Express Route—A Product of Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product.

One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A. Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed all the ingredients for trouble in plenty. Slade lived, in the heyday of his career, just about the time when men from the East were beginning to write about the newly discovered life of the West. Bret Harte had left his indelible stamp upon the literature of the land, and Mark Twain was soon to spread widely his impressions of life as seen in "Roughing It"; while countless newspaper men and book writers were edging out and getting hearsay stories of things known at first hand by a very few careful and conscientious writers.

The hearsay man engaged in discovering the West always clung to the regular lines of travel; and almost every one who passed across the mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on the border.

Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in 1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859. At once he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man—a case of a reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by admiring but ignorant writers.

Slade was reported to have tied one of his enemies, Jules Reni, more commonly called Jules, to the stake, and to have tortured him for a day, shooting him to pieces bit by bit, and cutting off his ears, one of which he always afterward wore in his pocket as a souvenir. There was little foundation for this reputation beyond the fact that he did kill Jules, and did it after Jules had been captured and disarmed by other men. But he had been threatened time and again by Jules, and was once shot and left for dead by the latter, who emptied a pistol and a shotgun at Slade, and left him lying with thirteen bullets and buckshot in his body. Jules thought he did not need to shoot Slade any more after that, and gave directions for his burial as soon as he should have died. At that Slade rose on his elbow and promised Jules he would live and would wear one of his, Jules', ears on his watch chain; a threat which no doubt gave rise to a certain part of his ghastly reputation. Jules was hung for a while by the stage people, but was let down and released on promise of leaving the country never to return. He did not keep his promise, and it had been better for him if he had.

Jules Reni was a big Frenchman, one of that sort of early ranchers who were owners of small ranches and a limited number of cattle and horses—just enough to act as a shield for thefts of live stock, and to offer encouragement to such thefts. Before long Jules was back at his old stamping-grounds, where he was looked on as something of a bully; and at once he renewed his threats against Slade.

Slade went to the officers of the military post at Laramie, the only kind of authority then in the land, which had no sort of courts or officers, and asked them what he should do. They told him to have Jules captured and then to kill him, else Jules would do the same for him. Slade sent four men out to the ranch where Jules was stopping, about twelve miles from Laramie, while he followed in the stage-coach. These men captured Jules at a ranch a little farther down the line, and left him prisoner at the stage station. Here Slade found him in the corral, a prisoner, unarmed and at his mercy, and without hesitation he shot him, the ball striking him in the mouth. His victim fell and feigned death, but Slade—who was always described as a good pistol shot—saw that he was not killed, and told him he should have time to make his will if he desired. There is color in the charge of deliberate cruelty, but perhaps rude warrant for the cruelty, under the circumstances of treachery in which Jules had pursued Slade. At least, some time elapsed while a man was running back and forward from the house to the corral with pen and ink and paper. Jules never signed his will. When the last penful of ink came out to the corral, Jules was dead, shot through the head by Slade. This looks like cruelty of an unnecessary sort, and like taunting a helpless victim; but here the warrant for all the Slade sort of stories seems to end, and there is no evidence of his mutilating his victim, as was often described.

Slade went back to the officers of Fort Laramie, and they said he had done right and did not detain him. Nor did any of Jules' friends ever molest him. He returned to his work on the Overland. After this he grew more turbulent, and was guilty of high-handed outrages and of a general disposition to run things wherever he went. The officers at Fort Halleck arrested him and refused to turn him over to the stage line unless the latter agreed to discharge him. This was done, and now Slade, out of work, began to be bad at heart. He took to drink and drifting, and so at last turned up at the Beaverhead diggings in 1863, not much different from many others of the bad folk to be found there.

Quiet enough when sober, Slade was a maniac in drink, and this latter became his habitual condition. Now and again he sobered up, and he always was a business man and animated by an ambition to get on in the world. He worked here and there in different capacities, and at last settled on a ranch a dozen miles or so from Virginia City, where he lived with his wife, a robust, fine-looking woman of great courage and very considerable beauty, of whom he was passionately fond; although she lived almost alone in the remote cabin in the mountains, while Slade pursued his avocations, such as they were, in the settlements along Alder Gulch.

Slade now began to grow ugly and hard, and to exult in terrorizing the hard men of those hard towns. He would strike a man in the face while drinking with him, would rob his friends while playing cards, would ride into the saloons and break up the furniture, and destroy property with seeming exultation at his own maliciousness. He was often arrested, warned, and fined; and sometimes he defied such officers as went after him and refused to be arrested. His whole conduct made him a menace to the peace of this little community, which was now endeavoring to become more decent, and he fell under the fatal scrutiny of the Vigilantes, who concluded that the best thing to do was to hang Slade. He had never killed anyone as yet, although he had abused many; but it was sure that he would kill some one if allowed to run on; and, moreover, it was humiliating to have one man trying to run the town and doing as he pleased. Slade was to learn what society means, and what the social compact means, as did many of these wild men who had been running as savages outside of and independent of the law. Slade got wind of the deliberations of the Committee, as well he might when six hundred men came down from Nevada Camp to Virginia City to help in the court of the miners, before which Slade was now to come. It was the Nevada Vigilantes who were most strongly of the belief that death and not banishment was the proper punishment for Slade. The leader of the marching men calmly told Slade that the Committee had decided to hang him; and, once the news was sure, Slade broke out into lamentations.