Henry Plummer: The Sheriff Who Secretly Ran a Gang of Killers

Henry Plummer was the elected sheriff of Bannack and a deputy United States marshal, and in the winter of eighteen sixty-four a self-appointed committee of citizens took him to a gallows in the dark as the accused secret chief of the road agents he had been sworn to stop. He was born on the Maine coast around eighteen thirty-two, the slight and sickly youngest son of a seafaring family, and he sailed for California in eighteen fifty-two. In the gold country he built fast, owning a mine, a ranch and a bakery, and at about twenty-four the people of Nevada City pinned a marshal's badge on him. Trouble followed the badge. By his own account he acted in self-defense when John Vedder lost his life, though the courts saw it differently, and a failing pair of lungs helped carry him out of San Quentin on a governor's pardon. By eighteen sixty-two he had drifted far north into the raw mining camps of what would soon be Idaho Territory, a man with two bodies behind him and a reputation that had not yet caught up. The camps he rode into had almost no law at all. The territorial court sat hundreds of miles west across the Bitterroot Mountains, so the miners made their own rough justice in the street, and the only standing force in the country wore the sheriff's badge Plummer soon won. Gold dust moved by stage over long, lonely roads, and that autumn the robberies came one after another, the Peabody and Caldwell stage, the A. J. Oliver stage, an attempt on Anton Holter, the loss of the Magruder party on the Lewiston road. A boy named Henry Tilden rode into Bannack one dusk saying three masked men had stopped him and that one was the sheriff, and he was told he was mistaken. After a young immigrant, Nicholas Tiebolt, was found on the road and George Ives was tried in open street, the Vigilance Committee rose, and the lawyer Wilbur Sanders set himself at its front. The question Tilden carried into town that night would outlast everyone who heard it, down through Plummer's wife Electa in the East, the preserved ghost town of Bannack, the three numbers still worn on the Montana Highway Patrol's shoulder, and a staged retrial in nineteen ninety-three where twelve jurors split exactly down the middle and settled nothing at all. Sources and further reading 1. Thomas J. Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana, Montana Post, 1866. Outlaw Records tells true stories of the American frontier, its outlaws, its lawmen, and the people caught between them.