Vigilantes: Table of Contents
The Vigilantes of Montana:
1864 Revisited

Pages 106 - 108 from Hanging the Sheriff

The night of 14 November 1863 reads like a scene from Midsummer Night's Dream, with Sanders, Plummer, Langford, and Tilden wandering through the mists, bumping into each other, or at least trying to, but despite all the fears, accidents, and accusations, no robberies took place that night. Nothing was stolen from Tilden nor from Langford and Hauser, who continued on their five-hundred mile trek unmolested, reaching Salt Lake City with their gold intact, even though Plummer had stashed it for them the night before and knew their trip plans.

The question still remains whether Henry Tilden saw Plummer on Horse Prairie on the night of 14 November. We have no reason to doubt Sanders's judgment of the boy's honesty. Tilden was a timid adolescent, reportedly sick with consumption and separated from his family. He had come to a new land with people who did not take him into their home but had no qualms about using him to run unpleasant errands. The entire Edgerton group had been deeply impressed at their first meeting with Plummer, the only figure of authority in the strange country, who seemed so likable but was actually a "bad man." Only two days before the robbery, Plummer had come to the express office, where Tilden worked, to pick up a revolver he had ordered. When Sanders sent the boy out alone on a stormy night to accomplish an impossible mission, he had given up and returned, meeting three men who pointed guns at him and searched him; the face Tilden saw, masked or not, was that of Henry Plummer. After that traumatic night there were days of silent fear for Tilden, until at last he told the vigilantes who had robbed him and ran to the Edgerton house for rope to end the life that threatened his. We have no report of what Tilden told the vigilante group, but considering his fear of Plummer, he would not have wanted to live in the same town with the accused after having revealed his secret. His testimony would determine whether Plummer lived or was immediately hanged, and Tilden convinced those assembled that he had been able to identify Plummer that night.

The validity of his story is quite another matter. If the men were not masked, it may have been only Tilden's fear at being out alone on a dark night that caused him to interpret an encounter with armed men as an attempted robbery, even after being told by the men that they did not want his money.

On the other hand, if the men were masked, as the majority opinion seems to be, identifying any of them after 8:00 P.M. on a November night would be doubtful since as early as 8 September, the sun was setting at 6:30 P.M. Though it is likely Tilden would connect any assailant with Plummer, the first "bad man" he had known, and the gun might appear to be the same one picked up at the express office two days before, it would not have been possible to distinguish one gun from another, see the lining of a coat that a man was wearing, or perceive its color as red in the darkness. For all of these reasons -- the boy's distraught emotional state, the disguises, and the darkness -- positive identification would have been impossible.

Plummer was neither informed of Tilden's accusation against him nor asked of his whereabouts on the night in question, but had he been given the opportunity, he could have explained that he and about a dozen other well-known residents of the area spent the time rounding up a herd of horses that they feared the Indians planned to drive to the other side of the mountain. Both Sanders and Edgerton saw the party depart and return, and in a direction opposite from Horse Prairie. It was with good reason that Sanders doubted the truth of Henry Tilden's claim to have recognized Plummer among his assailants.