Francis Thompson was involved with Henry Plummer from June 1, 1863, when they met at Sun River, until the vigilante hanging on January 10, 1864. He met Electa Bryan on the Emilie coming up from St. Louis in the spring of 1862, and was present at the wedding ceremony for Henry and Electa at Sun River on June 20, 1863. Both Henry and Electa considered Francis Thompson their friend and confidant. On the morning of January 10, 1864, Thompson sat down to breakfast with Henry at Martha Vail's house where they both were boarding. At that meal Thompson knew already the fate the vigilantes had in mind for Plummer, yet he said not a word. If there is a Judas in this tragic story it is Francis Thompson. But this gets ahead of the story.

His reminiscenses are, however, interesting and informative. We include here an excerpt which discusses Plummer and Cleveland in the fall of 1862. It's a bit confusing since he jumps around in time sequence; in the following he is talking about his return from west of the divide back to the Missouri, in May of 1863. This was the first time he actually met Plummer, but he had heard of him on the trip over the mountains. In May of 1863 the Vails and Electa would have told him about Plummer and Cleveland who spent several weeks at the farm in the fall of 1862.

MASSACHUSETTS MAGAZINE Vol. VI No.3 1913

Will the reader now go back with me to the time of my arrival at the government farm on my return from the Pacific coast? The train men whom I overtook on the road told me of there being at Bannack a young desperado named Henry Plummer. I was told that he had killed a man in San Francisco and had escaped from the California state prison, and had run such a pace at Lewiston and Oro Fino, that he and Jack Cleveland had fled and crossed the mountains late in the fall, with the intention of going down the Missouri in a Mackinaw boat. Upon reaching Benton the fear of Indians was so great that they could find no person willing to undertake to run the river. Just at this time, Mr. Vail at the government farm feared an attack by Indians, and went to Fort Benton to find help to protect his family. Plummer and Cleveland were engaged to return to the farm for the winter. Here Plummer first met Electa Bryan, the young sister of Mrs. Vail, a pure and beautiful young woman. Mr. Plummer was a good looking young man of twenty-seven, polite, and of good address, and the unsophisticated young lady, isolated in a palisaded log house with no companion of her own sex, excepting her married sister, was easily led by the pleasing manners and quiet assurances of Mr. Plummer to believe that he was the victim of circumstances which for his own preservation compelled him to commit the deeds which gave him a bad name. The Indian scare calmed down when the snows came, and Plummer and Cleveland, his chum, went to the new mines on Grasshopper.

Henry Plummer did not kill a man in San Franciso. He did not escape from prison in California. As the town marshal of Nevada City, California, he shot a man who came after him with a loaded gun intending to kill him. It was clearly a case of a law officer acting in self defense. He was also protecting an abused wife from a violent husband, something law officers simply did not do at that time. He was convicted of second degree murder, sentenced to ten years, but pardoned after serving a few months. The pardon was complete and unequivocal, but Henry Plummer never regained his good name.

Like so many of the players in the vigilante episode, Thompson tends to bend his narrative to conform to the original spin doctor, Thomas Dimsdale, who wrote his book, The Montana Vigilantes in 1865 as a series of newpaper articles.

We will meet Francis Thompson several more times in this narrative of Henry Plummer in Montana.