HENRY
PLUMMER
Man of Mystery
©Lee Paul
The story of Montana lawman Henry Plummer is one of the most fascinating---and confusing---legends of the Old West. Some say he was crooked, that he used his position as marshal to concoct and conceal some of the most heinous crimes ever committed in the mining camps of the vast Idaho Territory. Others disagree, claiming the handsome, well-dressed, young man was framed. The real truth may never be known. On 10 January 1864, the thirty-one-year-old peace officer was lured from his sickbed and lynched by a mob of angry vigilantes bent on destroying the epitome of all criminals, a road agent gang called the Innocents---a murderous group of outlaws one captured member insisted was led by none other than Sheriff William Henry Plummer himself.
Bannack, Montana, in the 1860’s, was not a typical boomtown. The town was full of hastily-built structures, tents, and brothels peopled with all sorts of transient young men with all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes. Practically everyone in town engaged in some form of mining, and thousands of claims were scattered all over the hills. Each new strike also brought another saloon or gambling hall, until the dens of iniquities finally outnumbered the residents nearly ten to one. As fortunes were made, hundreds of others arrived wanting in on the action.
It was absolutely the wildest and woolliest town in the whole Idaho Territory with outlaws totally out of control and raising hell. Holdups occurred daily, and killings were just as frequent. No one was safe. The outlaws took what they wanted and killed all the witnesses -- some claim by butchering, dismembering, and scattering the body parts high in the rugged cliffs and jagged rocks of the Northern Rockies surrounding the town. In sheer desperation, the harassed citizens finally decided they needed a lawman...one who would protect them from the Innocents, the meanest, most cursed road agent gang in the annals of crime. They chose a young man from the East, Henry Plummer.
Not much is known about Henry in his younger days. He was born William Henry Handy Plumer to Jeremiah and Elizabeth (Handy) Plumer in 1832 in the tiny community of Addison, Washington County, Maine. It is not known when the spelling of his surname changed from Plumer to Plummer, but it most likely occurred after he moved West. His ancestor grandfather was Moses Plumer, who had originally settled in the Maine area in 1764, when it was still a part of the Massachusetts Bay Province. By the time Henry was born, three generations of Plumers had inherited the hundreds of acres of both cultivated and timbered land, as well as salt marshes reclaimed from the sea by the construction of dikes. Henry could further trace his roots back to Francis Plumer, a linen weaver from England, who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1634.
Jeremiah and Elizabeth Plumer already had six older children – three sons and three daughters – and Henry was to be their last. His father, older brother, and sister’s husband were all sea captains, and it was their original plan for Henry to join them in the family tradition. But Henry was slight of build and consumptive, and he could not handle the rigors of the sea trade, a situation which incensed him almost to the state of rebellion.
Since his parents were prosperous, Henry had what was described as a "good, sound education" in the village near the family farm. No doubt, his parents hoped he would agree to becoming a banker or lawyer or something equally well-suited to his sickly nature, but Fate intervened. Jeremiah Plumer died while Henry was still in his teens, and the family fortune gradually took a turn for the worse. The adventuresome spirit that had beckoned his sailing ancestors to such exotic ports as the Canary Islands and the Azores now tugged insistently at young Henry’s soul.
Plummer’s notorious career took off two years after gold fever hit California. He learned of a company of gold seekers who had left Maine to seek their fortunes in the gold laden hills, and he persuaded his widowed mother to allow him to join the rush, promising to alleviate the financial problems at home. On 27 April 1852, the nineteen-year-old sailed from New York aboard the U.S. mail ship Illinois to Aspinwall, Panama, where he debarked and traveled by mule train to Panama City. There, he boarded a "floating palace" named Golden Gate for the continuation of his journey to the gold fields of California. He arrived in San Francisco only twenty-four days after his incredible coast-to-coast journey began---completely broke.
There are several different stories about what he did next to increase his finances. One claims that the eager youth went immediately to work in a bookstore, earning enough money in one year to grubstake his thirst for adventure in the mining camps of Nevada County, located about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. Another source claims he entered into partnership in a bakery before heading into the hills. It’s the Plummer legend which maintains that Henry didn’t hesitate at all---he went straight to work in the gold fields.
However it came about, a year after arriving in California, Plummer owned a ranch and a mine in Nevada County outside the county seat of Nevada City. Twelve months later, he traded mine shares for a business in town, the Empire Bakery. Three years after arriving in California as a penniless nobody, fellow merchants, impressed with his business acumen, persuaded him to run for town sheriff and city manager. Since Nevada City was the third largest settlement in California at the time, the job would offer state prominence.
Young Plummer was ready. In fact, he was not much interested in the bakery business or becoming a laborer of any kind. He much preferred the life of luxury only a rich man or the wrong side of the law could provide. In 1856, he managed to persuade enough voters with his well-mannered, well-dressed facade to be elected Nevada City’s town marshal by only the narrowest of margins. The job suited him just fine. As the only lawman for miles in any direction, he could pretty well do what he pleased...and get away with it.
Plummer gave the outward impression of being as honest as the day was long. He stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred fifty pounds, dressing the part of a dignified servant with his dandified clothes and shiny boots. Everyone liked him. He was prompt and energetic and quickly gained a reputation as a Sheriff who "when opposed in the performance of his official duties, …became as bold and determined as a lion." Even his manners were impeccable. Not only did he tip his hat to any lady he saw on the street, but he politely called people by name. He was the consummate con man of his day and was able to con people into thinking that he was the most competent man for the job.
The citizens of Nevada City thought their young marshal the most efficient lawman in the State, and he easily won re-election in 1857. But as his boldness increased, his discretion disappeared. Shortly after re-election, Plummer ran into trouble when he was caught with his badge off in the arms of another man’s wife. The other man was a miner named John Vedder, and Vedder was madder than a kicked hornet’s nest. The two men settled their differences the old-fashioned way, only Vetter was no match for the quick-triggered lawman. Plummer easily shot the enraged miner dead.
It was a sensational, emotionally-charged case that went twice to the California Supreme Court before Plummer was finally convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to ten years in the State’s brand new prison at San Quention. With his illness, the Court’s decree was a death sentence, and everyone knew it. Fortunately, Plummer still had many friends, and some of them petitioned the Governor for a pardon, claiming that Henry had acted in self-defense. Some of the signatures on the document must have impressed the governor because Plummer was released after serving only six months of his prison term. He promptly returned to Nevada City---back to the bakery business and back into trouble.
Plummer never recovered his once pristine reputation. Although rumors of his questionable character shadowed him everywhere, it did him no harm with the ladies. Brothels still interested him more than any other business, and since he was a very pleasant-looking individual with a winning smile and flashing teeth, he easily made himself welcome. By the end of 1858, when his bawdy-house lifestyle left him practically penniless for the second time in his life, he turned to crime full-scale. He hooked up with a gang of road agents and tried to rob a Wells Fargo bullion express. Somehow, he managed to botch the job, and the stage driver escaped with the coach and the valuable cargo. Arrested and tried, Plummer was acquitted due to lack of evidence.
When Plummer once again returned to Nevada City, he took up residence in his favorite brothel and resorted to his favorite pastime of brawling. In 1859, he picked a fight with James Ryder, who had a prostitute in the same cathouse. Plummer promptly shot the other man dead. This resulted in the ex-marshal once again being incarcerated in the jailhouse he had once run. Knowing he could not count on another pardon, he bribed a jailer, walked out in broad daylight, and bolted for Oregon.
Along the way, he hooked up with another desperado named Jim Mayfield, who had killed the sheriff of a neighboring town. Rightly assuming he could avoid pursuit by playing dead, Plummer exercised a stroke of sheer genius. As an ex-lawman, he knew most of the lawmen in the West. He simply sent word to the California newspapers that he and Mayfield had been hanged in Washington Territory---and signed the missive with the name of the local sheriff. The strategy worked; the posse retired.
By the spring of 1861, Plummer had killed two more men and had moved on to Lewiston, Idaho, where he moonlighted as the leader of an organized gang specializing in stealing gold shipments. He worked a legitimate job in a gambling hall by day, presenting himself as a concerned community leader. He even went so far as to provide money to hire lawmen to safeguard the crime-infested community. The ploy worked only too well because his right-hand man from his outlaw career, Charley Forbes, was promptly arrested. With the lynching party already on the street, Plummer stepped in front of the mob, gave an impassioned speech on the importance of fair trials, watched the crowd disperse, and promptly broke Forbes out of jail that night. The rumblings of vigilante activity convinced him to pack up and move east in the fall of 1862.
Henry Plummer never really planned on continuing his crime-ridden activities after he crossed the Bitterroot Mountains into what would soon become Montana Territory (it was created on 26 May 1864). His tuberculosis was getting worse, and he wanted to return home. He traveled to Fort Benton on the upper Missouri River with the intention of taking a riverboat back East, but he found the river frozen and closed to traffic for the winter. He had no choice but to remain in the area.
Plummer selected the Sun River Farm where he could winter as a ranch hand for his keep. It was a government farm and Indian agency on the Sun River, and there he became engaged to Indian Agent James Vail’s beautiful sister-in-law, Electa Bryan, who had moved there to be near her sister Martha. Another man equally interested in Electa was one of Plummer’s old partners-in-crime, Jack Cleveland, who was also awaiting the spring thaws to find another, more lucrative line of work. But the rivalry for Electa proved to be too stressful and in January 1863, both men headed for the hustle and bustle of Bannack, Montana, which had been born the previous summer when sizable deposits of placer gold were uncovered on Grasshopper Creek.
Though never as large as the stampedes to California and Colorado, the Montana gold rush had a unique intensity, coming as it did in the midst of the Civil War. Gold was desperately needed, and while many western mining men temporarily gave up the chase for wealth to fight for the Blue or the Gray, there were still plenty of adventurers, scoundrels, and prospectors ready to follow the cry of gold. In July 1862, a group of Colorado miners were on their way to the gold fields of Idaho. They had only stopped for a breather under the vast, arching sky northeast of the continental divide, but in a glistening creek that ran into the Beaverhead River, a miner named John White had found enough "color" to cause insanity. Overnight, the town of Bannack, a misspelled tribute to the local Bannock Indians, rose along the creek, in the higher country about 12 miles up from White’s initial find.
The gold would begin to play out in the Spring of 1863, but at the time that Plummer and Cleveland headed for Montana, a man could find a dollar’s worth of gold by pulling up a sagebrush and shaking the dirt from its roots into a pan. "Panning gold out of a sagebrush" became a running joke among the excited prospectors.
Plummer and Cleveland never did like each other, and the only reason they had left together in the first place was that neither one had trusted the other to remain behind with the beautiful Electa, despite the fact that she was supposed to be engaged to Plummer. Riding beside Plummer, Cleveland taunted the ex-lawman with insults on his character, and by the time the two men finally reached Bannack, Plummer was dangerously close to rage. In a drunken stupor in Bannack’s Goodrich Saloon, Cleveland again taunted Plummer by spouting of Plummer’s shady business dealings outside the law. Plummer warned him to stop, and then drew his revolver and fired a warning shot which struck a ceiling beam. It was all Cleveland needed. Planning to end things right then and there, he reached for his pistol. Plummer was faster and fired again, hitting Cleveland in the gut. Cleveland fell, but somehow he managed to struggle back to his feet. Plummer fired two more shots, one glancing off a rib and one entering just under Cleveland’s right eye.
The mortally wounded man was hauled to the home of a butcher named Hank Crawford, who lived two doors down the street, the doctor considered being too far a journey for the wounded man to make. Three hours later, Cleveland was dead. Plummer was arrested, but was acquitted at the trial because witnesses had heard Cleveland threaten him. Plummer was on his way.
That spring of 1863 turned out to be boom time for everyone. A small group of Montana prospectors missed their connection with other prospectors bound for Grasshopper Creek and were captured by Crow Indians. This turned out to be fortuitous because they found the real strike. One of the men, Bill Fairweather, pulled live rattlesnakes from his shirt and acted crazy, obtaining their release from the Indians, and on their way back to Bannack, they cut across the Tobacco Root mountain range to avoid further encounters with the Crow. They reached a creek in a narrow gulch lined with alder, where they stopped to rest the horses and attempted to pan enough gold to "get enough to buy some tobacco when we get back to town." Alder Gulch quickly developed into one of the richest mining districts in history. By late summer 1863, there were 10,000 men working for 17 miles along the creek. It attracted the "greatest aggregation of toughs and criminals that ever got together in the west."
Stagecoach robbers and cold-blooded murderers showed up by the score. Deserters from both armies of the Civil War, river pirates, and professional gamblers all arrived wanting in on the action. Lawlessness ran rampant and out of control. The situation called for action, and on a Sunday afternoon in May 1863, the frightened citizens of Bannack set in motion a series of history-making incidents by advertising for a sheriff. The call was answered by Plummer and the butcher Hank Crawford, each vowing to stop the outlaws.
When Plummer lost the election to the popular butcher, he became so incensed that he went after the new sheriff with a shotgun. Crawford was rescued by a friend with a rifle, who shot Plummer in his gun hand. While waiting for the hand to heal, Plummer learned to shoot accurately left-handed. Hearing the whine of pistol practice day-in and day-out from the edge of town, the new sheriff didn’t wait for the showdown. Hank Crawford turned in his badge, and on 13 March 1863, he left Bannack for Wisconsin...never to return.
Henry Plummer immediately ran for sheriff. His engaging personality and expertise with a shooting iron no doubt helped him win the election, but it didn’t hurt that in a town with fewer than 1,000 eligible voters, he could count on the votes of the 100-odd men who belonged to his gang of cutthroats and thieves. Unknown to the miners, Henry Plummer was the leader of the road agents. By the time he became sheriff in the newly created Idaho Territory on 24 May, his gang, which included some experienced criminal hands from his old Lewiston days, was doing a booming business.
Stagecoaches and individual travelers were at the mercy of the well-organized bandits. Informants and spies placed secret markings on wagons and coaches to indicate the ones worth robbing. Blatant killings went unpunished. With Plummer and two of his deputies all members of the road agents, most crimes were easily covered up. Plummer had the perfect job for whatever he wanted to do in the illegal line. The local residents who saw something or suspected something amiss feared the outlaws too much to say anything.
Plummer’s preferred targets of choice were always the gold-laden wagons of the miners trying to transport their gold to major railheads. He would round up his gang, and they would kill everyone, taking no chances on leaving a witness who could later identify a member of the gang. It is estimated that during a four month period in 1863, Henry Plummer and his gang killed more than 120 hard-working miners, stealing their gold, and chopping the bodies into buzzard bait. If the gang didn’t have time to dismember a body, they left the corpse to rot on the trailhead. All the gold was turned over to Plummer, and he buried it all over the hills.
When the hotbed for gold activity switched from Bannack to Virginia City that summer, Plummer’s gang moved right along with it. He even managed to get his legal authority extended that far, thus assuring the growth of his criminal empire. But the honest citizens of Bannack and Virginia City could take only so much deprivation. In December 1863, an incident in Bannack put the first crack in Henry Plummer’s carefully constructed facade. A popular young man named Nicholas Thiebalt was cruelly murdered by the road agent gang. One of the local ranchers found the body and brought it into town.
That was enough for the townsfolk. They formed a posse. Men from Bannack, Virginia City, and nearby Nevada City met secretly and organized the Montana Vigilantes. Their goal was to rid the area of violent men one way or another, and this meant using violence themselves. Masked vigilantes visited suspected outlaws in the middle of the night and issued warnings. They also tacked up warning posters that usually featured skull-and-crossbones or the "mystic" numbers "3-7-77." The exact meaning of the numbers is still being debated, but the Montana State Highway patrolmen wear the emblem "3-7-77" on their shoulder patches today.
The vigilantes quickly tracked down the outlaws, gave them a makeshift trial, and dispensed rough justice by hanging about twenty-two men. The captured outlaws, trying to save themselves, pointed fingers at others. Armed with this new information, the vigilantes began rounding up the rest of the gang. Finally, when a road agent with the name of Erastus "Red" Yeager was about to be hanged, he dropped a bombshell. He identified Henry Plummer as the leader of the gang and also named other gang leaders. It was the first indication anyone had that Henry Plummer was a road agent.
The vigilante posse immediately went to Henry Plummer’s house. It was 10 January 1864, a cold Sunday evening, and Plummer had been feeling ill for several days. The posse, armed with revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, surrounded the ailing sheriff’s cabin. They found Plummer undressing for bed, and he didn’t have a gun handy---not that it would have done any good against so many. He wasn’t given a full-scale trial because the vigilantes had Red Yeager’s confession and a list of outlaws. The vigilantes didn’t waste time with a trial. Seven months after the road agents had begun their reign of terror, Henry Plummer was marched from his home to a scaffold he himself had built in his role of sheriff. Moments before the posse could hang him, Plummer made an unusual request: "Give me two hours and a horse. I’ll bring back my weight in gold."
In answer to his request, the vigilantes strung him up. They provided no drop, but instead, bound his hands, slipped a noose over his head, and gradually hoisted him. They waited long enough to be sure none of his friends could save him and then, as one contemporary wrote, "returned to town, leaving his corpse stiffening in the icy blast." Henry Plummer died leaving obscure hints of hidden gold as his only legacy to his new bride of only a few months.
Immediately after Henry Plummer’s death, a new kind of gold fever hit the Montana Territory. Instead of looking for gold nuggets, prospectors looked for Plummer’s buried treasure, and there’s been all sorts of rumors that parts of it have been found. In the early 1900’s, two mysterious men rode into Bannack with a very dirty long-box they wanted to secure in a vault overnight. The only place with a vault was the bank, and one man stayed at the bank riding shotgun all night. The next morning, they disappeared. Nobody knew who they were, where they went, or what they had dug up. It was later presumed to be part of Plummer’s hidden gold.
It was the right fuel for other gold seekers. Even if one box of Henry Plummer’s gold was removed, much more might remain. Many have hunted the treasure for years, convinced that Plummer put enough money in different getaway places that it’s probably worth trying to locate. The treasure hunters are confident the gold still lies buried somewhere in the Montana hills.
And that’s the way the original story of Henry Plummer and his murderous road agent gang has been written into history. Twenty-two "suspects" were eventually caught and strung up. Before dying, one claimed Plummer was the leader, and the vigilantes marched on Plummer. The old legend further claims that if Henry Plummer really did abscond with Bannack’s gold, the horde could be worth more than $6 million dollars---if it could ever be found.
But there are those who claim the whole thing is all a fraud, a story invented with just the right sound of truth to make it believable in the mining camps. They claim it was fabricated to cover up the real lawlessness in the Montana Territory---the vigilantes themselves. And they offer remarkable new evidence as proof. These scholars maintain that the road agents probably did not exist, that they were invented by the vigilantes to "justify" the lynchings, that Henry Plummer just might have been innocent when he was hanged. They further claim that instead of hundreds of people killed in the mining camps of the Montana hills, a more accurate figure was probably less than ten---at the hands of the usual misfits and ruffians that pervaded every gold-mad town in the heyday of the west, and with a loss of very little gold at that.
Citing excerpts from newspapers, journals, and diaries, scholars claim that Plummer was a far cry from a bloodthirsty demon addicted to robbery and mayhem. Pioneers reported that he was a "genteel-mannered" peace officer, fastidiously neat in his elegant overcoat, patrolling Bannack’s streets at dawn. Furthermore, when Plummer was first elected sheriff of Nevada City in 1856, he kept himself constantly in the public eye. One of his manhunts was the pursuit of Jim Webster, a murder suspect terrorizing two counties. "Our efficient city Marshal," the local newspaper crowed, found Webster and a companion "asleep in bed, with their pistols under their heads. The pistols were quietly removed and the two...taken into custody." A year later, Democrats chose Plummer to run for state assembly, and he seemed a shoo-in to become the youngest man ever sent to the California Legislature. He lost only when the Democrats split, launching smear campaigns against each other.
Residents always knew they could approach Henry Plummer for advice. When John and Lucy Vedder rode into town, Nevada City was in the midst of a housing shortage. Vedder was a gambler, and a mean one to boot. When he wasn’t abusing his wife, he was abandoning her and his sickly daughter. Finding no suitable lodging for a young married couple, Vedder approached Plummer. After listening to John’s plea, Plummer graciously vacated his own home, allowing the Vedders to rent it.
It wasn’t long before people began to hear Lucy’s cries coming from the house, as John beat her. On one occasion, a passer-by rushed to the front door. When Vedder saw that he was being observed, he shouted he would kill the intruder. On another occasion, a neighbor saw John throw Lucy to the floor and then "pinch her nose until she could scarcely get her breath."
Plummer finally sent police to guard Lucy and a lawyer to counsel her. Lucy asked the lawyer to arrange a divorce, and when Vedder learned of it, he became livid. John threatened to kill the marshal and scurried from store to store looking for a gun. When Plummer confronted the lunatic husband, he managed to convince the man that he was a friend and would not resent it if John were to spit in his face. It brought only a temporary truce.
Lucy finally decided to leave John, and on the night she was to catch the 2 a.m. stage, Plummer sent his usual guard for her. He relieved the guard at midnight. Sitting by the stove watching Lucy pack, he was surprised when Vedder burst open the door and, pointing a pistol, quickly fired twice. The shots missed, but Plummer’s didn’t. John Vedder staggered down the stairs and died, and Lucy fled into the street screaming that Plummer had killed her husband.
After two trials, the jury decided that anyone sending a lawyer to break up a marriage must be a seducer and found Plummer guilty of murder in the second degree. He was sent to San Quention, but Plummer was deathly sick with consumption. Under the inadequate prison care, his condition rapidly deteriorated. While he lay dying, a former policeman rode to Sacramento with a petition bearing the signatures of more than 100 officials of two counties, which stated that ‘Henry Plummer is a young man having an excellent character.’ Governor John Weller immediately granted a pardon, but he did not exonerate Plummer. Instead, the Governor cited grounds of "imminent dangers of death from Consumption."
Plummer returned to Nevada City, recuperated, and resumed mining. But he could not shake his lawman ways. He made a citizen’s arrest of San Quentin escapee "Ten Year" Smith, and then later attempted to arrest "Buckskin Bill" Riley, who had escaped prison in a neighboring jail. When Riley whipped out his Bowie knife and laid open Plummer’s forehead, Plummer drilled him on the spot, killing him instantly. Plummer surrendered to police and was locked in the jail while a doctor sutured the gaping wound. The police agreed that Plummer had acted in self-defense, but they also agreed that he would not get a fair trial because of his prison record. They discreetly allowed him to walk out of the jail.
Although Plummer followed the gold stampede to Washington Territory, often in the company of fugitives from justice, he always behaved like a peace officer. In Lewiston, Idaho, he dissolved a lynch mob with the words, "These men may be guilty of the crime of murder, but we shall not be less guilty if we...put them to death other than by due process of the law." It made him highly unpopular with the pro-vigilante factions always present in the mining camps.
Not long after that, he ran into another problem in the Orofino, Idaho, dance hall. The saloonkeeper, Patrick Ford, ejected Plummer and some of his companions, followed them to the stable, and then fired at them with two guns. Plummer returned fire and killed Ford. The dead man’s Irish friends raised a lynch mob bent on hanging Plummer, and he fled to the eastern side of the Bitterroot Range. Fortunately, a Sacremento Union newspaper correspondent resided in the area at the time, and he reported that ‘all unite in bearing testimony that Plumer acted on the defensive.’
When Plummer agreed to help Agent James Vail defend his family against an anticipated Indian attack on the Sun River government farm, so did Jack Cleveland, a rowdy horse trader, who had trailed Plummer all the way from California, boasting in various saloons along the way that he was a great hunter on the trail of his "meat," Henry Plummer. What Cleveland carefully omitted in his speech was that he himself had been the one in trouble in California, and the pursuing law officer had been none other than Nevada City’s former marshal, Henry Plummer.
The fight that ended Cleveland’s life in Bannack’s Goodrich Hotel saloon was not all it was reported to be, either. As Plummer sat warming himself by the fire, Cleveland attempted to provoke a shoot-out. Even after Plummer fired a warning shot into the hotel’s ceiling, Cleveland would not back down. Following the code of justice at the mines, which stated that self-defense was judged according to who first went for a weapon, Plummer was "honorably acquitted" by a miners’ jury. When Plummer was later elected sheriff of Bannack and all the surrounding mines in May 1863, a Sacramento Union reporter wrote, "No man stands higher in the estimation of the community than Henry Plummer."
After Plummer married Electa that June and settled her into their log home at Bannack, he organized a deputy network throughout the camps and convinced citizens of the need for a detention facility to end the current practice of immediate hangings. With subscription of $2.50, which he personally collected, Plummer constructed the first jail in what is now Montana. He confided to a political rival, Nathaniel Langford, "Now that I am married and have something to live for and hold an official position, I will show you that I can be a good man among good men." Plummer’s constituents praised the sheriff’s "exhaustive efforts" to protect the camps and commented that "crime in the area seemed to be played out." The Union League, a Bannack political group, voted unanimously to recommend the young sheriff as a deputy U.S. marshal.
But crime hadn’t really played out. During the final months of 1863, a rash of crime swept the Bannack and Alder Gulch area mines. It wasn’t the alleged 120 murders and robberies depicted in legend, but one lone murder, two stage robberies, and the attempted robbery of a freight caravan. Although Plummer did increase his efforts of protection, a pro-vigilante force still organized. With faces covered by bandannas to conceal their true identities and in a hanging spree that lasted a month, the Montana Vigilantes rode the countryside in an all-out effort to rid the area of the lawlessness in the mining camps.
They were also ruthless when it came to criticism of their methods. When a preacher’s son named Bill Hunter expressed his outrage by shouting on a mining camp street that pro-vigilantes were "stranglers," his frozen corpse was found three weeks later dangling from the limb of a cottonwood tree. The vigilantes tolerated no disapproval, and it was well-known that Henry Plummer disapproved: Plummer had publicly stated that he intended to put a stop to the lynchings.
Thus, in 1864, a popularly elected law officer in a U.S. territory was, without due process of the law, deprived of his unalienable right to life. There really was not one shred of evidence connecting Plummer with any crime committed in Bannack or Alder Gulch, other than the "supposed confession" of a criminal attempting to save his own hide. Furthermore, on the mining frontier, rumors of huge bands---complete with passwords, spy networks, and codes for marking targeted coaches---were widespread. But they were just that...rumors. And everyone believed in them, true or not. The aunt of vigilante prosecutor Wilbur Sanders, Mary Edgerton, for instance, described the outlaw band’s countless atrocities by writing that even though the murdered victims "were robbed and cut into pieces and put under the ice...the murders had not been discovered by the people here." If she described something that no one knew about, how could anyone say for sure that it really happened?
Decades after the lynchings in Bannack, Judge Lew L. Callaway, a friend and admirer of vigilante captain James Williams, admitted that at the time, "some good people considered the vigilantes themselves outlaws." As for the true character of the maligned Plummer, Judge Frank Woody described him as "the last man one would take to be a highwayman." Also, the accepted notion that Plummer had headed an outlaw band in Lewiston for three years has also been proven wrong. Plummer was, in fact, residing in California at the time, and preserved documents suggest Plummer spent just three weeks in the Lewiston area---hardly enough time for the ex-lawman to organize and participate in the crime wave attributed to him.
Was there really a band of outlaws led by Henry Plummer? Who really knows? The whole idea has come under careful scrutiny. Documents attest only to four crimes in Plummer’s jurisdiction during that Fall of 1863, and none of the four appear to have been related to each other. The two stages that were robbed were not even carrying gold shipments, and the botched robbery attempt of the caravan transporting more than $75,000 in gold dust was carried out by only two men---one timid and the other inept. Where were the earmarks of the outlaw organization the vigilantes claimed were "the most perfect organization in the West?"
In trying to prove the existence of the road agents, the method of choice used by the vigilantes was absolutely ruthless. They looped a noose around the neck of a suspect named "Long John" Franck and repeatedly hoisted the poor man until the nearly strangled victim gasped out the answers the vigilantes wanted to hear. With that kind of inducement, anyone would lie. Along with Franck’s forced confession of a gang came his empty-handed attempt to lead the vigilantes to the gang’s headquarters. It didn’t daunt the vigilantes. They merely hoisted another suspected member, Erastus "Red" Yeager. Yeager is supposed to have dictated a list of gang members, a list that included Henry Plummer’s name as the leader. But the four copies of Yeager’s list disagreed with each other. And oddly enough, the name of Deputy John Gallagher, lynched at Virginia City, does not appear on any of the four lists.
In addition to the suspicion aroused by the discrepancies of Yeager’s outlaw list, the four bungled crimes, the lack of any kind of connection between the crimes, and the forced confessions at the end of a rope, there is the ominous lack of resistance to the vigilantes. If there truly was a crime spree in operation as the posse claimed, why didn’t the vigilantes encounter the West’s most "perfectly organized" gang?
Though the miners had taken steps to bring order by electing their own law officers, President Abraham Lincoln also sent to the territory Chief Justice Sydney Edgerton, a former congressman from Ohio, who brought along his nephew, a young lawyer named Wilbur Sanders, to serve as his secretary. It was only natural that there would be a certain amount of friction between the newcomers, whose authority rested only on paper, and those already actively engaged in administering justice in the eastern Idaho gold camps, men selected for their experience and the respect they had earned from the miners. Edgerton and Sanders did not trust Plummer, the miners’ choice for Sheriff. When Sanders organized a group of citizens into the vigilantes in December 1863, men who were bent on conducting a speedier and less expensive form of justice, they hanged two suspected criminals and then announced that one had accused the sheriff of leading a double life as lawman and crook. The vigilantes surprised Plummer at home, and without benefit of a trial or other means of determining whether there was sufficient evidence against him to have convinced a jury, they walked him, along with two of his deputies, to the town gallows where the three law officers were hanged. Before they were through, the vigilantes had hanged a total of twenty-one men during the turbulent days of January and February of 1864.
Henry Plummer left no heirs, other than his brothers and sisters back east. His wife Electa stayed in Bannack only two and one-half months after their marriage. She left to visit relatives, explaining that her husband would join her later. Her departure so soon after the wedding caused some talk, but otherwise it was not damaging to the sheriff’s popularity.
Plummer lived with the family of Electa’s sister, Martha and James Vail, who had followed Henry and Electa to Bannack. It is known that James was absent from the home much of the time, and Martha and Plummer seemed to live together compatibly, planning and hosting the most extravagant banquet ever held in Bannack. Plummer spent the last day of his life in Martha’s home and was still there when they came for him at ten o’clock that night. Whether or not there was a romance between them is not known, but Plummer asked to speak to Martha before he was hanged. His request was denied. Martha fainted at the news he had been hanged.
Electa learned of her husband’s death in a letter, and she claimed he was innocent. She spent the rest of her days regretting not spending the last months of her husband’s life with him. Some say she never had children by Henry Plummer, but there is reason to suspect that she was pregnant when she left Bannack. Several months after Plummer’s death, a girl named Rena was born in Iowa. It was not Martha who was in Iowa in 1864, but Electa, thus leading to speculation that Rena was Electa’s daughter who was only raised by Martha, perhaps so the child would not have to bear the Plummer name after her father’s being branded an outlaw. Regardless of who was the child’s true mother, Martha or Electa, and who was her true father, Henry Plummer of James Vail, Rena died without continuing family lines.
In an effort to set the record straight, Montana’s Twin Bridges Public Schools questioned the wisdom of the vigilantes and the guilt of Henry Plummer. They initiated a posthumous trial which was held in the Madison County courthouse in Virginia City on 7 May 1993. Sheriff Henry Plummer, after 129 years, finally received due process of law. Judge Barbara Brook presided over the trial, while twelve registered voters on the jury listened, as detail after detail of the Plummer myth was systematically chipped away. When it came time for a vote, the jurors were split on the verdict, which led Judge Brook to declare a mistrial. Had he been alive, Henry Plummer would have been freed and not tried again. Although the Montana Legislature had been formally asked to pardon the late sheriff, the Board of Pardons responded in August 1993 by saying that since Henry Plummer was never convicted by a properly appointed judicial court, the panel could not review a request for clemency.
The body of Henry Plummer was placed in a wooden coffin, and the coffin placed in Hangman’s Gully above the gallows with rocks piled on top of it. It was vulnerable to vandalism. It is said that the grave was broken into twice, first by the town’s doctor, who out of curiosity, severed the right arm from the body to search for Hank Crawford’s bullet. The doctor reported that he found the bullet "worn smooth and polished by the bones turning upon it." The second violation occurred when strangers passed through town and, after spending several hours in a local bar, decided to dig up the grave. To prove they had done it, they severed the head and carried it back to the Bank Exchange Saloon, where it was kept on display for several years, eventually being consumed in the fire which destroyed the building.
It is also interesting to note that the robberies did not cease after the twenty-one men were hanged in January and February of 1864. In fact, after the "Plummer gang" hanging, the stage robberies showed more evidence of organized criminal activity, more robbers involved in the holdups, and more intelligence passed to the actual robbers.
Was Henry Plummer the leader of a gang of road agents? Is there a stolen treasure, estimated at $6 million dollars in gold nuggets, coins, and gold dust still hidden in the stark Montana hills? Those are questions that may never be answered. Only the ones who participated in the gold frenzy days of Bannack know for certain and they, too, lie buried somewhere in the Montana countryside
The historical town of Bannack was placed under the protection of Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks in 1954. That means that anyone without a special permit is barred from digging for gold on state-controlled land. But since no one knows exactly where Henry Plummer buried the gold---if he did, indeed, bury any---the search still continues nearly a century and a half later.