I remember the time very distinctly. And, with all due respect to the memory of my departed elders—the vigilantes—if, after so many years, I may be permitted to express myself freely and fully, I would say God seemed to be terribly far away from the scene that night. Before going into the details of the hanging, let us have a look into the workings of the vigilantes—that organization of men who set itself up as judge and jury and executioner. There was tactful veiling of the identity of the individual members, and little is known of the inside workings of the local vigilantes.
This much is known, however. There was one little slip — a bungle—that was, in time, the means of disclosing the identity of the local operators, but that secret was also carefully guarded until practically the last one of the vigilantes has passed on to another world beyond the reach of wagging tongues and the strong arm of organized law. There is now only one—possibly two—of the originals left.
The vigilante organization or “Committee,” as it was called, had its birth in the Far West, for the specific purpose of dealing with “road agents”—banded highwaymen and murderers. The idea traveled East and the farther it got away from the home of its origin the farther it seems to have gotten away from its original purpose.
In the sixties and seventies vigilante committees were in evidence the full length of the old Overland Trail, from California to Kansas, and the fact that Wetmore and Granada had as residents a half dozen or so of the old stage-drivers, express messengers, and pony express riders, may account, in some measure, for the local organization of vigilantes. And, if so, by the irony of fate, it was in the home of a former express messenger that the vigilantes claimed their first and only victim. It is known that at least two of the old stage employees were vigilantes.
Without question, the idea filtered in from the West. The almost constant stream of returning gold-seekers passing through Granada over the Old Trail at a time when the vigilantes were very active in the West — particularly in Montana—may have scattered the seed.
While I was out in the western mining district, a quarter of a century ago, chasing fickle fortune—which was always just a few jumps ahead of me—I heard much about the exploits of road agents, and the work of the vigilantes.
In the Old West, at Bannack, Virginia City, and Nevada, in the Alder Gulch section of Montana, where a hundred million dollars in placer gold was recovered in the early sixties, road agents plundered and killed, without mercy.
Placer gold, as many know, is free gold that has been eroded from exposed gold-bearing ledges and deposited in the sands and gravel along the water courses. It was the first form of gold-mining in the West—the lure that caused the great stampede to California in 1849. It has rightfully been called “the poor man’s gold,” because of the comparative ease in which it is recovered.
The flush times in the Alder Gulch section, which contained about twenty thousand eager gold diggers, made rich pickings for the road agents. They preyed upon individual miners, on express companies, on anyone, anywhere they could grab gold-dust, or minted gold, the money of the times. And they were killers, every one of them.
The Montana vigilantes, sworn to secrecy and loyalty, with a by-law boldly asserting, “The only punishment that shall be inflicted by this committee is Death,” undertook the job of exterminating the road agents. And in one month’s time twenty-one of the notorious Henry Plummer gang were hung. The job was pepped up a bit when the first victims squealed on the others. This is history of the Montana vigilantes. They patterned after the California vigilantes. And it is to be assumed that vigilantes everywhere were organized along the same lines.