A Brief Biography of Edwin Purple

Edwin Purple was a native of New York who joined the California gold rush in 1850. In 1861 he moved to Salt Lake City, but in the spring of 1862 when the news of the rich strikes in Idaho reached there, he organized a wagon train of goods to search for the rich diggings. He settled briefly in the Deer Lodge valley, established a store there, but moved the the richer mines at Bannack in December 1862. He remained in Bannack until December of 1863, when ill health forced him to return to New York, never to set foot in Montana again.

Although he missed the trial of George Ives, the last miners court trial, and the lynching spree of the vigilantes starting in January of 1864, this did not stop him from commenting on these events when he finally wrote his manuscript many years later.

He was a staunch friend of Nathanial Langford, and with him visited the brother and sister of Henry Plummer in New York. This was, at least on the part of Langford, a self-serving, cruel undertaking, to forestall any action on the part of the family of the vigilante victim Henry Plummer to track down and possibly prosecute the perpetrators.

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