(Click on image to see full size, use BACK button to return)I was born in Dillon, Montana in 1924. My father owned and operated the City Bakery on North Montana Street, which he had bought from his father a few years earlier. My mother was born in Bannack, the first territorial capitol of Montana. My mother's father, Louis Stahl (later Judge), had moved from Michigan to Argenta, Montana, in 1888 to work in the silver mines there. In the 1890s he moved to Bannack to a log cabin, where my mother was born in 1900. The Stahl addition to the City of Dillon is named after my grandfather, but was known for a long time as "Dutch Flat." Dutch being the term used to denote anyone from Germany or Holland. Deutsch or Duitsch, both became Dutch. My grandparents, Louis and Julia Stahl, had emigrated from Germany in 1886 to Michigan with their infant son, Paul. I grew up and went to school in Dillon, blessed by the presence of the Montana State Normal School, which meant that the teachers in the first eight grades were also faculty members of the Normal School, and were uniformly excellent teachers. My father's father had also been both a miner and a baker, and prospecting was in the blood. My Uncle Vince was an inveterate prospector when he wasn't starting, operating, or selling a bakery somewhere: Twin Bridges, Montana, Salmon, Idaho, or working for my father in Dillon. During much of the 1930s my father grubstaked one or more of the members of the Schafer family of Argenta, Montana. The old man, John (Johann), was a contemporary of my Grandfather, Louis Stahl, but had children of my father's age down to my age. I don't know how many, but all lived and grew up in the old town of Argenta, pop. about 100. One summer in the thirties, I lived with the Schafers, but more importantly I got to accompany Henry Schafer on his prospecting trips in the mountains at the head of Rattlesnake Creek. I spent one whole summer living in the mountains with Henry and two younger Schafers. Later in the 1930s my Uncle Vince built a cabin near Badger Pass, which separates Rattlesnake Creek drainage from the Grasshopper Creek drainage. The cabin was near the old Bannack - Virginia City stage road, about halfway between Bannack and Argenta. During the summer of 1938 I lived out there helping my Uncle Vice prospect for gold, and roamed the country around the Pass. So I know the Bannack - Virginia City country very well. And of course I took in the legendary stories of the righteous Vigilantes who vanquished the evil road agents, whose chief was said to be Sheriff Henry Plummer. Sometime about 1935 my father decided to introduce a new brand of bread at his bakery, which was to be machine-sliced and automatically wrapped with wax paper, a great innovation at the time. He chose the name VIGILANTE for his new bread, although the bakery continued to be the City Bakery. It was about this time that the VIGILANTE ELECTRIC COOP was established. I remember my father telling me about the 3-7-77 code which the vigilantes supposedly pinned on the bodies of the victims they hanged. Of course no one at the time regarded the men who were hanged as victims, on the contrary they were as evil as could be, wore black hats in the movies, whereas the vigilantes were righteous and wore white hats. I know of no one at the time who questioned the handed down version of the vigilantes. In 1968 I became Head of the Department of Computer Science at Montana State in Bozeman, and during a visit to Virginia City I picked up a copy of Dimsdale's VIGILANTES OF MONTANA, which I read, but had no reason to doubt . Then in 1993, after I had retired from active academic life, I found a copy of Hanging the Sheriff: A Biography of Henry Plummer, by R. E. Mather and F. E. Boswell, in the bookstore in Dillon. I marvelled at the meticulous research and careful attention to documentation the authors had put into their book, which took years to compile and write. Henry Plummer, and his wife Electa, became for the first time real people, not players in a nineteenth century melodrama. In my mind Mather and Boswell clearly demonstrated that Henry Plummer was innocent of any crime during his stay in Montana, from September, 1862, until he was hanged by a vigilante mob in Bannack on January 10, 1864. In the fall of 1996 I planned another trip to Dillon to visit my sister Esther Mooney there and my sister Merle McMannis in Hamilton. Before the trip I re-read Hanging the Sheriff, and decided to look into what present day Montana historians had to say about the vigilantes, so I bought and read the book Montana: A History of Two Centuries, by Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Revised Edition, published in 1991. It was as if the authors had not read the Mather and Boswell book. Their account is straight out of Dimsdale, the original apologist for the vigilantes. On this trip I met Mark Weber of Twin Bridges, Montana, who has devoted a great deal of time in researching the vigilantes, and who is also convinced of Plummer's innocence. He can be reached at plummerh@3rivers.net Through him I was able to buy a copy of the second Mather and Boswell book Vigilante Victims: Montana's 1864 Hanging Spree. This powerful and moving book convinced me that another look is needed at the vigilante episode. And that's what I want to present in these web pages. I hope you are informed and enriched by browsing these pages. I would greatly appreciate any feed back by email to me at any time, and on any subject of relevance to the vigilante history.
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