The editor of Montana's first newspaper found that covering the Vigilantes meant becoming one himself

By R. E. MATHER

0NE OF THE MOST FAMOUS NEWSPAPERMEN OF THE WESTERN frontier, Thomas Josiah Dimsdale, appears to have been a fraud, and a cowardly one at that. In the 1860's, Editor Dimsdale informed Montana Post readers that pure democracy was the "acme of absurdity" so the justice system should rest in the hands of Vigilantes. Later, he described a series of lynchings as a "proud" record. But because Dimsdale was pious and scholarly, modern historians took him at his word when he claimed his articles were "impartial."

In 1978 Merrill G. Burlingame -- then history professor at Montana State University -- wrote that since Dimsdale did not participate in vigilance activities, his narrative should be "more objective than if he had been a member."

Wanting to appear objective seems to be exactly what Dimsdale had in mind back in the 1860s. In all probability, he deliberately concealed the crucial fact that he himself was a Vigilante. Also, his defense of the movement was probably so passionate because it was motivated by his own terror of meeting death at the end of the disgraceful hangman's noose -- a punishment for his role in the Vigilante takeover of the miners' justice system.

Do these two probabilities suggest we should strike Dimsdale's name from the list of newspaper greats of the Old West? Not at all. The far-flung influence of his articles has earned the editor of Montana's first newspaper a secure place in history.

In fact, Editor Dimsdale could be considered as much a victim of his times as the victims he gained fame by describing: a bedridden college graduate whom armed men limped out into the snow and then strung up on a pole leaned over a corral gate, ... a merchant they waked in the dark of night and dangled by the neck from a blood-stained windlass used for butchering beef...Fortunate suspects were provided a drop; others were noosed, hoisted from the ground, and left to strangle. During the lingering death, the body could flail at the end of the rope for as long as eight minutes.

NEWSPAPER SALES OF THE POST escalated as Dimsdale continued to furnish details like one victim's gangrenous feet smelling so putrid that hungry wolves were lured to the scene. Though a Vigilante lieutenant named John X. Beidler was honest enough to admit that strangulation was a "horrible" death, Dimsdale advised his growing reading audience against the use of drops and neck-snapping. Strangulation, he insisted, was "the only really merciful way of hanging."

Though none of the victims he wrote about were given a trial, all have been villainized in subsequent histories. Editor Dimsdale -- with his Christian burial and Masonic grave marker -- has been lionized as a decent citizen and dedicated recorder of his times.

Historians have used Dimsdale's accounts of Vigilante activity because of their "objectivity," but Dimsdale himself could have been in the organization.

Dimsdale's defense of the movement was probably so passionate because it was motivated by his own terror of meeting death at the end of the disgraceful hangman's noose... a punishment for his role in the Vigilante takeover of the miners' justice system.

Because of the boy's frail health and timid disposition, his parents sent him to Oxford to study for the ministry. But during his second year, the family fortune failed. Left with no funds and no career training, Dimsdale floundered about England and Canada before he impetuously joined the Gold Rush to what is now Montana.

LACKING THE stamina to work at mining, he supported himself by opening a private school in Virginia City. And to supplement his income he gave private singing lessons after class.

In Alder Gulch the aloof teacher was recognized as an "Oxford-educated gentleman."

His eleven-year-old pupil, Mollie Sheehan, thought the "small, delicatelooking and gentle" schoolmaster who spoke in a precise British accent "knew everything." While children "buzzed and whispered over their readers, ... the professor sat at a makeshift desk near the little window of the log school house writing, writing, ... always writing."

In the fall of 1863, two stage coach robberies took place between Virginia City and Bannack, home of Sheriff Henry Plummer, the popularly elected law officer for all mines east of the Rockies. Then in December, a grouse hunter stumbled across the frozen corpse of orphan Nick Tiebolt, robbed of two mules and then murdered. With Nick's raven-pecked remains on display in the Gulch, precursors of the Vigilantes galloped off to round up murder suspects. In late December -- after the miners' court held trials for Nick's suspected murderers -- the Vigilantes formally organized.

By February 3, 1864, they had hanged Sheriff Plummer and two deputies on the gallows at Bannack, carried out a joint execution of five men along the beam of an unfinished building in Virginia City, and hanged fourteen others at locations as far north as Hell Gate.

In May of that same year, Montana became a territory; and in August, the first newspaper appeared in the Territory, the Montana Post.

Soon after, the owners named Dimsdale editor. In August of 1865, he began his serialized articles on the Vigilantes' heroic war against the criminal element that had been headquartered at Bannack. Plummer's outlaw band, Dimsdale wrote, was a formidable network manned with spies, stool pigeons, fences, roadsters, telegraph horsemen, officers and a sadistic chief. These outlaws were responsible for countless robberies and over one hundred murders of innocent citizens.

The titillating stories of robberies and lynchings were so popular with the public that in 1866, Tilton and Company decided to resurrect them as a book. But while "The Vigilantes of Montana" was still in the galley stage, Dimsdale's health took a turn for the worse and the project had to proceed without his help. On September 22, he succumbed to his lung disease.

THE GRAVE OF THE PIONEER JOURNALIST perches on a hill overlooking the semi-ghost town where he achieved fame for editing Montana's first newspaper and writing Montana's first book. Subsequent historians did not sully the respected writer's reputation with suspicions he belonged to the vigilance organization.

Because of the secrecy of the organization, it is not possible to offer the membership roll as evidence that Dimsdale did or didn't belong. However there are far more reasons to assume he was a Vigilante than that he was not.

DRAWING BY C.M. DIAZ

Plummer's outlaw band was a formidable network manned with spies, stool pigeons, fences, roadsters, telegraph horsemen, officers, and a sadistic chief. This band was responsible for countless robberies and over one hundred murders of innocent citizens.

-- Thomas Dimsdale

Sheriff Plummer was demonized by Dimsdale, but a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union wrote in f863, "No man stands higher in the estimation of the community than Henry Plummer."

He contended there was neither time nor money for "the wearisome proceedings" and "the absolutely frightful" costs of trials held in the miners' courts. (As an example of costs, the miners' sheriff or deputies received fifty cents for serving a subpoena or summoning a juror.)

There is no doubt that Dimsdale was mightily impressed by "the Vigilantes, whose power reaches from end to end of Montana."

His claim that "nearly every good man in the Territory" belonged to the lynchers provides a second clue. Dimsdale insisted it was "an absolute necessity that good, law-loving, and order-sustaining men should unite for mutual protection, and for the salvation of the community." And after "being united, they must act in harmony."

If Dimsdale failed to unite, he would be acting contrary to his own advice. And when other pro-vigilante pioneers claimed every good man at the mines united, they certainly were not implying that Dimsdale was not among their number and therefore not a good man.

EVEN IF DIMSDALE HELD A HIGH POSITION in the organization, he would have considered it his duty to suppress the information. "Secret," the Vigilantes "must be, in council and membership," he wrote, "for the detection of crime."

It seems reasonable that he was describing the precise course he chose -- a silent unification. His own weakness and lack of self-defense skills were good reasons to unite with a powerful group that promised protection from the murderous criminals who supposedly honeycombed the camps.

A third consideration -- which is so important it eclipses previous points -- is that Dimsdale had little choice in the matter of membership. Alexander Davis, a judge of the miners' courts, has left an account of his experience with Vigilante recruiters. When Davis "politely refused" to enlist, the outraged recruiters advised him "he had the choice of joining the Vigilantes, leaving the region or being hung."

Dimsdale could have opted to leave the mines rather than join a body of men acting outside the law, but he did not. And since he was noted for his lack of courage, it is doubtful he defied recruiters and risked being hanged. He himself described the Vigilantes' authority as "resistless."

AS A FINAL reason, we have the report left by his successor at the Post. The new editor, a young Bostonian named Henry Blake, stated that he received notice he "had been elected a member of the Vigilantes."

There is no reason to suppose Vigilantes required Editor Blake to join them, but not Editor Dimsdale.

As early as autumn of 1864, members were becoming uneasy about having their names on the roll because of rumors that a Federal investigation was underway. Nathaniel Langford -- who admitted to being a Vigilante officer and also admitted that Vigilantes had made mistakes -- wrote in his book, "The Vigilantes ... knew full well that ... they themselves would in turn be held accountable before the law for any unwarrantable exercise of power."

The purpose of Dimsdale's articles was to exonerate the Vigilantes and thus head off prosecution. But in light of Dimsdale's previous behavior as an editor, it is amazing he mustered the courage to write them. His close friends confessed that Dimsdale did not possess the grit to be a newspaperman; he was too "thin-skinned and sensitive."

Editor Dimsdale's grave overlooks Virginia City, where he gained fame as the editor of Montana's first newspaper and author of the state's first book, "The Vigilantes of Montana."

PHOTOS BY F.E. BOSWELL

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The question that comes to mind is what sort of spinal injection was necessary to induce Dimsdale to publicly defend a besieged vigilance organization? Perhaps an injection of fear, a fear of receiving the death sentence in a Federal court. And had the prosecution commenced, the fact that Dimsdale's closest confidant was Vigilante Prosecutor Sanders would not be helpful to a defense.

0NE FURTHER HINT THAT DIMSDALE'S involvement in vigilance activities was greater than previously supposed came after the joint lynchings at Virginia City. After the five victims were buried atop Boot Hill, Vigilantes forgot the order in which they had arranged the men along the building beam. Interestingly enough, they went to Dimsdale for an answer. Though the teacher had purposely delayed his students at the school until the last dry-goods box was jerked out from under the last noosed victim -- and therefore was not present at the executions -- he quickly divulged the location of each of the five men hanged on the beam.

Any role Dimsdale played in the vigilance organization would have been in the upper echelons, rubbing shoulders with officers like Paris Pfouts and Wilbur Sanders, men who wisely left the dirty work of chasing down and eliminating suspects to underlings such as Beidler, who could ride and shoot well. Dimsdale's poor health prohibited such vigorous activity, and besides, he did not know how to use a weapon.

As a reward for writing his articles, Vigilantes presented their cooperative little editor with "an ivory-handled, silvermounted pistol." Spectators watched Dimsdale bashfully accept his first weapon and then dash off with "almost boyish glee" to learn how "to shoot it off." During his practice sessions, worried citizens were said to "tremble" for "the safety of the children and the family cow."

Reportedly, the highest proficiency Dimsdale reached was "to be able to hit an oyster can at ten steps once in ten times."

In some instances, Dimsdale's reporting was as inaccurate as his shooting. His main goal was to persuade readers of the existence of a murderous outlaw band, but it is highly unlikely that outlaws at the mines had ever organized.

Bannack

As a reward for writing his articles, Vigilantes presented their cooperative little editor with "an ivory-handled, silver-mounted pistol."

Spectators watched Dimsdale bashfully accept his first weapon and then dash off with "almost boyish glee" to learn how "to shoot it off."

Dimsdale created a lasting image of Sheriff Henry Plummer as a veritable demon. Yet early journals and memoirs claim the Sheriff had "a strain of nobility" and performed many kindnesses for his constituents, such as escorting a packer to his destination during a bitterly cold winter, or searching for a buffalo robe a lone prospector had lost somewhere on the trail.

In May of 1863, a journalist more objective than Dimsdale visited Bannack and dispatched an article to the Sacramento Daily Union, marvelling that he had seen workmen taking $3,800 in gold dust out of one of the Sheriff's numerous rich claims. "No man stands higher in the estimation of the community than Henry Plummer," the correspondent concluded. But Dimsdale's tirades reveal a personal hatred for the cultured young Sheriff whose riding, shooting, and mining skills made him the envy of the toughest gold-camp veteran.

IN SPITE OF DIMSDALE'5 DEFICIENCIES AS A journalist, his writing has had a profound influence on history. In 1958 J. W. Smurr -- then a history instructor at Montana State University -- complained that modern histories were a mere "reworking" of Dimsdale and Langford. Since 1958, some Eastern scholars have dismissed Dimsdale's account of the outlaw band as a tall tale, but most Western histories still echo the Dimsdale narrative.

What place does Thomas Josiah Dimsdale hold in the history of journalism? He violated professional ethics and had lapses in objective reporting. Nevertheless, through the morass of propaganda in his articles, many colorful images of the mining frontier shine through. His description of an evening at a hurdy-gurdy house, for example, is unsurpassed in gold-rush accounts.

But Dimsdale has left posterity more than a heritage of powers of observation and a flair for using words. His articles are awesome proof of a journalist's power to not only mold public opinion, but even shape history. MJR