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.

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...