Ring Out Montana’s Sesquicentennial (1864-2014)

When Montana’s birth year ended and the first day of 1865 dawned, the Montana Post heralded the milestone with a long poem, perhaps penned by editor Thomas Dimsdale. It is addressed to the paper’s subscribers, commemorating the territory’s eventful first year that included the Civil War, the Vigilantes’ work, and laying the cornerstones of religion and education.

By 1864, Virginia City was Montana's first commercial and social hub. This photo was taken circa 1866.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

As Montana’s sesquicentennial comes to an end, here is a much-shortened version, taken with quite a bit of poetic license, of a celebratory epic:

Wake up! Wake Up! This New Year’s morn.
The Old Year’s dead—the New is born!
Wake up! The carrier’s heart is stirred
To emulate the early bird,
This birthday dawn of ‘Sixty-five,
And let you know he’s still alive.

And while you hear him gladly sing,
Toss him your New Year offering,
Nuggets are welcome to his hand
With good fair dust without much sand;
For Greenbacks, too, his fingers itch,
Since Jeff is nearing that “last ditch.”

What mighty burdens of the Past
Has the Old Year behind him cast;
Good old Uncle Sam—the rare old chap—
Has blazoned on his ample map
Another name—Montana fair—
And promises a future rare.

She’s put her servants all to work
To find where golden treasures lurk—
They’ve torn the gulches, burrowed far
In mountain, hill and rocky bar;
They’ve bound the waters to their use,
To turn the wheel and run the sluice.

The Vigilantes, staunch and true,
Have done a useful thing or two.
And smiling farms in valleys fair
Are made to team with riches rare.
They’ve builded towns with magic art
Where Traffic holds her humming mart.

Another year! How like an eagle’s flight—
How like a vision of the Summer’s night,
Its dying months have swiftly sped—
And great events put to bed.
The mighty page of History seldom bore
A nobler tablet than old Sixty-four.  

Happy New Year, Montana, and here’s to 150 more!

P.S. You can view the original poem on Chronicling America.

A Gruesome Legacy

Violence in Montana’s mining camps affected everyone, and Helena’s Hangman’s Tree was a community icon. Mary Ronan recalled in her memoir, Girl from the Gulches, that one morning she and her classmates saw a man hanging from the tree. She never forgot  “…that pitiful object, with bruised head, disarrayed vest and trousers, with boots so stiff, so worn, so wrinkled, so strangely the most poignant of all the gruesome details.” Nearly seventy years later as she dictated her memories to her daughter, Mary still remembered.

David Hilger recalled climbing the tree’s dead branches as a youngster and examining rope burns on its lower limbs. He and his friends played marbles beneath it. On April 30, 1870, vigilantes interrupted their game for the lynching of Arthur Compton and Joseph Wilson. Once the double hanging was over, according to Hilger, the boys resumed their game. These were the last two recorded hangings on the Hangman’s Tree.

Records show that some of the tree’s victims were buried in various Helena cemeteries, but the burial places of others are unknown.  At least two coffins have surfaced in the neighborhood where the Hangman’s Tree once stood. In 1900, a workman digging a foundation for an addition in a backyard uncovered one coffin. A crew hit the other working on gas lines on Davis Street in 1931. Were these victims of the Hangman’s Tree? Both burials were in close proximity to the spot where the tree once stood.

This photo of James Daniels' hanging in 1866 clearly shows his high-topped boots.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 948-124

David Hilger examined the contents of the pine box discovered in 1931. Along with shreds of clothing were the remains of the victim’s unusual high topped boots. Hilger compared the boots with a photograph of the 1866 hanging of James Daniels. The boots, further described as “wrinkled,” seemed to match those in the photograph. If the remains were those of Daniels, the boots could be the ones that Mary Ronan described.  

Hangman's Tree

Virginia City placers dwindled and many transferred their stores and shops to Helena to “mine the miners.” The settlement boomed. William Sprague, an early settler, recalled that there were one thousand people at Last Chance Gulch by May 1865 and, “There was a good deal of shooting and hanging. The shooting was most all done by the gamblers, other people having very little trouble.”  By summer, there were three thousand residents. John Keene committed the first murder on June 7, 1865, when he killed Harry Slater outside a Bridge Street saloon. There being no government presence, Helena’s vigilance committee escorted Keene to the Hangman’s Tree in Dry Gulch. There he became the first of some dozen recorded victims who breathed their last on the gnarled branches. However, territorial Supreme Court justice Judge Lyman Munson observed upon arrival at Helena in July 1865 that some claimed the tree had already seen eight victims.
The venerable ponderosa pine stood until 1875 when the Reverend William Shippen chopped it down. He claimed flooding had loosened its roots, and the tree could fall on his barn and kill his horse. Citizens were incensed at the loss of this symbolic landmark, and hundreds crowded the neighborhood to take souvenir slivers of the tree. In 1913 when excavating for an addition on the home of Jacob Opp, workmen encountered the roots and found them as stable as if the tree were still alive. The tree’s exact location was on the property line between 521 Hillsdale and 528 Highland, just west of Blake Street.

Helena's Hangman's Tree appears on this map, drawn in 1875, just before the tree was cut down. Its placement is only approximate. Montana Historical Society Research Center Map Collection.

The activities of the Helena vigilante group—not the same as the group in Bannack and Virginia City—made a lasting impression on the community, and numerous eyewitnesses left accounts of their gruesome work. Rachel Parkinson remembered the morning she and a friend took an early-morning walk to the outskirts of town and came nearly face to face with the body of a man hanging on the scraggly tree. That same morning, children caught glimpses of the dangling corpse from their Rodney Street schoolyard. A few years later, as David Hilger and his young friends played marbles beneath the branches of the ill-famed tree, men arrived to scatter the boys so that ghastly business could be done. When the hanging was over, the boys resumed their game.

Captain James Williams

Pennsylvania native James Williams was the son of Irish and Welsh immigrants. The West lured him as a young man. In 1856, Williams was involved in the violent Border Wars in Kansas where he was a “Free State” man. He followed the rush to Pikes Peak in 1858 and came to Bannack with a wagon train from Denver in 1862. In the absence of a leader, the travelers elected Williams to lead the train and thereafter he was known as Captain, or Cap, for short. Cap Williams followed the rush to Alder Gulch in 1863. Then during those dark turbulent days of lawlessness, he again served as captain, this time of the vigilantes. When robberies and murders terrified citizens, Cap Williams stepped forward to lead the vigilantes in the capture and hanging of some two dozen suspected road agents during winter of 1863-1864.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 945-626

When this work was finished, Cap married and settled down in the emerald green ranchlands of Madison County’s Ruby Valley. But in March of 1887, searcher’s discovered Cap’s body hidden in a thicket. The newspapers reported that Cap had laid out his mittens and scarf as a pillow. He took a fatal dose of laudanum. He lay down knowing sleep would take over and the cold winter weather would do the rest. Some speculated that Virginia City banker Henry Elling was about to foreclose on his ranch. Others believed that his role as a vigilante weighed so heavily upon him that he could no longer live with the burden. Some however, had a different theory. Cap was a man of integrity, and he would never have willingly left his wife and seven children. Some believe that sentiments against Cap were still rife, and that he had enemies. Perhaps, they speculated, someone came along in the cold and offered him a fatal drink. A tombstone in a tiny burial ground today marks Cap’s grave. We will never know for sure what put him there.

Hangman’s Tree

A lone Ponderosa pine, just west of Helena's present-day Blake Street between Highland and Hillsdale, served as the town’s Hangman’s Tree. It was the only tree left standing in 1865 after miners had denuded the countryside for cabins and sluices. Mary Sheehan Ronan attended school up the hill in a simple cabin at Rodney and Broadway. From the schoolyard the children had a clear view of the lone Ponderosa. One morning as they arrived at school, the children saw the limp form of a man dangling from the tree. The boys ran up and down the gulch, speculating about the “bad man” who received such awful punishment.  Mary later wrote: “I hated the talk. It made me shiver… that dreadful, pitiful object, with bruised head, disarrayed vest and trousers, with boots so stiff, so worn, so wrinkled, so strangely the most poignant of all the gruesome details. I tried to forget, but I have never forgotten.” At least eleven men suffered this fate on the famed Hangman’s Tree. The last of the eleven hangings took place in 1870 when vigilantes hanged Arthur Compton and Joe Wilson for the attempted murder of a local rancher. Photographer Mary Ann Eckert captured the grisly scene in a graphic, horrific photograph.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 948-121

Until recently a copy of it graced the hallway of a Helena elementary school, a strong message that crime doesn’t pay. In 1875, thousands thronged the neighborhood to cut a souvenir sliver from the tree when Reverend Shippen, a Methodist minister, cut it down. He claimed recent flooding had undermined its roots and the tree was so unstable that he feared it would fall on his barn and kill his horse. Many years later, while workers were digging a foundation for a new house, the huge roots of the Hangman’s Tree came to light. They were just as sturdy and secure as they must have been when the tree was young.

P.S. Tales of hauntings abound throughout the neighborhood around the tree. Read about them in Beyond Spirit Tailings, now available as an ebook.

Friday Photo: Was Henry Plummer Innocent?

Recently, I got to chat with radio host Aaron Flint about Henry Plummer and the vigilantes, Custer's dogs, Langford Peel's tombstone, and lots of other wonderful tidbits from Montana history. Here's a link to Voices of Montana where you can hear the whole conversation.


E.C. Schoettner, photographer, Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives.

We'll probably never have absolute proof of Henry Plummer's guilt or innocence. But while you listen to the show and ponder the evidence, here's a photo of his grave. Plummer was buried in Hangman's Gulch within sight of Bannack.

Mining Camp Thanksgiving

Abraham Lincoln set a precedent during his presidency proclaiming the national observance of Thanksgiving the last Thursday in November. In 1863 Harriet and Wilbur Sanders, the soon to be famous vigilante prosecutor, spent their first Montana Thanksgiving at Bannack.

Wilbur Fisk Sanders. R.A. Lewis, photographer
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Goods were scarce, freight was slow arriving, and no one even thought about serving a turkey. Near neighbors invited Harriet and Wilbur along with Henry Edgerton, Sanders’ uncle, to Thanksgiving dinner. This neighbor wanted to make a good impression on the family. Edgerton was the newly appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Idaho Territory, which then included present-day Montana. Their host offered the invitation well in advance. He miraculously procured a turkey—an unheard of, unbelievable luxury—for thirty dollars in gold dust, and paid a fortune to have it freighted all the way from Salt Lake City. Harriet wrote later that their Thanksgiving meal was as fine and beautifully cooked as any meal she ever enjoyed in New York City’s finest restaurant. Unfortunately, their host failed to make a good impression. In early January, just weeks later, Sanders and the vigilantes saw to the hanging of Sheriff Henry Plummer, the same man who had hosted their Thanksgiving Day feast.


Bill for the coffin and burial of Henry Plummer
Montana Historical Society Archives



Robber’s Roost

Because events supposedly connected to Sherriff Henry Plummer and his suspected gang occurred near the Daly ranch in 1863 and 1864, mystery, legend, and mistaken identity have long been part of the history of the stage stop called Robber’s Roost. Although it never served as a gathering place for the road agents and no early-day murders have been documented there, the inn is historically important as a link between the two territorial capitals—Bannack and Virginia City—and one of few surviving log stage stations of this very early territorial period. Orlin Fitzgerald Gammell, who was born in 1846 and died in 1952, helped procure the logs that built Robber’s Roost. He says in his written reminiscence that ranch owner Pete Daly built the structure in the winter of 1866–1867, well after the vigilante hangings of Sheriff Henry Plummer and other suspected road agents.

From http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

Robber’s Roost never served as a hideout for robbers during that turbulent time, but it did later serve as an inn and stage station along the busy road between Bannack and Virginia City. So-called Robber’s Roost is actually important for a different reason. It was the place where Bill Fairweather, credited as the discoverer of the vast Alder Gulch gold deposits, died in 1875. Mrs. Daly cared for him during the final stages of acute alcoholism. He died penniless at the age of thirty-nine.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Bill Hynson

Bill Hynson was a bad apple and a rough character who, in a strange manner, scripted his own death at Fort Benton in 1868. When saloon patrons who had overindulged began to report money missing from their pockets, many suspected Hynson. Locals observed Hynson keeping company with inebriated saloon patrons whose funds came up short. The local vigilance committee—that Hynson, ironically, took some credit for organizing—planned a trap to catch the perpetrator. They planted a supposedly drunken patron with heavy pockets in the local saloon. The plant pretended to pass out, and Hynson helped himself to the man’s pockets. The next day, the committee informed Hynson that the criminal had been discovered. Deputy Marshall X. Beidler was in town and the vigilantes announced that they intended to have a hanging. Hynson, unaware that he had been observed, volunteered to supply the rope and directed old-time trapper Henry Mills to dig a grave. Hynson promised Mills that in due time he would supply the corpse. Marshall Beidler, a cruel man well versed in the art of hanging, took the rope Hynson offered and placed it over his neck. Without a word, Hynson’s life was quickly snuffed. The corpse that filled the waiting grave was Hynson himself. His was one of three known vigilante hangings in Fort Benton.

Wilbur Fisk Sanders

Over the course of more than a century, many illustrious men—and women—have served Montana as legislators. Our current lawmakers follow in some very big footsteps. One of the best known is Wilbur Fisk Sanders, whose long career as an attorney famed for his speechmaking began with a famous trial in Nevada City on a snowy December day in 1863.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 944-853

Sanders was the only man brave enough to prosecute George Ives, a suspected road agent accused of a brutal murder. Ives’s trial, conviction, and swift hanging on Nevada City’s main street served as catalyst to the forming of the famous vigilantes a few days later. Sanders’s first home in Virginia City and his second home—now the Sanders Bed and Breakfast in Helena—are important historical sites. Throughout his long career, Sanders was always outspoken and not easily intimidated. One winter day in Helena Episcopal Bishop Daniel Tuttle and Sanders met on a steep and icy street, and at that moment Sanders slipped and fell. The Bishop looked down on the prostrate man and observed, “The wicked stand in slippery places, Mr. Sanders.” Looking up, Sanders shot back, “I see they do Bishop, but damned if I see how they can.”

From Montana Moments: History on the Go