In spite of the considerable volume of literature which has been published on the subject, anyone whose mind is not stultified by romanticism is bound to admit that the history of the Montana Vigilantes is very imperfectly known. This is something of a blemish on the writing of the state. Dimsdale wrote his little book almost a century ago, Langford came out with his more than sixty years past, and, the writing that has been done since has mostly been a reworking of these two authors.[1] If one does not find what he is looking for in Dimsdale and Langford, he is not likely to find it at all. I do not mean to suggest that we can get at the truth of the Vigilante movement simply by adding new information to that which we already have, for I believe that the greatest failing has been in making poor use of the older materials.
Perhaps if we could be certain of finding new evidence at least as good as the old it would be wise to postpone any rigorous reexamination of the standard literature until the hoped-for discoveries took place. The recovery of records during recent decades has on the whole been so unimpressive that it is no longer reasonable to expect future finds of importance. Such tidbits as turn up, helpful though they may be in minor respects, cannot and do not alter the realities of Vigilante history.[2] We are very much like the classicists in our dependence upon a few sources of doubtful merit. Let us make a virtue of necessity by assuming, as is indeed the case, that Dimsdale and Langford are unreliable, and apply our critical knives to the puffy corpulence of their literary remains in order to find out what, if anything, is buried inside. I propose in this place to examine certain things which they either mentioned with reluctance or not at all, with a view of finding the answer to two questions: Was the Vigilante movement universally popular in Montana; and if not, why not? It is a large investigation, and to get anywhere with it, in a limited space, I must assume that my readers have read either Dimsdale or Langford. I do not apologize for this, because both books are entertaining, so entertaining that a good many people have augmented their incomes considerably by rewriting them and adding colorful matter of their own invention. Whether these sums have been fairly earned is a question which the reader must answer for himself, after giving me a chance to invoke the statute of frauds.
A good place to start is with Langford's book of 1890. Mr. Langford was a man of high purpose, and what that purpose was he hastened to make clear the moment he took up his pen. If he enlivens his narrative with melodramatic writing, he tells us, it is to show the situation in its darkest colors so that the world might know why the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. In simpler terms, he proposes to justify them. To justify them to whom? Drawing upon scattered remarks in his book, modern writers have supposed that he was concerned with certain criticisms of the Vigilantes which were current many years after the first period of activity. Although the whitewashing of the movement was already an established tradition in Montana when Langford began to compose, there had indeed been something of a reaction. Col. W. F. Sanders was nettled by it and showed his irritation in a speech before the Bar Association in 1886.[3] As everyone knows, Vigilante raids on the Musselshell by Granville Stuart and other stockmen in 1884 were openly denounced at the time. A story was spread to the effect that the ferocity of the plainsmen was so great that Stuart executed his own son upon finding him with the criminals.[4] Unprejudiced readers will concede that people who found fault with Vigilante activity in the 1880's might easily have come to believe that such proceedings had been wrong from the first.[5]
I myself question whether there was ever as complete a break in public sentiment as Langford and later writers suggest. As early as 1867 an attempt by the Helena Vigilantes to revive their former organization was publicly condemned by a special group formed for that purpose. This group limited itself to a criticism of the methods of the Vigilantes, but I think they were out to eliminate Vigilante activity altogether. Judge for yourself. Here is the notice the anti-Vigilantes ran in the Montana Post:[6]
We now, as a sworn band of law-abiding citizens, do hereby solemnly swear that the first man that is hanged by the Vigilantes of this place, we will retaliate five for one unless it be done in broad daylight, so that all may know what it is for. We are all well satisfied that in times past you did do some glorious work, but the time has come when law should be enforced. Old fellow-members, the time is not like it was. We had good men with us; but now there is a great change. There is not a thief comes to this country but what 'rings' himself into the present Committee. We know you all. You must not think you can do as you please. We are American citizens, and you shall not drive and hang whom you please.It is worthwhile remembering that when Dimsdale wrote his book, two years before the incident just related and a quarter of a century before Langford, he approached the Vigilantes in the same apologetic spirit as his successor and gave the same reasons for it. He would demonstrate "not only the necessity for their action, but the equity of their proceedings." I am unable to follow writers who gratuitously assume that he, and Langford, too, were writing with Eastern readers in mind; the difference here being that Dimsdale was writing almost contemporaneously with the events he described, too early, I think, for Eastern reaction to have become known. He may, of course, have been anticipating a bad reaction from the East and seeking to forestall it. One wonders why he wrote his book at all, if that was on his mind. Granville Stuart's pro-Montana pamphlet of 1865 ignored the Vigilantes completely, certainly a much wiser policy.[7]
These theories about Western fear of Eastern reaction assume what I believe remains to be proved, to wit, that the Vigilantes would have been condemned out of hand if the Westerners had failed to publish books like Dimsdale's. I call the reader's attention to the vulgar boastfulness of Dimsdale in dealing with terrorism when applied to Western criminals. If his object was to convince Easterners that the Vigilantes had a high regard for human life, he might have chosen better language for the purpose. But why must we assume that the East was unsympathetic? The success of Mark Twain's Roughing It and the Beadle novels demonstrates that an appreciation of Western conditions had existed in the East for some time past; built up, no doubt, by the Dimsdale book and many others employing the California style, an art form deeply rooted in American frontier experience and no mere contrivance. A nation which could be led to excesses against the Mormons and the Minnesota Sioux on the strength of sensational reports easily disproved, a nation inured to the carnage of four years of Civil War, was not a nation likely to blanch at a little bloodletting hundreds of miles away in the Rocky Mountains. Violence on the frontier was an old thing, as everybody knew. Perhaps the typical Eastern reaction was that of Charles Dickens, who was fascinated by the Dimsdale book and expressed a desire to meet X. Beidler, the Vigilante executioner.[8] Dickens was always interested in bizarre types. So were his readers.
The most logical persons to have criticized the Vigilantes were not those who lived far from the scene, but people who were present at the executions. They alone were in a position to know whether the actions taken were necessary or not. A significant amount of space in Dimsdale is taken up in explaining away certain hangings which should have been left out of the book altogether if the author's object was to placate the East. Other actions which reflected discredit on the Vigilantes were not discussed by Dimsdale. Why this selectivity? Was it not because a few episodes were so notorious locally that they had to be justified before Montana critics, regardless of the effect this policy might have on Eastern readers? I offer the Daniels affair as a case directly in point.
When a person is writing Vigilante history, so much depends on his point of view. In a letter sent to the New York Tribune from Virginia City, dated July 9, 1867, A. K. McClure said of the Vigilantes: "In these years of operation, covering nearly one hundred executions, this organization is not today charged, by friend or foe, with partiality or prejudice, or with a single unjust punishment.[9] The popular writers of today would doubtless take this to be a complete exoneration of the Vigilantes by a man who was in a position to hear grumbling if there were any. A skeptic like myself wonders what McClure meant by "friend or foe." But take it as it is, his statement is still false, because we have evidence from eyewitnesses that some people did believe the Vigilantes guilty of inflicting unjust punishments.[10] This evidence, though slight, is unimpeachable. If anyone feels that it is unrepresentative, let him turn to Dimsdale-Langford. I contend that when these two books are examined with care, one perforce comes to believe that never did all the peaceloving citizens of Montana fully approve of what the Vigilantes did during the very heyday of the movement, the period 1863-65. The following facts, well known to attentive readers of Dimsdale-Langford, ought to be spread across the record at this point as evidence of the public temper in those days.
The Vigilantes constituted a private group.
They tried their victims in secret.
They seldom boasted of their exploits then or later, and the rollcall of their organization was never published.[11]
Taking their lead from Dimsdale-Langford, modern writers have construed these facts entirely in favor of the Vigilante . We learn that they remained a private society because they feared reprisals by uncaught rogues. They worked in a dark and mysterious manner for much the same reason, and also to forestall last-minute rescues by force. They did not choose to make their former connections with the organization known, because they were modest or because they had found the work distasteful. And so on and so forth...
The ordinary way of treating malefactors in a mining camp was to convene all the miners of the district and to call for a verdict by all. A variation of the scheme was to appoint a jury from among the larger number, but with the understanding. that an appeal to the whole group could be had, upon conviction. The Vigilantes abandoned this democratic procedure and substituted private trials by men who were usually convinced of the guilt of those they hunted down, even before interrogating them. Had they kept to their original intention of punishing only with death, the break with tradition would have been more startling, but the inhumanity of such a procedure forced them to fall back on banishment in some instances. One may assume that the policy of by-passing the miners' court annoyed quite a few people, because both Dimsdale and Langford were so determined to justify it. They explained it away by relating how earlier attempts to convict known murderers had been foiled by cheap appeals for mercy and by fear of armed rescues and reprisals by friends of the accused. They emphasized the difficulty in trying to operate an open court system where the sheriff himself was the leader of the criminal gang. To these excuses they sometimes added a fourth, namely, that speed in capturing criminals being essential, the ponderous miners' courts could not act fast enough. Were these explanations as acceptable to the men of the time as they apparently are to modern worshippers of the Vigilantes?
The first defense employed by Dimsdale-Langford, that the miners were weak in judgment and easily persuaded by the wrong side, was in reality an attack on the rationale of the entire American court system, a fact as obvious to them as it is to us. The amour propre of any modern citizen would be grossly affronted were he to be told by some self-constituted authority that he was unsuited to serve on a jury confined to the select few. Was it otherwise one hundred years ago? The impression I get from the sources is that before the hanging of Boone Helm the miners would have abdicated their civil rights to the hounds of hell, had that been the quickest way of ridding themselves of the murderers, but that afterwards they had doubts on the matter and showed their feelings in criticism of the Vigilantes. Dimsdale's description of popular reaction to the executions of Slade and Brady seems to bear me out here. In any case, inasmuch as Dimsdale-Langford placed more stress on other defenses it is obvious that they had little faith in this one.
They preferred to say that the Vigilantes operated privately out of fear of counter-action by criminals. If the Vigilantes feared that criminals still loose in society would form a band and attack them in order to free their prisoners, was the threat as important in the later phases of the clean up as it was, say, during the sensational trial of Ives? I think not. After the leading men in Plummer's gang had been executed in Bannack and Virginia City the Vigilantes decided to punish the others as well. Though somewhat out of order in this place, I cannot refrain from pointing out that many of the remaining members of the road agent band were planning a flight to Idaho and might have succeeded if the Vigilantes had not apprehended them first. In spite of that it is commonly said the Vigilantes desired only to drive the criminal element out of the Territory. These lesser figures had no opportunity to raise a strong force for any purpose. Judging from the small numbers sent in their pursuit, the Vigilantes never expected them to do so. The record shows that after Helm's death there was no real chance of a last-minute raid on the Vigilantes, and a trial by the miners in open court could have been had in some cases. If it was personal reprisal which the Vigilantes most feared why, when the years passed and this danger had lost all meaning, did they remain obdurate on the issue of publicity? The policy was carried to such lengths that several families of deceased members destroyed all evidence linking them to the organization. When one remembers that the Vigilantes usually went unmasked, it is hard to give much credence to the fear of reprisal as an excuse for closed trials. At best, the excuse has meaning only for the small group of leaders who performed entirely in the shade. Little time need be spent in disposing of the argument that the Vigilantes had no choice but to abandon the miners' court because its chief police officer, the sheriff, was in cahoots with the criminals. Henry Plummer was hanged in January of 1864. The majority of the road agents were executed after that event.[12]
The fourth reason advanced by Dimsdale-Langford for not trying the suspects in the regular miners' court strikes me as the feeblest of all. Pursuing and punishing persons accused of crime are distinct operations. The Vigilantes could have served as a regular posse and left trial, judgment, and execution to the miners in their court. Such, in fact, seems to have been their general policy with respect to the People's Court set up at Virginia City at a later date, although even here, I think, the Vigilantes performed as prosecutors as well as policemen. The slowness of the miners' court would have been unimportant if the Vigilantes had stood by to prevent escapes. If dissatisfied with the verdict (which would rarely have gone contrary to their wishes), they had the option of recapturing the guilty men and hanging them anyway, the policy applied against Daniels. If the reader is honest with himself he will admit that there was just as much need for fair trial procedure in a gold camp as anywhere else. On one occasion the Vigilantes hanged a man for murder while his victim was still alive. The victim recovered later. At a regular miners' court, had one been convened, some friend of fair-play might have prevailed on the jury to withhold action until the issue of life-or-death were known, but the Vigilantes moved too fast for that. The most cynical passage I have ever seen in a book of Western literature closes a summary of the tragedy in these words: "somewhat to the chagrin of the Vigilantes the wounded man eventually recovered." [13]
I believe that the Vigilantes kept trial and punishment in their own hands because they had little faith in the jury system itself, and I cannot help but think that their attitude was well known and resented, at least by some people. A group which received so much tender consideration from contemporary writers (themselves Vigilantes or friends of Vigilantes) obviously had a record which needed defending. That the Vigilantes finally relinquished their power to the civil authorities does not speak for their attitude in earlier days, a fact which Judge Hosmer took into account when setting up the first district court in December of 1864. Why appeal to them to be law-abiding otherwise?[14] As it turned out, his fears were well founded.
There is little point in denying that the Vigilantes had good reason for mistrusting public trials. Mining camp populations were transitory in nature and a free-and-easy toleration of the criminal element had helped to elevate Plummer to great power in the first place. Such toleration was of the most reprehensible kind, because no one with two eyes could conceal from himself (howevermuch he might conceal from his neighbor) the vicious behavior of the road agents or doubt that they were the persons responsible for the criminal acts committed day after day, often with the flimsiest kind of concealment. Dimsdale-Langford indulged in fictioneering when they described Plummer as a leader of genius. He and his cohorts blundered again and again, as the record plainly shows. As repositories of dark secrets they were flat failures. Compared to criminals like Murell of Natchez Trace, they were bumpkins fresh from mother's knee.
Admitting all that, I still feel that the Vigilantes have a good deal to answer for if they deliberately flaunted a court system which they might have used once in a while. I am impressed by the fact that on several occasions a specific pledge to a criminal that he would be taken to Virginia City for trial was deliberately broken. As we have noted, Dimsdale-Langford ascribe such behavior to the fear of armed assault by thugs still at large in the town. It seems probable that what the Vigilantes feared much more was subjection to anguished appeals by women. They always dreaded that contingency, even when facing prostitutes. The Vigilantes themselves would hold firm, of that they were sure, but what about the fickle miners? The precedents were most discouraging.
The most revealing action of the Vigilantes with respect to the court system the early period is found in the Slade affair. Slade was a public nuisance of the first order and a menace to society, but at the time of his hanging he had supposedly committed none of the crimes for which men were ordinarily executed in Montana Territory.[15] At one time, it seems, he had even been a member of the Vigilantes. After the mass executions in Virginia City early in 1864, Alexander Davis shamed the reluctant Vigilantes into setting up what was known as the People's Court. Davis was elected presiding judge of it. [16] Although its announced purpose was to hold fair and open trials of a more constitutional sort, the Vigilantes opposed what they considered its kid-glove treatment of Slade. They favored his direct punishment at their own hands. When Slade defied the court after one of his wild carousals the Vigilantes lost patience and called for a general meeting of their members. At that time the more timid miners had enrolled as Vigilantes and the small groups which had initiated the movement were swelled by hundreds.[17] The leading members constituted the Executive Committee, hitherto the real power of the organization. When the angry miners poured in from neighboring localities, as bloodthirsty now as they had been timorous before, the Executive Committee reluctantly surrendered control and Slade was hanged against their wishes. Consider the episode from the Committee's point of view. What was this larger assemblage but the old miners' court all over again, with its running after extremes, its intense emotionalism, and its lack of respect for the "better element" of the Vigilantes? If the Vigilante leaders retained any confidence in popular juries before the Slade affair, surely that fiasco convinced them it was misplaced.
I do not think most people realize how strongly the Vigilante officers must have felt about juries. I say "must have," out of deference to those who may be unconvinced by my previous remarks on the subject. For them I have a final consideration to offer. When we read that "the Vigilantes" did this or that, it is important to keep in mind the structure of the organization, because the number of Vigilantes who performed the more important tasks was very small. Under the "Regulations and Bye Laws" adopted in 1863, the trial and sentencing of criminals was left to an Executive Committee of seventeen members. [18] When I speak of "the Vigilantes" operating in a secret manner, it is the Executive Committee I refer to, as the other branches of the organization simply carried out orders handed down from on high. The "hundreds" or thousands" whom, the public saw at the most famous executions had no more to do with the trials of the accused than the public itself.[19]
Confusion on this point has developed out of an unfortunate use of the word "committee." At times Dimsdale-Langford use it in reference to the Executive Committee, and at other times to the entire body of Vigilantes. By remembering the special powers entrusted to the Executive Committee, the reader can easily keep the two groups separate when studying any particular action by "the Vigilantes" or "the Committee." Arguments to the effect that the Vigilantes were justified in ignoring the miners' courts, since these they could not trust, are less impressive when it is realized that the Executive Committee rarely permitted the rank-and-file Vigilantes to participate in the trial of accused persons.[20] Under the procedure laid down by the regulations it was fairly easy for the leaders to keep a close scrutiny over the membership, so I do not think they retained supreme power in their own hands out of fear of infiltration by the criminal class. Nor, for that matter, do I think they did so out of sheer perversity. All the observations I have made with respect to their attitude toward the miners' court apply equally well here. They just did not trust juries, that is all. Let us pass to another subject for the moment.
Langford tells us in so many words that Vigilante activity disappeared gradually.[21] Once the Vigilantes "found the courts adequate to their necessities," they saw no reason to continue. Later revivals of the organization were "extreme cases" in which "the slower process of law" had to be anticipated, but "only when the offense was of a very aggravated character." During Plummer's day the excuse had been that there was no judicial system at all; now, with People's courts and Territorial district courts in operation, the slowness of ordinary procedure is considered sufficient justification for private killings. Quite a change. Competition with established courts was no new thing for the Montana Vigilantes, however. In August of 1864 the deputy sheriff of Madison county and a Vigilante captain both appeared in a Salt Lake court to claim a man charged with theft in Montana. He had been "arrested" in Utah by the Vigilante officer. It is not certain that the sheriff and the captain contested one another's claim to the man, but when the court freed him (because neither claimant had a warrant) .it "refused to deliver him to either of the applicants for custody..." [22] Montana Vigilantes in the vicinity then ignored the court by kidnapping the thief and bringing him to trial in Montana Territory, where he was hanged. (The reader might also keep this episode in mind when he reads that the sole object of the peacemakers was to drive the criminal element out of Montana.)
On June 7, 1865, what appears to have been another conflict with the courts took place, this one in the new town of Helena. A person named Keene surrendered to a citizen of the town immediately after murdering a man in plain daylight in front of a saloon. The prisoner was turned over to the sheriff, and there can be little doubt that at a regular trial he would have been sentenced to death by any jury that ever sat. Before that could happen a crowd gathered and formed a committee to try him at once. Vigilantes from Alder Gulch were on hand to provide leadership.[23] The sheriff refused to surrender his prisoner (a sure sign that sentiment for regular trials was growing), but he was overpowered and the victim was hanged by orders of a special jury called on the spur of the moment. As this "trial" was only partly dominated by Vigilante influence, the public saw a good deal of it and the deliberations were long According to Dimsdale, the episode demonstrated that a more formal Vigilante organization was required. The Helena Vigilantes immediately took form, to commence without delay the great work of executing criminals at no cost to the taxpayer.
The Keene hanging illuminates certain dark aspects of Vigilante history which I must deal with here in order to show that the crowd which tried him in this informal manner had a perfectly feasible alternative before them. A word on the court system is in order. Although Keene was tried and punished almost a full year after Montana Territory was constituted, the only Territorial court authorized to try felonies did not sit in Helena until August 1, 1865, too late to be of service to Keene or his accusers.[24] Montana was a part of Idaho Territory for a time and subject to its laws, but the Idaho district courts did not fully organize before Montana was set off as a separate Territory, so they did not figure in the Vigilante history of this state. I mention the Idaho courts at this point so the reader may understand that the situation facing the Helena people in the Keene affair was legally the same as that which the citizens of Bannack and Alder Gulch had to contend with in 1863-64.[25] The only duly-constituted court in Helena at the time was that held by Justice of the Peace Qrsin Miles, and JP courts had no authority to try felonies. [26] What, then, were the good people of Helena to do? Release Keene and give him liberty to murder others because there was no legal way of terminating his career?
The people of the West were often faced with such a dilemma during the first months of Territorial government. Unwilling to free dangerous criminals, they had no choice but to try them by a court which had justice, if not law, on its side; a court of their own devising. Two such courts had emerged, the Vigilante court and the People's court. To the uncritical reader there might seem to have been little difference between them, since both were extra-legal and both had to rely upon the inchoate mass of the citizenry for support. But the differences were fundamental. The Vigilante "court" was a private affair whose principal sanction was violence. Lawyers were not permitted to argue for defendants, as a general rule, and other elements of fair trial were missing. Vigilante decrees were irrevocable, since the Vigilantes answered to nobody but themselves. The People's court represented an orderly evolution from the old, unwieldy miners' court. Our information for such courts in Montana is scanty, but very likely they operated here much as they did elsewhere Defense attorneys were sometimes present and in general there was some effort to adhere to the spirit of the common law, the People's courts thereby serving as a check on the blood-lust of enraged mobs anxious to inflict summary punishment. Vigilante committees were irregular by their very nature. People's courts were continuing bodies with a sense of responsibility. As we have seen, the Vigilantes more than once competed with the established courts. I know of no instance in Montana where a People's court did so, and most of them gladly laid down their authority when Territorial district courts appeared on the scene.
I think it was to the People's court which Sanders referred when he later said that the "voluntary organization of miners' courts had in the spring [of 1864] yielded their jurisdiction without resistance or regret to the justices of the peace and the probate courts...[27] If he had some other body in mind he was wrong. Criminal trials before the old-fashioned miners' courts ended with the Ives trial of December, 1863. They were succeeded first by Vigilante action, then by the People's court of Virginia City, and finally by the Vigilantes again, working parallel with the People's courts. Probate courts had only civil jurisdiction. In suggesting that justices of the peace tried major criminals, Sanders probably meant that these officers often presided at the People's courts in order to give a semblance of legality to their proceedings, a common practice in other Territories and doubtless here. I think that wherever a justice of the peace is found presiding at what is otherwise described as a simple miners' court, one is in reality dealing with a People's court. I refer to real justices of the peace, men who bore commissions from some Territorial governor, and not to persons elected to that office by miners. Readers who must have a villain to hate but nevertheless cannot bring themselves to criticize the Vigilantes, in spite of all I have said, may vent their spleen on the Federal government, especially Congress; for there was no immutable law barring the solons from providing for the judicial interregnum which frequently took place between the founding of a Territory and the establishment of Territorial district courts. In earlier days of Territorial government, governors could be empowered to establish a temporary police system designed to operate until the Territorial judges arrived and set up shop.[28] By 1864, when Montana was created, the Territorial system had become too rigid for that, largely because of the indifference of Congress. But this is beside the point. We have seen the suspicion with which Judge Hosmer regarded the Vigilantes. The district court not only refused to retry an issue determined by the People's court but affirmed its judgments in an official manner.[29] The law-abiding citizens of Montana should have supported their People's courts and used the Vigilantes as policemen only. Where no People's court existed it was the work of a minute to establish one. It is wrong to say that Montanans had the Vigilantes or nothing.[30]
Returning to the later revivals of Vigilante power, we have already seen the attitude of a Helena group in 1867 toward the new appearances there, and Langford admits that one such revival (the lynching of Daniels) was wholly wrong. He nevertheless gives a broad sanction to the later activities in the words quoted above, and speaks insinuatingly about irresponsible elements within the Vigilante organization, or of persons who were not Vigilantes at all, as the agents responsible for occasional lapses from high standards. It seems to me that the failures he glosses over so easily were inevitable in any organization which set itself above the law. The logical end of the process was reached in Helena, in 1870, where the Vigilantes coolly seized two prisoners from jail by force and hanged them in outright defiance of a Territorial judge who urged that the prisoners be turned over to the Territorial court. The deed was not done in the heat of passion but calmly, with the fullest knowledge of the seriousness of what was afoot. While few modern writers discuss this outrage, earlier historians were more forthright. Bancroft said that it would "recommend itself to all lovers of justice."[31] Was this what was known as "mobocracy, lynch law, the work of the infuriate rabble?" Certainly not. [32]
I am quite sure that a goodly number of Montana citizens did not approve of these revivals, and I point to efforts by Langford to de-odorize the hangings as demonstrating the existence of criticism. What of the executions he does not mention? In spite of the fact that Langford had ample opportunity to treat the revivals in detail it is significant that he speaks only in general terms, the Daniels case excepted. He gives us accounts of Vigilante activity all over the West, but of the two actions last described, not a word. As an example of his crafty methods his treatment of the Helena affair of 1870 is worth emphasizing. Only a few weeks before it took place a hot controversy pro and con the Vigilante system raged in the regional press.[33] If Langford had discussed the hanging he could hardly have passed over the newspaper war, so he omitted both. His slavish successors have done the same.
There is still another way to measure the public attitude toward the Vigilantes, and that is to examine the Vigilantes' attitude toward the public. The only man of the original group of leaders who derived great political profit from his Vigilante work was Col. W. F. Sanders, and he was a special case. Sanders was best known to the people as the prosecutor of Ives, an action which preceded organized Vigilante activity in Montana. The trial of Ives was of the old-fashioned sort, a real miners' meeting. Sanders had no formal organization to defend him at the time, and it was his personal bravery under harrowing circumstances which paid political dividends later. Other members minimized their Vigilante connections. They did so at a time when a universal rage for public office incited the host of candidates to boast of anything which had the effect of setting them apart as bold leaders of men. If the ex-Vigilantes did not choose to run on their record as public benefactors, was it because Vigilante activity was not as popular as Dimsdale-Langford suggest?[34]
In closing I wish to call attention to several other aspects of Vigilante behavior which need more study than they have received. I will not have been the first to suggest that there may have been some connection between the politics of the Vigilantes and their standing with both the criminal class and the public at large. Dimsdale, Bancroft, Langford, and other early historians speak as though most of the Montana roughs were Southerners and perhaps Secessionists.[35] The principal Vigilantes, on the other hand, seem to have been mostly Unionists.[36] While it would be too much to say that the Vigilantes ever hanged anybody for political reasons, unless in the case of Daniels, it is conceivable that the sympathy given to some of the accused men by non-Vigilantes sprang from a common political sentiment. If true, it would help to explain why some men never became Vigilantes. It would also tend to justify the mistrust of popular juries by the Vigilantes. The political question has many ramifications. Leeson has a statement to the effect that the Vigilantes once warned Governor Edgerton that they would "resume the actual government of the Territory" if he did not conduct an election according to their wishes.[37] Sanders denied the episode flatly, but Leeson often had good sources for his stories. An unbiased journalist of wide experience visited Montana in 1865, and after describing the Territorial government which supposedly ran things there he said: "Actually the power was vested in the 'Vigilantes,' a secret tribunal of citizens, organized before civil laws were framed, when robberies and cold-blooded murders were of daily occurence."[38] The journalist was on good terms with the Vigilantes and apparently wrote these words as a simple matter of fact, obvious to all. I am still treading where others have trod when I assert that a little research might show a similar connection between the Freemasons and the Vigilantes. From a suggestive chapter in Langford it has long been suspected that the Masons sponsored the Vigilantes in Montana and carried the movement to success. The official spokesman for the order has held otherwise, however, although he identified eleven of the original twelve Vigilantes as members. "This fact," he said, "is significant to this extent only: the Masons knew they could trust each other and consequently they took counsel of each other and acted in conjunction... I do not think it occurred to any one at that time that anybody was active in the work because he was or because he was not a Mason."[39] Henry Plummer had doubts on this point, and so do I. The Masonic order in Montana was an offshoot of the Northern branches of the organization and was probably loyal to the Union.[40] A considerable number of miners were Roman Catholics as well as Democrats, and the inharmonious relationship between the church and the fraternity is too well known to require further discussion here. The Masonic order may thus have served to reinforce other prejudices which caused the Vigilantes to act as they did. Furthermore, I am pretty well convinced that the ceremonial character of Freemasonry, as well as the traditions of the California Vigilante movement, inspired the forms adopted by the Vigilantes. These considerations do not prove Callaway wrong, of course, but they temper his reasoning somewhat. While reading accounts of Vigilante activity in the West I have often been impressed by the importance of taxation a factor responsible for the poor support given to the regular courts and magistrates. Bancroft admits that men were sometimes hanged as a substitute for trying and punishing them at the public expense. Dimsdale-Langford allude to the same attitude in Montana. There was nothing to prevent the miners from taxing themselves sufficiently to provided a fund from which a large police force, a strong jail, and a reasonably well paid judiciary might have been supported-nothing but their dislike of taxes. I find myself wondering whether those who might otherwise have denounced the Vigilantes remained quiet rather than pay out money for a better system of law enforcement.[41]
In the course of my critique I have refrained from citing relevant passages in the books of Dimsdale and Langford as support for my assertions and suspicions in order that you, the reader, might study these works and draw your own conclusions on the basis of the whole record and not just parts of it. I probably ought to add that I arrived at my present position on the strength of my reading of these two books alone, and turned to other evidence merely out of curiosity, never doubting what I would find there. I have introduced some of this outside evidence because I feared that without it my conclusions would seem incredible to those who have read Dimsdale-Langford in the traditional manner. Additional material in my possession reinforces my feeling on these matters, but as this material will eventually be published by others I will not anticipate what they have to say. My motive in writing this little study was to stimulate critical thinking about a phase of our history which has been treated superficially by the popular writers, the ones most people read. When Professor Webb recently implied that the history of the Far West was hardly worth writing I had to disagree with him, but had he said that it was hardly worth reading on the basis of what we find in the book stores today, I must have supported him fully.[42]
John Welling Smurr is an instructor of history at Montana State University. Recently he co-edited, along with K. Ross Toole, the first book length publication of the newly created Western Press of the Historical Society of Montana, Historical Essays on Montana and the Northwest.