Cyrus Skinner

Cyrus Skinner was typical of the thieves and murderers who terrorized the gold fields of Montana in the early 1860s.  Skinner was born in Ohio in 1829 and began his robbing as a teenager.  Immigrating to California in 1850 was arrested for burglary soon after, and served 2 years in San Quentin.  Six months after his release, he was again arrested for burglary in Yuba County, California, being sentenced to 3 years in San Quentin again but escaped and committed 5 more robberies before his recapture and sentencing to San Quentin for 15 years this time.

In early 1859, Henry Plummer, an old friend of Skinner, joined him in San Quentin, and together they escaped for the final time in 1860 and fled to gold camps in northern Idaho where he became of a part of Plummer's gang of criminals.

Skinner moved east over the mountains to Montana gold fields, establishing saloons at Bannock and Virginia City.  Skinner was one of the most brutal of Plummer's gang and occasionally killed his victims just for the fun of it.  By early 1864, he and the gang had taken over 100 lives.

After Plummer was caught and hanged by the Vigilante's, Skinner left town but was tracked down to Hellgate, Montana in January of 1864. He had a morbid fear of being hanged, so he ran, thinking the Vigilantes would shoot him instead.  Then denied him that privilege and recaptured him and hung him, the last of the 24 bandits that were executed by the Montana Vigilantes.

Mr. X

Mr James Beidler, who preferred to be called simply "X" had little formal education and tried his hand at a variety of trades.  He was first a shoemaker, then briefly a brick maker and finally a Kansas farmer.  Beidler was also a supporter of John Brown, a radical abolitionist.  After Brown was captured and executed for his raid on Harper's Ferry, Beidler left Kansas for Texas where he wandered northward and joined the Montana Gold Rush in 1863.

Not long after coming to Montana, Beidler joining the Montana Vigilantes and became one of the organization's most active members.  Unlike most of the members, Beidler didn't care about concealing his identity, but rather welcomed the attention.  Many legends arose about the "Vigilante X" and Beidler did little to discourage them.  He was the principal hangman for most of the victims and survived several narrow escapes in his pursuit of the criminal element.

After helping rid Montana of crime, Beidler became a stagecoach guard and deputy US Marshall.  Although he was successful in both of these jobs, he was often criticized for misuse of his authority.  Maybe he liked the Vigilante in him a bit too much?

Beidler feel on hard times and became dependent on charity from those who remembered his prior service to the communities.  He died in Helena, Montana in 1890 and his certificate is listed as "Public Benefactor".

Next time...the Vigilante's Victims.

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More Trivia on the Montana Vigilantes

During the Vigilantes reign, each morning would be found bodies hanging from any improvised gallows.  Trees, Signposts, wood posts, clotheslines...In 6 weeks, 24 outlaws were hung and countless others just hightailed it out of town before dawn.

Legend has it that the hanging's man wife and children would gather at the hanging, weeping for the man's life.  This would, of course, cause those attending the hanging to feel pity for the man and his family, often asking the law to reconsider...until it was discovered that the women were local prostitutes and the children were orphans playing a role for profit.  There were thereafter banned from the hanging festivities

For Henry Plummer, his execution was more planned. Story goes that the Vigilantes invited him to dinner - with a $60 ham they had confiscated from a stagecoach robbery of his.  The group dined, drank and enjoyed themselves for 3 days, after which they hung Plummer and two of his men in the front yard on January 10, 1864.

Justice for Montana

In the 1860s the leading citizens of Virginia City had formed a semi-secret "vigilance committee" to combat the depredations of a organizations like Henry Plummer's.  Determined to reassert order, this vigilante committee began their work of turning Montana into a law-abiding territory and became known as the Montana Vigilantes.

The Montana Vigilantes had a better interstate/inter-territory operation for criminal punishment than the FBI.  Pledged to secrecy and loyalty, they had their own reign of terror in the region throughout the 1860s.  They would send photographs and descriptions of wanted desperadoes known to other areas such as Colorado.  In Colorado, they would quietly and quickly lynch the criminals without the bother or expense of extraditing them back to Montana.  And, of course, Montana would do the same for them.

The legend goes that if you were known to be in the area, the Montana Vigilantes would pay you a visit at midnight and post a cryptic code on your door: 3-7-77.  You had one of two choices - get out of town before dawn, or hang from the nearest tree.

What did the 3-7-77 mean?  Some historians claim it was the perfect measurements of a grave: 3 feet wide, 7 feet long, 77 inches deep. 


Next time we'll look at a couple members of this so-called law-enforcement group...

The Sheriff of Bannock

Montana was isolated with little connection with the rest of the West.  That isolation led to many unsavory bandits  and marauders that found Montana country to be a prime place to operate. The greatest and most murderous of these gangs of organized thieves and bank robbers ever to operate in the West's gunpowder days was in Bannock.

Henry Plummer, was a charming psychopath who managed to con the citizens of Bannock into electing him sheriff from where he ran a highly organized dynasty of 100 highwaymen whose murders numbered into the hundreds and whose value was worth millions in stolen goods. Stage robbery was their game, and they were quite good at it.

Plummer was also quite adept at espionage and covered a wide part of Montana and nearby territory, from Salt Lake to Virginia City, confident that the meager law enforcement in the region was no match for him and his men. 

There was just one thing he didn't count on...next time. 

Last Chance Gulch Grows Up!

Unlike most mining towns in Montana, Last Chance Gulch didn't disappear when the gold ran out.  What made the difference? Last Chance Gulch had a good location for agriculture, a good location to other mining towns, and eventually, good locations to major transportation routes.

There are several legends on how Last Chance Gulch became the city of Helena...by the 1870s it was a resort town for cowhands, gamblers, cattle barons and highway men.  In fact, it boasted a red light district that was in business until reform finally shut it down in 1953.

Last Chance Gulch is said to have only had 3 women living in it when it was named, so the fact that it was named for a women seems to have several stories attached.  One has John Sommerville, who lived near the head of Nelson Gulch 6 miles away, chairman of a meeting held by dissatisfied citizens on Oct 30, 1864.  These men wanted to change the town's name, authorize the layout of the streets and elect commissioners.

The first suggestion was "Tomah," a word the committee thought had connections to the local Indian people of the area. Other nominations included Pumpkinville and Squashtown (as the meeting was held the day before Halloween), but Sommerville, who was a lawyer in the business of prosecuting gold crimes in the area, proposed that the name be Helena (and set the pronunciation of it as Hel-EE-na) because of the classic Greek reference, meaning "far from the interior".  It seems Mr Sommerville was quite knowledgeable in Classic Greek and wanted it known.  Obviously classic Greek had little to do with this frontier mining town.

Another legend says that a small town in Minnesota named Helena was the original home of many of these dissatisfied citizens  and they just wanted a taste of home. This immediately caused an uproar from the former Confederates in the room who insisted upon the pronunciation HELena, after a town in Arkansas on the Mississippi River. While the name won, the pronunciation varied until approximately 1882.

The third story is that there was a kind and very popular resident name Mrs. Goldberg, who came from Virginia City and brought most of that town's Jewish population with her to vote  to name the town after her, as her first name was of,  course, was Helena.

Which one of these legends is true? Depends on who you talk to, but the end result was that Last Chance Gulch was officially changed to Helena, Montana  and became the capital of the territory in 1875, and then the state of Montana in 1889.

Montana's Early Days

Anxious to create new free territory during the Civil War, President Lincoln established the Montana Territory in 1864.  Montana was then "unstable" frontier. The first governor, Sidney Edgerton actually fled the state after months of Indian raids, including the Sioux, Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Flathead and the Blackfoot.

Until the 1850s the settling of Montana was sparse. It wasn't until 1862, when a small amount of gold was discovered at Grasshopper Creek and the first Anglo settlement was born, almost 20 years after most of the West and Northwest. In 1864, the discovery of gold in Last Chance Gulch brought prospectors to Montana and qualified it for territorial status.  It wasn't until 25 years later that it qualified for statehood.

On July 14, 1864 four prospectors (called the 4 Georgians - John Cowan, D. J. Miller, John Crab, and Reginald  Stanley).spotted signs of gold in a gulch off the Prickly Pear valley (modern day Helena).  They were eager to reach what they thought were richer gold finds farther to the north and so passed it by.  After striking out in the Kootenal area, they decided to take one "last chance" on finding gold and returned to the Helena area.  When they found a rich deposit there  on July 1864, they marked their claims and named the new mining town "Last Chance Gulch".

Last Chance Gulch proved to be the 2nd biggest placer gold deposit in Montana, producing some $19 million worth of gold in just 4 years.  Thousands of miners came, and the four original prospectors added to their fortunes by establishing the town as a place for food, lodging and supplies. The city's main street is named Last Chance Gulch and lies close to the winding path of the original gulch.

Unlike many of the mining towns, however, Last Chance Gulch did not disappear when the gold gave out....
Next time...Last Chance Gulch grows up!

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Louisiana Purchase Trivia

During the last decade of the 1700s American were settling into the Cumberland, Tennessee and Ohio River Valley regions. To do so, they depended on their right to use the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans. Spain had granted the right to ship goods from American ports through the Mississippi without paying duty or storage at New Orleans.

In 1802 Spain revoked the privileges and created an atmosphere of growing tension in that part of the West.
In 1803 Napoleon (the French now had control of the land) offered to sell to the US the entire Louisiana Territory. US Foreign Ministers Livingston and  Monroe joined French Minister Talleyrand in Paris to make the deal.  Problem was neither of the American representatives had instructions nor authority to purchase the whole of the territory even as the negotiations continued.

The actual purchase was dated on May 2 1803, but it was antedated to April 30. The final cost of the Louisiana Territory was $27,267,622. At the time, it was unclear exactly what the US had even purchased. The terms did not even clearly define the boundaries, and it was thought that an amendment to the Constitution was  needed to legalize the entire transaction...as it turned out the Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7, still without clear boundaries.

The northern boundary was established amicably by an Anglo-American convention in 1818: the Rocky Mountains (then called the Stony Mountains) were the west, while the Mississippi River was the eastern boundary - for all practical purposes. This was some 15 years after the "territory" was purchased!

Out of this purchase came North and South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota and Louisiana.

Not bad for $27.5 million!! Even if no one knew what they were buying exactly!