In company with a friend, he visited his comrades, Hunter and Carter, at Brown’s Gulch, and on their way back, among the hills which form, as it were, the picket line of the Ramshorn Mountains, the two met Anton M. Holter, now a citizen of Virginia. They politely invited him to replenish their exchequers by a draft on his own, which, under the circumstances, he instantly did; but he was able at the moment to honor only a small check. They read him a lecture upon the impropriety of travelling with so small a sum in his possession, and then, as an emphatic confirmation of their expressed displeasure, George drew his revolver, and, aiming at his head, sent a ball through his hat, grazing his scalp. A second shot, with more deliberate aim, was only prevented by the badness of the cap. After this failure, this “Perfect gentleman” went his way, and so did Holter, doubtless blessing the cap maker.
Tex was a frequent companion of Ives, who was also intimate with Plummer, and George used frequently to show their letters, written in cypher, to unskilled if not unsuspecting citizens. He spent a life of ceaseless and active wickedness up to the very day of his capture.
Perhaps the most daring and cold blooded of all his crimes was the murder which he committed near the Cold Spring Ranch. A man had been whipped for larceny near Nevada, and to escape the sting of the lash, he offered to give information about the Road Agents. Ives heard of it, and meeting him purposely between Virginia and Dempsey’s, he deliberately fired at him with his double-barrelled gun. The gun was so badly loaded, and the man’s coat so thickly padded that the buckshot did not take effect, upon which he coolly drew his revolver and, talking to him all the time, shot him dead. This deed was perpetrated in broad daylight, on a highway—a very Bloomingdale Road of the community—and yet, there, in plain view of Daley’s and the Cold Spring Ranch, with two or three other teams in sight, he assassinated his victim, in a cool and business like manner, and when the murdered man had fallen from his horse, he took the animal by the bridle and led it off among the hills.
Ives then went to George Hilderman and told him that he should like to stay at his wakiup for a few days, as he had killed a man near Cold Spring Ranch, and there might be some stir and excitement about it.
In about half an hour after, some travellers arrived at the scene of murder. The body was still warm, but lifeless, and some of the neighbors from the surrounding ranches dug a lonely grave in the beautiful valley, and there, nameless, uncoffined and unwept, the poor victim:
“Life’s fitful fever over,
Sleeps well.”
The passer-by may even now notice the solitary grave, where he lies, marked as it still is by the upheaved earth, on the left side of the road as he goes down the valley, about a mile on the Virginia side of the Cold Spring Ranch.
All along the route the ranchmen knew the Road Agents, but the certainty of instant death in case they revealed what they knew enforced their silence, even when they were really desirous of giving information or warning.
Nicholas Tbalt had sold a span of mules to his employers, Butschy & Clark, who paid him the money. Taking the gold with him, he went to Dempsey’s Ranch to bring up the animals. Not returning for some time, they concluded that he had run away with the mules, and were greatly grieved that a person they had trusted so implicitly should deceive them. They were, however, mistaken. Faithful to his trust, he had gone for the mules, and met his death from the hand of George Ives, who shot him, robbed him of his money, and stole his mules. Ives first accused Long John of the deed; but he was innocent of it, as was also Hilderman, who was a petty thief and hider, but neither murderer nor Road Agent. His gastronomic feats at Bannack had procured him the name, the American Pie-Eater. Ives contradicted himself at his execution, stating that Aleck Carter was the murderer; but in this he wronged his own soul. His was the bloody hand that committed the crime. Long John said, on his examination at the trial, that he did not see the shots fired, but that he saw Nicholas coming with the mules, and George Ives going to meet him; that Ives rode up shortly after with the mules, and said that the Dutchman would never trouble anybody again.
The body of the slaughtered young man lay frozen, stiff and stark, among the sage brush, whither it had been dragged, unseen of man; but the eye of Omniscience rested on the blood-stained corpse, and the fiat of the Eternal Judge ordered the wild bird of the mountains to point out the spot, and, by a miracle, to reveal the crime. It was the finger of God that indicated the scene of the assassination, and it was His will stirring in the hearts of the honest and indignant gazers on the ghastly remains of Tbalt that organized the party which, though not then formally enrolled as a Vigilance Committee, was the nucleus and embryo of the order—the germ from which sprang that goodly tree, under the shadow of whose wide-spreading branches the citizens of Montana can lie down and sleep in peace.