First Witness for the Prosecution | Red Yeager's Testimony | Dutch John's Confession | The Sheriff of Bannack, Montana

Ignoring such bandwagon witnesses as N. H. Webster, who after the hangings concluded that the sheriff's road agents must have stolen his missing buffalo robe and overcoat, we will take a look at the accuser who started the ball rolling. In her history, Helen Sanders credited Henry Tilden with providing the first proof of Plummer's guilt: "The real character of Henry Plummer, who had led a life of crime in California, had been long suspected by a few, but the first proof of his complicity with the Road Agents was the story told by Henry Tilden, the lad who crossed the plains with Governor Edgerton."[161]

As Dimsdale described the incident, "Henry Tilden... reported that he had been robbed by three men -- one of whom was Plummer -- between Horse Prairie and Bannack." On the next page he added that $10 was taken from Tilden.[162] Since Mattie Edgerton claimed to have heard Tilden tell his story twice, we will quote her remarks in full to get the details:

At nightfall loud shrieks were heard from the Horse Prairie Hill. They proved later to have emanated from Henry Tilden, who had been sent to Horse Prairie by Father and Wilbur to drive in some cattle for butchering. On his way back he was met by three masked horsemen who ordered him to hold up his hands while they searched him. Finding nothing in his pockets but a comb, and a picture of his girl, they let him go, and he went without delay, speeding toward Bannack. As he topped the hill above town his horse stepped into a ditch and threw him. This was too much. He made night vocal with his shouts for help.

Standing at our back door, I heard him and wondered who it could be calling so loudly. More frightened than hurt, he went at once to Wilbur's house, where he related his experiences of the day to Cousin Hattie. She brought him over to our house, where he repeated his story, concluding with the declaration, "One of the men I know was Henry Plummer."

The next day, Wilbur having returned from Alder Gulch, Henry came again to our house and was questioned by both Father and Wilbur. "How do you know one of the robbers was Plummer?" he was asked.

"Because he had on that overcoat of his he always wears, lined with red. Then he came into the Express Office (Henry worked there) day before yesterday to get a revolver he had sent for."

"That revolver proves nothing," was the reply, "but the overcoat is convincing. No one else in town has one like it." Then Wilbur said to Lucia and me, who were in the room and attentive listeners, "Girls, never breathe a word of what you have heard, or our lives will not be safe." I can testify that we kept quiet, as did Father and Wilbur, except once, later to be mentioned when Father took a man into his confidence.... A few days later Plummer came into the office to ask Henry if he had any idea who any of the holdup men were. Naturally, Henry protested his ignorance, but he was terribly frightened. Every night after closing hours he ran the whole distance to his boarding place.[163]

Wilbur Sanders, who together with Edgerton, questioned Henry Tilden the day after his ordeal, left an account similar to Mattie's, but different enough to require its inclusion:

I had sent Henry S. Tilden, a young man who had accompanied me from Ohio to Bannack, to Horse Prairie to get some cattle which had been left there in the fall and drive them to town. About 9 or 10 o'clock in the evening he had made his appearance at my house on Yankee Flat, and related to my wife his experience of the day and evening.... About half way between Horse Prairie and Bannack he saw in the distance, in front of him, several horsemen, and, upon approaching them in the road, they commanded him to halt, dismount and throw up his hands. Some of them dismounted and presented their revolvers at him, while one of them proceeded to search his pockets for money, with a result somewhat discouraging, whereupon they proceeded to say to him that they did not wish his money, that they did not desire him to say what had been his experience that night, and, if he did, notwithstanding this request and notice, he need not hope to escape death at their hands.... They permitted him to remount his horse and proceed on his way. He was a boy of fifteen or sixteen summers, thoroughly frightened by this episode.... His journey into town was rapid, riding across Yankee Flat at a gallop, his horse stumbled and threw him upon the ground, and for a time he was insensible, but upon recovering consciousness he proceeded on foot to the residence of Mr. Edgerton and told the family what had occurred to him and who several of the party were that had stopped him in the highway in the manner described. He then came to my house, repeated the story, and my wife accompanied him to the residence of Mr. Edgerton, where several of the neighbors were called and consulted.

... Upon my return to Bannack I was disinclined to believe that young Tilden's identification of Plummer as the principal actor in the attempted robbery was correct, but the young man was of undoubted integrity, and he was certain that if the identification of individual faces was a possible thing, he there saw and knew Henry Plummer.[165]

If Sanders's version is correct and Tilden was stopped and searched by three unmasked men who told him they did not want his money and then let him go, the incident need not necessarily be interpreted as an attempted robbery, but could have been only a precautionary measure by the men to ascertain whether the approaching stranger was armed.

On the other hand, Mattie's version described an attempted robbery, but left identification of any of the masked men doubtful, especially since the event occurred shortly before nine o'clock on a November night. Francis Thompson agreed with Mattie, claiming that Edgerton told him the men were masked.[166]

Helen Sanders's history is correct in stressing the important relationship between the attempted robbery of Tilden and an assessment of Plummer's guilt. Tilden is the only person on record, either in Montana, Idaho, California, or Nevada, who claimed to have witnessed Plummer's involvement in a robbery. Wilbur Sanders took advantage of this singular testimony to convince those who still had doubts about Plummer's guilt after the four vigilantes had brought the news of Yeager's testimony and Dutch John had confirmed it. Langford says Tilden's testimony was the clincher: "And when it was determined on the afternoon of January 10, 1864, that Plummer should be hanged, Tilden was sent for and related his story in detail, which convinced all who heard it, of Plummer's guilt."[167]

Wilbur Sanders confessed that he was at first disinclined to believe that Tilden's identification of Plummer was indeed correct. Sanders's disbelief is easy to understand. Who would want to rob Henry Tilden since he had no money? Tilden could not have been mistaken for part of the Langford-Hauser party because he was riding toward Bannack rather than away from it. Even if someone had attempted to rob the boy, it was not likely to be Plummer, who had ridden off earlier that day in the opposite direction, with Sanders following him on the mule, and had returned from the same direction in which he left, the east side of town, not the south, where Tilden was accosted. Also, of what use would it be to Plummer to have an entire band of men under his direction, as Sanders suspected, if he had to participate in the holdups himself, thus risking being recognized?

But Sanders eventually disregarded such objections and accepted Tilden's word because "the young man was of undoubted integrity." Therefore, Sanders concluded, Plummer could have made a long, circuitous doubling back after he left Bannack that day and a second one when he returned that night. It was the only way to fit Plummer's departure and return into Tilden's story.

Sanders warned Mattie, Lucia, and Tilden not to tell anyone that Plummer had been recognized or their lives would not be safe. Tilden felt the weight of the fear, as did all of the Edgerton clan. Langford however remained fearless. Though he and Sam Hauser supposedly suspected Plummer, they made their plans to carry $14,000 in gold dust to Salt Lake in full earshot of his deputy. At camp the first night, Langford claimed to have seen the same three robbers Tilden saw, first from a distance of about four hundred feet. "In the dim moonlight" he could make out three men, whose "features were concealed by loosely flowing masks." On seeing him, they fled, but he followed, noiselessly wading a stream and crawling through thirty feet of willow thicket to an opening beyond. "Not fifty feet distant from where I was lying, stood four masked men. One of them had been holding the horses -- four in number -- while the others were taking observations of our camp. After a brief consultation, they hurriedly mounted their horses and rode rapidly off towards Bannack."'~~ Langford's story appears to confirm Mattie's contention that Tilden's robbers wore masks, but the fact that he did not return to camp to warn others of the danger has raised doubts about his having seen prowlers at all that night. Mattie credited Langford with a lively imagination.[169]

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.

RED YEAGER'S TESTIMONY AGAINST PLUMMER

While Tilden received credit for first associating Plummer with a robbery, Yeager was the first to claim personal knowledge that crime in the area was organized and Henry Plummer the organizer. Dimsdale quoted Yeager as saying, "I know all about the gang." Judging by the similarity of verbiage, Dimsdale's informant was Beidler, who claimed to have heard Yeager's testimony firsthand, though it should be pointed out that Judge Alexander Davis left an account that differs considerably from Beidler's. "Red confessed," Beidler said, describing the execution of Yeager and Brown. "We hung both of these men at Lorrains's on a cottonwood tree. Brown begged for mercy and died praying. Yager shook hands with us and his last words were: 'Good-bye. God bless you. You are on a good undertaking.' Then we went on to Bannack to get Plummer, Stinson and Ray."[170]

The Bannack vigilantes may have needed Henry Tilden as a second witness before they were convinced of Plummer's guilt, but not Beidler; he was apparently satisfied with only one accuser. In regards to this small amount of proof the vigilantes required, George Bruffey, in his reminiscences, claimed that Carter and three others were hanged even before Yeager had confessed they were members of a gang. Perhaps Bruffey has only tangled the sequence, but his charge brings up a relevant point: the activities of the vigilantes were secret; we do not know when the individual hangings took place nor what men said before they were hanged. We know only what the vigilantes chose to report afterwards.

In the vigilante account of the big breakthrough, that is, the discovery that a gang existed, there is something rather bizarre about Yeager's reported behavior. In Alexander Davis's account, Yeager breaks down completely during interrogation, but Beidler and Dimsdale staunchly insist on Yeager's courage and calmness up to the end, which tends to lend more credibility to his confession. Still there seems to be some inconsistency of behavior in Beidler's account when Yeager claims he was not a murderer but a messenger, yet he good-naturedly accepts the death penalty, shaking hands all around with his killers and asking a blessing on them. Yeager was apparently trying to ingratiate himself with his captors: "I agree to it all," he said when they preached to him about the lawlessness in the area. Then when Brown begged for mercy, Yeager commented, "Brown, if you had thought of this three years ago, you would not be here now, or give these boys this trouble." Yeager protested too much that he was not trying to buy his life by giving wanted information: "I don't say this to get off. I don't want to get off." But his testimony was obviously influenced by a desire to say what those who held his life in their hands wanted to hear.

According to Beidler, Yeager claimed there was a gang and named twenty-four members, not one hundred thirty-nine as Toponce recorded. Beidler did not list the assigned duties of each member, the childish offices Dimsdale earnestly reported -- a stool pigeon, a spy, a fence, a horsethief, and as secretary, George Brown, though we are told of only one letter he composed in this official capacity: "Get up and dust, and lie low for black ducks," the message that foiled the vigilantes, though it is so brief it hardly needed to be committed to paper. Yeager should have been able to remember the essence of the message on his own. Neither did Beidler mention the robber band having a code of dress, an oath, or a password, the famous "innocent" appearing to have been of Dimsdale's origin. And Dimsdale put the password to good use in his book, explaining away any victim's last insistence of innocence as being nothing more than the password. As for wearing moustache and chin whiskers for mutual identification, the pencil sketch of the hanging of Plummer, Stinson, and Ray shows all three clean shaven, and Mollie Sheehan also described George Ives as "smooth shaven.[171]

Assuming Beidler's account of Yeager's confession is true (though we would not be the first to call Beidler a liar -- Alva Noyes's grandmother did), there are still several problems with the testimony. First, it is not in Yeager's words; however, assuming that Beidler and Dimsdale captured the general meaning, we still do not know if what he said was true, or if he even believed it was true. It would have been possible that the lawless element of the community counted on Sheriff Plummer's sympathy in the event they should be caught. After all, he was a man with a record himself, and circulating rumors of his supposed support of contemplated robberies would help to bolster timid accomplices enlisted to do the dirty work. In other words, it would have been possible for Yeager to repeat such a rumor, either because he believed it himself or because he thought it would save his life.

What we really need to know from Yeager (and what Beidler does not tell us) is whether he witnessed Plummer operating as the chief of the road agents or whether it was something he had only heard. Without knowing which was the case, we cannot determine the value of his information. However, if the vigilantes actually had in their possession a witness who could give concrete details of the sheriff planning and directing crime in his own district, it is likely this living proof of the corruption of the existing justice system, from top to bottom, would have been paraded before the entire community like a trophy. Instead, the witness was immediately destroyed.

Perhaps Yeager was not preserved because his testimony consisted mainly of words put into his mouth, or his so-called confession may have been no more than saying "yes" to questions put to him. There is reason to believe that Sanders was looking for an aye-sayer from the time of the Ives trial. A biographer of the colonel states that Ives secretly informed Sanders after the trial that Plummer was the head of the gang.[172] Yet Sanders himself, when he wrote up the trial in detail, made no mention of receiving such information from Ives. However, the rumor was spread and can be found in the writings of others; it may be the result of Sanders's search for just such a statement as that attributed to Yeager, to set in motion the removal of Plummer. In stronger language, the idea of a gang with Plummer at its head may have come originally from Sanders rather than Yeager.

It is doubtful that Yeager belonged to any organized gang. As Calloway has already pointed out in his book on the subject, the vigilantes took Long John, key witness against George Ives, along with them to identify road agents; yet when the party ran into Yeager, fiery red beard and all, Long John did not even recognize him. [173]

Yeager did not come up with a single concrete detail regarding the planning of any robbery, and anyone who takes time to examine the individual robberies case by case will notice a decided lack of intelligent planning. As mentioned earlier, Langford and Hauser's wagon train carrying $14,000 in gold dust got through without even an attempted attack. And George Ives's trial proved that Nick Tiebolt's robbery and murder were instigated on a spur-of-the-moment whim after Tiebolt made the mistake of flashing a heavy poke. At the trial, the key informant made no mention of Ives having to split the take with headquarters.

The Moody wagon train, a real prize, carrying over $75,000 in gold and $1,500 in greenback and accordingly guarded by well-armed men anticipating attack, was taken on by only two men: Marshland and Dutch John, who were still making last-minute plans in earshot of the wagon party. Marshland was too timid to carry out the first attempt, and the second was so badly botched that rather than the robbers making off with the booty, the freighters ended up holding a mock trial to determine who got Marshland's possessions -- a horse, gun, and twenty pounds of tea stolen from the Mormons.

The robbery and killing of the Magruder party was more successful. Langford correctly identified Howard as the "arch and bloody instigator of the brutal tragedy," but Dimsdale attributed this crime to Plummer also, and such historians as Helen Sanders have accepted his word as fact. Information about this robbery and murder came from Billy Page, who was at the scene and later offered up testimony. Page described the incidents in explicit detail but he did not state that the crime was planned beforehand, explaining instead that Howard told him one day on the trail "that Magruder had a great deal of money, and they meant to have it." Page's testimony at the trial as taken down by a reporter for The Golden Age and reprinted by other papers is there for those who wish to read it, only there is no mention of Plummer or a gang being involved in the crime in any way.[174]

Most of the robberies attributed to the gang were not of wagon trains, but much smaller affairs such as the two holdups of stage passengers or some minor losses suffered by individuals travelling alone. No information exists that can link these isolated robberies together into a single chain, in fact the more we read of them the less we think they were connected by the planning of a leader who directed the roughs. No details exist of groups sharing information, working together, or dividing loot. In his book on the gold frontier, Dan Cushman expresses the same opinion, that judging by results no masterminding took place. "Men were robbed and brutally murdered by their own party," he writes. "Other robberies were hastily got up affairs, ill-planned and bungled."

Cushman, speaking of how from the earliest days of the gold camps miners and merchants carrying gold used to slip out of town quietly as a precautionary measure, offers the following explanation for the origin of the notion that the road agents were organized: "Virginia was believed to be full of spies who watched for rich shipments of gold. At a later date this was built up into a legend of intricate organizations with spies, couriers who were ready to go flying along the trails at a moment's notice, bands of highwaymen with military chains of command, special handshakes, knotted neckties, passwords, and a single mastermind."[175]

Dimsdale, Langford, and Sanders passed down the above legend, describing an elaborate network of spies stationed throughout the territory, who gathered and disseminated intelligence on every ounce of gold transported. Members were well heeled and horses well trained, Red Yeager having killed two mounts in delivering Brown's letter of warning to Alex Carter and party. That the vigilantes used the legend to arouse fear and thus rally support can be detected in the speech Charles Bagg gave after the hanging of the Virginia City five. Bagg, who was Sanders's assisting prosecutor at the Ives trial, commenced by stating his remarks were intended for the benefit of any persons who might question what had just taken place: "The men were convicted by evidence of their own confederates in crime, for there were one hundred men who'd been murdered between the mines and Salt Lake for their gold dust within the past twelve months, and these road agents had said the pirates' flag would wave over the town before Spring."[176]

The mention of the pirates flying their flag over Virginia City is evidently a reference to the rumor that Plummer had a grandiose plan to unite all the displaced southern rebels into a military organization that would take over the government of the entire West. Bagg's speech had the desired effect of inspiring fear in at least one listener, George Bruffey, who thought to himself, "Who would have ever known what became of me if I had been killed by these men since few of my associates knew where I was from?"

Another person who naively accepted the exaggerations and rumors of brutality being spread about the road agent organization was Mary Edgerton, who wrote home justifying the shelling, hanging, shooting, and burning of young Joe Pizanthia, who was not even charged with being a gang member: "You may think that was hard, but the house had been the headquarters for all those villains for a long time.... During the past year they have committed about one hundred murders.... The victims were murdered and robbed and their bodies, some of them, cut into pieces and put under the ice, others burned, and others buried."[177] Likewise, Wilbur Sanders wrote about Nick Tiebolt's mutilated body, not mentioning in the same sentence, as George Bruffey did, that the condition of the corpse was due to magpies having pecked on the back and shoulders. [178]

Any organization of the roughs and robbers into a gang seems to be just what Cushman labels it: a legend, fanned and spread by those who wanted to replace the existing system of justice with one under their own control rather than the electorate's. Red Yeager's testimony, as presented by either Dimsdale or Beidler, provided no detail that could be used as evidence to the contrary.

The critical issue in accepting Yeager's supposed confession becomes not so much what he actually said and whether it was true, as if he made a confession at all. As has been noted earlier, the vigilantes claimed that Plummer, Stinson, Ray, Parish, Gallagher, Lane, Helm, and Lyons all confessed to their guilt, yet eyewitnesses reported that each of the eight men professed his innocence up to the last. We cannot trust the executioners' prepared accounts of the final statements of their victims. To determine whether Yeager confessed we have only the word of the vigilantes upon which to rely, and in such instances the vigilantes have not proven to be reliable witnesses.

DUTCH JOHN'S CONFESSION

There is no record of the testimony given by Dutch John, accused of attempting to rob the Moody train. Dimsdale was tight-lipped about what the prisoner actually said, but he claimed it was a "long statement, corroborating Red's confession in all important particulars." We do know, however, that the confession was extracted with great difficulty, seven or eight "parties" making a try and giving up. Finally, a "literary gentleman," probably Sanders, informed the prisoner that he was going to be hanged, upon which John burst into tears and made a statement, according to Dimsdale, "evidently hoping that it might be held to be of sufficient importance to induce them to spare his life."[179] The literary gentleman did not bother to take down the statement or write a summary of it later; all we are told is that it backed up Yeager's confession. The problem with both confessions is that they were made under the duress of waiting to be hanged and with the hope of saying something of "sufficient importance" for the vigilantes to reward them by sparing their lives. It was certainly not an appropriate time for John to inform the vigilantes they had made a mistake in assuming there was a gang, that he had planned the robbery himself.

Mattie Edgerton explained Dutch John's reason for making his final statement, and again we must rely on the vigilantes as to whether he actually confessed to anything. "I shall always believe that the price of his confession was to have been his life," Mattie said, "but there being no penitentiary where he could be imprisoned, hanging seemed to be the only alternative, and he well merited the death sentence."[180] John's surprise on being read the death sentence the Vigilance Committee issued indicated that he had indeed expected his statement to purchase his life.

It is not known whether Dutch John's confession made mention of Plummer, but at any rate it had no bearing on Plummer's death sentence, which had already been issued by the Virginia City vigilantes before Beidler came to Bannack and before Tilden testified to the assembled group. John's corroboration was used only to convince the Bannack people, who were skeptical of what Yeager had said, but evidently it was insufficient and Sanders had to bring in Tilden. Backed by Edgerton as chief justice, Sanders could have insisted that all witnesses against Plummer, a man of official position, be brought into court so they could testify under oath and before the public, but he chose not to. Tilden, Yeager, and Dutch John were all witnesses for the prosecution who did not have to undergo cross-examination by the defense, yet none of the three were able to provide one piece of concrete evidence that connected Plummer to a single robbery or murder. Small wonder the two lawyers did not take their case to court.

We are not the first to conclude that there is no real evidence against Plummer. Dan Cushman has already expressed the opinion, though he bases his findings not so much on the sources we have quoted as on conversations he held with pioneers of the area while residing in Beaverhead County. "Plummer, by the context of his career, deserved what he got," Cushman writes, "but the charges set forth would never have stood up in court. Aside from hearsay, inflated in the passage of time, no actual proof exists that Plummer profited by a dollar from road agentry, or planned a robbery. His record was against him. He was destined for a gunman's grave or the hangman's noose ever since his early days in California."[181]

We will look at these early days in California to which Cushman refers, but before doing so we should make it clear that our purpose in writing is not to prove Plummer innocent of the charges for which he was hanged in Montana. Innocence is assumed until guilt has been proven. Our purpose is to reveal what kind of man Plummer was, and before leaving Montana, we need to summarize what can be learned about him from his experiences while sheriff of Bannack.

THE SHERIFF OF BANNACK, MONTANA

As Cushman indicates, most of what is written about Plummer is hearsay that has been inflated through the years. Articles have been published about the rich hordes of gold he stashed away, caves full of sparkling nuggets waiting to be discovered, but there were no big hauls made by anyone during Plummer's administration. The only successful robbery was of the Magruder party, who left town with $14,000; twenty-six years later when Langford wrote, the amount had swollen to $24,000. Doc Howard spent some of the Magruder plunder in making the escape and deposited the balance in the San Francisco mint, from which it was returned to Magruder's widow after Howard's execution. The other robberies were only small amounts taken from individuals. Actually, the miners of Bannack and Alder Gulch, who worked for about $7 a day ($10 if underground) lost more money to the Main Street agents, who charged them $18 each for a pick and shovel, 90' for a tin cup, $5 for a frying pan, $6 for a kettle, 55' a pound for flour, $1 a pound for salt, and $3 a pound for butter, than they ever lost to road agents. Merchants and suppliers came away from the gold camps with fortunes, not miners, road agents, or lawmen. Any wealth Plummer accumulated came from his mining claims, whose maintenance and supervision were costly and time-consuming and whose profits were well earned.

Plummer was not a robber chief, gunslinger, or a dual personality. What he really was he has not been remembered for: he was simply a lawman and by all reports a very good one. He brought to the Beaverhead diggings the reputation of a dangerous man as well as experience in civilizing frontier towns, both of which were valuable to him in setting up a system of popular justice in the mining districts. And that is exactly what he did, set up an operating form of justice in a lawless territory. It was he, not the vigilantes, who brought law and order to the area. By taking individual subscriptions, in amounts as small as $2.50, he raised funds to build the first jail, thus offering an alternative to banishing or immediately killing a criminal suspect. Convincing early residents of the desirability of such an alternative was no easy task, since many of them strongly objected to the expense involved in building and maintaining such a facility. In addition, Plummer appointed immediately following his election a network of deputies throughout the mining camps to support the work of the miners' courts.

We have only to compare conditions in Bannack on his arrival in the winter of 1862 to the situation one year later. Before Plummer came, the miners' court had limited itself to settling mining disputes, and its first criminal trial was at his insistence -- his own acquittal in the Cleveland case. In fact, the legal structure Sanders used in prosecuting George Ives was the democratic system that Plummer advocated and supported. Though, as Dr. Smurr has pointed out, the vigilantes did not have faith in the popular jury system, Plummer did. Opposing the "new way" being taken by the vigilantes, Plummer took the conservative route, sticking with the tried system that had been adapted to the peculiarities of the social environment. And in some instances, the miners' courts receive good marks for the justice they rendered. One of the interesting contributions made by this experiment in popular justice was the habit of allowing the audience to participate in the proceedings by making suggestions or criticisms or demanding that the lawyers put an end to useless wrangling and get on with the business at hand. Probably the most valuable deviation from standard legal practice, as far as possible application to modern problems, was that of restraining both prosecuting and defense lawyers from attempting to sway an unsophisticated jury. As Sanders pointed out in his account of the Ives trial, before his arrival to the area, lawyers tried to remain as neutral as possible in order to allow the jury to contemplate the evidence presented with an open mind. Sanders, however, objected to the practice and quickly set new precedents.

Even Plummer's accusers praised the executive ability he showed during this period, building a jail, directing his deputies, and assisting any person who asked for his help or advice. But of course their praise does not come from completely innocent motives. First of all, they had no other choice because his abilities were well known at the time, or, as Plummer would have it, because they did not "dare do otherwise." Their compliments were also part of the propaganda spread to convince the populace that Plummer possessed the potential to organize and keep in line every restless bummer and hardened rough who happened to wander into the area, which brings up the issue of the possible corruption in his administration. The question to be asked is whether he was tough enough to withstand pressure from his old associates on the other side of the mountains. Considering the amount of fear he inspired, we could guess that he was if he chose to be. He saw a career ahead of him in the kind of work he liked, and he had no reason to allow old friendships to destroy his chances. Actually, the charges that he was soft on criminals probably grew out of certain personal traits rather peculiar in his profession -- a gentleness, a respect and courtesy even for those charged with offenses, and a relaxed manner of operating, pursuing his duties without vindictiveness or urgency to punish.

Judge Rheem, who worked with the sheriff at Bannack, noticed another peculiarity about him that may have made some of his constituents a little uneasy. Langford referred to it as Plummer's "prescient knowledge of his fellows," but Rheem was more blunt in describing Plummer's "cold, glassy" eyes that "seemed to be gazing through you at some object beyond, as though you were transparent." Rheem was also suspicious of Plummer's constant control of voice and facial expression: "No impulse of anger or surprise ever raised his voice above that of wary monotone."[182] The judge was correct in suspecting that deeper emotions lay beneath the calm. Cleveland stirred them up and did not live to regret it.

Thompson also reported seeing Plummer lose his cool on one occasion: Mattie Edgerton and some girl friends had come to Thompson's store. "I was busy weighing the young ladies," he wrote,

when the door opened and Plummer came in. We were all talking and laughing, when a young man... walked in. Immediately both men began to fumble for their arms, and I saw that there was to be trouble. As they approached each other both began cursing and the young ladies fled shrieking to the street. I ran between the two men facing Plummer and put my two hands against his shoulders which hindered him from quickly getting at his heavy sheath knife. His opponent was unable to release his pistol in time to shoot, as I had crowded Plummer to the rear door of the store where he made a lunge by my face with his knife, but was unable to reach his victim. I threw open the rear door and pushed Plummer out and his opponent vanished by the front door and was hustled out of town by Oliver & Co. If I ever understood the quarrel between the two men I do not recall it, but Plummer afterward apologized for beginning a quarrel in my store, and more especially when ladies were present, but said that I saved the rascal's life."[183]